Coffee & Gems

Stefan Tilkov brilliantly sums up the out-of-band information problem in REST's HATEOAS constraint on the REST-discuss group : Given the representation contains <link rel="some-concept" ref="/some-uri"> you don't hardcode the string "/some-uri" into your client, but rather the string "some-concept".

Today I went to a talk at the local Ruby on Rails group. The speaker was quite clueful. He had even implemented his own DSL to describe his business problem. Obviously, the guy was not a noobie in Ruby. However, what really turned me off was his usage of the word "RESTful". For him, it seemed to be a way to describe the inner workings of his application, like, say, "separation of concerns". RoR guys are generally not the most clueless people, but nobody in the audience challenged him about this. It seemed to be the generally accepted usage of the term in the Rails community. This made me think that DHH and Rails have done two things to REST: First, they greatly help to evangelize the term "RESTful" Second, they hijacked the meaning of the term and changed it from "architectural style" to "application architecture" As it happens I listened to a podcast from the Pragmatic Programmers on my way home. It was about the .Net Ruby implementati...

In my current pet project I do a fair amount of parsing of rel-tags (the microformat spec for "tagging"). At first I got a bit agitated how many occurrences there are where the spec is not implemented correctly. But I have come to realize that the spec is simply broken. There are two ways I can think of a spec to be broken: If it's internally inconsistent or inconsistent with other specs. If it's somehow useless. The rel-tag is almost 1.), which makes it a little bit of 2.). Here's why: the spec says that this tag <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">fish</a> denotes "tech" rather than "fish." This means that this microformat restricts the URL space on your server. You need to have the "tag" folder and in it there must be a file "tech" - unless you link to another site which is not a solution to the problem. Being able to control my own URL space is one of the pronciples of the ...

By pure chance I found a useful feature on my iPhone: when you play music but have another application in the foreground double-clicking "the" button will bring up a mini iPod control. That's nice e.g. for skipping a song without having to leave the app in the foreground. Related news from the Macworld: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I'll scream if I read the word "pluggable" once more... I mean, seriously, how hard can you make simple things? Don't know what I mean? Dig this: Think about it this way: JDOM ships with the Apache Xerces parser. That parser isn't part of JDOM, but is used by JDOM, so it's included to ensure that JDOM is usable out of the box. The same principle applies for JAXP, but it isn't as clearly publicized: JAXP comes with a parser so it can be used immediately. However, many people refer to the classes included in Sun's parser as part of the JAXP API itself. For example, a common question on newsgroups used to be, "How can I use the XMLDocument class that comes with JAXP? What is its purpose?" The answer is somewhat complicated. First, the com.sun.xml.tree.XMLDocument class is not part of JAXP. It is part of Sun's Crimson parser, packaged in earlier versions of JAXP. So the question is misleading from the start. Second, a major purpose of JAXP is...

OK, here's a rant: 10 years of Google. And it's beginning to treat its customers(*) like MS. Today, I wanted to mail myself(!) a zip file as a backup. Gmail wouldn't let me, though, because the zip contained "an executable,... blah, security". Well, yes, there was a .bat in the zip. But this sure reminded me of long-gone days when my employers forced me to use Outlook (which did not not allow to open received executables unless you really really wanted to and hacked the registry). When will we see a GMail Clippy? Btw: if you ever wondered what happened to MS's Clippy: From: http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/archive/2008/05/27/do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night-part-3.aspx (*) yes, I am a paying customer. I bought storage space.

Today, I gave a talk about development of applications within social networks at the Internet Briefing in Zurich. It was mostly about marketing aspects, rather than technology. Find the slides (in German) below (or download them here ). Socialapps View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.