techno.blog("Dion")

Web services has been over-hyped for a long time. Book sales are poor. You don’t hear too many people talking about it other than “REST vs. WS-*” arguments.

I realised that there doesn’t seem to be a community here. I think this may be similar to there not really being a community that revolved around JRMP or IIOP itself?

People want to get together to talk about meaty stuff:

How can I get work done

Open source software often has great community, as the software that is successful normally comes out of pragmatic need. It also does well as the group often encourages participation, and you feel like you can make a difference. If you find a bug, you want to put it in JIRA as you know someone will be in there. How many times do you have to fight for this with larger commercial companies, who get to it after they finish up bugs that have come in from their largest clients (NOTE: lots of good commercial companies take care of their lil guys too).

The interesting thing to note is that Web services is happening. More and more projects have a need to use some form of them for inteop, or other reasons. However, it is often a fringe part of the project. “I need to do X, Y, Z, and need to expose a service A that can be consumed safely”.

My main participation with a WS community is finding bugs and issues where interop is a painful broken promise :)

It is interesting to compare this to the communities that jumped up when EJB was brought into life. A lot of developers were forced into that world, and quickly developed hacks (patterns) to make it usable. We haven’t really seen the same take off in the WS space.

With the EJB mess behind us, we are able to focus on writing good software, with real OO models, and yes with services of some kind.

It is even easier to annotate the planet now. The Geobloggers have hooked up Google Maps! and Flickr to easily add photos to locations.

All you have to do:

You can join in and add your own photos by following a couple of simple steps.

1. Add three tags to your photo, “geo:lat=xx.xxxx”,
   “geo:lon=xx.xxxx” and “geotagged”, where xx.xxxx are the decimal format
   for it’s lat and long position.

Example “geo:lat=53.013″, “geo:lon=-2.1756″ & “geotagged”

2. Then;
   • Fastest,
     in the description add a link to www.geobloggers.com (i.e. (<a
     href=”http://www.geobloggers.com”>geotagged</a>). From the
     photos own page (not the photo stream) click the link. geobloggers will
     automagically look up the photo you just came from and search the tags
     for the lat and long. Note: If the link doesn’t seem
     to work wait a couple of minutes and try again. Sometimes it takes a
     short while for the lon/lat tags to appear in the XML data I get back
     from the flickr API.
   • Slower, just wait. geobloggers picks
     up the RSS stream for all public photos tagged as “geotagged”. It does
     this once every 5 mins, but the RSS feed itself is updated far less
     often (as far as I can tell). As it only holds the last 10 pictures,
     it’s possible it’ll miss some this way, I’ll wrangle around this in the
     future.
3. errr…
4. that’s it.

or

1. If your camera records the GPS data in the Exif headers, tag your photo with “geocoded” and it’ll be grabbed from the RSS feed

I have had an absolute ‘duh’ moment. I am a Ruby fan, and keep pinging JRuby to see if it is ready for prime time, and it never is (YET!). I have also talked with Microsoft about Ruby.NET.

I have written Python code in my past, but it was sandwiched between Perl and Java, and was used at first due to the very nice embedable API (embedding Perl was a nightmare for example). And, then I have moved on to Ruby/Groovy for my scripting needs. So, partly due to timing, partly due to FEEL, Python has been overlooked (as has PHP).

However, it turns out that Python is an obvious choice for a dynamic language that is fairly ubiquitous:

Not only can you get it on unixen, Windows, etc… but it runs on the JVM and CLR!

JPython

JPython has always been out there, but it seems to have picked up more steam recently (anecdotaly). We do have the strange combining of the worlds, and deciding whether to use python APIs vs. Java APIs, which depends on whether you are looking to run on the Java platform and just use a scripting approach here and there, of if you want a scripting language on a whole set of platforms (e.g. reusing your .py all over the shop).

IronPython

It seems that the Python community hasn’t been happy with how Microsoft has gone quiet until a recent IronPython release. Jim Hugunin is a great bloke, and I have no doubt that things will change and he will be able to break through the MSFT beauracracy.

