thoughts.iterator()

If you are interested in JavaScript, DSLs and how they work together inside your browser to provide truly rich user experience in web apps, you can register to get some training from the comfort of your desk:

JavaScript DSLs for the Client Side
With Dionysios G. Synodinos
Date: June 3, 2009, 3 PM EDT
Duration: 1 hour

“With the W3C working on a specification that defines an API for providing scripted access to geographical location information, Mozilla recently announced built-in Geolocation support for Firefox 3.5. This is aligned with an earlier announcement from Opera that also adds support for Geolocation in their browser. Will this make geographically aware applications ubiquitous?”

Read the full story: Location-Aware Browsing to become Mainstream?

“HTML 5 is the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web and although the specification is ongoing work, parts of HTML 5 are already implemented in browsers like Safari 4 beta.

In addition to specifying markup, HTML 5 exposes several new scripting APIs for:

• 2D drawing
• Media
• Browser history
• Cross-document messaging
• Drag & drop
• Client-side persistent storage
• Server-sent events
• and more…

InfoQ recently conducted a virtual panel via email regarding how the JavaScript frameworks will evolve in order to take advantage of these new APIs. The panel featured representatives from some of the most widely deployed projects that deal with client-side JavaScript:

• Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo
• Matt Sweeney & Eric Miraglia, YUI engineering team
• Andrew Dupont, core developer of Prototype
• Thomas Fuchs, creator of script.aculo.us, and core developer of Prototype and Ruby on Rails
• David Walsh, core developer for MooTools
• Scott Blum and Joel Webber, co-creators of GWT

“

Read the article: Evolution of JavaScript Frameworks for HTML 5

“John Resig creator of the jQuery JavaScript library, has released Test Swarm, a platform for distributed continuous integration testing for client-side JavaScript. Frustrated with traditional JavaScript testing environments that don’t scale, John’s new project which is currently is private alpha, aims to provide a systems for outsourcing browser related testing to large groups of people or communities.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/test-swarm

“Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking.”

See the full interview here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/tim-bray-future-of-web

“Atmosphere which started off as an evolution of Grizzly, is a POJO based framework that aims to bring Comet to the masses. This Comet Abstraction Framework released its first alpha version and InfoQ had a Q&A with its creator Jean-Francois Arcand about it.”
Read the full story here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/atmosphere-alpha

“With the Web becoming the default development platform, we are witnessing major innovations in browser technology. In the spirit of time, Opera has announced plans for “the fastest JavaScript engine on the market” code named Carakan and Apple has released Safari 4 in public beta with several new features and improvements.”

Read the ful article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/caracan_safari4

It’s my pleasure to announce that I’ll be speaking at at DSL Developers Conference, in April 16-17, 2009, at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond.

Summary

What	2 days of practical, applied DSL sessions from industry experts and practitioners
When	April 16th, 2pm-6pm (registration at 1pm), April 17th, 9am-6pm
Where	Microsoft Research Building 99, Room 1919 14820 NE 36th Street Redmond, WA 98052 USA

The topics are very interesting and the list of speakers is impressive:

When	What	Who
Thursday, April 16th
12:00pm	Registration
12:45pm	Welcome	Chris Sells
1:00pm	Keynote	Martin Fowler
2:00pm	M DSLs: Deep Dive	Paul Vick
3:00pm	Domain Specific Languages for automated testing of equity order management systems and trading machines	Tom Rodgers
4:00pm	DSLs in the Horn Package Manager	Paul Cowan
5:00pm	How to implement DSLs with Groovy	Guillaume Laforge
6:00pm	Reception (food and beverages)
6:45pm	DSL Panel	All speakers
Friday, April 17th
7:30am	Breakfast
9:00am	Textual DSLs and Code Generation with Eclipse Tools	Markus Voelter
10:00am	JavaScript DSLs for the Client Side	Dionysios G. Synodinos
11:00am	Functional vs. Dynamic DSLs: The Smackdown	Ted Neward, Bradford Cross
11:45am	Lunch
1:00pm	Embedding DSLs in Newspeak: EBNF, Hopscotch and NewShell	Gilad Bracha
2:00pm	RUMBA: RUby Managed Business data for Applications	Umit Yalcinalp, Tilman Giese
3:00pm	A DSL for Cool Effects in Adobe Pixel Bender	Bob Archer, Chuck Rose
4:00pm	Language Oriented Programming in F#	Chance Coble
5:00pm	TBD	TBD

“Last week Mozilla released Bespin, a web-based framework for code editing and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of a web-based workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like the Heroku web-based IDE for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/web-based-ide

Reading a friends blog post, I found out about a challenge for making a web app in 140 characters or less.

