Trying to follow…

It has been a while since my last post, but construction and professional deadlines kept me going for a while. This post doesn’t mean it is over but at last it shows progression .

I went to Javapolis this week. Only one day but it was nice to see some people again after a year. The conference still has one of the nicest settings I know with a nice show booth setup. Actually the sponsers room was better then the actual talks. A lot of them are becoming more and more sales pitches then actual code or development or architecture discussions.

Some nice things were Jruby on Rails, probably one of the most succesfull DSL out there, and the more and more attention and acceptance of low weight architecture design as REST. Java FX is nice but I don’t quite see what SUN is going with that. 1.6 is dominant and clearly worth upgrading. there was not much talk about persistence, but a nice overview of the content repository JSR’s. A lot of vendors ar involved so it looks pretty promising.

this week I also discoverd a new website /service for wine lovers. snooth makes it possible to create a wine cellar with a listing and tasting notes. Looks nice with terrific search asides it.

And finally; @ office we now also have a playstation 3 next to the wii. So game on….

It is my second day in Berlin and just found the time to blog about the conference. In all not so bad although some presentations were a bit old or a bit to simple. But also some nice surprises, like the evolution amazon is undergoing or should I say started as a service company. It is nice to see that a lot of other companies are following that track.

The ginger presentation of Tariq Krim was not so good but the topic is interesting and more compelling. How to combine the social networks. Unfortunatly, it is about combining the networks with widgets like Google Open Social. And not yet about creating a network with the facebook profile pages, the meebo communication, the twitter statusses, the gmail mail app and many other services… That ’s more like it but widgets can be the first step. If they beccome bigger and more complex, the services become the added value and the networks become reality and I think I’m coming close to web 3.0 then…

Still a lot of tracks to follow and some interesing people to meet. Keep you posted…

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A nice article with a must read label. I think google is again on to something here. The one thing that I myself wanted to do , was creating a niche web 2.0 app that uses your facebook profile (because it is the best) together with some other apps. Open social is going to do just that. It is kind of openid minded web 2.0 mashup development (whew, lots of buzzwords).

Wikipedia is apparantly over the top as more and more messages appeare about the decrease in wikipedia user interaction. In a time were I spend more and more time on Wikipedia, this seems bizarre. But on the other hand as more and more info gets injected, more and more people feel less inspired to add. In other words, one has to become a specialist to add something to  wikipedia and specialist are more inclined to stay that and so sharing the details is not an option.

Do I think that this is the end, no, but certainly a major halt. And that leaves options for the commercial vendors.

today something strange and worse happened. Netvibes started up as startpage and a lot of my feeds were gone. And suddenly I realized a big fault in the system. When I went over my startpage the new statewas saved every time. which means that the error was gone and netvibes was now programmed to the new state.

This gives me off course a chance to re-organize my pages and tabs,God knows its about time, but I still miss a few. I made a backup so no big harm but I still like some new ones I added recently.

So the backup daemon, what is in a word, is back. I hoped for a while that the web2.0 services would solve that issue but …

Maybe I need to come up with a solution or a new service. Does anybody uses a backup web 2.0 service?
Back to the drawing bord…

Working with different types of widget library’s one gets in contact with Ajax libs. Personnally I think the difference is even not there. As soon as you get asynchronous calls to the backend (whatever backend that may be), we are talking Ajax. And a widget is a piece of code that works on its own and thus has his own method for calling the backend. Hence widget = ajax in a simple form. But ajax then… I thought it was a complex matter to get the communication with the backend going but these days I get in contact with a lot of frameworks that seem to get the job done. There is Google that has several intakes in the issue, like their gadgets, the mashup editor, GWT, etc. There is off course Mootools and Scriptaculous but they are more of collection of snippets. There is also Dojo, DWR, echo and the commercialy backbase, tibco, jackbe,….

But you have to make a distinction between server and client frameworks. The server frameworks have a server side footprint and a small client base (eg gmail), the client frameworks can  potentialy work offline but have a bigger client lib –> more downloadtime. But that is relative because today a lot of pages go beyond the 500KB and that is a lot of javascript.

Going offline is also a key component for the future, like google gears. That means that the server-side story is slowly going down and can be replaced by a client-service oriented architecture. Those services provide a readable URL interface to underlying systems with a atomic structure… True webservices without the problems, just loosly coppled systems. It also fits in the development of RIA, Rich Internet Applications, were the OS will be independent (or as some say the internet will be the OS).

It is a complex picture but in constant motion and as the story continues I wil be trying to follow it. So check back here for more updates and technical remarks. PLease feel free to comment on the issue…

Just discovered a new site since I’m a dad of two. Apparantly since men are more involved in raising kids, they start using their pragmatic sense. And now there are a lot new inventions for new dads that should make life easier. Like a jack that is a nursery bag, or an alarm for when it is diaper time or feeding time, and so on.

So all new dads, check it out: www.dadgear.com

a new toy software found www.backpakcit.com from 37signals (the guys from Ruby on Rails among other stuff). A nice tool but google already has something like that called Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Picasa and blogger. But I got to admit that Google doesn’t combine easily. Maybe we should try to create a mashup from some google service to acces them easily, like  notebook,  calendar, gmail and blogger…

I recently discovered MIcrosoft One note and I’m already an avid user. I like the concept of no save button, the organisation is splendid with maybe even to muh options (they still can get it right like Google or Apple) but the only thing missing is a automatic backup system (and the thing is performant but still I get the feeling of memory clutter.)

Check it out…and let me know what you think

After spending my entire IT life on windows, and the last few years Linux@home, it was time for the ultimate, the best ….the Mac. And now I finf myself in the rare opportunity to use all my experience to install a machine GOOD. You know that feeling were you have all the options for software but this time   you know which one to install and which one not. So I’m installing firefox and extensions, textmate, twitter, Office (once it arrives ), thunderbird… You know all the good stuff without some crappy shit like shareware and others.. And then out of the blue, there is some shareware (demo ) software I like to have and yippie-ka-yeee it is installed. ’sync Google Calendar and Ical auto-matically, now that is something I want. Lets hope it works.

If someone had some suggestions for me of Mac tools I MUST try out, please leave them here… Much obliged