Coffee & Gems

For those of us who are confused if we are currently to use Java or Javascript on the the server-side or the client-side: Dion Almaer from Ajaxian has a a historic perspective (taken from here ):

Here 's a complete overview of Apple's product cycle.

fxspy is like Firebug for Flex. I think in 2 days I cannot imagine the world before anymore.... (check out the demo : click the button in the upper right corner and edit property values). Installation instructions are on the wiki .

(Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.) In case you follow the Rails community you must have come across this New Year's rant of Zed Shaw, creator of Mongrel. It is really tiring to read as Zed seems to be a textbook-case for ego problems. However, I find this bit really interesting: I believe, if I could point at one thing it’s the following statement on 2007-01-20 to me by David H. creator of Rails: (15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day (15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10 (15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice (15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right? Notice how it took me a few seconds to reply. This one single statement basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average. Let me put this into perspective for you: I’ve ran servers that needed to be restarted once in a year. They were wri...

OK, after I was daring enough to publish some predictions for 2007 , let's see how I did: The uptake of RoR will continue. JRuby will make a diffenrence and will allow RoR to make its way into the enterprises. Similar frameworks in other dynamic languages will rather help RoR than take away from it (Django, Grails, etc) because they will only increase the overall interest in dynamic languages. I'd say half-right. RoR's rise did continue, albeit with much lower pace. However, Django, Grails, etc did not make much of an impact. REST will become mainstream in the sense that it will not be considered the poor little relative of SOAP anymore, but a viable alternative even for the enterprisey guys. REST has become mega mainstream, up to the point that by now saying "SOAP" has become a bit of an embarrassment. Macs will continue to lead the pack in terms of innovation on the desktop. Uhm, yes. Neither Vista nor Leopard changed the world, so the distance between these com...

I just realized that whenever I feel terribly tired there is an urge to post a video on this blog. Well, here we go. And merry christmas, everyone.

A small hint if you need a line feed in your Flex resource bundle property value: \n needs to be written as \\n Seems not very intuitive, but is logical when you think about how the strings get processed.