Blue Sky On Mars (Java)Kevin Dangoor's Weblog of Technology, Entertainment and LifeWhy another RSS reader- April 29, 2005 Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to write an article or two about design choices that I've made in Zesty News. The ideas for Zesty News started forming in late-2002, and were fairly concrete by mid-2003. I remember talking to Nigel, my boss at the time, about some of the ideas. At that point, with a baby coming in July, I was not in a good position to make a run for it. Late last year, I surveyed the scene and decided that I'd give it a go. None of the feed readers out there did what I.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001718.html Announcing Zesty News- April 29, 2005 People everywhere are discovering new ways to gather and use the information available on the internet. Zesty News will provide a new new way to gather up and read the information on the net. The focus of Zesty News is simple: keep you informed about everything that matters to you, and use up as little of your time in the process as possible. Zesty News runs on Windows PCs or Macs and works within the browser you're already familiar with: Internet Explorer on the PC, Firefox on the PC or Mac...http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001717.html Beware of Java string memory allocation- April 27, 2005 Charles Miller and other Atlassian folks were digging into a memory issue and found out that memory allocation and garbage collection for Strings and StringBuffers may not be what you're expecting. The main thrust of it is that there are some optimizations to speed the common cases that can result in considerable memory waste if you're not aware of the implementation. (For example, if you have a StringBuffer with a 32K capacity and do a toString on it, that new String will take up 32K of memory.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001715.html JavaScript Shell- April 26, 2005 The JavaScript Shell lets you interactively run JavaScript commands, even against a particular window. This allows you to easily test out DOM manipulations you're considering or, as the authors suggest, GreaseMonkey scripts. Very nice, but it does not appear to be Safari compatible at all. Just goes to show that Firefox is far and away the best browser for development. I have found that Firefox's tools are the easiest for getting things working, and then I deal with making things cross-browser.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001712.html Ian Bicking on Ruby On rails- April 23, 2005 Ian Bicking has posted more thoughts on Ruby on Rails. For those of you not familiar with Ian, he&8217;s had his hands in object-relational mapping, web frameworks and even template tools. Ian&8217;s perspective in this latest article is from short experimentation with Rails, but I agree with the things that he has said that he likes and dislikes. Ian has described Paste in terms that make it sound like a piece of middleware for web framework developers to use in sharing code. While...http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001709.html Why specs matter- April 23, 2005 Being an XP type, I don't go in for specs for everything. Where interoperability counts, specs are key... and Mark Pilgrim nails the personalities in Why specs matter. Angels read specs closely, write code, and then thoroughly test it against the accompanying test suite before shipping their product. Angels do not actually exist, but they are a useful fiction to make spec writers to feel better about themselves.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001708.html HTTP abuse and painful frameworks- April 23, 2005 Ryan Tomayko had commented on my post from yesterday regarding using HTTP correctly (not abusing HTTP GET, etc.). My posting was following the pragmatic perspective of getting things done without worrying about absolute correctness. I agree with Ryan&8217;s new posting &8220;On HTTP Abuse&8221;. Favoring &8220;getting things done&8221; doesn&8217;t also mean that I don&8217;t want to do things correctly. His post is correct that the frameworks that we use to get real work done just don&8217;t...http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001707.html GET, POST, PUT and DELETE in REST- April 21, 2005 No, I'm not yelling in the title. I'm just following up on Dare Obasanjo's post about misunderstanding REST: A look at the Bloglines, del.icio.us and Flickr APIs. Dare's complaint is that these services all have URLs that have side effects via HTTP GET. This is an interesting distinction to make. I just set up a new Drupal installation, and I'm reminded of Drupal's cron.php. cron.php runs whatever periodic maintenance tasks are needed. In other words, it changes data. But, you really want to...http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001705.html F-Script Anywhere (and Mac OS X) are very cool- April 21, 2005 F-Script is a Smalltalk dialect for Mac OS X. Clearly, many in the Mac community are already aware of F-Script, since it won an Innovators Award in 2003. I&8217;d imagine many are always aware of F-Script Anywhere, which allows you to attach F-Script to any Mac OS X program. I wasn&8217;t aware of this until yesterday, so I just had to say &8220;wow! that&8217;s cool!&8221;. Using F-Script Anywhere, you&8217;ve got an object browser that you can use to poke around at the various objects in a..http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001704.html So much for a small Flash download- April 18, 2005 Adobe Acquires Macromedia hopefully won't mean that you need Adobe Reader to view Flash in the future.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001702.html |