impl.emented» Web Development

Stack Overflow, HTML 5, Chrome Processes, Atmosphir and More [Best of September '08 #2]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:23:38 +0000

An assortment of the most interesting posts this week (September 8-14 2008):

Stack Overflow launches, a Q&A site for programmers, who can ask questions and get answers from other programmers. The site is community driven, good answers get voted up and rise in the list of answers to a question. As a result, any discussions among the answers are discouraged, as these will be scrambled, explains Joel Spolsky, one of the founders. Community members can build a reputation by earning points and badges in response to good answers and other activity. Marshall Kirkpatrick liked Stack Overflow in his review, and I think it could be a useful service. Marshall requested subscribable feeds for answers to a question. I found a link to an Atom feed for each question, not sure if it is optimal though. There are also feeds for a users top answers and questions, and the top 30 questions for a specific tag. A chronological feed with all questions belonging to a tag would perhaps be more useful.
Tags: programming, web development
Webmonkey has an article about HTML 5, the next specification in works for the HTML language. The latest specification 4.01 was completed in 1999, and we probably will have to wait at least another 10 years for a completed version 5. In the meantime some browser vendors have implemented parts of the HTML 5 draft, e.g. the canvas element, and more recently the video element, as I wrote about last week. Browser extensions like Gears, and plugins like Silverlight and Flash also find a niche, where the current standard is lagging behind.
Tags: HTML5, web standards
Scott Hanselman writes about the use of multiple processes in the Chrome browser and in IE8. Separate processes create a greater degree of isolation between tabs: If one process/tab crashes, the other processes/tabs stay unaffected. The potential overhead of processes vs. threads, and the inter-communication between processes, are really no problem nowadays considering the rapid development of computer hardware.
Tags: Chrome, IE8
A new tool dubbed CookieMonster will soon be released to the public. It is able to get hold of user credentials submitted to secured sites via a man-in-the-middle attack. Several banks are identified as insecure. The tool utilizes a programming flaw, where the website developer has failed to designate the authentication cookie as secure.
Tags: security
Atmosphir, a 3D platform game creation tool, is currently in private beta but expects to open to the public at the end of the year. Atmosphir got one of the five jury selection prices at this years TechChrunch50. Hopefully it is fun for creative kids.

Tags: gaming

RESTful Programming Explained. DRM Leads to Piracy [Best of August '08 #2]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:25:21 +0000

Interesting posts this week (August 11-17 2008):

Dare Obasanjo explains the essence of a REST-based architecture, some benefits over SOAP, and how it obeys to the architecture of the Web itself: "Don't fight the Web, embrace it." The ideas behind REST stem from a Ph.D. dissertation by Roy Fielding in 2000, and are a bit abstract and academic in their nature. But the essence seems to be to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the HTTP protocol, such as using GET, PUT and DELETE wisely instead of fully relying on POST. For example, caching is a benefit offered by using GET.
Dave Winer chips in, and reminds us not to forget about XML-RPC, which on the XML-RPC home page is explained as "remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding."
Tags: REST, web development
Josh Catone shares some insights into why people pirate software, as compiled by game developer Cliff Harris. Low game quality and presence of DRM, are important reasons for piracy, besides the obvious reason of saving money.
Tags: DRM, gaming
Twitter quietly announced an important new feature to their API, as noticed by Jesse Stay. It is now possible to reply to any specific message in the past, not just to the last one posted.
Tags: Twitter
My recent post on ECMAScript Harmony and the future of JavaScript and ActionScript.
Tags: JavaScript

Identica Microblogging and Gnip Pinging Services [Best of July '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:40:11 +0000

This week's interesting posts (July 1-6 2008):

Identi.ca, a new open source microblogging service discovered by ReadWriteWeb has a host of attractive features like support for OpenID and the OpenMicroBlogging specification, which allows for publishing of notices across microblogging services. Identi.ca builds on the open source code laconi.ca, with reportedly a number of installations across the web, building a promise of a distributed alternative to Twitter. The code may have some flaws, e.g. the core architecture more resembles a content management system (CMS) than a messaging system, though since it is open source that can certainly get fixed.
Tags: microblogging, open source
Gnip — ping backwards, is a new free service for data providers and consumers, acting as a proxy between the two, taking API load off providers while increasing the update notification speed for consumers. More features are in the planning as anticipated by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Brad Feld has a detailed story about his evolving partnership with Gnip and MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, from the first IM from Eric in 2004 to working as partners today.
Tags: proxy services
Blogged — a blog directory and human powered news aggregator. A potential Techmeme killer, had it only got rss feeds ...
Tags: blog directory, news aggregator
Ars Technica points to a browser wishlist initiative of the OpenAjax Alliance, "an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax". Among the most requested features of the next generation browsers are native JSON parsing, persistent connections, 2D graphics, video support and CSS features.
Tags: web development
Google learns to crawl Flash, for better or worse. After all, less Flash content is something I'd rather see. Visiting a Flash heavy site usually is a noisy experience for me as the CPU fan starts spinning due to the increased CPU usage and temperature.
Tags: Flash

SproutCore JavaScript Framework is Pushing for Standards Compliant Browsers [Best of June '08 #3]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:48:26 +0000

Interesting posts this week (June 16-22 2008):

