Loosely Coupled

I started this podcast project so I could learn some things I haven't had time to experiment with in my "real" job. Things like playing more with Ruby, trying out Behavior-Driven Development, and experimenting with Agile practices (plus I really wanted a better podcatcher program and I needed something to do over the winter). While I haven't produced much real code yet, I've created some simple prototypes and wanted to comment on some things I've been looking at. Reading an RSS feed My first prototype was a very simple Ruby program to read and parse an RSS feed. I had found some code here using the standard Ruby RSS Parser so that's where I started. At first I thought it was broken, but after about a minute and a half it returned. This wasn't going to cut it, so I started to look for alternatives and quickly found the feed-normalizer gem. Some quick coding and the total time to access the RSS feed was reduced to about 10 seconds. Not bad...

I just listened to an interview with Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web. While most of the interview focused the Semantec Web , what I found most interesting, were his thoughts on Rich Internet Applications. Of course he thinks this is an exciting development, but with various technologies (Flash, JavaFX, Silverlight) competing in this space, he feels that standardization would help speed its adoption. He points to how standardizing HTML in an open and royalty-free way helped to speed the adoption of the Web. Standardizing this technology would be a great step. Right now, these technologies run as a plugin on the browser. Once standardized, browsers could build this functionality right in, making adoption seamless. Open-sourcing the technology is not enough. The biggest problem with standardization is that it takes so long. It's a good thought, hopefully it will gain some traction. ****** More news on the DB front. The more I delve into the database schema and...

I've previously written about Rich Internet Applications and how they bring desktop-like functionality to web applications. The knock on this technology has always been "how do I work if I don't have an Internet connection?" Last week, Google announced Google Gears , a framework designed to address this problem. Google Gears provides 3 modules developers can used to make their web applications available offline. LocalServer allows web applications the ability to store, then serve, web content locally when a user does not have an Internet connection. These resources can be updated when the user is reconnected to the Net. Database provides persistent storage to the application when working offline. WorkerPool allows long running operations to be "chunked", and run in the background without blocking the browser. It's likely Google developed this technology to widen the appeal and availability of it's Google Docs & Spreadsheats offeri...

My work had focused on web application development for so long, I had to pause when I was asked to develop a desktop application. I had little idea where to begin. I started searching for application frameworks that met the following criteria: I could write the application in Java The resulting application would be cross platform with a native look and feel. The framework was mature, easy to use, and widely adopted. I quickly narrowed the field down to 2 choices Eclipse RCP and NetBeans . Both met the criteria I was looking for. Either would have been a reasonable choice, and I chose Eclipse. First of all, I was comfortable developing in the Eclipse IDE. Second, Eclipse had a larger installed base and an avid community following, with over 1200 commercial plugins available. I was happy with my choice. Since I had been coding with JSF for some time, the leap to an event based system was not that large. The Forms plugin allowed me to easily create an attractive interfac...

On my last web application project, we realized the JSP/JSF presentation layer we implemented was not cutting it anymore. Transitions between pages were too slow, users wanted more dynamic feedback and drag and drop functionality. The project was put on indefinite hold shortly after that but I wanted to talk about some of the technologies I researched to address these problems. AJAX Ajax seems like the mainstream choice. While AJAX could help address the transition time and feedback issues, I don’t believe it could help add drag and drop. What worries me about AJAX stems from my experience with CSS. Even though CSS is a web standard, some browsers still implement CSS differently. I’ve had to place hacks into my CSS to account for these inconsistencies. It is a pain. Like CSS, web browsers could implement AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) functionality slightly differently. For me, I’d rather stay away from AJAX if at all possible. Adobe Flex I first noticed the power of Flash in ...