Robert Hanson's Tech Log

About Swoon

2011-01-23T12:39:00.004-05:00

It seems that the older I get the more I look for inspiration. I find that one of the best places to go on the Internet is to watch videos of presentations from TED. Today I wasn't looking for anything inspirational, and instead it found me.A friend of mine posted a link to a presentation by "Swoon". His only description was that she was one of his favorite artists and an all-around wonderful

Political Polls (file under "BS")

2010-09-16T22:19:00.002-04:00

I received this poll in an email from my congressman Leonard Lance. Dear Friend,As you may know recent newspapers reported that according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) more than 97,000 federal employees were delinquent on their 2008 federal income taxes, owing almost $1 billion in unpaid taxes.While all Americans have an obligation to pay the taxes they owe, because federal employees draw

Politician Bullshit: The Game

2010-09-15T09:07:00.004-04:00

I don't care if you are a Democrat, Republican, Green, Tea-bagger, or whatever. Politicians run marketing machines that bend the truth to make them and their party look better.I received a newsletter from my Congressman Leonard Lance yesterday. In it were several half-truths, and I wanted to share one of them."Certainty that comes with renewing the Bush-era tax cuts for all taxpayers so that

Use the right tool for the job, or not

2010-04-17T10:28:00.000-04:00

An intelligent developer always advocates that you should "use the right tool for the job". But is there really a "right" tool, or is that just the developer's way of being tolerant to other languages and tools? I suggest that in 90% of development projects the "right" tool is strictly the preference of the developer and that there is no concrete reason that the tool chosen is the best fit

Philly ETE 2010 - Battle of the Frameworks (slides)

2010-04-14T09:48:00.003-04:00

Here are the slides from the Battle of the Frameworks, which was held on April 9th 2010.The audio of the event can be found here.

Frameworks Battle: Questions Wanted

2010-03-16T10:07:00.003-04:00

On April 9th I will be hosting a panel titled, "Battle of the Frameworks II" at Philly ETE. This is a followup to the same panel that was held two years ago, on which I was a participant.What I am looking for are questions for the panel. If you could ask these guys anything about languages or frameworks, what would it be?Have a question that you think I should ask the panel? You can send me

The Humane Interface

2010-01-30T09:04:00.004-05:00

It has been a long time since my last post, but it is time to shake the dust off my blog and get back to work. There are a few cool things going on for me including a new book, a speaking gig, and some interesting projects. I'll post about all that stuff in the weeks to come, but for now I wanted to share a book that I am reading, The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin.Wait, wait! Don't go!I

Managing a Remote Development Team

2009-07-26T09:52:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine called the other day and was asking some questions about managing a development team that is separated by several time zones. I consider myself a thoughtful person, but not very quick, so the answer I provided was off the mark and not very insightful. Now that I have had a few days to ponder my answer, I believe that I now have something valuable to share.To make my advice

Do you really need to test that?

2009-05-16T09:11:00.005-04:00

We all know Kent Beck. The co-creator of JUnit, one of the founding fathers of the Agile Manifesto, author of several eXtreme Programming books, just to highlight a few. Now that Kent has spent a decade telling us all to test everything... now he says, it is ok to skip testing.I'll let that sink in a bit.What he is basically saying is that it is ok for the kids to play in the street, if they

Software Craftsmanship

2009-05-13T21:30:00.002-04:00

It has been a while since I sat down to write something, but that is because I have been caught up in learning. In March I presented at ETE in Philadelphia, and during my stay there I met a programming hippy Corey Haines. Corey was just like all of us, writing code for his day job, and like some of us enjoyed it. In December he lost his job, and with some money in the bank and a lot of free

Introduction to GWT for Developers

2009-03-28T13:43:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I presented a session on GWT at ETE 2009. Both the slides and demonstration files for the GWT presentation are available for download.

ETE 2009 - Twittering Reflections

2009-03-28T08:51:00.003-04:00

I just got back from ETE 2009 in Philadelphia, and it was really a great conference. Andy Hunt the Pragmatic Programmer was one of the keynote speakers, as was the CTO behind the Obama on-line presence for the campaign.I learned a lot, but something that really stood out wasn't what was in the presentations, it was what was going on between the audience. It was Twitter.I have heard about people

My Philosophy

2009-02-17T10:32:00.002-05:00

Every once in a while some tiny little event crosses your life's path and it becomes a keystone in your being. For me one such event was in the late 1990's when I was working as a web developer at a computer manufacturer.I recall talking with Phil from the marketing team. He was explaining some idea he had for the company website, probably related to a new customer tool. As usual I listened,

Increasing Internet speeds for innovation, education, and the economy

2009-01-14T09:32:00.003-05:00

Please Vote: Change.gov has a new feature called Citizen's Briefing Book, where I posted this article. If you agree with what I have to say here, I ask you to please vote for Increasing Internet speeds for innovation, education, and the economy.As a nation we suffer from relatively slow Internet connection speeds. By every account that I have heard, we are 15th world-wide and slipping fast.

