- InfoQ: FlexMonkey 1.0 Released – FlexMonkey is an open source testing tool for Flex and AIR applications. FlexMonkey provides for the capture, replay, and verification of Flex user interface functionality. FlexMonkey generates ActionScript-based testing scripts that can be run from the FlexMonkey application or included within a continuous integration environment.
- First Steps to Scala – In this article, you'll follow twelve steps that are designed to help you understand and gain some basic skills in the Scala programming language.
- InfoQ: Dion Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 and Web Oriented Architecture – Dion Hinchcliffe is an advocate of Web 2.0 and the Web Oriented Architecture. He explains how a mindset shift helped some companies be very successful using the Web 2.0 model while others have failed. He also considers that eventually most companies will migrate to WOA because we are living in an increasingly networked world.
- Tips and Tricks: An easy way to persist Lists, Images, etc. with JPA / EJB3 | Platypus Innovation: technology, AI, new media, maths, interactive drama, ARGs and related miscellanea – JPA is EJB3's persistence annotations. These make saving state to a database relatively painless (and possibly give Java the edge here over most other languages).
- Jackson JSON Processor – Home – There is a nice and fast XML / JSON parser with the name Jackson. It is especially useful for fast XML parsing and JSON processing with JAXB support.
- Introducing Java DB 10.5.1.1 – The next major release of Java DB, version 10.5.1.1, is now available for download. Java DB is Sun's supported distribution of the Apache Derby open-source database. Java DB is 100 percent Java technology and easy to use. Don't be fooled by its small JAR file (2.5M): This free database is fast, reliable, and packed with features
- iPhone’s camera is the most used on Flickr | iPhone Root – In just 20 days the iPhone has climbed to the top of Flickr and is now in first place among the most used cameras.
- InfoQ: Spring Framework 3.0, The Next Generation – Juergen Hoeller co-founder of Spring Framework, sees 3.0 as the completion of what was started with 2.5. Some topics covered in his presentation are: more annotation-based configuration options, Unified EL++, REST, Portlet 2.0 and Java EE6 support.
- Top 10 Tips and Tricks for Better Coffee – Coffee – Lifehacker – Coffee doesn't always make work better, but you can definitely work to get better coffee. From four-cup hotel machines to French presses, from home-roasted beans to decorative foam—we've got a wealth of tips for enjoying a better cup
- Java Entrepreneur: AMR: Oracle/Sun to ‘Wreak Havoc’ on Enterprise Software Market – Of the top 50 software vendors ranked by AMR, two-thirds have applications that require Java, including many Oracle competitors… 'Not only will vendors be impacted by the fragile economy, but 33 out of the top 50 vendors will have to reevaluate their commitment to the Java programming language,' said AMR vice president Dennis Gaughan," Gage writes
- Cloud servers for your Perl app – Amazon’s EC2 vs Mosso – Catalyzed.org: A Catalyst and Perl Blog – On the whole Amazon EC2 and Mosso are very close competitors. Amazon loses out on CPU power per dollar spent, but Mosso costs a bit more per gigabyte of RAM. Mosso loses out on 'extra storage' but wins on general IO speed.
- RESTful Web Services Cookbook – RESTful Web Services Cookbook is a book for programmers designing and developing RESTful web services, to be published by O'Reilly and Yahoo! Press by the end of 2009. This book is currently a work in progress.
- Coding Horror: Oh, You Wanted "Awesome" Edition – Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.
- President Obama’s first 167 days – The Big Picture – Boston.com – U.S. President Barack Obama has now been in office for 167 days, and it's time for a look back. Why 167 days? Why not – it's just as arbitrary a number as the usual "100 days".
