Coffee & Gems

Chances are you have not heard of Colayer , a Swiss-Indian company producing a SaaS-based collaboration software. I did a small project with the guys, that is how I got to know. When I first saw their product I immediately thought the guys are onto something good, so it is worthwhile to share a bit of their application concepts. They follow an approach I have not seen anywhere else. On first look Colayer seems to be a mixture between wikis and forums: the logical data structure resembles a hierarchical web-based forum and the forum entries are editable and versioned like in a wiki. But there is more: presence and real-time. All users that are currently logged in are visible and one can have real-time chats within the context of the page one is in or see updates to the page in real-time (similar as in Google Docs). These chats are treated as atomic page elements (called sems in Colayer parlance) just like the forum entries or other texts. Through this mechanism, all communication around...

Here is a small bit about the asynchronous nature of the Flex layout mechanisms that I learned while slapping together a presales demo yesterday: When changing properties of UIComponents listen for FlexEvent.UPDATE_COMPLETE events. They get fired when the change is actually done. In my case I needed to get the textWidth of a Label after changing the label text. Right after calling the setter of text the getter of textWidth will still return the old value. [Some background reading ]

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Java User Group Switzerland (JUGS) titled "Agile RESTful Web Development". It was about the REST style in principle and hands-on RESTful development with Apache Sling. I enjoyed giving the talk and think that it was well received. Here's the slide deck: Agile RESTful Web Development View more documents from mmarth .

I just wrote a small Ruby script to generate a Google sitemap out of file directory. I thought that it might come handy as a quick start for someone, so here is the code (requires the builder gem) require 'builder' htmlfiles = Dir.glob("*.html") x = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => $stdout, :indent => 1) x.instruct! x.urlset( "xmlns" => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" ) { for file in htmlfiles do x.url{x.loc "http://www.example.com/#{file}"; x.lastmod "2009-09-17"; x.changefreq "monthly"; x.priority "0.8"} end }

(cross-posting from here ) OK, I admit it, declaring that " the RDBMS is dead " is a meme that has been going around the software industry for a while. Remember object-oriented data bases that were supposed to replace the relational ones? Well, guess who is still here. However, despite the RDBMS's amazing survival skills I would like to propose a related prediction: I believe that the year 2009 will go down in history as the year when the " relational model default " ended. The term "relational model default" was coined by me to describe a peculiar thing that goes on in application development: start talking to your average application developer about some arbitrary business requirement and chances are that simultaneously he mentally constructs a relational model to fit those requirements. That relational approach to modeling your problem may or may not be suitable. The real problem is that all too often this default does not get challenged. As a conse...

The slides shown in my Jazoon talk are now online: Jazoon 2009 View more presentations from mmarth .

On Thursday, I will give a talk at the Jazoon conference in Zurich. It will be about Apache Sling, the web framework for content-centric applications. The agenda is: Scalable Agile Web Development: REST meets JCR meets OSGI This session is a very hands-on lab that shows how a real web application is developed from scratch in a very agile fashion leveraging a heavy-weight enterprise ready back-end yet allowing for unprecedented agility in development in building rest-style web applications. Thinking of a classic j2ee stack this may sound like a contradiction. Agility of development begins with the amount of tooling and setup we need to get started, so expect to see the entire walk-through from installation of the server software to the development of a complete application within the time constraints of the session. Agenda: (1) Web architecture, think outside the box. (2) Meet: apache sling. (3) Building a real-life webapp from scratch. The full conference agenda is here . I shall also ...