Free book Contagious hits NY Times Best Seller List

2009-01-10T13:04:00.003-05:00

I have been listening to Scott Sigler's stories on his podcast for a few years now, and religiously bought his books when the finally came out in print. Yes... he provides the book for FREE as both a podcast and PDF, typically before it comes out in print.On December 30th Scott's book Contagious was released in print, and Contagious hit the New York Times Best Seller list in its first week.

One RIA Framework to Rule Them All

2008-12-29T20:05:00.003-05:00

I took some time on this holiday break to start experimenting with Silverlight and Flex, neither of which I have any experience with. While I was toying around with them I started thinking about the dizzying number of the RIA framework options.With Silverlight I really liked developing in Visual Studio, it was intuitive and fast. I also liked that fact that I could use XAML to markup the layout

Developing Applications more Efficiently

2008-12-24T13:35:00.002-05:00

Your boss walks up to you and says, "we need to be more efficient". This seems reasonable; efficiency lowers costs, and assuming you don't sacrifice quality, who in their right mind would argue that this is a bad thing. But now think about it a little. How can you improve efficiency without being able to measure it? And how do you go about measuring efficiency when it comes to building

Spring Security + Splunk = Security Monitoring

2008-12-13T08:47:00.015-05:00

For many web sites Spring Security provides the framework to secure the site from unauthorized personal. This is a good start, but it won’t let you know when someone is testing your security to see if maybe they can sneak in. That is where Splunk comes in. Splunk is a tool that will analyze your log files real time, allowing reports and alerts to be generated. So if Splunk it to be the

Log Analytics: Splunk

2008-12-04T07:53:00.004-05:00

Sure, I use logs to troubleshoot problems, but I never gave it much thought as an analytics device since the rise of JavaScript based traffic analysis tools like Omniture and Google Analytics. I must say that I have sorely underestimated the power of logging.I say this because of a tool that I have begun using called Splunk. If I had to characterize Splunk, I would say that it is a data

Thanksgiving Day Rick Roll

2008-11-30T18:49:00.005-05:00

I know, I know. Rick rolling is so old now that everyone is over it. That might be true, but I can't help but get a kick out it when Rick Rolling hits mainstream television.Don't know what Rick Rolling is? You can get the full explanation here and here.If you didn't happen to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, check out this clip. I had thought originally thought that it was completely

Obama names Chuck Norris as head of Homeland Security

2008-11-07T09:19:00.002-05:00

The announcement this morning made so much sense to me, Chuck Norris is the ideal choice for heading up Homeland Security. Obama stated that after reading Norris' book Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America, the choice was clear.Chuck Norris is well known for demoralizing the enemy with his signature roundhouse kick. According to Chuck Norris Facts, Norris has been credited with ending

Getting the Facts on Taxes

2008-10-28T09:54:00.003-04:00

Editorial Note: No, this isn't tech related, and for that I apologize. But this is something I feel compelled to post.With an election looming I have been discussing the candidates with family and friends. One point of contention is the two tax plans and "distribution of wealth".You can see the two plans on the candidates respective sites.http://www.barackobama.com/taxes/http://

Lou Dobbs, utterly ridiculous

2008-09-29T20:21:00.003-04:00

Let me preface this entry by saying that I am not a fan of Lou Dobbs. I do not agree with him on mostly everything.That being said, I was watching him tonight just because he was what was on CNN, and I wanted to know what was going on with the bailout. He seemed exceedingly happy that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 failed to pass in Congress.After 20 minutes of Lou saying over

What do you think "great software" means?

