Web 2.0 is great - it allows users to get involved on your website.

Allthetopbananas.com shows not how to do it. Just be lazy and not bother to tell your website that Cork is not near Drogheda (for our non-Irish-based readers, they’re at opposite ends of the country, about a 4-5hr commute!).

Why should I bother to report to you that ‘Cork is not Drogheda’ if you haven’t done your basic research and looked at the map? Save your ‘wisdom of crowds’ stuff for items that you can’t find anywhere else.

Downloading the latest Radiohead (In Rainbows) Album now, not going to say (yet) if it any good or not. I’m more interested in how much did YOU pay for it when you were given the choice?

We paid Sterling 5.50 - Eur 7.95 according to Oanda Currency Convertor. Come on, tell us , how much did you pay for it?

Update: These are the numbers (see the comments below). I’ll update the graph as more people leave comments. I’m interested in this , not from the music point of view (it’s a good , but not great album). It’s more I’m looking to price my next mad-take-over-the-world idea. How do you put a value on something that (a) doesn’t physically exist and (b) will have wildly different values for different people?

More Posts from the People and Technology Blog

Flash is created by cool people who wear black and use Apple Macs. If you’re not sure as to what flash is, the chances are that if you’ve seen something on the web recently that made you go ‘wow’ for it’s coolness, then it was built using Adobe Flash.

To add substance to this froth Java people can use Flash (instead of normal web pages) to create cool pages that do useful stuff. For example Google Analytics uses Java and Flash to create a stunning User Interface. Even though Ajax and DHTML give you a lot of interactivity on your web pages, Flash goes one better at the small cost of not being as good for SEO and requiring a plugin (that most people already have installed).

So, what are you to do if you want to combine the coolness of Flash with the heavy lifting of Enterprise Java on the Server? The two main options are:

1. Flex from Adobe is one way for Java people to create flash. The core toolkit is free, but the editor costs about $500 and that’s before you pay for using it on your servers. More details in the previous blogposts on Adobe Apollo and Adobe Flex.
2. Open Laszlo Project is open source all the way, but does’t have a drag and drop editor (i.e. it’s more technical than graphical). Still , it allows you to create some cool effects , such as this Flash Clock.

Which framework will win out? I don’t know , and that’s before you even consider the Standard Java Web Frameworks such as Struts 2.

More (In progess) notes on Open Java and Flash are on the wiki. In an impulse buy , I bought the OpenLaszlo in Action yesterday. As an EBook , with rebate (coupon LZ35607 before the end of August) it costs about 10 Euro. Initial impressions are good (both for the book and Open Laszlo) , but I’m still working my way through it (so don’t quote me on it).

Disclaimer: I get a rebate if you buy the book from Amazon, but not if you buy the (Cheaper) E-Book direct from Manning. I bought the E-Book this time, but have got free books from Manning in the past for having reviewed (as yet unpublished) JBoss items.

Most websites do one thing : grab information from the user, and store it in a database.

For these simple websites , using Enterprise Java is like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - you’re much better off using a solution like Ruby on Rails. Off course, once you go off the usual path (e.g. to implement complex business rules and workflow) things become a lot more difficult. That’s how we make a living - a post for another day.

So, if you’re a business person looking for a web site ‘that has to be done by the end of the week‘ or a technologist looking to solve the pain of ‘I can’t believe building web sites is still so difficult‘, then it’s worth checking out Ruby on Rails.

A good place to start is Rails for All, which has recently moved home to Google Groups, and. The official announcement is below.

Rails For All - No more RFA email Hello everybody, This may be the last email you will get from Rails For All. You loved our email updates you say? Well, we have created two Google groups for your reading pleasure - one for discussions and one for announcements. Good stuff. Tell all your friends.

See you there!

Sincerely,

Robert Dempsey

Founder Rails For All, Inc.

—————

Promoting Ruby on Rails to the developer and business communities

More posts on Ruby

A quick summary of the Barcamp talk on Enterprise Web 2

Until now, innovation has stopped at the corporate firewall, with most of the Web 2 activity taking place in the personal and consumer space. With blogs (slowly) coming to the attention of the business mainstream, what is next to be taken up? Why should large companies bother? How will they implement it, or is Enterprise Web 2 just a fancy name for stuff they are doing anyway? More importantly, will anybody make a living out of it?

