Wolkje.net Weblog

Yesterday, at the J-Spring 2008 event at Bussum in the Netherlands, the Flex User Group was officially launched. This group, called FLUGR, aims to support developers using Adobe Flex and AIR and promote the technology and inspire developers.

Coincidentally, today I had a one-day training in Adobe Flex. This training introduced a group of developers of Finalist to the Flex technology and especially focussed on integrating Flex with a JEE application using LifeCycle ES (or BlazeDS for that matter). The training, given by Mark van Hedel of the company Prisma-IT was pretty intense, but at the same time very educational. I didn’t have any experience with Flex or Flash, but have the feeling that now I know a little about the technology, and will definitely invest some more time to experiment with Flex.
Rich Internet Applications are a rather hot topic in the IT-industry nowadays, and I suspect it will be relevant for a developer to have at least some understanding of the technologies involved. However, I’m not sure what the best technology is for these kind of webapplications. Flex has the benefit of a large number of users that can run applications right away, because the Flash-player is installed on a large number of systems. On the other hand, you are stuck to (at this moment) one supplier (Adobe) and the Flash-player is not open source, which means that support on more exotic platforms, such as Linux and mobile phones is dependent on the mood of Adobe. Alternatives are Silverlight, which has the problems of Flash, but lacks the wide spread availability of the player, JavaFX, which is not really available yet and finally the HTML/JavaScript combinatilon. In my opinion, the battle will go between HTML/JavaScript and Flex, but maybe I’m very wrong at this.

Adobe is trying very hard to convince Java developers to use Flex, by being present at conferences (J-Spring was a good example of this) and by providing the source of the Flex compiler and BlazeDS. A usergroup like Flugr can be good to increase awareness of Flex. But I think the site of Flugr is a really bad example of how Flex should be used. The site is completely made in Flex, but I really don’t understand why they choose for this technology. The site could be exactly identical when developed in plain HTML with a bit of JavaScript. Using Flex for this site doesn’t really add any value to it, but does restrict a large number of users to view this site (because a Flash-player is required) and the usual drawbacks of Flash apply to this site. I thought Flash-only sites was a thing of the past, because they are not indexed by Google, lack the usual accessibility features provided by modern browsers, and the mouse wheel doesn’t work (at least on a Mac using Firefox 3 beta). The decision to create this site this way does more harm than good to the image of Flex.

Today started The Next Web, a conference about Internet-related startups. There are presentations of new companies and presentations from people who created succesful companies, like Digg.
A live videostream is available on the site of the event. It is interesting to see the new ideas people come up with. I particulary liked Zilok and find the nearest drill hammer which people offer. A really good idea I think, because it is obvious but has not been done yet. They seem to use Google Maps (or something very similar to it) for locating the stuff that is offered. You have to meet to deliver the stuff you offer for rent, but that is, I think, the power of this concept. However, before it really works, more items should be offered, because most of it is now offered in Belgium, which is a bit far for most people in The Netherlands.

Like all current events, there is a lot of coverage on weblogs and so on. Slandr has an overview of Twitter entries on the event. Erwin Blom has live coverage of the event on his weblog using Cover It Live (which is a nice tool…).

Last week, PJ from Groklaw wrote an article on the voting process for the OOXML format as a ISO-standard. For an unknown reason, she thought is was necessary to refer to a post on my weblog on a speech held by Raul Pesch of Microsoft in March 2005. On that post, also a reaction of Pesch was posted, and specifically this comment was the think PJ was referring to:

Microsoft Nederland’s Pesch gave a speech in 2005 at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, and there’s a blog entry on it by a student there, Martin Sturm. The funny part, to me, is that Pesch responded to the blog article in a comment, and he obviously used Microsoft software to copy and paste his comment in, because it’s almost unreadable in spots, due to Microsoft’s habit of extending standards.

It completely puzzled my why this comment was relevant to the post, because I think it is kind of pathetic to use these things to make your point. She pointed out that there are broken characters in the post, which she assumes is caused by copy/pasting the text from Word (or something). First, assumptions are the mother of al fuckups, but more importantly, it’s very likely that the problems in the post are caused by something else - for example, an incorrect character set used by my blog (I don’t know if that’s the case, but it is possible) or by an upgrade of Wordpress which caused the problems.
Anyway, I think it not relevant to the whole issue the Groklaw article is about.

