Blogging Roller

Month of blogging

Dave Johnson — Sun, 2 Aug 2009 16:04:33 +0000

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, the automatic Latest Links posts from my Delicious.com account started to pile up in my blog editor. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them and would never have let a month go by without blogging. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.

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Category: Blogging

Joe Gregorio: Comment system review
"Comparing Disqus, IntenseDebate and Google Friend Connect." Joe Gregorio looked at commenting systems and ended up chosing Intense Debate.
Integrating Disqus and Roller Weblogger on blogs.sun.com
"I've recently updated my site to use Disqus the blog comment hosting and conversation site." Sun UK CTO Wayne Horkan explains how (and why) to use the Disqus in a Roller, with code and helpful comments from Disqus CEO Daniel Ha.
Official Google Blog: New Blog Search tools
"Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts." Nice to see Google is still working on blog search despite the rumored death of blogging.

Category: Feeds

pubsubhubbub - Google Code
"A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom." Collaboration between Google and SixApart folks to allow quick notifiation of new content to feed subscribers and reduce load on feed publishers. Hub implementations are underway for AppEngine/Python, Erlang, Python and Ruby. Hmm... no Java?

Category: General

The Ryding List | Why Not?
"I have found a wealth of great things to do in Raleigh." Great list of things to do around Raleigh by newcomer John Ryding, one of my coworkers at IBM.
The Different CTO Roles - All Things Distributed
"there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does." Of special interest to me now that I work on a CTO's staff.
Life During Wartime video from Stop Making Sense - Boing Boing
"This is the best concert movie I've ever seen." Me too.

Category: IBM

Integrating and Extending Rational Team Concert 2.0
Great guide and presentation on Team Concert development via the Jazz Server SDK. Referring to this a lot these days.
Eclipse Galileo for Mac: Cocoa or Carbon?
"Carbon is more mature and thoroughly tested, the new Cocoa implementation offers advantages and improvements." And the answer is: 32-bit Cocoa. Yep, I'm paying attention to Eclipse again. It's really the only way to do Jazz development.
Whitepaper: e4 Technical Overview
Lots of detail on the apparently massive changes coming in Eclipse e4 including the ability write Eclipse components in JavaScript and to run "existing SWT applications to be executed on web platforms such as ActionScript/Flash."

Category: Java

James Strachan: Scala as the long term replacement for Java
"if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." I'm sure that sent a lot of folks to Amazon, including me.
Google App Engine plugin in NetBeans
"With a video showing how easy it is to develop Google App Engine application in NetBeans. You can see that Hello World takes just 1 minute. :-)" Looks good and apparently it's an open source side-project. Hosted at Kenai.
Trails of EasyExtend: Java Spring - or the Biggus Dickus effect
"Looking at the API alone Spring feels like reading a parody on Java enterprise software." Schadenfreude for me; never been a fan and always thought of it as a big grab bag of insidious crap I don't need.

Category: Open Source

NYTimes.com: For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Are Getting Tricky
"Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return. The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla's $75 million in revenue in 2007." Makes you wonder about the future of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
"The software architecture is simple: Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Yet another Linux distro. That's cool with me; I like Linux distros.
The Java Wars, continued (Scripting News)
"most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today." Dave Winer's take on Google's Chrome OS. I think he's probably right at the moment but things are changing rapidly.

Category: Social Software

Creating a Google Data Gadget - Google Data APIs - Google Code
"This article will walk you through creating a Blogger gadget." Google and OpenSocial Gadget support for OAuth makes things easier, but it's still a PITA.
Writing OAuth Gadgets - Gadgets API - Google Code
"send mail to oauthproxyreg@google.com with the following information to register your OAuth Consumer Secret." If you want to write a Gadget that uses OAuth to access Twitter there's an icky manual registration step involved. Apparently the solution to this problem is for Twitter.com to enhance their "OAuth configuration to accept digital signatures directly from iGoogle."

