But is it enterprisey class?

Via Alex Russel, who calls attention to Sun's Project Phobos:

The goal of Project Phobos is to show that Java is an excellent platform for server-side scripting, allowing dynamic-language developers to leverage the power of Java SE and EE. The initial focus for Project Phobos is JavaScript, but the design supports the use of other dynamic languages as well....Project Phobos attempts to learn from Rails, but is not limited to the use of any particular programming language and may prove to have a different sweet spot

I checked... the word "enterprise" does appear on that page, but only in the breadcrumbs (" Projects > java-enterprise > enterprise-incubator > phobos).

Rich JavaScript Apps

Two developments are really going to accelerate rich Javascript web apps -- they sure have around here...

1. Dojo is a framework for building js + html + css widgets. A widget ends up looking like this in your html:

<div turboalign="left" dojoType="TurboSplitter"></div>

That is a splitbar widget from TurboAjax, who extend the Dojo framwork, and it really is that simple to put a sliding splitbar on a web page.

2. Google has open sourced Excanvas. This is a one line include that lets you script the <canvas> element in IE. <canvas> is an element available in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and now standardized by whatwg, that lets you script vector drawing primitives. Excanvas just implements all the Canvas apis in VML. Finally, a unified model for vector drawing!

IT Consultants Underestimate the Long Tail. Again.

From Marketplace's story on Google Spreadsheets:

I.T. consultant Gerald Murphy won't recommend it to his clients....

GERALD MURPHY: The only people I think this would have any applicability at all to are very small companies that have extremely limited budgets who wanna pay no money at all.

Um, yeah. Sorta like the way Adwords lets all these very small companies advertise for pennies.

Getcher Web 2.0 Certification here.


Requirements:

Big fonts
Oversized input fields
Silly or misspelled name
"Beta"
AJAX
Community content
"Something"-sharing
Bright colors and/or pink
Rounded corners
Use of Google maps
Founder has a blog
RSS
Tagging
Creative commons
Wiki
Podcast/video/mobile content

Peter Seibel Video

Peter Seibel, author of the excellent Practical Common Lisp, gave this hour long presentation at Google, evangelizing Common Lisp. And here are the top three reasons CL rules and Java sort of sucks:

3. He gives a good worked example of using CL generics to replace miles of Java code implementing the visitor pattern. The key is the "double dispatching" in the pattern: You visit each node, calling some polymorphic method; you pass the method a reference to the calling object, which may itself be polymorphic. So the number of cases to dispatch is m * n, where m and n are the number of possible types for each of the two objects involved in the call. In CL, you just create a generic with m * n implementations; in Java, well, you have to touch a lot more code.

2. He contrasts ordinary try/catch exception handling with CL's conditions mechanism. Java unwinds the stack, losing all the state; CL notifies handlers up the stack without yet unwinding the stack, so that a handler up the stack can ask a function lower down to restart.

1. CL Macros let you abstract out syntax paterns.

It's the kind of video you can mostly listen to and only watch occasionally, as you get other work done -- just the way you'd do if you were at the presentation.

80/20 REST at Amazon

The Register has short interviews with Tim O'Reilly and Amazon's Jeff Barr on WS-* vs REST, and unsurprisingly, REST "wins". Barr says they see "20 per cent SOAP, 80 per cent REST."

The Enterprisey Web Style

Oh this is too funny: SOA integration with Flickr and del.icio.us.

We picked a messaging bus that uses the industry standard WS-HTTP and the emerging WS-Blog protocol.

But you know this is how the consulting crowd are going to sell web style, starting very soon.

GData Optimistic concurrency

Google Data APIs beat Atompub to the punch and stamped legitimacy on REST. I hope Atompub will end up looking as nearly like GData as possible.

Of note: this is a Hi-Rest API, and now, we can safely say, it's the way the web actually works. Not just the way some very dedicated people aspire for the web to work.

So enough rejoicing. Let's begin analyzing GData to death.

First technical question: optimistic concurrency: What's wrong with plain old HTTP if-unmodified-since/if-match? That's how you guard against concurrent updates in HTTP right? Why invent a new protocol for that?

SOAP+REST: Why?

mnot declares

I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible with HTTP.

MarkB responds he's offering a face-saving out for SOAP vendors. Is that the best reason? I can't think of one reason to wrap the messages I traffic in, in a SOAP envelope. What are the use cases for RESTful SOAP, please?

Slightly More Complex List Extensions

Using the MS Simple List Extensions for RSS and Atom, you can really make a "feed" be anything you want it to be. Anything you can put between the angle brackets of a <cf:treatAs> tag, you can represent in a feed. I call it SMCLE (Slightly More Complex List Extensions).

Here is how it will work:

We'll define several new values for <cf:treatAs> element. Currently the only defined value is "list". Now we will have:
<cf:treatAs>Bag</cf:treatAs> : the items form an unordered collection.
<cf:treatAs>Queue</cf:treatAs> : the items form a fifo queue.
<cf:treatAs>Stack</cf:treatAs> : the items form a lifo queue.
<cf:treatAs>CircularQueue</cf:treatAs> : when you get to the end of the collection, start over again at the top.
<cf:treatAs>OneBigString</cf:treatAs> : the items aren't items at all, in the RSS/Atom sense. The content of items really should be concatenated to form one big string.

Additionally, we'll allow extension namespaces so you can define your own "treatAs" values, e.g.:


<cf:treatAs ns="http://my.example.com/smcle">JavaScriptStatements</cf:treatAs>



Now, I know your aggregator is going to suck if it can't process all these variations correctly. Not to worry: the MS Feeds API will handle it all for you! In fact, the MS Feeds API will pretty much become the definition of a feed. If it doesn't work with the API, you don't need it!