There was some buzz about SproutCore this week — YAJF (Yet Another JavaScript Framework) if you like, though this one comes with an application framework supporting the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern. SproutCore, labeled by some as a Flash competitor, relies solely on web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, the provided demos relies on elements of the forthcoming standards HTML5 and CSS3, currently supported by the Safari browser, but not by IE7, for example. However, standards compliance is always welcome, even if a bit ahead. Hopefully this can help to speed up the compliance efforts of the other browser vendors.
Tags: JavaScript, web development
Semantic search engine Hakia opens up their services to developers and provides an API. Free access to the search API is time limited "until the partners' quota is filled," as they write. The text analysing API, however, does not seem to be time limited and is free up to 1000 requests per day. Currently available for text analysis is the "Summarizer", which provides "a summary of a large text block or URL". Yet to come is the "Categorizer", "Characterizer" and "Text Meaning Representation (TMR)", which are additional semantic analysis tools.
ReadWriteWeb tested the Summarizer API component, and weren't very impressed, writing: "Mostly, it seemed to just return the headline or first sentence as the summary for articles we threw at it."
Tags: API, semantic search
Lifehacker, featuring The How-To Geek explains a few tweaks how to make Windows Vista less annoying. Something for Microsoft to read and learn. I'm still using XP, though I'll probably shift to Vista in due course. I'd rather use Linux, but I'm afraid I'm too dependent on Microsoft-only tools and software.
Tags: Windows Vista
Ed Bott asks if we will be using petabyte-sized (1000 TB) disks in 2020. That's not unlikely if Moore's Law continue to hold. Historically hard disk capacity has increased 10 fold every 5 years. To get some perspective, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day. Around 2035, we will have exabyte (1000 PB) disks. That can still be useful, since in 2006 it was estimated that Internet users created 161 exabytes of new data, a number that is estimated to grow to around a zettabyte (1000 EB) in 2010. Next in turn storage devices are yottabyte (1000 ZB) disks, which can be expected around 2065, which is probably beyond my lifetime though.
Tags: storage
Josh Catone leaves RWW, sadly enough. He will always be remembered by this blog for his Web 3.0 posts though.
Tags: Josh Catone

News and Noise [Best of May '08 #3]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:15:23 +0000

This week turned out interestingly too (May 12-18 2008):

Robert Scoble has been blogging actively recently, and has an interesting post about news and noise. As he says: "The news is in the noise," which makes places like Twitter and FriendFeed interesting for the makers of news. The news items appearing on Google News and Techmeme are filtered out of the noise, which makes these news sites essentially noise free, and in some sense less interesting. Google News only tracks large well-known sites with multiple editors, which further reduces the noise, and also blocks individual bloggers from being covered. Getting on Techmeme is still feasible for an unestablished individual blogger, but it requires several "votes" by elite bloggers, as Scoble explains. On Techmeme's item selection process, Robert writes:

TechMeme: watches signaling from key members on Twitter and Google Reader. If enough people who are on the TechMeme Leaderboard Twitter and share an item on Google Reader you’ll see the item pulled onto the page.

Tags: news, Techmeme
Calais, the semantic markup service, is out with an improved version that recognizes terms from areas other than business, like media, music, entertainment, sports, medicine and healthcare. Calais also announced the release of WordPress and Drupal plugins.
Tags: Semantic Web
Robert Scoble also has a recent post stating 9 reasons why FriendFeed won't go mainstream, a few of them being: "Normal people don’t like noise", "FriendFeed doesn’t work well on mobile phones", and "Comments get fragmented, even inside FriendFeed." Honestly, Robert in a companion post states 9 reasons why FriendFeed will go main stream.
Tags: FriendFeed
The OStatic blog, one of my recent subscribes, tips about the Google Doctype project, an "open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications", with resources on Web security, DOM manipulation, CSS and more.
Tags: web development
Yahoo! Search's open platform SearchMonkey is released to developers and site owners. Developers are allowed to create small applications that enhance the info about the URLs returned from a Yahoo search (but are not allowed to reorder the search results). The applications trigger on the returned search URL, e.g. I could build an application that enhance the search results from this domain (http://impl.emented.com). The structured data available to developers for enhancing the results come from core and semantic data gathered by the Yahoo crawler (called Slurp), special data feeds submitted by site owners to Yahoo and custom data services that you could create yourself.
Once developed, the applications are to be used by people searching the web with Yahoo Search. Obviously, an application that only triggers for a site which seldom show up the search results, will have difficulties to attract users.

Site owners are allowed to contribute with structured data about their site in a few different ways: By submitting Atom feeds to Yahoo, by using semantic markup or by creating custom web services.

Tags: search, Yahoo
Google Friend Connect was released this week, and caused some controversy about what the service really is. For example, Marc Andreessen thinks it is not a competitor to Ning, but "a mechanism that provides the embedding capability for Open Social gadgets to be used all throughout the web -- with the added benefit that with a Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget, the user gets her social context anywhere she goes." Robert Scoble on the other hand thought that Friend Connect could be a competitor of Ning. The Friend Connect site says that the service provides "a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing." The member gadget is said to provide core social features for the site, like sign-in, invite and activity showing to other social networks, member browsing across social networks, and on-site friend connect. A site owner can also easily add OpenSocial applications to the site.
Thus, an existing site can easily be socially enabled, and as such potentially compete with a Ning social network aimed at the same audience. Also, someone considering to start a new social network now has the choice of building an own site and using Friend Connect, instead of using Ning. Building an own site is of course somewhat more complicated, but it gives a much greater degree of control. So, in conclusion I think that Friend Connect could compete with some of Ning's audience, and also provide an alternative for some social network builders. Note that for really serious social network builders interesting in implementing OpenSocial, there is still the option of using Shindig.

Tags: OpenSocial, social networks
Jeff Atwood criticizes the frequent use of XML, due to its verbosity and poor human readability. Alternatives could be YAML or JSON.
Tags: programming
RSSmeme, an aggregator for Google Reader shared items, has released an API, which makes it possible to get all kinds of specialized feeds out of the service.
Tags: aggregation