Today is Valentine’s day and I take the opportunity to follow the Free Software Foundation’s call to spread my love for Free Software. I love Free Software! Usually people argue about using Free Software with technical or cost-related benefits like you’re able to look into the source code, incorporate your patches immediately or don’t have to pay any license fees. All of this is true, naturally, but I love Free Software for many more of its benefits....
Last weekend I had the honour of speaking at the Free and Open Source Software Conference again (after having talked there last year and in 2006) which took place at my alma mater for the 7th time now. The title of the talk was “conquering the mobile web: leverage standard technologies - gain extraordinary results” and it was great fun again. Talking at a conference is - at least for me - quite stressful since I’m really eager to deliver a talk which introduces the audience to something new while at the same time delivering it so that people have fun listening....
About a month ago, I finally had the time to publish a small side-project of mine: https://webchan.nl. Webchan.nl is a simple service that everyone can use to augment a website with push notifications. You simply include a small JavaScript file in your web pages that connects to the Webchan.nl server, reserves a channel and receives messages from that channel. From that point on your server-side components can push to that channel any information you want your users to see in realtime....
The social intranet software that me and my team is developing obviously contains a wiki component (which is btw. one of the most frequently used components of our software at our customers, along with the microblog). But ever since I joined the company I didn’t quite like the look and feel of our wiki pages. What bugs me most is the fact that we only have a rich text editor which stores the pages’ text as HTML....
The architecture for the webapp we’re building at work is layered in the typical way for Java applications: Our main layers are presentation, RPC, business and persistence. So when a user clicks some button on our app in his browser his request will most commonly pass all these named layers; the presentation layer (which actually runs on his browser since we’re using Google Web Toolkit) passes some value to the RPC layer which does authorization checks for the action the user would like to perform, transforms the value and passes it to the business layer which eventually passes it to persistence causing sth....