In Wikipedia you read:

In software engineering, a web application or webapp is an application that is accessed via web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. It is also a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language (such as HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc.) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

So this is what I could come up with: just paste the following piece of code (140 characters) in a file with a .html extension, open it with a browser and you have a crude number guessing game:

<script>function
x(){if(confirm("odd?")&&((Math.floor(Math.random()*10))%2))alert(":)");else
alert(":(");if(confirm("rpt?"))x()}x()</script>

The browser calculates a random integer and asks you if it is an odd numbers. If your answer is correct it returns a smiley (or a frown if you’ve guessed wrong). Finally it asks you if you want to repeat the game and if you choose “ok” the whole thing starts over again.

You can save many characters by omitting the loop. Also you can save 10 whole characters by having the browser randomly choose “1” or “0” and asks you to guess between them.

<script>function x(){if(confirm(”1?”)&&(Math.round(Math.random())))alert(”:)”);else alert(”:(”);if(confirm(”rpt?”))x()}x()</script>

The third annual QCon London conference is coming back to the UK March 11-13, 2009. QCon is an Enterprise Software Development conference for team leads, archtiects, and project management. Some of this year’s speakers include:

• Sir Tony Hoare – Inventor of Quicksort, Turing Award Winner
• Joe Armstrong – Father of Erlang
• Martin Fowler – Loud Mouth on Object Design
• Steve Freeman – Agile Software Development Pioneer
• Michael T. Nygard – Author of “Release IT”
• Rod Johnson – Creator of Spring
• Dion Hinchcliffe – Web 2.0 and Social Media Industry Expert
• Eric Evans – Mr. Domain Driven Design

The track themes for QCon London & track hosts are as follows:

Architectures in Financial Applications – Hosted by Cleve Gibbon and Alexis Richardson

The latest innovations as well as time-proven best practices that architects of banking & finance systems need to know.

Emerging languages in the enterprise – Hosted by Ola Bini

. In this track we will look at some of the languages and how they are used in the enterprise, what benefits they give and what to look out for.

Real World SOA – Hosted by Stefan Tilkov

Whether based on SOAP/WSDL-style Web services or alternative approaches such as RESTful HTTP, we will talk about the good, the bad & and the ugly.

Turning on a sixpence – technical skills for Agile development – Hosted by Steve Freeman

This track is about the technical essentials you need to know to make Agile software development reliable and sustainable.

Web as a platform – Hosted by Geir Magnusson

Benefits and liabilities of web programming and recent case studies.

Agile Organisational patterns – Hosted by Linda Rising

What’s the optimal way of working together – Social aspects of software dev teams, organizational alignment, compensation,self-organization, decision making, vision.

Architectures you Always Wondered About- Hosted by InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu

The BBC, Guardian.co.uk, and others.

Domain-Driven Design & Development – Hosted by Eric Evans

This track will take you through the foundations of DDD, and how they are applicable and actually applied in projects.

Functional and Concurrent Programming – Hosted by Erik Meijer

The track presents a series of examples of actual use of functional programming languages and actor/concurrent languages and discuss how it affects our way to comprehend distributed, asynchronous software systems.

Java.Next – Key Technologies Shaping the Future of Java – Hosted by Scott Delap

Technologies pushing the limits of Java on the server, desktop, and places in between.

Architecture for the Architect – Hosted by Dan North

Industry leaders share their experiences in designing architectures and being good architects.

Domain Specific Languages – Hosted by Neal Ford

This track covers a wide range of business areas and technical implementations.

Historically bad ideas – Hosted by Floyd Marinescu & Aino Corry

Null References? Corba? This track will feature technology directions that were once discussed almost like silver bullets but which later proved to be bad ideas or short-lived fads.

Next Generation Web on .NET – Hosted by Beat Schwegler

Learn how to develop state of the art Web Applications using technologies such as ASP.NET, Silverlight 2.0, Deep Zoom and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Systems that never stop – Hosted by Michael Nygard

How do you develop, test, update, maintain, and reason about systems without borders?

The previous QCon was well received, below are some comments from bloggers who attended our last QCon:

• Erik Johnson – QCon London was a top-notch event and among the great presentations, two things I learned stand out …
• Nik Silver – every hour of the three days of the conference there were insights and guidance that could be tucked away, and reused later to save hours, days or weeks of time elsewhere.
• Matthew Ford – … I’ve just spent the last week at QCon and I’ve just about fully recovered (it was pretty intense)…
• Ola Bini – I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. I can definitely recommend QCon as one of the best conferences around in this industry.
• Steve Vinoski – I just returned home from QCon London, and its excellence exceeded my expectations. As usual, the quality of speakers QCon attracts is outstanding, and they cover a very wide variety of topics.
• Antonio Goncalves – I only had two days at the conference and I have to say, QCon is different from what I’m used to. The audience looked more experienced (or older if you want) and the quality of the presentations was really high
• Mark Edgington – In short fantastic. I left the conference armed with lots of ideas and inspiration and a handful of excellent contacts.
• Danilo Sato – I was really impressed with the quality of the conference, from tracks, to sessions, and speakers. QCon is one of the best technical conferences I’ve participated and I recommend it for anyone interested in enterprise software development. I’m looking forward to attending again next year.

