Aehso’s Output

Google Reader is now using Google Gears to enable offline reading of your 2000 most recent items.  Check the top right corner of your reader for a new ‘Offline’ button to trigger installation.

Ars (and lots of other sites) have the user details, check out the Gears API Developer’s Guide for more info on the implementation.

It’d be fantastic if they did a version for Opera(or Minimo)/OS 2007/N800!

aehso atom, google, rss, web2.0

A recent discussion on rest-discuss related to describing RESTful resources has lead to interesting discussion by Aristotle Pagaltzis, Stefan Tikov and Don Box on the topic.  They highlight a couple of issues that have been bugging me (at Oisin’s expense I think!):

• How should RESTful clients bootstrap into a RESTful system, or rather, how does the client determine the correct payload to send to the first RESTful resource it interacts with?  Currently it appears that there must be some out-of-band definition of the first RESTful resource request that the client has ‘baked-in’ in order to initiate a conversation with a set of RESTful resources.  HTTP Web browsers solve this problem through (bookmarked) URLs.  Should all RESTful resource clients do the same?
• How should RESTful clients interpret arbritrary XML response payload?  The response XML is presumably defined by a schema (somewhere) but I’m wondering how is a RESTful client expected to interpret the semantics of the XML unless it has prior knowledge of the schema.  Is this prior knowledge just assumed? Again, HTML browsers succeed in this regard because they are build on the semantics of the HTML language schema.

I’d be very interested if anyone has insights into the above two questions.  If knowledge of the schema(s) is assumed (Aristotle’s post implies this) then perhaps all folks are looking for is guidance on how to determine which XML element definitions are expected/returned by RESTful resource request/reponses. 

Perhaps that’s where the value in WADL lies.  Unfortunately WADL seems to promote static resource set definitions, as WSDL does for WS-* service endpoints.  Perhaps if the WADL resource set definitions could also reference other WADL resource set definitions then we might have something a bit more dynamic?

aehso rest, soa, web services, web2.0, xml

I was trying to use Google Reader on my N800 at the weekend and it just didn’t work well enough to be usable. The page layout and text size really isn’t suited to a 800×480 display, I was scrolling far too much to reach important buttons/links and some of the AJAX controls (such as the tree nodes) just did not seem to react to touchscreen input.

However Google Mobile Reader has more than saved the day. This stripped down version of reader is designed primarily at mobile phone handset users, but it works very well on the N800.

The main page, once logged in, shows the ten most recent posts with convenient page-forward and mark-as-read-and-page-forward links:

The Subscriptions page is simplicity itself – a flat list of feeds, with feeds that contain new posts at the top of the list.

Each Feed page (http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed%2F<HTTP-encoded-feed-URL>) is almost as simple but with one line of the entry body under each item, and additional navigation/mark links at the bottom:

Each Entry page (as above with additional query string) is also simple, with convenient links to see the original feed entry page, along with links to star, mark as read and move to next.

Note my recurring use of the term ’simple’. In this environment, simplicity really does win the day and in this case it adds up to a very usable service. The fact that it is perfectly synchronized with my laptop feed reader is a significant plus. I left NetNewsWire behind a long time ago because I just couldn’t coordinate reading sessions across my home mac and my work pc. This is really another type of client that I want to read the same data access the same service with.

And then I noticed that they have a custom Google Reader for the Wii too, with bonus Wiimote integration! It is going to take a lot to get me to ever switch to a different feed reader.

aehso atom, google, n800, rest, rss, web2.0

I just stubled accross Scribd while looking for an online copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question (I found one).

Quite cool, YouTube type upload and sharing of (copyrighted?) documents, downloadable as PDF, MS Word, Plain Text or machine-generated MP3 (not the easiest to listen to it has to be said) formats.

aehso content, copyright, media, web2.0

Not a bad one, webware, to be used instead of SaaS.

aehso tech, web services, web2.0

I’ll not be at EclipseCon this year (it conflicts with polishing our next major product release this week) but if I was there I’d be going to any sessions related to the new Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) incubator project. Think the Eclipse UI running in your browser, with the Eclipse application, developed as plugins, running remotely on a web server.

The Yoxos Eclipse On Demand online Eclipse distribution builder is a good example of the types of applications this framework could support. In fact, given that Yoxos is run by Innopract, the folks who are driving the RAP project, it is probably the best example out there. It’d be interesting to find out how far along they are with their RWT API implementation – attempting to build a remote client framework based on a local client framework like SWT is perhaps a dangerous thing to attempt to do but we’ll see how they fare.

(Not to be confused with the WTP 2.0 AJAX Tooklit Framework (ATF) incubator project or the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which are designed to also support development of AJAX applications, albeit using other frameworks and user interfaces…)

aehso eclipse, java, osgi, web2.0

With the ever growing trend towards online applications and services, software architects need to be more aware than ever of the challenges in building platforms to host these types of applications. Successful sites in this space (Craigslist, Fickr, Salesforce etc.) all have one common problem to cope with – how do you maintain availability while dealing with exponential audience growth?

Two excellent pieces serve to proffer incredible insight into the experiences of those who have hyper-succeeded in the past:

• Inside MySpace.com, by Baseline Magazine is a great read about how MySpace scaled their architecture from zero to over 26 million user accounts, serving over 40 billion pages a month (isn’t that figure just incredible!).
• Database War Stories is a series of posts by Tim O’Reilly, interviewing folks from Second Life, Memeorandum, Craigslist and more. (The rest of the posts are linked to at the bottom of the first post.)

One common theme in many of these stories: periodically these guys are faced with the stark reality that incremental improvements to existing infrastructure will not sustain the current business model. It is testimony to the folks in charge that they trust their geeks enough to bet the company repeatedly on new architectures.

It is a high-risk world and there are many that fall by the wayside but the rewards for the brave are there for all to see.

aehso dev, hardware, soa, software, web services, web2.0

Via RexBlog, this quiz is so true, it’s funny. Has the world run out of unbranded words or is it time to retake the asylum from the the lunatics?

(Wow, I just searched for a link and I can’t find a link to Alan Cooper’s “The Lunatics are running the Asylum” book anywhere. WTF? More people need to read that book…)

aehso internet, web2.0