Tuesday January 20, 2009
Ars technica is writing about a project called Seed, which allows to write Gnome desktop apps with JavaScript.
Quote from the website:
Seed is a library and interpreter, dynamically bridging (through GObjectIntrospection) the WebKit JavaScriptCore engine, with the GObject type system. In a more concrete sense, Seed enables you to immediately write applications around a significant portion of the GNOME platform, and easily embed JavaScript as a scripting-language in your GObject library.
Go JavaScript, go! 
Posted on Jan 20, 2009 at 19:28 (MET) |
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Thursday January 8, 2009
2009 will be interesting. This is the last entry of this series of posts, about my thoughts/wishes about technological improvements in 2009. Previous entries: Really Rich Internet Applications, Easy JavaScript for Everyone, Databases and Persistence, Distributed Version Control.
Wiki-based documentation will become the single source for documentation in 2009. While wikis have been great for collaboratively created documentation ever since, the problem is that they are not very well export their contents to other formats in order to ship documentation as printed books or integrated online help. DocBook export is needed here.
I have requested this[1] for my favourite wiki[2] back in 2004 with no luck. However, this year we will ship a solution[3] for this. The Scroll Wiki Exporter for Confluence lets wiki-users export their documentation from trees of wiki pages to DocBook and PDF. Eventually we will support other output formats, pluggable, themes, and much more.
[1] Feature request for DocBook Export: CONF-762
[2] Atlassian Confluence
[3] Scroll Wiki Exporter
Posted on Jan 8, 2009 at 06:14 (MET) |
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Wednesday January 7, 2009
2009 will be interesting. In this series of posts, I publish some thoughts/wishes about technological improvements in 2009. Previous entries: Really Rich Internet Applications, Easy JavaScript for Everyone, Databases and Persistence.
Couple years back, I thought CVS was ok. Nowadays, I think it was crap and I am happy that I don’t have to use it anymore. Instead I use Subversion, which I thought SVN was ok. After watching Linus’ talk about DVCS and Git[2] and using it for SproutCore, I am sure that SVN days are counted, too. My bet is on Git, because it is already well established among open-source projects through github. Mercurial is nice, as is provides an SVN interface.
Note: I heard a couple times people telling that Git only works on Linux and Macs. Don’t believe that[3].
[1] Two DVCS contenders:Git, Mercurial
[2] Linus Torvalds on git
[3] GIT on Windows
Posted on Jan 7, 2009 at 06:00 (MET) |
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Tuesday January 6, 2009
2009 will be interesting. In this series of posts, I publish some thoughts/wishes about technological improvements in 2009. Previous entries: Really Rich Internet Applications, Easy JavaScript for Everyone.
Before I go on, let me state: Relational Databases will continue to stay as the backbone of persistence.
BUT: Non-relational databases will become more popular this year. Examples include document oriented data stores[1] or as graphs databases[2]. Also, it will become more popular to split storage and search. This will allow more flexibility and search performance. E.g. store your data in different data stores, and keep a local index/copy for searching[3].
[1] Couch DB
[2] Neo DB
[3] Read this blog (and comments) for a very nice overview.
Posted on Jan 6, 2009 at 08:11 (MET) |
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Monday January 5, 2009
2009 will be interesting. In this series of posts, I publish some thoughts/wishes about technological improvements in 2009. Previous entry: 2009: Really Rich Internet Applications.
For classic websites, jQuery has made the JavaScript development somewhat easy. Especially, if things like accessibility, graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are high on your priority list (which they really should be!).
One key success factor for broader adoption will be, whether the jQuery development team integrates/consolidates the excellent community plugins[1] into the main releases[2]. This will make the handling of the plugins hopefully easier and will make jQuery look better in feature comparisons.
[1] Treeview, Menu, …
[2] jQuery, jQuery UI
Posted on Jan 5, 2009 at 09:01 (MET) |
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Saturday January 3, 2009
Via mobile-facts.com I found this nice Mac/PC-style comic about Android and IPhone:
(Source: Joy Of Tech)
Posted on Jan 3, 2009 at 20:42 (MET) |
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Friday January 2, 2009
2009 will be interesting. In this series of posts, I publish some thoughts/wishes about technological improvements in 2009.
The development of browser-based applications with HTML(5), JavaScript, CSS, which run on PCs, Netbooks, Gaming Consoles and Mobiles will become increasingly popular. Basis for this will be improved browser performance[1], better JavaScript libraries for desktop-like application development[2], and extended browsers, which allow access to OS functions (like local file system, background threads, location information, etc.)[3].
[1] Chrome, Firefox 3.1
[2] SproutCore, Cappuccino
[3] Google Gears, Phonegap, AIR
Posted on Jan 2, 2009 at 08:33 (MET) |
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Thursday January 1, 2009
I wish everybody a Happy New Year!
(Photo by Michael Sutter)
2008 has been really great: I spent 6 weeks in Singapore (4 in Feburary + 2 in July) to help building a development team, got married with Petra, Emil was born. I can’t get much better!
At work, things became increasingly interesting, when I started working on HTML-based UI development. 10 years after I started my career in an internet agency hacking HTML and JavaScript for Netscape 3 and IE 3, things have improved a lot.
I am very excited about what 2009 has in store.
Posted on Jan 1, 2009 at 17:33 (MET) |
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