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New user? Wednesday, March 6, 2002
The Java Extension Mechanism??
Sun: The Java Extension Mechanism
Can someone please explain this to me in a sentence or two of english (even geek english) instead of Sunglish?
Update... Peter notes that the tutorial at the bottom of that page is pretty helpful. Indeed! I wish they had put that at the top of the page instead of the bottom. I got half way through the page and my eyes started to glaze over. (mind you it was just before lunch so maybe i was low on sugar ;-)) Thanks Peter!
RE: The Java Extension Mechanism??
Awesome... Bill expands on the Java Extensions tutorial with some very crucial information. I think I've actually seen that situation before but didn't understand it. :-|
Thanks for the info!
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
AspectJ with WO
Christian Pekeler has written a great tutorial for using AspectJ with WebObjects. I mentioned AspectJ here on Jan 10, 2001, but never did get the chance to play with it like I hoped. Christian has really armed me with what I need to know to get up to speed with it, and I'm grateful for it. :-)
Stepwise: Aspect-Oriented Programming with WebObjects
Christian is also a project admin for the WOUnitTest project on SourceForge.
Flash MX Overview
WebMonkey: Flash MX Overview
By the way, in case you're wondering why it's called Flash MX... they actually named it after my new son, who we originally named Matthias Xavier. A few days later we changed our minds and named him Xavier Matthias instead, but Macromedia had already sent all their files to the printers so it was too late to change.
Pretty cool, huh? ;-)
Soar Like an Eagle
Wow. Ashcroft is a spooky fella. Greg points to a very amusing story about his... singing, fear of tabby cats, and being anointed with cooking oil.
Whatever flips your bic, Johnnie boy.
J2EE and .NET Interop w/o Web Services
TheServerSide: J2EE and .NET Interoperability without Web Services?
Damian Mehers asks "who needs Web Services" now that Ja.NET (a Java framework) makes it possible for Java code to talk to .NET code. Ja.NET speaks the .NET remoting (binary) wire protocol.
That's pretty short sighted. It hardly deserves repeating, but there is more to the world than Java and .NET. And more to the world than entprise application servers and commercial software. Besides that, I think it's pretty cool that Java can now talk to .NET in that way. I wish vendors would come up with RMI classes for non-Java systems. Web Services are great, but variety is even better.
bbum on OSX profiles
Yesterday, Bill Bumgarner wrote a great rant, in full bbum style about Apple's installer, crazy classic user thinking, and how to set up your OS X machine so it's easy to back up and restore your profile on any machine.
This is what I love about Bill. He's a natural-born-blogger. Bill does this all the time, these long, informative rants. If you've ever met Bill, been subscribed to a mailing list he's on, or attended the same session as him at WWDC, you know what I mean. No one does it like bbum.
Bill really cares about this stuff. An example: on September 13, 2001 I got an email from Bill (whose office is/was in Manhattan):
"[Jim: I wrote this on the train on the way into NYC tuesday morning. Never got the chance to send it before the city-- and CodeFab's internet connectivity with it-- exploded. Can you post this to -newbies (if it is still relevant)? We are all OK, btw.... thanks.]"
The message was a 300 word (short by Bill's standards but given the situation pretty incredible) response to a question on the webobjects-newbies mailing list. Incredible.
Teen hero's pain
Toronto Sun: Teen hero's pain
What a tragic but courageous story. I hope the community can lift them from their grief and get them back on their feet.
Monday, March 4, 2002
Another Google/Weblogs story
This is a follow up from the same folks that brought us the Google Loves Weblogs story I linked to yesterday.
Google Time Bomb - Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine?
If weblogs really take off... I mean, 1,000x more weblogs than there are now in 5 years, this effect will be flattened. The issue is, right now, weblogs are a small group, tight knit and self-referential, and just large enough to be statistically significant in Google's eyes.
I wouldn't worry about it long term.
Flash MX is announced
Robert and Robb shed some light on the Flash MX announcement this morning.
CNET has a story about it... Flash: More than just eye candy
Robert's take on Bump was very interesting to me, I didn't know anything about the ColdFusion integration. It's obvious if you think about it for even 5 seconds, but I hadn't, because I haven't had much interest in either Flash or ColdFusion. But now I do.
For a long time I've mostly ignored Flash... thinking it was bad for the web. Whether that's true or not is not the point anymore... the point is, in my position, I'm in no position to put my head in the sand and just pretend it doesn't exist. Time to get up to speed, evaluate things with open eyes.
Thankfully, my new boss is a dynamic Flash expert. This will help.
The History of Flash
Untold History : The History of Flash - "The story of Flash as told by its inventor Jonathan Gay. Unedited"
Macromedia ... Backs Mac
OsOpinion: Macromedia Unveils Flash MX, Backs Mac
"[In] this release, we found that supporting the newest versions of OS 9 and OS X [was] extremely important to our customers. Therefore, we were able to remove legacy boundaries and significantly improve our code base to better support the enhancements in the more modern operating systems," Wittman said. "Our entire engineering team spent five months re-architecting the Macintosh authoring tool."
You have no idea how much it pisses me off to read that. And you have to imagine the folks at Apple are ready to throw punches too.
Adobe, Macromedia, Quark and Microsoft all bitched and moaned about Rhapsody, because they'd have to rearchitect their apps to use the YellowBox (now called Cocoa). Now, after all the work to make Carbon and the years of delays it caused for OSX, they're throwing away their code-bases anyway. And why? Because they sucked to begin with.
Grrr. Now we're stuck with Carbon for god knows how long. (Stomping and whining) And YellowBox would have had their apps running on Windows and Rhapsody for Intel on the same fucking codebase.
..|..
Frontier, Radio, ODBC, and me
Stephen Tallent: Stephen Tallent's Radio Weblog
Waaay back in 1998 (you know, the stone ages), I was redesigning the CEISS web site. The site's pages were ASP pages so that certain parts of the layout could be dynamic. The ASP pages were actually generated dynamically from a Frontier's Content Management suite (which still lives on inside Radio... more on that soon from UserLand it appears). The source of the pages (and the templates, logic, etc) lived in Frontier's Object Database (ODB).
When the ASP pages were rendered on the NT Server running IIS, they didn't have access to the ODB, so we had to have the ASP pages connect to an ODBC datasource (an Access 97 database in this case) that contained the data.
The cool thing was, people didn't have to enter that data into the database. They entered the data into the Frontier source for the web page, and it was automatically pushed into the Access database through Stephen Tallent and Henri Asseily's ODBC extension for Frontier.
The Access database contained "see-also" information. Here's how it was entered, in the top section of the document which contained the "directives" (page settings):
#metaKeywords "jim, roepcke, webobjects, canada"
A filter script I wrote in the ODB would be called automatically by Frontier when a page was generated. That script parsed the #metaKeywords directive and pushed the keywords into the Access database, relating each keyword with the page's title and the page's URL on the web server.
The ASP page knew its URL, and could use that to find the keywords stored in the Access database accociated with itself, and display them in the page along with links to the "see-also" pages which would display the list of other pages that also had that same keyword.
This isn't really all that fancy, nowadays, but it was in 1997. It was pretty hard to convince a lot of the other developers at CEISS (including Alex) that Frontier's page generation system was worth the effort to learn and use. Once we iterated over a site design a dozen times and was able to regenerate the entire staging site with one click after editing the template, it was pretty clear to everyone that major time was being recouped.
I look forward to watching more people discover Frontier's page generation system (known as the "HTML suite" by old-timers, and "Website Framework" by slightly less-old-timers) through Radio UserLand.
Keep your eye on that essay-in-progress.