Two guys decided this weekend to create a startup in a weekend. They created a new webservice, called Tweetburner which can be used for creating sort url’s to webpages for use on Twitter. This is not a very innovative idea, but they added a tracking system which makes it possible to create rankings of the most popular links.
The way they created this new service is the most intersting, since they used weblogs (another one) and http://www.twitter.com/tweetburner”>Twitter intensively. This resulted in a large number of new users and new ideas they probably didn’t get when they developed it without publishing about it. I think this is a great way of creating a new service. A similar example is the creation of Fav.or.it, on which the creator also blogged a lot before the service was released to the public. This resulted in a rather large group of people knowning of this new service even before there was a ready-to-use product.
Via Erwin Blom.

Since a few days I’m using Pulse. This is a service which providers the possibility to use a shared profile for Eclipse. You can either use this service anonymously or as a registered user. In the latter case, you create an account and can select a generic profile for Eclipse, targeted at a specific audience. For example PHP developer or J2EE developer.
Then you can start your profile after which the required software (Eclipse and the plugins required for your profile) are downloaded. You can customize your profile, which also includes the Eclipse preferences such as the size of your font in the editor etc., but also other plugins which aren’t yet part of Pulse.
The most interesting part is when you use another computer. There you can just login to Pulse, click ’start your profile’ and presto: on this computer the same Eclipse as you normally use is downloaded and configurered according to your preferences! It is even possible to share profiles within for example development teams, in order to let everybody use the same development environment.

According to IEBlog, Microsoft changed its opinion on the standard compliance of Internet Explorer 8. The browser will now probably break compatibility with IE7 and will be more standard compliant thant the previous versions of IE.
Untill now, the company opted for a ’switch’ which made IE8 more standard compliant, but in the default mode it would emulate the behaviour of IE7. I think the new approach is a good move of MS.

I didn’t write much here for a pretty long time. Of course, I have my reasons for not to do so. Last month, my girlfriend broke up and as a result I had to move to another apartment. Needless to say, this was a difficult period, but currently, I have the feeling everyting is getting better now. At least I have my own place now, which makes things less difficult. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Internet connection yet at my new place, so I won’t write much here the coming weeks.

I want to wish everybody merry christmas and a happy 2008!

Due to the fact that Apple (and Linux distributions as well) may not use the Windows logo because of copyright restrictions, Apple had to find another way to represent Windows system when browsing the network. In my opinion they found an alternative which is accurate and funny in the same time:

Of course, some people are insulted by this way of representing a Windows system. They claim that Apple degrade all systems not running OS X as inferior. I agree with Jakub Steiner who claims that it is a very recognizable. I think it is cool.

Kore Nordmann explains why in his opinion one shouldn’t use BBCode for comments and forums. I think he has a point, but it only holds when the BBCode is parsed using regular expressions, as he explains in another article. Actually, you’re not really parsing the BBCode when using regular expressions, because it is pattern matching. He explains why it makes no difference to use HTML syntax instead of BBCode syntax. Obviously, he has a very good point, because the BBCode syntax is not well defined, while HTML syntax - especially for the things that normally are allowed in blog comments or on forums - are well defined and known by many people.

An intresting observation is that, even despite the good explanation of the problem with BBCode - a false sense of security when parsing it with regexps - is that people demonstrate in the comments that they really don’t understand it. For example, one comment states that it is almost impossible to block all not allowed HTML using blacklists… Obviously, one shouldn’t use blacklists, but whitelists. By default, all < and > should be replaced by &lt; and &gt;.

HTML Purifier is a library that parses HTML and uses a whitelist to allow certain HTML tags and attributes. Why should one develop something like this from scratch when there is alreay a library available?

Today, I stumbled upon a weblog post of Jeff Moore on the way properties of objects should be accessed in PHP. Accidently, I thought a little about this problem myself last week because I’m working on a small project which uses a large number of data objects. Jeff Moore argues that you should not use $object->set($name, $value) or $object->get($name) to modify properties, because it does not add anything. I agree completely with that (and I’ve never used this technique myself). He recommends accessing properties directly or using setXxx($value) and getXxx() to access properties (where Xxx is the name of the property).
An intresting discussion arises in the comments where some people argue to use getter and setter methods, while others defend direct accessing the properties. I’m not sure on which side I am standing, but I think it depends on the purpose of your class.

For example, in a hobby project I’m currently working, I have quite a number of data objects (in fact models) which are generated dynamically using some kind of object-relational mapper. The properties of the objects are the fields of the table in the database the object is representing. I think in such a case, it is valid to access the properties directly. Other languages and frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails) use a similar strategy. I think it is also valid to use this technique, because since PHP 5, the language provides magic methods (__set and __get) which enables the developer to override the properties when necessary. This way, it is possible to modify the implementation without breaking the API of the class and as such keep the objects’ loose coupling. I think classes which are more behavioural (and not a representation of data) it makes more sense to use setter and getter methods, because you hide the implementation completely.