Tag: flickr
Daily del.icio.us for January 9th
- enunciate – Enunciate is a Web service deployment framework. It is not another Web service stack implementation. Rather, Enunciate leverages existing Web service technologies to provide a mechanism to build, package, deploy, and to clearly, accurately deliver your We
- Ryan Heaton’s Blog: Web Service Programming for the Masses, Part I: Developing the Web Service API – This is the first part of a tutorial will walk you through developing a Web service API that could meet the requirements of all of the above-mentioned use cases. For the sake of clarity and brevity, we’ll keep the operations simple, but by the time we’re
- Bob Rhubart’s Blog: The SOA Governance Prescription – A significant part of getting your SOA to do what it’s supposed to do is getting the people involved in the SOA to do what they’re supposed to do
- Pinaki Poddar’s Blog: Slice: OpenJPA for Distributed Databases – Slice is a OpenJPA plug-in for horizontally-partitioned, distributed databases. As distributed databases are being increasingly common in enterprise IT ecosystem, I considered extending OpenJPA to transact against a set of databases instead of a a single
- Top 10 SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and DTS tips – Whether you plan to migrate SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or run DTS packages in SQL Server 2005, this expert advice can help
- How to Dynamically and Iteratively Populate An Excel Workbook from SQL Server – SQL Server Central – In this article, I will show you how to create a new Excel output file and populate the file with discrete spreadsheets containing specific data from a database. We will Integration Services for the task
- Application Development Trends – SpringSource Offers Spring.NET 1.1 – SpringSource is offering the final release of Spring.NET 1.1. Spring.NET 1.1 supports the ASP.NET Framework for Web development. It enables dependency injection for pages, controls, modules and providers
- InfoQ: Bruce Johnson discusses Google Web Toolkit – Google Web Toolkit (GWT) tech lead Bruce Johnson discusses the design of GWT, how GWT converts Java into JavaScript, community involvement with GWT, new features in GWT 1.4, and the philosophy behind GWT.
- Book Review: Google Web Toolkit Applications – Google Web Toolkit, by Ryan Dewsbury, is an excellent book for those looking to use GWT to good advantage, covering most areas of GWT functionality in exceptional detail. It covers software engineering, server integration, custom component composition, CS
- Adobe – Developer Center : Using BEA Workshop Studio and Java to create Flex-based RIAs – In this tutorial, I walk you through the steps to creating an RIA using Java for the back-end business logic and Flex for the front-end view of the application. I will use the BEA Workshop Studio (Flex Bundle) to create a simple Java mid-tier and a simple
- smarturls-s2 – Google Code – SmartURLs-S2 is a Struts 2 plugin that provides a rich set of convention based handling for web applications. In addition, it also provides a component framework for developing web application components in separate codebases and the deploying them into a
- Building Struts 2 Apps Without XML Gluecode – In this article, we jettison XML gluecode for “convention over configuration”. Using the SmartURLs plugin for Struts 2, we can autowire Action classes to page templates with search-engine-optimized URIs.
- Embedding Flickr Photos – In this article, I’ll explain how to fetch data from Flickr using a proxy client library and displaying the data in a Visual Web Application page.
- Atlassian Developer Blog – How to build an Atlassian plugin – There’s a single command that will download Tomcat, install Confluence or JIRA, start them up, load sample data, then install your plugin for testing. And once you’ve started the application once, you can just leave it running while you uninstall and rein
Daily del.icio.us for Mar 02, 2007 through Mar 04, 2007
- Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters – This book is a practical course that takes you into the world of real-life RIA applications. We also provided open source components and libraries that we hope will help you in your own development.
- IntelligentEnterprise : Debriefing: Adobe’s Jeff Whatcott Explores the Rich Internet Apps Trend (printable version) – Macromedia is credited with coining the term "Rich Internet Applications," so who better to comment on the future of enterprise apps than Macromedia veteran Jeff Whatcott. Now senior director, product marketing in the Enterprise & Developer Solutions Busi
- Body Language: A Key to Success in the Workplace : Yahoo! Finance – Body Language: A Key to Success in the Workplace
- Ted Leung on the Air » Blog Archive » Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web – I guess we can only hope that Adobe?s experience with Tamarind warms it to the benefits of a more open model for the future of Flash. Sun has finally woken up, so maybe it?s not impossible for Adobe to either.
- Writing Better Code: A Conversation With Sun Microsystems Technology Evangelist Brian Goetz – Meet with Brian Goetz, author of the book Java Concurrency in Practice to get his thoughts on Java technology performance challenges, Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), common performance hazards, the challenges of moving from C to Java progra
- FlickrBlog – Beautiful Madison, Wisconsin – "What city has the most active Flickr group? New York? Chicago? Nope. None of the above. Of the top 100 cities in America, the San Francisco, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin Flickr groups have more members per capita than any other city in America. Madison
- IT-eye » Flex the next Java? – There seems to be some similarity with Java. Not that Flex will replace it, but Flex might become the Java for RIA?s for Companies who do not want to rely too much on Microsoft
Pictobrowser Rocks
Just found the Pictobrowser from Thomas Hawk's blog and it is an amazing way to embed pictures in your blog. Pictobrowser is a simple widget that allows you to display sets of pictures from Flickr directly on your site or blog using Flash and the users never leave your site. Pictobrowser is the brainchild of Diego Bauducco. Check out a sample below from one of my sets:
Daily del.icio.us for Jun 15, 2006
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Google launched a beta version of the Picasa Web Albums earlier in the week and I got invited to participate in the beta of the product. Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily
Google’s Picasa Web Albums – No Flickr Killer, Yet!