2008-07-31T07:29:00.004-04:00

I am always looking for new ideas and new ways of doing things. Today I find myself reading Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, and in chapter one it ask you the question, "what do you think great software means?".Ok, I'll take a stab at that.Great software does what the customer wanted, and a little bit more. From the user's point of view it should be simple, reliable, and easy to

Launched Penlets.com, for Pulse Pen Users

2008-07-05T11:25:00.003-04:00

Back in May I was at JavaOne and had a great time. Among other things I picked up a Pulse pen from Livescribe. If you haven't heard about the Pulse pen, here is the short version... The pulse pen is a computer in a pen, allowing you to record writing and audio as well as write penlet applications in Java. Pre-installed demos include a piano that your draw on the paper then tap to

Pimping for Scott Sigler

2008-05-13T08:54:00.003-04:00

If you don't know him, you should. Scott Sigler is an "open-source" author who heard about this "podcasting thing" and just happened to have a finished book lying around. Sigler is arguably the father of serial podcast fiction, attempting to emulate the serial nature of radio stories from the 40's in this new format.His fans are fanatical about his work, and even though he gives away his books

Countdown to JavaOne 2008 (and Twittering)

2008-04-29T08:29:00.005-04:00

This will be my first year going to JavaOne, and I am expecting to have a lot of fun. In creating my schedule I was a little surprised by the number of sessions on scripting languages. I guess I shouldn't be though, there has been a lot of news regarding scripting languages on the JVM in the last year. Here is a sampling of the sessions.JRuby: Why, What, How...Do It NowJavaScript Programming

Are web apps moving to the Desktop?

2008-04-23T07:50:00.002-04:00

I saw an article on Ajaxian yesterday noting that Google was now allowing you to use their APIs in non-Ajax applications. For instance, you can now use their translation API from the server, or in a Flash application, or perhaps even from a VB application.This combined with the release of Adobe AIR, a platform form running "web applications" on the client, makes me wonder if the future of "Web

.NET is leapfrogging Java and fairies just stole my underpants

2008-04-22T17:12:00.002-04:00

I received an email from Manning along with a link to their forum that caused me to pause. It was titled "Has .NET Leapfrogged Java?".It seems that an anonymous author had three facts that made this true.1. .NET has LINQ2. C# had generics/foreach before Java.3. .NET has Python, Ruby, F# and others.These "facts" seemed a little light to me, and I said as much.If you have an opinion on the matter

GWT-Ext vs. Ext-GWT

2008-04-22T11:46:00.003-04:00

If you haven't seen Ext-JS, you should. It is a wicked cool API for JavaScript containing tons of widgets and tools. What immediately attracted were the rich set of attractive widgets that comes with Ext-JS out of the box.For us GWT developers there is a project that wraps the Ext-JS library for GWT, namely GWT-EXT (GWT before Ext). The initial release was in July of 2007, and since then it

Review: Project Management with Jira

2008-03-08T08:19:00.006-05:00

According to the Jira website, Jira is...JIRA is a bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management application developed to make this process easier for your team. JIRA has been designed with a focus on task achievement, is instantly usable and is flexible to work with.I had already been a casual user of Jira, but due to a business need I needed to look into it a bit further. I am rather

GWT Widget Library Close to a 0.1.6 Release

2007-12-31T18:51:00.001-05:00

There has been a lot of work going in to the GWT Widget Library lately, and I wanted to provide a preview of what it will include.New Canvas widgetGeorge Georgovassilis added a Canvas widget to the library that uses VML on Internet Explorer and the canvas tag on Firefox, Opera, and Safari. After the launch of the initial implementation you can expect to see incremental enhancements down the

Presentation: GWT Tools Panel

2007-12-28T11:15:00.000-05:00

As mentioned in a prior post I had the opportunity to be a part of the GWT Tools Panel at the recent conference hosted by Peason. That session was just made available online for those unable to attend the conference.You can find this presentation and others from the conference on YouTube.

Testing Servlets with JUnit

2007-12-20T18:06:00.001-05:00

In my day-to-day job I write a lot of unit tests, and I try to test everything I can. Recently though I had written a service that I was unable to test completely. One of the methods in the service had the job of sending an HTTP request to a remote server and responding with the results. For my project I used commons-httpclient to send the request.@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")public String

Resistance to Change

2007-12-15T15:28:00.000-05:00

As a programmer I have learned to embrace change, but this was not always the case. I can remember when I was once told a long time ago that I was resistant to change. At the time I felt that change was bad, it was expensive and there was in my mind no reason do so. But now I see the flip side of the coin, without change there can not be betterment.For me changing from a Perl developer to a

