LinkedIn & Grails
Thursday, June 12th, 2008The LinkedIn Blog has the first in what is promised to be a series of post about their use of Grails.
The LinkedIn Blog has the first in what is promised to be a series of post about their use of Grails.
I finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress (2.5) tonight. It was pretty painless and well worth it. The folks at Happy Cog redesigned the admin interface and it’s much improved. After the upgrade I’m feeling like I need to go through and clean out a bunch of crap (themes & plugins) that DreamHost laid down during the initial install and setup. Anyway, if you’re a WordPress user you should check it out.
Here are a couple of things that I stumbled upon this week in the aftermath of SXSWi. I’m not sure exactly where I found them. Probably through twitter or someone’s blog, but they somehow made it into delicious. Anyway, check them out.
One of the days I’m going to make it to SXSWi. I’m sure that by the time I do it will have become completely irrelevant.
As I mentioned, in my last post, we are evaluating web frameworks at the office. Seeing as all of our current web-app development is done using Struts 1, we thought it would only be fair if we first looked at Struts 2. I also mentioned in my previous post that we have some basic criteria by which we are evaluating these tools. This evaluation took place on Friday, February 29th, with two of my coworkers.In case you’re wondering, Struts 2 is a significant departure from Struts 1. In fact, it’s totally different. If you’ve ever used WebWork then you’ll be at home in Struts 2 because it’s basically WebWork renamed.How did it stack up against our criteria?
Overall I was satisfied with Struts 2. Aside from the things already mentioned the only major concern I had was the constant feeling that “this ain’t quite ready for prime-time”. Again though that’s mainly because of the desire for “zero configuration” and “REST”. If those things are not requirements for your project, and you can use the current release version of Struts 2 you’ll probably have a decent experience.
At work, sometime towards the end of this year, we’ll be moving our primary application to a different web framework. There are a number of reasons for doing this, some I’ll talk about here, others I won’t. Obviously in order to properly evaluate some of the tools we need to develop some basic criteria for the evaluation. None of this is set in stone, but here is my first cut (these are in no particular order):
For my birthday back in October I received a Garmin Forerunner 305. The Forerunner is a GPS training device. It’s targeted at runners, cyclists, and other outdoor enthusiasts. It allows me to continually monitor distance, pace, elevation, and heart-rate information all “at a glance”. It’s really awesome, and pretty geeky.
I’ve found the Forerunner to be extremely freeing. It allows me to try new routes without having to worry about exactly how far I have been or when I might need to think about turning around. No more sweaty trips in my car attempting to figure out how far I’ve been. The pace information also helps keep me honest when it comes to training. I have a tendency to relax a bit too much.
Garmin ships an application called the “Training Center” along with the Forerunner which serves as a management console of sorts, and training log. The “Training Center” is not nearly as cool as the device itself; in fact it’s a bit underwhelming. However, it does support OS X, which is cool.
If the “Training Center” does not meet your needs then you can also make use of Garmin’s online tool Motion Based (for a small fee of course). I’ve played with Motion Based a bit, but have not yet found it compelling enough to actually pay for. It seems to me that Motion Based could be so much better than it is. Hopefully Garmin is looking at significantly retooling it.
Garmin is also making some strides related to development tool support for their products. Thus making it easier for 3rd party application developers to access device data and get it into other tools. Tonight I spent some time playing around with the Garmin Communicator Plugin, which allows you to interact with a Garmin device via javascript in your browser. It’s freakin’ awesome. I wish I had more time to play ![]()
Today was Blue Beanie Day on the web. I hope that you all donned your beanies, I know I did.
Adam Keys’ recent post on micro-apps is a great read. It’s inevitable that we’ll continue to see a rise in the number of “micro-apps” as developers leverage rich API functionality in mashups.
Over the last several weeks there has been an interesting debate/discussion/conversation brewing related to the current state of web design. Some lament the absence of truly great work on the web. Some seem to agree with these conclusions, and a number of others do not. As a developer, and not a designer, I tend to agree more with the second set of folks. Either way though, I would highly recommend reading all of these posts to anyone who is involved in web design/development or interested at all in the subject.
I have been trying to get a little more disciplined about keeping track of web sites that I find inspiring. I spend so much time building web applications that I often find it necessary to step back and refresh myself a bit with others work. I’m NOT a designer, but I appreciate great design. I’m more of a nuts and bolts guy that spends a lot of time working on the plumbing of highly interactive and dynamic web applications. Anyway, here are some sites that I stumbled across this week that I think look fabulous (you can also find these in my delicious bookmarks).
Lokesh Dhakar’s new blog is beautiful. I love the simple elegance. I also really love that the navigation on the right remains in place as you scroll the page.
(via SimpleBits)
The following two links are evidently some mockups that were done for The Internet Movie Database. It is always refreshing to see such great layout when there is actually a lot of stuff to put on a page. I also really like the contrast between rounded and non-rounded corners. (via thebignoob)