Any thoughts / comments / suggestions on what people what like to see?

I’ve been playing with Yahoo’s latest toy - see Yahoo Pipes in 10 easy steps.

It’s a very good example of a Web 2 tool. While it is still in beta it already allows you to combine / filter / clone and edit RSS streams. (RSS = a summary of a website, offered by many sites, including this one - just look for the orange logo). In the same way that SQL queries a database, Pipes allows you to query Websites (or to be more precise RSS streams) for the information that you want.

Yahoo Pipes is worth checking out for the following reasons:

• The user interface (finally) puts Gmail to shame. Just how do they generate the dynamic / curvy pipes linking the boxes?
• It’s completely graphic. Users with at a ‘power user of Excel’ level can generate streams that would previously have taken an experienced programmer a number of days.
• It’s another piece on the Web2 infrastructure. All other desktop apps have migrated to the web. It was just a matter of time before developer tools did as well. Does it make sense for you? Your call.

Pipes, for the reasons below, is not yet going to displace teams of Java people who do nothing but code RSS streams all day. Before, the choice on many IT projects was Build , Buy or use Open Source (or various combinations of those three). Online Web 2 apps and services (of which pipes is only one example) gives a fourth option to put into the mix. So what does Yahoo pipes need to overcome the ‘toy’ label and become a ’serious’ option for IT projects?

• The problem is, it’s free. How do Yahoo intend making money out of Pipes? More accurately , will they make enough money so that my project can still use it in 3 years time.
• You’re stuck with Yahoo. If you build against pipes, you’re stuck with them. Even in the database world, it is possible, if expensive, to switch product supplier. I’d love Yahoo to open source pipes to solve this dilemma, and allow them to build a business around the ‘pipes hosting’ part.
• It’s completely graphic. This is mainly a good thing but no doubt most developers would still like the option to see and edit the generated code.
• It’s hard to extend. If there is a way of extending it with my own ‘widgets’ , then I missed it. I can host RSS-generating code on my own server, but this detracts from pipes overall ease of use.

What do you think - will Yahoo Pipes take off , or be quietly abandonded?

Yahoo Pipes allows you to take RSS Feeds (Website summaries) and combine , filter, sort and otherwise manipulate them according to what you need. This sample shows you how to do this, based on several feeds from the Iona website. The feeds we are going to combine are:

IONA Information, News and Events
Keep on top of the latest IONA news, events, class schedules and more

Debbie Moynihan’s blog
Open thoughts about open source, open standards, and lots of other random stuff.

Eric Newcomer’s blog
SOA, Software Standardization, Web Services, and Transactions

Oisín Hurley’s Weblog
SOA, Eclipse Tools, Open Source and SCA

Publicly Speaking
Rob Morton’s Weblog

IP Babble
William Henry’s Weblog

SOS
Services in OpenSource

Essence is Real
Kiyoshi Egawa’s Weblog

If you want to see the end result (all the Iona Dublin Feeds in one place), click here.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Iona, but I do want to read all their Bloggers feeds in one place.

Yahoo Pipes in 10 Easy Steps.

1. Open your web browser and Login to Yahoo Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/. You can use a standard Yahoo ID (e.g. from Flickr, or Yahoo IM)

2. Click ‘My Pipes’ on the top left of the page . You should see the following screen

3. Click on ‘Create a New Pipe’. It should be in the middle of the screen towards the top. You should now see something like the following

4. At the top left of the screen is a blue menu option ‘Sources’ , with a couple of different places we can pull information from (e.g. The results of a Yahoo Seach, A Google Base Search, Flickr Photographs). The one we’re interested in is ‘Fetch’ , which can pull information from any Web Address (url).

Drag and drop the ‘Fetch’ box into the ‘grid’ area on the right. The main part of your screen should look something like the following:

5. Now we will add the Web Addresses (URL’s) that we want to pull the information from. We’ll get these from this page on Iona’s web site. Luckily, the blogs / web pages we want to combine also come in the RSS format (the orange buttons on this page). All blogs and many web pages have this ‘RSS’ option, and it makes it easier to combine the information in pipes.