Category: Sun

The end of Sun
"And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees." A depressing article for former Sun employee to read, or anybody I guess. I do think there is something to this quote about Scwhartz.
Oracle-Sun Creating Churn - Forbes.com
"Suns loyal customers are defecting in droves." Not really very surprising considering the conventional wisdom, which seems to be that Oracle will gut Sun's software efforts and ditch the hardware entirely.
Computerworld Blogs: Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? -
"Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid." This article is typical of what I've seen from the author: dumb speculation of the mean-spirited variety.
Justice department extends Oracle-Sun probe
"All that's left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed." I don't there's a chance in hell that it is, but wouldn't it be fun if this was all about the Sun-Apache Terms of Use controversy?

Web development

InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Brief overview of Twitter architecture, use of caching and message queue technologies.
Evaluation of Javascript Libraries
"jQuery and YUI come out on top, Prototype at the bottom." Helped convince me that, now that we have YUI, we don't really need Prototype and Scriptaculous in Roller.
"MooTools vs JQuery vs Prototype vs YUI vs Dojo revised
"Prototype is among the slowest." More justification for ripping out Prototype and Scriptaculous.

And now, back to your regular schedule of blogging, or not.

A logo for the Ape

Dave Johnson — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:47:53 +0000

Just learned from Tim's blog that Greg Borenstein just came up with a cute logo for the Atom Protocol Exerciser (Ape), which, in case you don't know, is the closest thing we have to a compatibility test for Atom servers. The logo is featured on the Ape's home page.

RTP web-tech/blogger meetup tonight, 6:30PM at Serena

Dave Johnson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:39:37 +0000

The Raleigh Bloggers meet-up has morphed into a more inclusive RTP/Triangle-wide gathering, not just for bloggers and not just for Raleigh. We're still meeting on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays, but we've moved the location from Raleigh Times Bar to the more centrally located Serena, a nice restaurant/bar with free WIFI. And we've established a community page at Ning. Our first meet-up in this new configuration is tonight so come on down and join us at 6:30PM tonight.

Nice weekend and DCampSouth

Dave Johnson — Mon, 4 Jun 2007 09:41:52 +0000

It was a nice weekend: I had dinner and went to a musical (The Full Monty at the RLT, quite good) with my parents, played some Heroscape with the kids, got a little work done and on Saturday I attended DCampSouth.

DCampSouth was a lot of fun. Thanks to Jackson Fox and friends for creating just the right environment for a barcamp experience. Here are a couple of notes on my experience.

The day started with a keynote by Thomas Vanderwal. He discussed how to design social software centered on the user, the person or the "person using" as he prefers to say since he dislikes the term user and it's negative connotations. I sensed that the term "developer" might have some negative connotation for Thomas and I felt tempted to ask him to refer to developers as people too, or "persons developing." Despite that developer vs. design guy tension, the talk as informative and full of good ideas. For example he stressed how important it is to provide a good experience for individual users and especially for the 1:1 connections between users since those are so valuable and nuanced. Too often, he said, developers and designers focus on the many and forget to focus on the one.

Vanderwal also talked about using tagging to help people navigate and self-organize corporate intranets. So I had to ask him what software folks are using for that. He mentioned an open source option Scuttle, DogEar from Lotus Connections and had high praise for ConnectBeam.

After the keynote, everybody gathered in the lobby to propose and pitch sessions. I was torn between Ruby Sinreich's Microformats session and Kim Ashley's Web behind the firewall session. I ended up in the Web 2.0 behind the firewall sessions where we discussed the difficulties of using blogs/wikis in a top-down control environment, the self-service nature of Web 2.0 tools and tagging for intranets, which everybody thought was a great idea -- especially the two guys in the room from the stealth startup ("Distruptive Monkey" I think they said).

Finally, I attended Jackson Fox's agile vs. web development session. I always thought web development was especially well suited to agile techniques, since you can deploy often and you get constant user feedback. Apparently, it's not that easy if you want to follow the various agile methodologies out there. I found Jackson's discussion of using agile methodologies at Lulu.com very interesting.