Google launched a beta version of the Picasa Web Albums earlier in the week and I got invited to participate in the beta of the product. Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web.
Picasa has always had the ability to take you existing pictures and create html based or webpage slideshows but you needed to have a host where you could upload and display these pictures. I’ve been using Picasa since it became free with the Google acquisition and it has always worked great. Picasa is really my favorite program for managing my photo collections and it’s worked great for that purpose. I always used the ability to upload and print pictures directly from Picasa to Ofoto and other online digital photo printers.
The latest beta which as the Picasa Web Albums is exactly like the older (v2.0) of Picasa but the first thing I noticed that was different was the extra button in the bottom of the application named ‘Web Album’. Clicking that button allowed you to upload the selected pictures to the web and stored on Google’s servers. The first requirement is a Google account and you get 250MB of free storage space. For $25.00 per year, you can get a subscription to an additional 6GB of storage. While the fee is comparable to Flickr, the storage limit is something different. I have a Flickr Pro account and I essentially have unlimited storage capacity – The only restriction I have is a monthly upload bandwidth limit.
The user-interface is very simple and with a few simple clicks, you can upload your pictures directly to your Google Picasa Web Album site. One of the things that make Picasa stand apart from Flickr is that Picasa offers image manipulation ability while Flickr just offers hosting. In the past, I would export ‘fixed’ pictures from Picasa and upload them to Flickr or create web-pages out of Picasa to share with family and friends. Once you create an album, you can share it with friend and Picasa lets you email people to share the location of the album.
I took some pictures from my recent vacation in Hawaii and put them up using Picasa. The album interface is full of Ajax goodness like Flickr but there are a few subtle differences. A nice feature that I haven’t seen in Flick is the ability to ‘Download Album’ which allows you to download a complete album to your computer. Each album is also accessible and available as an RSS feed which is also pretty nice. It also appears that you can add a user as an RSS feed and see future uploads in your feed reader.
All in all, Picasa Web Albums is a pretty neat idea and a very simple, yet elegant interface. I didn’t see any Google Adsense ads on the site yet but I am sure that will come. Being a Picasa fanatic, I guess I’ll start using the Web Albums but I wish you could get the same result but my web host for storage. I know some of the hosted features of comments, etc wouldn’t work without the Google backend but I would live without those features of have that type of functionality still tied back to Google. Oh well – Time will tell and once the API opens up, people will come up with some pretty creative solutions.
Network Neutrality: Why it really matters?
Let’s hope Congress does the right thing and adds in adequate protection to guarantee Network Neutrality as life without it could really suck. Can you imagine a world where people who use Verizon as their ISP not being able to get to Google as Microsoft is paying Verizon to make MSN the preferred search engine. So all traffic to Google could be blocked or QOS’d down to a trickle. Can you imagine using a 4 MBps Internet connection where your connection to Google or other sites is a trickle of 56 Kbps? Can you imagine your Skype call sounding like crap because you are using AT&T as an ISP and they would rather sell you their VoIP services?
It’s funny how the Telecommunication companies essentially want to blackmail content providers and consumers. When I surf to Google or Flickr or Digg or Live.com, I am using my local Internet connection that I pay for – Sites like Google, Flickr and Digg also pay for the bandwidth they use and so the consumer is paying to get to the provider and the provider is paying to connect to the Internet. But my ISP now wants to give one company priority on their networks over another, for a price. Sounds pretty shady, doesn’t it?
Can you imagine how this would just totally kill innovation on the Internet? If we don’t get Network Neutrality, innovative companies like YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and countless others would have never been able to launch as they wouldn’t have been able to pay the Telecom companies extortion. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo would be able to afford it but new upstarts would be left out and can you imagine a world where there is no real competition? Look at Microsoft and Internet Explorer – After Netscape died, Microsoft essentially disbanded the IE team and didn’t add any new features in the browser for almost 6 years. Competition is critical and fuels innovation and without competition, we have stagnation and the consumer suffers.
Web2.0 or Bubble2.0, depending on your perspective has largely been made possible by the ubiquity of the high-speed Internet access. Even Al Gore, the creator of the Internet has spoken up on this issue. 🙂 At a recent speech, Al Gore said “Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy. It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates.” (Via FreePress.net)