To find the URl, we right-click on the orange button on the IONA site, and select ‘Copy Link Location’.

6. Back in Pipes Again , we paste this RSS link into the ‘url’ field on the Fetch box. We also click the ‘+’ sign at the top left of the box, so that pipe gives us the option to enter a 2nd URL. Our Fetch box now looks like this:

.

7. We repeat step 6, and copy the 8 other RSS feeds into our fetch box.

8. At the bottom of the Fetch box there should be blue circle. Drag this blue circle and drop onto the ‘Pipe Output’ box. Your screen should now look something like this.
.

9. Clicking on ‘Pipe Output’ (grey tab at bottom left of screen) fetches the information that we have just selected. The output from your newly created pipe should be at the bottom of the screen and look something like this :

10. That’s it! We’ve created a Pipe. To allow the world to see your new create, Select ‘Save’ then ‘Publish’ (both grey tabs on the top right of the screen). We’ve published a cleaned up version of the Iona Feed for you to view at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/KIwiFt282xGelck8mLokhQ

And the winners of the Feedburner T-Shirts (as chosen by our completely automated selection process) are …. at the bottom of this post.

In another shock scandal, Bernie Goldbach got disqualified by following a link from his own blog. He did send the most (25) commenters our way, and since we’re making this up as we go along, if anybody doesn’t take up their prize , I’ll pass one onto him.

Thanks to everybody who took part , and to everybody who posted the message on their blogs! (Bernie , Damian, Phil, Billy Leo and Podcasting Ireland.

Drum Roll please …. The winners are ….

• Jonathan Brazil (from the Weblog of the same name) , as sent by Irish Eyes.
• Frank , from BifSnif , as referred by AskDirect
• Bernard from Running with Bulls, as sent by Irish Eyes.
  

What happens next? I have the winners emails , so I will contact them directly to arrange posting the stuff out.

Update: Apollo has since been rename AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime. Personally, I Preferred the ‘Flex’ name.
What is Adobe Apollo? You know, Adobe , the people that give us the PDF reader.
Is Apollo the new Java for this Decade? Will it replace Atlas and .Net? Is Apollo an answer to problems we have in building web sites that all users can see? Will Apollo replace Ajax , Flash and plain vanilla HTML? Does it play well with Ruby and JRuby?

I don’t know. And neither does the Financial Times Tech Blog. But it does say

Adobe (and incidentally eBay) looks like it has a winner - if only the company can find a better way to explain what Apollo does.

I do know that Apollo may fix the pain of cross-platform web development. So, I’m over to the Adobe Labs site to find out more. Ajaxian has the demo. Mike Chambers (Adobe product development) has the slides. According to Mike:

Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Translation into plain English:Powerful web pages,easy to build , loads of pretty colours. If it’s delivered as promised

Dear Bruce,

First up, thanks for the book. Yes I’m saying thank-you about 8 years too late. ‘Thinking in Java‘ is what got me going in the language and in my mind is one of the best Java books written (sorry Tim). Giving it away free only cemented your reputation as the Bono of the Java world. OK, Bono without the Guitar, the Stetson and with a couple of overloaded constructors thrown in, but a man of stature nonetheless.

Secondly, I’ll forgive your flirtations with Python, on the basis that I’ve been having an affair myself with JRuby. I now understand the pain that you’ve been having at home, the endless repetitive arguments to get simple things done, and the temptation of a newer, younger, more flexible model.

So , I think you’re onto something here in your blogpost. I can feel the pain, the need to deliver Rich clients to users over the web. I think that Ruby / Google Web Toolkit / Struts 2 / Name your web toolkit has further to go than you may think , but eventually these ‘heroic efforts‘ (nice quote) will run out of steam. On the basis of your recommendation alone I’m willing to look at Adobe Flex, but I’m not sure if this is going to solve all the problems.

Now , a lot of us Java guys don’t like change (and as if you needed proof, just look at the comments on this O’Reilly blogpost on the Google API’s). All the same , we have a problem that gets worse every passing year. 6 Years ago we could have been sure that 90% of web sites were running Internet Explorer 4. Now we’ve got IE, Firefox, Safari (in all their different versions) as well as an explosion of mobile devices. The Windows Vista launch is only going to fragment things further with yet another platform to support.