Overall DCampSouth was a nice way to spend a Saturday and thanks again to Jackson for that. We need more of the BarCamps around here.

DCampSouth

Dave Johnson — Fri, 1 Jun 2007 10:53:25 +0000

I feel bad blogging about this so last minute. I really should have mentioned it weeks ago.

I just signed up for DCampSouth, a BarCamp style unconference for "anyone interested in design and user experience" that's happening here in Raleigh, tomorrow June 2 from 8:30 - 4PM. The attendee list looks interesting and the venue certainly looks pretty far out (literally and figuratively): the School of Communication Arts housed in "three Monolithic hurricane proof, clear span concrete domes."

It's a busy week but I'll definitely be able to make it to the morning and some of the afternoon sessions.

New Atom protocol spec draft and Queen City planets

Dave Johnson — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:50:19 +0000

Joe Gregorio announces a new Atom Publishing Protocol Spec (draft #12) and he says it might end up being the final. I guess it's time for a new Blogapps release with APP draft #12 and ROME 0.9 support.

Plus, Joe has put together a set of new planet sites for towns in the Charlotte, NC area; all based on feeds from Google Base, Google Blogs, Google News, Craigs List, Flickr and the Weather Service. The sites look useful, but the ads combined with the minimalist design make them look a little spammy on first glance. Perhaps a short "about this site" paragraph is in order.

Visual Web Pack is NOT for you if...

Dave Johnson — Wed, 6 Dec 2006 18:16:42 +0000

Roumen: Visual tools for web development are a double-edged sword. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Some users love Visual Web Pack for what it provides but some of them go crazy because by using visual tools they lose a bit of control or they don't fit their development environment. So I'd like to discuss this topic, so that you can decide whether Visual Web Pack is for you or it is not.

A very thoughtful and balanced post from Netbeans evangelist Roumen Strobl that examines some of the reasons you might or might not want to use the new Netbeans Visual Web Pack.

Upgrade your browser!

Dave Johnson — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 11:28:47 +0000

Kurt Williams: Just one problem. Web 2.0 is done with Web 1.0 technology

Yep. If everybody used Firefox everything would be cool, but there are armies of series four browsers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.) out there just waiting out there to break your latest JavaScript creation.

JSF vs. run of the mill bile (continued)

Dave Johnson — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:12:29 +0000

After Rick Hightower posted a positive review of Java Server Faces, the alternative framework zealots decended on him like a rabid pack of OS/2 fanatics. He fought back valiantly here, here, here, and here. Along the way he was able to plug his company's training class, drew lots of attention to his JRoller hosted SourceBeat blog, and ended up as a feature story on Java Developers Journal. Score: RickHigh 1, Zealots 0.

MattRaiblesWiki

Dave Johnson — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 15:53:16 +0000

Matt has the RollerWikiPlugin up and running. He has also created a very nice new JSPWiki theme and started his own Wiki to support his weblog, AppFuse, and StrutsResume projects.

Web app UI design

Dave Johnson — Sun, 1 Sep 2002 09:06:30 +0000

I've always been interested in UI design, but I have never been very good at it. My previous UI development experience involved Windows via MFC and Java via Swing. Webapp UI design is quite a different beast and I would like to (at a minimum) understand the basics. So I searched around a came up with a couple of key links:

And a couple of books:

<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789723107/104-2810709-4065544"> Don't Make Me Think - Krug and Black
<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156205810X/104-2810709-4065544"> Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity - Neilsen
<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789723700/104-2810709-4065544"> The Art and Science of Web Design - Veen
<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596001967/104-2810709-4065544"> Web Design in a Nutshell - Niederst

Those books seem to emphasize website UI design more than webapp UI design. I'm more intested in creating usable web apps than in creating beautiful web sites. If you have some other website and book recommendations for webapp UI design, I'd like to hear about them.