Raible Designs

Comparing Ajax Frameworks

From the SpikeSource blog:

SpikeSource's Matt Harrison blogs about his latest interest, AJAX. He's been checking out the various frameworks for AJAX's and being a python lover he has even ported some of them to be used with python. Matt has also conducted mini interview's with one of the framework creators: Alex Russell of dojo, and Bob Ippolito of MochiKit. An interesting read.

http://panela.blog-city.com/ajax_explosion.htm

Harrison also references a nice AJAX Library Comparison on the Open Source Applications Foundation website. I'd love to see an AJAX Framework Smackdown at a future conference.

Want to learn more about Ajax? Come to tonight's DJUG.

If you live in Denver and want to learn more about Ajax, you might want to attend tonight's Denver JUG. Steve Benfield will be delivering a presentation titled "Injecting Life into Web Applications with AJAX".

In this session we will cover how AJAX works, discuss architectural considerations for building AJAX-enabled applications, look at lots of code examples, explore some real-world AJAX examples, discuss using AJAX for returning dynamic data versus dynamic GUI elements, and cover emerging AJAX frameworks and patterns. We will end with a demonstration and comparison of an AJAX enabled business application versus a traditional HTML application.

Finally we will discuss what our team had to consider and some of the pitfalls we found when it came to implementing our own AJAX framework.

Looks like a good session. I won't be attending b/c I need to take care of some OS Rot on both my PowerBook and Desktop.

DWR and Script.aculo.us now included in AppFuse and Equinox

Last night, I integrated DWR into both AppFuse and Equinox. AppFuse has had Script.aculo.us integrated since 1.8.2 and it's been great to work with - so I added it to Equinox as well. I added these with the philosophy that it's easier to remove them than to add them.

Thanks to Joe Walker (DWR), Thomas Fuchs (Script.aculo.us) and Sam Stephenson (Prototype) for authoring (and supporting) these great open source projects.

Next up: integrating Ivy (or Maven 2's Ant Tasks) for downloading dependencies. Hopefully both will still allow bundling JARs in a release so both AppFuse and Equinox can stick with the 1-download-to-get-everything philosophy. The main reason I'd like to integrate a dependency downloading tool is to reduce AppFuse's size in CVS, as well as make it easier to upgrade dependencies.

What's a good external firewire drive?

I have a 60 GB firewire drive that we resurrected from Julie's dead PowerBook, but I'm interested in getting a bigger one to start regular backups. CNET recommends the Maxtor OneTouch II (300GB), but there's lots of bad reviews. 200 GB should be enough for the next year or two. Any recommendations? Is there one that can be used to backup OS X, Windows and Linux?

Java in Action Presentations and OS Rot

I think I have a serious case of OS Rot on my PowerBook. Despite the fact that it's been extremely slow lately, I went ahead and used it to deliver my Comparing Web Frameworks talk at Java in Action. I was a little hesitant when I agreed to do this talk - mainly because it required me to stretch a one-hour presentation into a 3-hour presentation. I figured the best way to take up all that time would be to do some live coding. So I recorded a whole bunch of "Live Templates" in IDEA and went in to the talk thinking I could pull it off. To say the least, my Mac didn't cooperate and the "live coding" I did failed miserably. JR Boyens hits the nail on the head in his review. Cameron only attended the first part (before the live coding started) and it looks like I did pretty good in the first hour.

Lessons Learned: 1) Have a backup plan and 2) don't do Comparing Web Frameworks as a 3-hour tutorial. I've never had a backup plan in the 2 years I've been speaking at conferences. I've been pretty lucky though, my demos have always worked. I was due for a failure. For my afternoon session about Ajax and Spring, I moved all the live coding stuff to the Dell laptop I had with me. This worked much better, but I was again spat on by the Demo Gods and over half of my demos failed to work. Oh well, I guess it just wasn't my day.

