Software As She’s Developed

Jeff Attwood encourages developers to eat their own dogfood: I’ve found that much of the best software is the best because the programmers are the users, too. It is UsWare. It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves– even if only […]

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Update: Instead of the following, which assumes you're running containers off the filesystem, you should really run them off the web server. So the recommended way to run Shindig's sample container is "jetty:run-war" (not documented in the README, but my alert colleague located it on the mailing list). Then point to http://localhost:8080/gadgets/files/container/sample2.html. I checked out the [...]

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More raw Shindig notes. This time, looking at org.apache.shindig.util. See Shindigging tag. This is just a quickie for completeness sake as it's a few generic util classes. This post completes the listing of all Java classes in the Shindig architecture at this time. Check - Runs some standard assertions (empty null etc). InputStreamConsumer - Input stream -> [...]

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More raw Shindig notes. This time, looking at org.apache.shindig.gadgets.http. See Shindigging tag. I'll structure them just a little more this time. Main Servlet BasicHttpContext.java - data struct for country/language/locale GadgetRenderingServlet.java - The servlet that accepts gadget spec URL and prefs, and outputs the gadget content (typically in an iframe). Delegates heavily to GadgetServer, in order to get a [...]

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This is the first of an open series on the architecture of Shindig, the new open-source gadget/widget framework project. As mentioned here earlier, this project is building something similar to iGoogle, i.e. an environment for serving gadgets, a run-time environment for the gadgets to operate in, and a gadget container (as well as OpenSocial support). I'm [...]

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Ajax, Ajax Patterns, Javascript, Server-Side Javascript As server-side Javascript continues to gather momentum, patterns will start to emerge. Dual-side templating, which I'll explain below, is a pattern I've been harping on about for a while because you can kinda sorta use it already with a product like Rails. It will be a lot more powerful with [...]

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ssh, Unix Lately, I've been living dangerously and doing a lot of coding on the live server, via ssh. This is all proof-of-concept stuff at Ajaxify. The reason I'm coding live is that it's all widget development and it's just easier that way, since environments like iGoogle and Facebook need to reach my apps live, in [...]

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Coding Standards, Software ... because they are dogmatic. Coding guidelines are just fine, but coding standards imply: There will be an automated tool that checks your conformity to guidelines, leading to (a) inability to check in your code; (b) public shame; (c) much head-banging on keyboards A smug sense of unjustified satisfaction from the [...]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns As foretweeted last week, I created a little Ajax app called BlingText. As you can see, it takes a message and provides some ASCII renderings. In particular, it includes a port of the old UNIX/C Banner utility. If I do more work on it, the main improvements will be: Options. Let the user specify, for [...]

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Hosting, Podcast In the past day, I've pulled down all my podcast mp3 files from libsyn and updated all the posts to point to my domain instead of libsyn. Hence the major feed refresh on the blog and podcast, sorry if that hit you subscribers. (Is anyone still subscribed to the podcast?) This is a big relief. Having [...]

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