The serverside.com has a good webinar about the EJB roadmap, and how it relates to Hibernate.
The talk is given by Gavin King of Hibernate and JBoss - obviously eminent in the area. It has lots of great info, but Gavin is a um, ah - um, aaaaaaaa - ahem; a disappointingly bad speaker - not that I’m any good.
Just a warning if you’re going to watch the webcast.
I found this great posting on IBM-Developerworks comparing Synchronous and Sequential processing against Asynchronous and Concurrent processing. We do it all the time when we schedule projects - “part A and part B are unrelated so they can be worked on at the same time…” So why not apply that same thinking to developing complex applications. Why don’t our multithreaded, multiprocessor, multiserver applications take advantage of the same benefits?
Proof that process design can have a significant impact on performance of a system.
Another one from Jacob et al. - this time they have some good advice on building better search interfaces
Add smooth borders to divs using CSS - I might use this one.
using css to emulate frames based layout - interesting. One more reason not to use frames - as if you need another one…
Jacob Neilson helps us Get to know the low-literacy web user.
I disagree with some things that come out of alertbox. This article opened my eyes to some interesting insights into how low-literacy web users navigate a page - what information they get and what they don’t get.
I think it can be taken one step further. Instead of thinking of a user as either a high-literate or a low-literate think of them terms relative to the content of the page. Documents heavy with jargon, difficult concepts or excessive detail makes a document more difficult to comprehend. This in turn increases the literacy level required to scan the document. If scanning becomes ineffective, then a user normally regarded as a ‘high-literacy user’ has to resort to reading word-by-word. You can turn a high-literate user into a low-literate user by increasing the vocabulary requirements of a document. It’s all relative to the document.
I haven’t done clinical tests on this theory. I do know it’s true of me whenever I attempt to comprehend something over my head.
I find that often my colleagues and I assume that they way we surf the web = the way that most people surf the web. When you think about it, it’s not true at all. It is easy to use skewed perceptions to formulate false assumptions. If not for the over-abundance of statistics to the contrary, I think that people might assume things like “that everyone I know uses Firefox, so most people must use Firefox“.
If you want to market a service or a product to as wide an audience as possible, then you should keep the literacy-level of your target audience in mind or you risk abandoning the long tail.
How many low-literacy users do you think have a blog?
The ServerSide (TSS) has a couple of posts on using AJAX.
For those of us new to AJAX - the first post links to a great step-by-step AJAX example. In the example, link descriptions are loaded via AJAX on mouse over.
The example itself may not be a good idea from a web design or search engine optimization perspective. Regardless, it is a great starting point for beginners to build a working model.
For more advanced AJAX programmers, TSS has another post linking to a whitepaper from BackBase. [pdf] Mostly promotional material that I think may provide inspiration.
Make and Slashdot discuss an interesting paper on dual photography. Dual photography “exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene“. In simple english, it enables you to take a picture of a scene, then view it from wherever the illuminating light source is setup.
This blows my mind. There are some impressive photos of its use in action in the full paper(pdf).
What can this be used for? To me this has obvious applications in military/paramilitary and surveilence applications. But it sure would be handy next time I play poker too.
Open Source News
It’s raining code (Hallelujah?) - why open source is good for CIOs.
On a related note - Sun VP of technology Jonathan Swartz recently blasted the GPL. Slashdot has a good discussion regarding Jonathan’s point of view.
New Sites of Interest
O’Reilly launched Code Zoo a neat, new code repository/search engine.
Asynchronous browser communication
Using XML and JavaScript. It’s the same technology makes Gmail so slick - AJAX + Struts online how-to tutorial < drool />
Pure Java Servlet implementation example without Struts.
Rapid Web Development/Prototyping
Lately there has been a some talk about Rapid Web App development/prototyping using Ruby and Rails - Ruby+Rails vs Java+Spring+Hibernate analysis test - the results are all red.
Web Design
Javascript events in Flash - now for Mac
Web Statistics
The problem: many web stats programs use cookies to identify returning users but a large number of people regularly delete their cookies. Want a ‘better’ way? use flash to track return visitors
Content Management
CMS interoperability - talks about the lack of standard, and a little on the direction the community is going.
One the lighter side…
Sur-real life Rocky Balboa. It’s amazing what some people will get away with because they look crazy.
Applying mathematics to sports - How to determine the true NBA MVP?
- The true MVP is the player that adds most value to their team in the category that has the most meaning - Wins.
