Bill Gates' House
usnews.com: Bill Gates' House: "You are your own tour guide inside the Gates estate. Simply click on the active areas of the image or use the text links below to navigate"
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usnews.com: Bill Gates' House: "You are your own tour guide inside the Gates estate. Simply click on the active areas of the image or use the text links below to navigate"
Haystack: "Haystack is a tool designed to let individuals manage all their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary barriers created by applications that handle only certain information 'types' and that record only a fixed set of relationships defined by the developer, we aim to let users define whichever arrangements of, connections between, and views of information they find most effective. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve everyone's ability to find what they need when they need it."
AWS Java DAO Integration Project:
There's a new AWS Integration project on sourceforge.net. Here are the goals:
The AWS Integration project provides a Java DAO layer to client applications making the Amazon Web Services (AWS) even easier to use, especially for J2EE developers.
Using the integration API, you don't have to work with the web services directly, or even through the Axis generated API, you access the Amazon data seamlessly using simple DAO and JavaBeans.
Qualified developers are invited to join the project and to contribute code. They are planning to cover ECS and AWIS.
(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)
..other people seem to have similar "feelings" about Ajax..
Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Ajax Mistakes: "Ajax is an awesome technology that is driving a new generation of web apps, from maps.google.com to colr.org to backpackit.com. But Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems. "
(Via Alex Bosworth's Weblog.)
UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction: "If you've done any Web or UI design, or even thought about it much, you should say, 'Oh, right, I know what that is' to most of these patterns. But a few of them might be new to you, and some of the familiar ones may not be part of your usual design repertoire."
..check the screencast, pretty impressive, but I'm still not convinced that AJAX is the next major UI-technology..
AJAX encapsulation with TIBCO General Interface: " With all the recent AJAX buzz, there's renewed interest in toolkits that can abstract away the inherent nastiness of that style of development. TIBCO's General Interface is one such toolkit, and today's 8-minute screencast excerpts highlights from a demo shown to me yesterday by Kevin Hakman. He's a founder of General Interface, which TIBCO acquired last fall. ..."
(Via Jon's Radio.)
Tools for dynamic languages: "I met Paul Kedrosky for the first time last week and we had a great conversation. We share a connection through ActiveState: Paul was a member of the board of directors and I was on the technical advisory board. (We've both since resigned those positions.) It occurred to us that, ironically, the original mission of ActiveState -- to create professional tools for open source programming languages -- may now be more relevant than ever. ..."
(Via Jon's Radio.)
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary:
"To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible."
..that's the way to do it..
Backpack becomes a web service:
Backpack is not just for you to love, but for machines too. The brand new Backpack API makes it possible for other programs to easily talk to your backpack. That opens the door to Dashboard widgets, weblog integration, command-line tools, and much more.
We’ve created a forum to go with the API, too. Let us know of your creations and share them if you can. The API is not all finalized, so hold off with the nuclear reactor integration for a couple of weeks. But have fun experimenting today.
If you’re working with Ruby, have a look at this sample wrapper for the API.
(Via Backpack Weblog.)
Ruby on Rails: "Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups"
Downloaded and am reading (only to page 27 so far) the first public draft of the Fortress language spec when LtU posted info about it. Very nice looking stuff. Very Scala like as well.
I'm looking forward to seeing where Sun goes with this. I really like what I see in the spec!
(Via Waste of Time.)
I've met a lot of companies working on web services APIs while I've been working on Where 2.0. These companies want to reach programmers like me, the ones who will play with something, build a cool app or two, then promote it within their company if they like it. They want to know how to make their service attractive to these Internet programmers.
I always tell them, 'Make it useful and easy.' All too often the company is so tied up in its existing business that its idea of an 'open API' is 10 hits/day, strictly non-commercial use, SOAP-only, with fax-in paperwork only downloadable with the latest version of IE on Windows. They're looking at the API purely from the point of view of the provider. But if you want me to use this API, you'd better start thinking about it from my side: I want something that's easy to start using and that will scale with the coolness of the apps I build.
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
Effective desktop applications:
Some months ago I wrote an article in Spanish called Aplicaciones de escritorio eficientes, that could be translated as Effective Desktop Applications. I wrote this article because this is a very important topic forgotten by the common biliography. It's very easy to found information about EJB best practices, Servlet/JSP/JSF best practices, persistence best practices, web services bestpractices, interoperability best practices, but what about the desktop?
Even it seems that Sun is planning with Mustang some type of swing blueprints - correct me if I'm wrong, I think I have read this somewhere just today. That would be a great thing!
Well, in this article I talk about different best practices I found during my last +5 years of Swing programming and =2 years of SWT programming. I planned to translate it to English, but it's very very difficult to find some time to translate -my English isn't specially good, so I need a lot of time :-). But today I decided to post here the best practices summary. You can contribute and if people is interested, we could talk about some point in a different weblog entry.
So here we go:
I think that to work developing healthcare systems has helped me a lot to understand the great importancy of the items above. For example, when a cardiologist is doing some operation, and has to check some information on the patient clinical history, the last thing he want to do is waiting some minutes for that information to be downloaded. So in this job, you're encouraged to do very responsive UIs; to lazy and eager load data in a smartly way; to offer the possibility of offline working - imagine, that you're being operated, and suddenly the network adapter goes down, etc.
Well, do you have any other suggestion to this list? Do you like to talk about any special item?
(Via Martin Perez's Weblog.)
Use Java 1.5 on 10.3: "I am desperately waiting for Java 1.5. But I dont want to switch to Tiger. So I downloaded the new Java 1.5 from Apple's Developer Site. Unfortunately, the installer wouldn't proceed, because my current OS version is below 10..."
(Via macosxhints.)
Strategic Weaknesses of Folksonomies:
There has been some talk about technorati and del.icio.us and the issue of tag spam. But any system whether Wiki or tagging or other, that is open will suffer from the same basic strategic weakness...there are potential solutions though...
What are the contributing factors that allow spam to happen?
(Via Get Real.)