No one web solution is going to display the same in all of these browsers. We’re not going to get a single solution from Microsoft / Sun / Adobe that everybody from developer to my Granny is going to install. So we’re going to have to take the ‘least bad’ route - something that looks great, but degrades gracefully to standard HTML on less capable devices. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know (yet) if Flex does this.

Yes Hybridizing open source Java is the starting point for the solution. Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go yet, and Flex is perhaps only inspiration along the way.

Yours sincerely

Paul

Ruby has a lot of buzz around it. The idiots version of what Ruby is:

• It’s a programming language (like Java) that allows you to tell computers what to do.
• Used with the Rails framework , it allows you to churn out your latest Web 2 site faster than you can pitch it to your friendly VC.

InfoQ has a good link to a Free Ruby Book that has just become available. The author of the book (Jeremy) blogs here.

We have two main reasons why we’re interested in Ruby:

1. Java is great for scalable , Enterprise systems used by thousands of people. Sometimes we just want something quick and dirty to try out an idea.
2. If your idea proves successful , you want a migration path (i.e. not to have to throw away all your original work). Ruby gives you this as the way it is organised means it is less likely to fall into a heap (Object Orientated)
3. So Why not PHP (the way this blog, using wordpress, is built)?  Ruby has a companion tool called JRuby. This means that you can run Ruby code anywhere you can use Java. Anything that Java can do , Ruby can do as well.

We’re also going down the free book route on Enterprise Web 2.0. Only it’s taking us a lot longer to get there. Currently the problem is a techie version of writers block.

Or to be more accurate ‘Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java as we know it’.

Think about this. Who pays your wages Mr Java-Developer-who-has-just-had-a-couple-of-years-at-the-top-of-the-pile? Clients, or if you’re in a larger organisation , the business folks (i.e.’internal’ clients). Do you think any of them care about Java? Do any of them know what Java is? All they want is to get things done, quickly , and with as few mistakes as possible.

These business people would be happy to run their organisations on Spreadsheets. Do you remember the cartoon where Dilbert convinced the pointy haired boss that he could fly the plane using Excel? There’s more than a element of truth to this. I know of at least one US Fortune 100 company that (until recently) conducted most of it’s operations on little more than Microsoft Office and duct-tape. It worked, not very well, but it worked.

Until now , the next line would be ‘Excel (or any other type of Spreadsheet) is not secure / scalable / sharable / not web friendly’. That was until Google launched their Docs and Speadsheets. It’s an online version of Office with some spreadsheet functionality. Play with it a bit and you’ll see that there’s plenty missing. But this being Google , I’m willing to put good money on

• (a) new features rolled out (think steamroller) and
• (b) These Spreadsheets being massivly scalable / secure / sharable.

This being Google, there is also an API (developer page here). It’s got massive holes in it (e.g. you can’t yet use it to create a new spreadsheet). But when Microsoft bring out their version of online spreadsheets (and they will) not only will they clone the Google API (to get market share), they’ll need to go one further and introduce new features / remove the usage restrictions in order to compete.

So, secure, scalable, sharble online spreadsheets are here to stay. So lets take a look at Mr. (or Ms.) Pointy haired boss thinking about their new project:

1. Hmm, I think we need to be able to gather which health plans our employees are enrolled in.
2. OK, I’ll throw together a spreadsheet to show people what I want
3. Before I’ll give to our friendly Java developer and let him ‘do’ a website from it.
   Soon I’ll just share this on Google.
4. Great , Loads of people are now using it, I’ll just the (Ruby / PHP / Insert other language here) guy to add one or two extra features.
5. Most Excellent. Why don’t we spin this off as a Web 2 company and sell it to EBay??

There you have it, Massively scalable , Highly secure websites (see Google Authentication API), without needing to know anything about EJB, JMX , JBoss, JDBC or any of the hard won knowledge that us Enterprise Java Developers have built up over the last 7-8 years. I’m exaggerating, but not much.

What do you think? Is Enterprise Java dead, or is Web 2 just another boost and a slightly different way of doing things for us Java people?