The good news is that all the demos are available online. The master/detail applications I developed are already part of Equinox, and the Ajax demo is available at http://demo.raibledesigns.com/equinox-ajax. Features include an ajax-ified Display Tag with AjaxAnywhere, an editable text with script.aculo.us (click on a user's first name in the table), in page updates with DWR (on the detail screen) and a zip-code autocomplete/city-state auto-populate with script.aculo.us and DWR. If there's any interest, I can write up a tutorial on how each feature was constructed. In the meantime, you can download the equinox-ajax project from java.net.

After my Ajax talk, I was approached by a couple of the AjaxTags developers, and they showed me some very cool widgets they're working on. I definitely plan on digging into this project in the very near future.

Made it to Java in Action

I just arrived at Disney's fancy "Yacht Club" for the Java in Action show. Today was a fun day - Julie and I took Abbie and Jack to Magic Kingdom and had a great time. Abbie got to meet Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Eor and Tigger. She was scared of Mickey, but warmed up to Pooh and friends pretty quickly. It was weird - it kept raining off and on throughout the day, but it didn't seem to put a damper on anyone's spirits. Unlike Colorado, rain doesn't cool anything down. In fact, the humidity seems to crank the temperature up a notch or two.

Tomorrow is a full day - I have a 3 hour tutorial on web frameworks in the morning, followed by an hour of Ajax + Spring in the afternoon. After that, it's back to vacation-mode until I return to Denver next Tuesday.

I'd post the slides from my talks, but they're starting to make less and less sense (in downloadable form) as I add more images and less bullets. Besides, I plan on coding and conversing for most of the talks. That's the fun part of speaking at conferences - who wants to listen to a presentation anyway? Why does the good conversation have to take place in the hallways? Can't it happen right in the room?

PowerPoint 2.0

From beyond bullets:

Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.

You can view his presentation at this link.

It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.

Woah. I'm blown away. This is a great example of what your presentations can be. To be honest, this looks very hard to do. You basically have to know what every word you're going to say is, and you have to have a new slide for every 2-3 words. It sure would be fun to deliver this kind of presentation.

Gmail's New Auto-Save Feature

I dig the new auto-save feature in Gmail. It seems to fire off about every 20 seconds and I can already tell it's going to be a life saver. This is something we need desparately in Roller. There's nothing more frustrating than having your browser crash when you're writing a long post. Of course, the easy solution to that problem to that problem is to use an offline editor to author the post. However, I much prefer using my web browser.

Trackback Spam

Roller seems to have done a pretty good job of suppressing comment spammers. The math question seems to trip up automated scripts and I only get about 1 or 2 spam comments per month. At least, I only see 1 or 2 per month - many get marked as spam and just sit in the database - never to be displayed. However, recently I've started to notice a lot of Trackback spam.

I dive into my "comment" table a few times a week to format comments so they look like their author intended them to look (I never alter wording). In the past couple of weeks, I've noticed a buttload of spam trackbacks (up to 10-20 per day). Here is an example. How do we go about stopping trackback spam? I'm guessing the easiest way is to disable trackbacks.

The Busy Season Begins

I never thought the 4th Quarter would be the busy season, but it is for me this year. Tomorrow marks the beginning and it won't end until after The Spring Experience is over. My current schedule is that I'll only be in Denver 2 weeks in the next 2 1/2 months! Of course, I'll be home on the weekends, but I'll be on the road the rest of that time. Most of the travel is for conferences, but a few weeks is for clients, as well as a couple weeks of remote work/vacation. I'll be traveling to Florida (twice), Keystone (Colorado), San Francisco and New Jersey.

In that same time span, I'll be speaking 15 times. 2 times at Java in Action next week, 6 times at the Colorado Software Summit (in two weeks), twice at Denver's No Fluff, at the Gator and Orlando JUGs in November/December, and 3 times at The Spring Experience. Phew! That's a lot of talking. Conferences are fun though, especially since you only have to really work for the hour or two while you're talking.

The last part of the whole roadtrip should be a really good time. We're heading down to West Palm Beach (Florida) for Thanksgiving and staying for 3 weeks. I'll be working remotely, swimming in Julie's Mom's pool, speaking at the JUGs and ending it all at the Spring conference.

If you're going to any of these shows, let me know. I'm always up for a beer.