GWT Patterns: Simplifying Structure Through Events

2007-12-09T22:43:00.001-05:00

On the way back from the GWT conference I felt pretty inspired, and decided to restart work that I had done on a GWT chess application. Like most apps that I build for fun, I didn't think the whole thing through before I started. In particular I was interested in the drag-and-drop aspect of the project, so I started there. Eventually I got to the point where I could move the pieces to

Reminiscing the GWT Conference

2007-12-08T14:17:00.000-05:00

As some of you may know, I had the privilege of speaking at the GWT conference hosted by Pearson Education this past week. I was part of the GWT tools panel moderated by Adam Houghton, creator of GWTFlow. The rest of the panel included Eric Clayberg of Instantiations, Ray Cromwell CTO of Timepedia, and Fred Sauer creator of the gwt-dnd library. Being part of the tools panel was great, but I

Grokking Domain Specific Languages

2007-09-22T15:20:00.000-04:00

A Domain Specific Language (DSL) is a programming language that is designed for a specific task. Although this definition is overly simplistic, it is good place to start.As a Java developer I use domain specific languages in every non-trivial project that I am involved in. I use Hibernate, which uses an XML configuration file to map Java properties to data in a database. This XML file is a DSL

Tail Chasing

2007-09-20T08:28:00.000-04:00

I hope that I am not the only one with this problem, but I often find myself trying too many different things. By "things" I of course mean technologies. Things like Wicket, Grails, jQuery, and Silverlight. So many cool things to learn, and only so many hours in the day. It is enough to make my head spin.I have been trying to come up with a strategy that will allow me to learn more, but with

Some Thoughts on Commercial GWT Components

2007-07-26T08:16:00.001-04:00

Recently a message was posted to the GWT developers forum seeking advise on distributing commercial GWT components. The poster explained that his commercial product included an advanced GWT component along with a sophisticated server-side piece to it. His concern was protecting his intellectual property by obfuscating or otherwise hiding his code from his users. I have a few thoughts on

Appearing at OpenNMS Dev-Jam

2007-07-09T07:19:00.000-04:00

If you haven't heard about OpenNMS, it is an enterprise grade open-source network management solution. Each year they bring a guest speaker to their Dev-Jam conference to speak on a topic pertaining to their needs. This year they are working towards using GWT for the user interface of the OpenNMS tool, and have invited me to their conference.It is nice to see adoption of GWT by such a well

Hey Borders, GWT Isn't About Search!

2007-07-06T09:09:00.001-04:00

I decided to visit my local Border bookstore this past week so that I could actually see that GWT in Action was on the shelves. I am not sure why I wanted to look, I guess I was just had a little spare time, and was curious.I went right over to the shelf filled with books about web programming, perhaps my most visited shelf in the store, and began a visual search for the book. I didn't see it,

GWT (and me) Unveiled on The Server Side

2007-06-28T09:04:00.001-04:00

I did a video interview with Eugene Ciurana of The Server Side web site. In the interview we talked about the benefits of GWT and a little about the contents of GWT in Action.GWT in Action: TheServerSide Tech BriefThe posting as drummed up some lively conversation. Perhaps the best quote in the comments so far is, "GWT style programming is for cowards". I am not sure how using GWT makes me a

YeeeeHaaaa! See Y'all at the Java Ranch!

2007-06-27T07:37:00.000-04:00

This week GWT in Action is the featured book on the Java Ranch web site. Adam and I will be fielding questions about GWT in the HTML and JS forum for the next two days, and the Java Ranch will be giving out some free copies of the book.The Java Ranch forum is quite a bit different them the GWT developers forum. Most of the questions revolve around the discussion of what GWT can do, how it

GWT announced as the new iPhone SDK

2007-06-17T09:10:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the title of this entry is slightly misleading, but it comes close to the truth. In this entry I present a guy named Steve, and his announcement that gave me some insight to the future of web development.First, let me provide some background information. In case you missed it, Apple held its World Wide Developers Conference last week, and as usual Steve Jobs stood up on the big stage to

GWT a Year Later

2007-06-07T14:10:00.000-04:00

One year ago there was a post on the Ajaxian site that reviewed GWT, and the author was pretty harsh. I remember that it really bothered me and a few others, as you can see in the comments on that article.Recently I was speaking with Dietrich Kappe of Ajaxian, and commented that I thought that review of GWT was a little unfair, especially since it was posted only a few days after GWT was

