License 2 Code

Adobe Liberates Flex. Moving the Flex SDK and compiler to open source is a nice move - will it matter? Apparently Adobe was listening to this blogger’s plea to open source Flex.

Congratulations to Jerome and his team for the 1.0 release of Restlets. I’ve been using this for a couple months now and have quite enjoyed the framework. I re-engineered the server APIs on a software project I maintained to use Restlets instead of the proprietary interfaces I had developed. Very nice!

Restlet 1.0.0 released! « Noelios Consulting

An interesting take on categorizing popular web frameworks - I’d love to see this represented graphically - Tufte disciples - get crackin’!

Grails vs. Rails performance smackdown - round 1 goes to Grails. Sure there’s chatter about the preliminary nature of these results, admission that the tester really didn’t know how to tweak Rails, even an honest request for any help in improving the test. Well my one suggestion is - drop Rails. Read more »

The article, “Why PUT and DELETE?” at Artima is perhaps the best article I’ve read describing why PUT and DELETE are useful. The argument boils down to PUT and DELETE are idempotent, PUT allows you to create a resource at a client-specified URL, and POST is the catch-all that can do all of these things, but with different semantics. In the end, the developer has to decide if the semantics are important enough to require PUT and DELETE. In general, I suggest that systems are simpler if they support PUT and DELETE instead of disguising these verbs with POST.

Joel Spolsky’s latest entry is an interesting view into source management for a large project. My first reaction (uninformed) to the large number of sub-branches was “yuck!”. For example, it may be weeks or months before a feature from Team A is visible by Team B. But this blog entry argues that waiting until the feature is tested before being visible to other teams is more important than the delay.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/29.html

InfoQ has a great format for video/podcast content - recordings synced with transcriptions or slides. I started watching Joshua Bloch’s Javapolis presentation on API design. “But I don’t design APIs or frameworks…” Um, do you program? Bloch starts with the adage that thinking in terms of API design improves code quality - “Good code is modular - each module has an API”.

I have found this to be extremely true, and the more I’ve learned about API design, the more my own code quality has improved. Learning the principles of design-by-contract for example, had a tremendous impact on my code. A longer summary is in order once I can digest the entire presentation.

There is an incredible amount of content online like this these days - ninja-quality speakers, slide-sets included. Makes one think you could assemble your own mini-conference (minus the networking of course) in your pajamas. Anyone up for an API design discussion session over beers after watching this?

*bonus - a great interview/concurrent transcription with DHH on the future of Rails.

“Now I know how to do SOA right”. Marketing slogan from a test-automation company. You see, since “SOA is a methodology and technique to deliver J2EE, .NET, XML Web Services, Web applications, and anything else that uses a network to provide users with information services” (emphasis added) and “Services are always-on and must work well when many users make requests all-at-once.” SOA is all about performance testing.

Now granted I’m a fan of performance testing, especially when its incorporated into the dev process using tools like JPerfUnit and JMeter, and not done as an afterthought late in the quality assurance cycle. And I’m a fan of the PushToTest model, which is to support the community and user of the open source TestMaker tool. So this post isn’t so much to slam PTT as much as it is to highlight an interesting example of the hype train that is SOA… Read more »

This week we’ve been inundated with talks at the CSS on LAMP and Rails. What our spies in the field are reporting is that Rails is fast replacing PHP in the coveted LAMP stack. Yes, this new stack is LAMR. But you probably knew that.

The Colorado Software Summit has a tradition called Q and A, where the entire attendee population gathers at the end of the day for a totally open-mike, free-for-all question and answer session. Its a great place to get a quick collective opinion, or hook up with an expert for a follow-up.

And sometimes is just great for lobbing some caustic bomb of a question. Like the Java v. Ruby/Rails question raised tonight… Read more »

In fact, IE7’s release hasn’t blipped a single time on Central Standard Tech (best tech blogs evah). I mean, I realize that we *webdevs* *dislike* IE. But, this is the first major upgrade in 5 years to a browser that’s used by 80-90% of the world. I’d expect a little link love.

So, cheers to IE7! Now go download Firefox.

IE Link Love:

Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure

Information on Reports of IE 7 Vulnerability

The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0

Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?)

OpenLaszlo has evolved into a write-once, run many platform. You write in a proprietary markup language “LZX” which is then compiled into target runtimes. Until recently, these were Flash 7/8 and DHTML (coming fast). Orbit is an partnership announcement between OpenLaszlo and Sun to introduce J2ME as a third runtime.

I’ve been following OpenLaszlo since they announced they were open source under the CPL. Read more »

Amazon currently has three general purpose, developer focused web services: S3, EC2, and SQS. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service - and it is just that. Think of it as a large hash bucket for files. EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud and can be considered virtual computing instances that can be programmatically created and destroyed. Lastly, SQS stands for Simple Queue Service and is a standard queue which is a standard FIFO queue which includes a 256K message body.

Amazon S3 is a very compelling web service Read more »