Other Java Posts from Technology in Plain English

Some other notes:

• Java is read once , run almost anywhere. The ‘Almost’ is because (for various technical reasons) the difficulty in getting reasonably priced web hosting. Have your tried getting some recently - impossible to find , or at least impossible to find at the prices PHP and Ruby guys can get theirs?
• Tim O’Reilly with was right with the notion of Web 2.0 and the network as a computer. We’ve also written about the notion of online software being at a tipping point.

This article was originally published on the O’Reilly books OnJava Website.

For the consideration of the Academy , here are our Irish Blog Award nominations. We may or may not vote for them (!), but I’d like the Irish Blogging public to consider some of the alternatives to the usual big A-List bloggers (who are fairly safe to get nominated anyway :-). Also pretty sure to be nominated are last years award winners. Now , if only I can figure out how to work the award nomination form ….

• Best Blog Post - David McWilliams on something even more important than blogging (!) the impending property market crash.
• Most Humorous Post - Bifsnif. For having the best cartoons available on the web , of which this is only one sample.
• Best Photo Blog - Ireland from a Polish perspective. Not a dedicated photo blog, but the images are as good as any that I’ve seen on the web.
• Best Blog - Red Cardinal. He’s angling for the ‘Best Newcomer’ spot, but I think he’s worthy of ‘Best Blog’ consideration (a) Because he’s got good content and style and (b) He blogs about something relevant to all bloggers - how to get noticed by Google.
• Best Political Blog - Dominic Hannigan. You may or may not agree with his politics (Labour), but he’s one of earliest politicians to blog, and deserves kudos for his suggestion to mail dog s**t to the Meath county manager.
• Best Group Blog - IQ content who have just been accepted into the 9Rules network (a sure sign of blog quality if ever there was one)
• Best Personal Blog - The Swearing Lady. But only because I’m afraid of her.
• Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog - 2 Years in a row for Conn? , even if an lionra has just ended. Damien has just told me that you can’t both sponsor and be up to win the award. I suppose it would be a bit awkward for the photo’s.
• Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere - Damien Mulley. He stuck his neck out and organised the 2006 Irish blog awards when nobody was sure it was going to take off. Despite the huge increase in workload, He’s organising the 2007 awards.
• Best Technology Blog/Blogger (you mean, apart from ourselves Justin Mason. A one man anti-Spam fighting machine. Kudos for his work on Spam Assasin ,but he’s also quite a good technical writer.
• Best Designed Blog - Ken McGuire(Creative Imaginations). A very visually appealing blog, andmanages to get a lot of information and content across without appearing cluttered. AFAIK Ken doesn’t do freelance word press work , but if he did , you’d want him to design your blog for you.
• Best Specialist Blog - Brian Honan, Security Watch. You mightn’t know it from his blog, but Brian does have a personality :-). A single minded dedication to security makes his blog a ‘must read’ for anybody who uses a PC.
• Best Newcomer - A lot of the people that are newcomers , don’t look like newcomers (i.e. the quality of the blog is so good you thing they’ve been blogging forever). Perhaps this list might give you a few suggestions. My vote goes to Pat at Roam4Free.
• Best Business Blog - McGarr Solicitors. Maybe not the best business blog, but worthy of your consideration as one of the first traditional (i.e. non tech business) bloggers out there.

We’re not nominating Best Music / Best Podcast / Best Podcaster / Best Videocast / Best Arts and Culture blogs. Maybe we should get out more.

More Posts on the Irish Blog Awards.

Update: With Conn out of the way perhaps Blunt Cogs could be the surprise Entrant. No, somebody else is going to have to nominate them.

Damien has just announced that the 2007 Irish Blog Awards will be held on the 3rd March 2007. I might even last until the end of the night this year.

Update: Nominations are now open.

A good rule of thumb is : if it’s covered in the Economist Magazine, then it’s just about to go business mainstream. When you’re evaluating new technologies you neither want to be too early (with a high risk of betting on the wrong horse), or too late (and miss the boat). The economist = mainstream rule of thumb has been true for trivial things such the Internet, Open Software , Agile Project development, Web 2.0 and Blogging.

So , this article in the Dec 19th - Jan 2nd Edition (tagline ‘Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing’) should make you sit up and take notice.