See also past QCon/JAOO talks available online on InfoQ:

• How to Work With Business Leaders to Manage Architectural Change by Luke Hohmann
• Building your next service with the Atom Publishing Protocol with Dan Diephouse
• Establishing Your Organization’s Enterprise Security API by Jeff Williams
• Real-Time Java for Latency Critical Banking Applications by Bertrand Delsart
• Architecting for Latency by eBay’s Dan Pritchett
• Martin Fowler and Dan North Point Out a Yawning Crevasse of Doom
• Designing RESTful Rails Applications with Obie Fernandez
• Lessons Learned from Architecture Reviews by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Registration for the 3 day conference is £1,170 if you register before February 22nd, a savings of £130!

“The public draft of the Java EE 6 Platform specification has been published and will remain open for public review and feedback until the 23rd of Feb, 2009. Maybe the most notable part of this delayed draft is the Web Profile, which is first profile in the history of the Java EE platform.”

Read post here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/java-ee6-draft

I think snitch.name does pretty well

PeekYou. FAIL!

Spock. FAIL!

Whoisi. FAIL!

YoName. FAIL!

ex.plod.us. FAIL!

snitch.name delivers!!!

“With JDK7, OpenJDK and IcedTea all evolving in parallel it can get confusing about how these projects relate to each other. David Herron, which is OpenJDK Quality Lead, tries to set the record straight and explains why the JDK7 has taken so long.”
Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/jdk-openjdk-icedtea

snitch.name was originally a tool I developed because I was tired of having to search in various place to find information about someone I met. It hasn’t been designed to be fancy, but solves a real world problem until the people that build social services decide on some profile searching APIs. Until that time comes snitch.name is the best tool for searching for people’s profiles on social services.

I’ll try to incorporate more user requested features, so drop me a line if you’d like to have a new search provider added or have some new functionality in mind.

Plugin

You can search with snitch.name directly from your browser’s search box using the OpenSearch specification! This is the box that sits right from your address bar. Both IE7 and Firefox support it

FAQ

Do I need an account on these social sites?

In most cases these sites reveal little or no information to users that don’t have an account so it would be wise to get an account. It is free anyway

Why can’t I just use Google?

There are several advantages over a plain Google search! Some of them are:

1. There are several social sites that are not indexed by Google at all or in a very limited way. As has Tim O’Reilly agreed on: “Social sites like Facebook/Flickr grow  exponentially without being indexed by Google”.
2. Depending on your privileges to the various social sites, you’ll always get the maximum information that you are allowed to get. For example if you are in someone’s network in Facebook you’ll get more information in snitch.name than you would get directly from a Google search.
3. Google will not necessarily give higher ranking to results that are “people profiles”, so you get a whole bunch of results from mailing lists, forums, etc. that might have little value to you.
4. With snitch.name you get all the results expanded in your page so you can print them all at once and have them available
   when you are away from your computer.

Why everything loads inside the browser?

This way you access the social sites using your own credential and get authorized for the maximum amount of information you are allowed to. Many social sites don’t have public/open APIs (eg. LinkedIn) and even the ones that do have would need you to authenticate again. This could be very impractical. With snitch.name the cookies you have stored in your browser already do all the work to authenticate you.

Is it better than other people-search-services?

Try yourself to see how superior snitch.name is!

Many thanks to Christos Stathis, Fotis Stamatlopoulos, Kostas Troulos & Panagiotis Astithas, for their early feedback.

“During Devoxx Mark Reinhold, Chief Engineer for Java SE, gave a presentation about the latest directions for Java 7, alongside a release date in early 2010. Although Mark described his presentation as a provisional plan and not binding, there have been many reactions from the community, especially regarding the omission of Closures.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/java7-updated

“JSR-315 has produced a Public Review (PR) of the Servlet 3.0 specification, accompanied by a reference implementation in the GlassFish trunk. This release has resulted in a debate around the choices that the Expert Group (EG) has taken for the next generation Servlet APIs and the whole of the Java EE 6 platform.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/servlet3_debate

“Though Comet and Ajax can both deliver end-user experiences that provide desktop-like functionality and low user-perceived latency, only Web Sockets lives up to the promise of providing a native means to accurately and efficiently stream events to and from the browser with negligible latency. It is by far the most comprehensive solution for delivering real-time information over the Web. Not only does it provide full asynchronous duplex streaming communication with a single TCP/IP connection, but also benefits from few HTTP headers and more importantly allows the same message format to be used by both the browser and the origin service.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/websockets-vs-comet-ajax

“Joe Walker, creator of Direct Web Remoting (DWR) , has been summing up the reasons that as he thinks have lead the Web to become the default development platform over the last years. Easy of deployment, simple UI programming, simplicity of HTML and Openness made the Web become the most scalable system today.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/web_default

“Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems, has been advocating about how “cool” would be for the Sun JDK to be modular. He’s is putting up a good argument about how the complexity is hurting the platform and how the Java Kernel and Quickstarter features in the JDK 6u10 release just address the symptoms of JDK’s long-term interconnected growth.”

Read full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/modular_jdk