Bearfruit

Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?

It’s that time where people make their predictions. I’ll chip in my 2 cents worth regarding technology changes in the future. The last decade, I think, can be described as the decade of the web. The next, in a word, will be mobile.

Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:

The latest craze is to write an iPhone app. I’ve been preaching for a while that mobile apps are the way of the future but I don’t like the idea of iPhone apps and here’s why.

Amazon sent me some recommendations and they are good. 7 out of 9 look like something I want to read. Kind of for my own future reference here are the books they recommended:

• Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers by Steve Souders

My brother is applying for a jr. web-dev position so I was thinking about what tips to give him. That thought process lead from one thing to another and I realized that two of the most influential web-dev books I’ve read are not ones that would normally jump out at you. These are not replacements for a good HTML or JavaScript book, these are a bit more high-level. No matter what your development expertise (front-end, java, php, ruby, etc) these books will each take you up a significant notch in your web-dev skills and will set your web-applications way above the norm.

The Beagle Board is getting a lot of attention lately. It should, it’s an awesome platform. How does it compare to the Tin Can Tools Hammer (discussed in a previous blog post here)? Well, the Beagle is faster and cheaper for one thing, it also has excellent video and audio output capabilities. But that doesn’t necessarily make it better. It all depends on the application.

Please let me know if you find errors in this document or if you’d like me to add clarification. These notes are based on my hearing of the conference sessions and it’s entirely possible I mis-understood the speakers or in the heat of the moment a slight error was communicated.

Drupal is the software we use to manage our main websites. Last week while UDS was happening I was able to attend a training seminar in New Orleans, Louisiana called Do it with Drupal to learn how to better make use of this platform. It was a powerful training program and I came away with a wealth of information that will help us in the future.

This report is quite long because I know that a number of people will be interested in the various parts, so I’ll start with a one-page summary:

My Goals for This Seminar:

1. Make it easier to delegate tasks to others
2. Simplify common tasks for users creating content
3. Evaluate the process of upgrading to Drupal 6
4. Learn about Acquia, a professionally supported version of Drupal created by the Drupal founder and various other core developers

Nutshell:

• Drupal 6 is a major improvement, in large part because a significant amount of time was spent re-architecting key add-on modules such as views and CCK.
• Future Drupal upgrades will not be as challenging because the key modules will not go through this same upheaval in the foreseeable future (I go this from the mouths of the CCK, Views and other modules developers)
• My observation is that Drupal developers are focused on the needs of integrators more than end users - this makes it a powerful tool with a wealth of APIs and add-ons, but it is still a challenge to use it as an end user CMS
• There are some major sites doing some cool stuff with Drupal - Sony/BMG, Warner Brothers and a few newspapers were demoed
• We at Canonical are using only a tiny subset of the most basic features - I can see some great benefits for us if we adopt some of the more advanced Drupal functionality. Potentially this could allow us to have fewer websites, manage content more efficiently and do some things we can’t do now.

(by the way, this last week the BIS team at Canonical released an open source plugin that allows drupal websites to authenticate and get group information from Launchpad)

Key Modules:

Some of the powerful applications demoed relied on a few key modules, namely:

• Views 2
• CCK (aka Content Construction Kit)
• Flag
• Advanced Help
• Image Cache (powerful image uploading/resizing)
• Numerous CCK related fields
• Panels (Currently still relies on Drupal 5, same author as Views and Views2, he is now focusing his efforts on updating this powerful module)

Other interesting modules were:

• Organic Groups
• Workflow
• Revision Moderation (combined with workflow eliminates the need for a staging server)
• Date and Calendar (to replace event)
• Admin Menus (when logged in gives quick access to admin function)
• Markdown (wiki syntax for drupal)
• Developer Module
• Boost - big performance boost for sites with mostly anonymous traffic

Also, someone said I should check out “Selenium macro recorder” to record web-browser interaction and then re-play it later. Sounds slick.

/end one page summary

If you’re a little frustrated with the API docs for the gdata python api I’m right there with you. I’m trying to build a django app that accesses Google calendar. The basic “hello world” stuff works fine but when I want to actually use it for my own app I get frustrated. For example, the doc explains how to deal with authsub tokens but doesn’t really tell you about what to do with session tokens.

Congratulations Netbeans team on the release of 6.5. I’ve been using the pre-release versions but as expected experienced some problems that prevented me from using it seriously. I’m excited with 6.5 because PHP has been given first class status and includes what appears to be simple debugging. I’m downloading the full version now so hopefully will have something interesting to report soon. Request for next release - Django support built in. It looks like the Python Early Access release is shaping up and I noticed some of the milestone builds had Django support so hopefully this isn’t a far-fetched request.