Excellent JavaScript talk from Yahoo
Over at Yahoo Video you can watch an excellent talk by Doug Crockford on JavaScript (part 1). (part 2, part 3, part 4) This is likely the best introduction to JavaScript I have seen, and worthwhile...
View ArticleSelling your Software as a Service: Notes and Audio
At the St. Louis Code Camp on May 5, 2007, I gave a talk on Selling Your Software as a Service, in which I discussed our experiences selling a complex (Java) “enterprise” application in that manner....
View ArticleJava Documentation in a Windows HTMLHelp (CHM) file
The Java software development kit documentation can be downloaded from java.sun.com, in the form of a ZIP file with tens of thousands of linked HTML file. This seems like an ideal canonical form for...
View ArticleNext Big Language = JavaScript
There’s a lot of buzz about Steve Yegge’s “port” of Rails to JavaScript, and Steve has now provided (in his funny, self-deprecating style) the background of how it came to be. He doesn’t quite say it...
View ArticleGrowing a Language, by Guy Steele
This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998. It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about...
View ArticleOptimize Hierarchy Queries with a Transitive Closure Table
Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful...
View ArticleIs Delphi Dead? No.
A few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the same topic. Here goes. Delphi shipped in 1995, and...
View ArticlePlease, Use a Web Application Framework
Historically I have not been a fan of “frameworks”, and I have often repeated the following joke: What’s the difference between an application and a framework? An application is something a customer...
View ArticleGit Talk at the STL JUG
Yesterday (Oct. 9, 2008), I gave a talk on Git at the St. Louis Java User Group. Rather than a typical “intro” talk, instead I showed a dozen or so common usage scenarios, then answered questions with...
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Rhino + JavaScript + Swing, Look Ma No Java
A while back I was discussing the future of programming languages with a colleague, and we agreed that for all its foibles, JavaScript will continue to enjoy very wide and increasing use in the coming...
View ArticleMobile Workforce Management, a Five Year SaaS Mission Completed
Here is the story of a substantial chunk of my professional life over the last five years. I didn’t tell this story in real time (for various good reasons), though I have mentioned bits of it in...
View ArticleMy First Emacs (plus Slime, Swank, Clojure) on Mac OSX
Emboldened a talk that Ryan Senior gave at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge (now available as a video), I grabbed the most popular two Emacs versions for Mac OSX: Aquamacs GNU Emacs 23.1 and set up each on...
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Map-Reduce in the Small: an Array of Talks
At Strange Loop 2010, Guy Steele gave a wide-ranging, excellent talk in which the key point was: In essence, his notion is to use a divide-and-conquer approach, which he described as “map-reduce in the...
View ArticleAncient History: JBuilder Open Tools
Some years ago, the Java IDE marketplace looked quite different than it does today. VisualAge was very popular. Borland’s JBuilder was another top contender. Since then, many of the good ideas from...
View ArticleJIRA API – Anonymous Access to Public Instances
There are rumors around that it is impossible to use the JIRA API anonymously, even with an instance set up for public read access. This is not true. I wrote a tiny example tiny project to demonstrate...
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