Basically, it states that such Web 2 mainstays such as WebMail (from Google) as well as Google’s Office replacements (for Word and Excel) are ready for the corporate mainstream. Introduced by employees familarity with these tools in the consumer market, the reason for their adoption will be financial : by specialising in these areas , Google can provide what were formerly in house desktop applications quicker , faster , cheaper and more reliable than any other provider (e.g. Microsoft) and better than the in house IT teams.

The 2 points that I take from this are:

• ‘Software as a Service’ (i.e. something you get over the web , rather than in a shrink-wrapped box) has finally reached the tipping point. It’s a similar moment (with equal opportunities) to when the internet first arrived, or the move from Dos (text based computers) to Windows (Graphics and mouse).
• With the amount of Viruses in existence, it can be argued that web based applications are now more secure than anything running on a PC. Google is a bit like Ryanair , the low cost Irish Airline, in this regard. One major crash and the damage to their reputation would put them out of business. Do you get the same ‘paranoid about safety and security’ feeling when looking at the average consumer PC?

An example of this trend is FirstPartners.net email. We could manage it ourselves, but allowing Google Apps for Your Domain to do it for us allows us to get on with doing things that clients will pay us for.

I’m remember Karen Lillington writing in the Irish times about how life in ‘The Valley’ was tedious in having a choice of several Web 2.0 networking events to go to every evening.

Dublin isn’t quite at that stage , but there is the Firefox 2 launch party coming up in Dublin on the 14th November.
Thanks to Paul of the Web2Ireland blog for putting me on to this one.

http://script.aculo.us/images/logo.gif

I’m already a big fan of using DWR to create Dynamic Ajax web pages. I’m beginning to warm to script.aculo.us. DWR is the workhorse, script.aculo.us the flash cousin with all the special effects. Still , any framework with a page on Unit Testing gets my vote. Enterprise JavaScript , here we come!

Derek Organ is brave enough to ask the question below about the Barcamp Ireland unconference. He’s deeply involved with Web 2.0 startup 1time.ie, so we know he’s not thick! I’m writing this post, as Enterprise Ireland recently posted an invite to everybody that was at the Web 2 Ireland get together, and I can just picture the people there scratching their heads and wondering ‘What is this Barcamp thing anway?‘.

Dereks’ Question:

I’ve never been to one of these events but I’d love to go there and show off our own web 2.0 product and also see what other people are at in ireland. I’m struggling at the moment though to figure out exactly how the the day will be formated. As in who talks, organizes etc? I’m sure they work but i wonder could anyone share there experience if they have been to one. What usually happens?

So, below are the answers the top questions I had before attending. Yes, the answers are strange, but yes, the whole thing seems to work.

1) Where is the event going to be held? At the time of writing , it’s going to be in Dublin, Cork, Galway or Waterford. Yes, it makes it slightly difficult to book accomadation, but hopefully a consensus will be arrived at soon. In general , Barcamp is dependant on people ‘donating’ a place to meetup. For example , last Octobers Techcamp Ireland was held in the Northside Civic Centre , Dublin.
2) When is the event on? This appears to be a little clearer, with current opinion favouring Saturday the 23rd September.

3) Who should attend? Anybody with a passion for the uses of technology - not just geeks in the traditional sense of the word, but people who can string two sentences together and still get excited about new possibilities.
4) How do I get invited? You invite yourself. Go to this page on the Barcamp site , and add your name to the list (click on the ‘edit page’ button on the top left). Yes it’s one of those web pages that everybody and anybody can edit (a wiki). In exchange for you being trusted to change the page, please don’t go mad with it.

5) How do I get in touch with the organiser? The organiser is you. I understand this may come as a bit of a shock, but at least you have about 30 other people (at the last count) to help you out. The wiki (see point 4) is what makes it all come together - the more you put in, the more you get out of it.

6) What will people be talking about? Anything that interests you. The current list is on the wiki, and first timers are actively encouraged to sign up to speak - not as a sales pitch, but if you genuinely think you have something useful to share.

If you’re looking for more information, you could do worse than check out the people that have already blogged about the event:

• Argolon
• Eirepreneur
• Paul Watson
• Fergus Burns
• Tom Raftery
• Jonathan Hill (Infacta)

And by way of apology to Derek for damning him with faint praise , here is his company logo - well worth checking out.