With a solid IronPython, JPython, and CPython, you now have a very compelling dynamic language!

If you can put up with self ;)

And, there is also word that a new web framework named spyce is going to try to do what Rails has done for Ruby.

The IE Blog, and Chris Wilson have come out talking about an upcoming beta of IE 7.

There has been a lot of talk on what will be in the browser:

• Tabs?
• SVG?
• CSS fixes?
• JavaScript updates?
• … insert other FireFox feature …
• … insert other “standard” support feature …

The blog entry discusses the fact that CSS support will be fixed (and hence a lot of CSS code that expects the broken IE behaviour will become broken itself) and PNG alpha channel support.

Looks like they threw a little bone out, without really coming out to say what will be here ;)

Tim Bray has written about Sun’s new website, and how he hates the term ’solution’.

This is a pet peeve of mine. I am always driven nuts when I go to a companies website, and there are two drop downs:

• Products
• Solutions

Holy confusion batman!

Imagine Maven talking to Jelly talking to Ant talking to Groovy :)

Jeremy Rayner contributed a nice Groovy Ant task, which we can piggy back on in Maven.

Guillaume Laforge put in the magic to make sure that the Maven POM is injected into the scripting engine, so you can play with $pom:

<project default="groovy" xmlns:ant="jelly:ant">
<goal name="groovy">
<ant:taskdef name="groovy" classname="org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy" classpathref="maven.dependency.classpath"/>
<ant:groovy>
println pom.eachPropertyName{ println it }
println pom.name
</ant:groovy>
</goal>
</project>

It would be cool to be able to <ant:groovy script=”….”/>, or to write tags IN Groovy itself.

Of course, with m2 we will be able to write plugins with Groovy (as well as BeanShell and the like).

Brett Porter also talked about his addition to Maven to support CVS/SVN as a Maven repository itself. I personally am fine with using a traditional repository, where the http://….. is a SVN view itself, but I do hear people asking for exactly what Brett has implemented. Kudos Brett for doing this even though you won’t be using it yourself!

Rocky Lhotka mentioned a short (8 minute) video called EPIC 2014. The video is from the year 2014, and explains how the web grows, how Google and Amazon take over and become Googlezon (after they buy TiVo). We learn that the NY Times ‘goes offline’ in spite of the new platform. EPIC is the final platform: “Evolving Personalized Information Construct”.

If you work for Google, Amazon, TiVo, Microsoft, Blogger, Friendster, or the NY Times you must be having a bit of a laugh! ;)

Eric Gunnerson has hit the nail on the head with his Hitchhikers review.

I didn’t think it was bad. It was average. It was a homage to itself.

I love Tim from the Office playing Arthur Dent. Ford Prefect wasn’t great, and Zaphod really was bad. I never envision him as a dumb texan, but rather as somewhat cool (why would Trillian go for the idiot!).

The biggest problem was that it really wasn’t that funny. I was into it at the beginning, but it got a bit boring over time, and it missed many of the great lines/parts.

However, it is a BLOODY hard task to put this on the screen, so all in all they didn’t do a bad job.

Ben and I have been talking about tweaking our Ajaxian RSS Reader to be a SVG application. The problem has always been that SVG is plugin based, and just isn’t hugely used.

I think that will change with the announcement that:

But perhaps more interesting than that is the possibility of mixing SVG graphic elements directly into the markup of regular XHTML pages, freeing vector graphics from the small rectangle of a browser plugin and opening up a host of exciting new possibilities for web developers. This is enabled by the integration of SVG directly into the Gecko rendering engine, instead of as a browser plugin.

Now we just need the IE team to put SVG support into IE 7 (come on guys!), and we will be rolling!

The IE team could map SVG to XAML and be done :)

As I was following a car which was swerving all over the shop, I wondered why we hadn’t seen smart windscreens like we were promised.

The screen should be like a HUD. It could have a video feed of the rear (better than a read mirror), and other angles.

One small addition would be to project where the wheels are in the road. For the first time, people would REALLY see where their wheels are, instead of guessing. This would also help with parking the car.

Of course, if you think about it a ton of features could be added :)