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.

It is possible to download the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. I tried it in Parallels on my Mac, and it seems to work. Obviously, people on the Internet are complaining that sites are broken in IE8. Fortunately, the websites I maintain seems to work flawlessly in the new browser (but that was to be expected, since I try to keep them standards compliant). The website of my employer seems a bit broken in IE8.

I also tried the latest Firefox 3 beta for Mac OS X. FF3 seems a lot faster than 2, so that is nice. It is also more standard compliant, since it passes the Acid3 test, it scores 59 points, which is the highest score of all browsers I tested with this it (only Safari 3, FF 2.0.0.12 and FF3 beta so far). FF3 has also some nice usability improvements. For example, I like the link to the originating site of active bookmarks which wasn’t there in FF2.
By the way, IE 8 only scores a miserable 17 points in the Acid3 test, making it the worst performer on my system in this test. Even FF2 had a higher score. I also noted that it offered me to choose ‘express settings’ on the first startup, which suggested Google as the search provider… has even Microsoft loses trust in its own search engine?

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.

‘Hello from Seattle’ is Microsoft’s alternative on the Zune to the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ that is printed on the packaging of Apple products. I think it is a bit of sad in a way an indicator that Microsoft is actually losing its leading position on the IT market. I don’t think it is a very good sign that you have to imitate (or react, depending on your view) this kind of gimmicks of the competitor.

Last weekend was quite busy. We went to the Efteling because the employer of my girlfriend was having a family day there. It was very nice, especially because the weather was exeptional good for this time of the year.

I also read today about a new mainbord from ASUS which incorporates a embedded Linux installation for configuring the system and also provides some functionality, such as Skype. I think it is a nice idea, but unfortunately, it is a little expensive with a price of 360 dollars. You can buy a complete system for that money.

Rikkert Koppes has created a library which enables some Web Forms 2.0 elements for existing browsers. Not all additions are implemented and some parts, like css pseudo classes, work a little different than in it will be in the ‘real’ WF2 implementtions, but it is a very nice start and I think it can definitely be useful in web applications (especially the various date controls).

Because I now use a Macbook for development, I had to install some stuff I needed for development. Unfortunately, Mac OS X does not provide a convenient method to install all the stuff using a single tool (such as apt-get/Synaptic on Ubuntu), but installing some basic stuff is not very difficult. After some research, I choose to install the following packages:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• PHP 5
• Eclipse

Read on for the location of the packages I used (more…)

Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the Internet and chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium, is interviewed by ITworld.com. It is an intersting read, about various subjects. Berners-Lee believes very much in the so-called semantic web, of which he is one of the initial creators. (more…)

Last few days, I was very productive (compared to normal). I managed to squash a number of bugs on the website of the my badmintonclub. There were some issues with Internet Explorer (surprisingly). I recently added a feature to keep track of the competition teams of our club and the matches they played. For this part I created some tables which were styled using some CSS-rules. This worked perfectly in Firefox, but in IE the fonts in the tables were too large and not the same as in Firefox. The font problem was fixed easily, by adding a font-size definition to the table element. The other problem was pretty hard to fix. I’m using border-collapse: seperate; and border-spacing: 0px; in order to create no space between the cells, but displaying a border for every table cell. However, it seems that Internet Explorer doesn’t support the border-spacing property, and there is no easy fix in CSS for this problem. So in the end, I had to add cellspacing: 0 to every table. Even worse: Internet Explorer 7, according to Microsoft better at supporting web standards, seems to ignore the border-spacing as well. Oh well, it was already known that Internet Explorer sucks…

I did also some cleaning of the code, because various parts were using different dabase classes for example. Some parts of the code are still really bad, but that will be cleaned up eventually.

For my personal site, I did some investigation on a photogallery script. I have a pretty big number of photos, and I’m planning to share them with the world for quite some time. In the past I used a custom script for this, but due to a server crash, I lost most of that script (and it wasn’t very stable as well). Because I don’t have the time (and I don’t want to) to write a new script, I decided to use an existing script. While there are many packages for webgalleries, it seems most of them are broken in some way. I looked at Gallery, which is too bloated (and not easily to customize I think), PhpWebGallery is also too bloated (and hard to customize). PhotoStack looks nice, but is a little to simplistic (upload features are limited, and no comments), Plogger also looks nice, But I decided to take a more indepth look at Zenphoto. This package seems to provide exactly the features I’m looking for in a nice way. The default themes are also nice and clean (which is not the case with Plogger).

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a little comment spam problem. This problem resulted in over 30.000 spam comments on my weblog (most of them are deleted now, but still some 2000 remain). The problem is that there are actually some non-spam comments on my webliog (yes, it seems strange, but it is true ). Because most spam comments are on only a few posts, it would be helpful to ‘mass edit’ the comments of one post. In current versions of Wordpress, this is not possible. So, I created a patch which enables this (it was pretty easy). During the creation of this patch, I noticed that the source of the admin part (I didn’t look at the other parts) of Wordpress is a bit of a mess. Different kind of block separators are used (both brackets and ‘endif’s) and the commenthandling should be abstracted to some classes (it is now in a very long php-file without any functions). I expected the Wordpress code to be cleaner than this. Even some ‘low profile’ php projects have cleaner source code. The ‘comment management’ code is duplicated in at least two files…

I also installed some anti-spam plugins on my weblog. I hope these will block most of the spam. I am also tracking some visitor statistics, for which I’ve created a plugin (not available yet for the public, because it is not finished yet).
I also discovered that my current archive goes back to the beginning of 2005. However, I’m already blogging since early 2004. I thought I lost most of these posts during a harddisk crash, back in 2004. In a recent cleanup of my harddisks, I found a very old databasedump of my weblog, with posts from the start of my weblog until the beginning of august 2004. I’m planning to import these posts in the current archive. This is not very straightforward, because the database id’s overlap with the current posts, and also the categories are different than now.

I decided to update my weblog a little bit. Combined with the upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, I have introduced a new design of my weblog. I also cleaned up the content of the site a little bit and added some additional information.
The last few months I did not updated this site very regularly, which caused a massive amount of spam in the comments. I cleaned up most of it, but there is still a huge number of spam comments to be removed. Because there are some ‘real’ comments, it is not simply a matter of deleting everything from my comment table… I have to figure out a long-term solution for this problem, because sorting out 30.000 spam comments is not fun.

The new design of my site is implemented as a Wordpress theme. I used the default Wordpress theme as a starting point, and modified it according to my design. It turned out pretty easy to modify Wordpress this way. In the past I had the intention to write my own weblog software, but due to experience, I learned that it take too much time to write a fully functional package myself. It is also not very smart, but it is way faster to modify existing software in order to include all the features you wish. I only need to find a good software package for publishing my photo’s on my website. Something which is easy to modify and is stable. I wrote in the past something which could work, but it will take a very great amount of time to finish it, and I don’t think I have the time for that (I can spend the time I save this way on improving other software).

Red Hat has introduced a new social community site called ‘Mugshot’. It’s not entirely clear to me what the goal of this project is, but I have got the feeling that it could be useful. Currently, it contains a thing called ‘Music radar’, which enables people to publish information about songs on their weblog or website.. I’m not sure what is new about this. Another feature is called Link Swarn, which enables people to discuss about weblinks. This is quite interesting I think. During my exploration of Mugshot, I came across this. I hope that this will not be the process a user has to go through in the final version, because it will be a nightmare for helpdesks and system administrators, because not any non-technical user will understand this behaviour. On the other hand, if it will be the case, there is a clear oportunity for other OS’ses like Mac OS X and Linux because the usability will be so much better, that even stupid users will see it (I hope).