Free Chapters from GWT in Action

2007-05-24T08:09:00.000-04:00

As part of the promotion for GWT in Action, Manning has released two chapters of the book for free. When Adam and I were asked which chapters we wanted to release, we were in complete agreement.Chapter 2, "Creating the default application", is a 30 page getting started guide. If you are new to GWT and having some difficulties getting started, this chapter will walk you through it. It covers

GWT in Action is #3 at JavaOne

2007-05-12T08:03:00.000-04:00

According to the JavaOne site, GWT in Action was #3 on the best sellers list for JavaOne. Adam and I had no idea that they had a best sellers list, but as you can guess we are extremely pleased with how well our book did.So, to everyone who bought our book at JavaOne, Thank You! It was really great to see this sort of feedback.If you weren't able attend JavaOne and wanted to pick up a copy, you

GWT in Action: It's a baby book!

2007-04-28T07:41:00.000-04:00

Check out my baby pictures! Isn't it the cutest book you ever saw?9 months ago a book editor told me, "Writing a book is like having a baby." If that is the case, I feel like I just gave birth to a 900 pound gorilla! For those of you that don’t know, Adam Tacy and I set out to write a book for Manning nearly 9 months ago, and the result is a 600 page behemoth that covers everything from the

A Sample GWT Application: The Dashboard

2007-03-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

While Adam and I were writing GWT in Action, we generated a lot of mini-applications that were used as examples throughout the book. At some point it was decided that we wanted to tie all of the apps together, forming one large mega-app, that would add some continuity throughout the book. We call it the "Dashboard", and we hope it will be a useful concept to everyone that reads the book.Manning

GWT-RPC: Customizing RPC in GWT

2007-02-18T14:40:00.001-05:00

In the unlikely event that you were not aware, the GWT developers are hard at work on a 1.4 release. This release, like many software projects, is going to miss it's release date, but now that GWT is open source we can get a peek at the code that is coming our way soon. In this article I want to take a look at the new and improved RemoteServiceServlet. If you simple use GWT-RPC, then the

GWT ClippedImage - Optimizing Image Loading

2007-02-18T14:36:00.001-05:00

If you have been watching the news groups you will have heard about the upcoming GWT 1.4 release, and the long list of features it will include. One of these features is the ClippedImage class. This article is meant to explain how to use ClippedImage, and the details of how it can optimize image loading in your GWT application.What is ClippedImage, and what is it for?ClippedImage allows you to

This Week in GWT - 1/5/2007

2007-01-07T11:59:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the third installment of This Week in GWT, and the first of this new year. As you recall from last week there was a Request for Review for building a set of "Data Aware Widgets". We pick up this weeks review from there, where the discussion strayed quite a bit from the original message to discuss problems with the existing HTMLTable. HTMLTable WoesIn the midst of the discussion about

This Week in GWT - 12/29/2006

2006-12-31T09:59:00.000-05:00

This is the second installment of This Week in GWT, and some of you may have noticed that I have already skipped a week. For those of you that celebrate Christmas, it was last weekend, and for Christmas this year I got the flu. And it was a grand flu at that. I wasn't much in the mood for writing. But enough of my problems, lets get back on track and cover the highlights of these past two

This Week in GWT - 12/15/2006

2006-12-16T19:17:00.000-05:00

This is the first (and hopefully not the last) summary of the newly created GWT Contributors list. The list was only started on Tuesday, so this summary is really for only a half week. I think the size is just about right though, so I expect that going forward I will filter out a little more than I did this week.The GWT Contributors list officially opened on Tuesday with a welcome message from

Java Posse: GWT Round Table Discussion

2006-10-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

The Java Posse just released a round table discussion about GWT, which I was able to take part in. The other participants were Bruce Johnson of Google, and Ryan Dewsbury of Gpokr.com. I have been following the Java Posse coverage of GWT since the announcement of GWT at Java One, so it was nice to be able to add my own thoughts to the discussion.In my opinion there are two important points that

What's New...

2006-08-27T14:47:00.000-04:00

Based on current statistics most of my readership are users of Google's Web Toolkit, so this will geared toward my work with GWT. I have been somewhat absent, especially on the GWT dev list, where I have become more of a spectator than a poster. This isn't because I have moved on to other things, instead it is because GWT has become a second job for me, and it business is booming. So let me

Expanded GWT API Map

2006-08-05T15:16:00.000-04:00

Last week I posted a visual map of the components that come with GWT. I had mentioned that I wanted to include interfaces, but it would have become a mess rather quickly. An anonymous reader added the comment below.Possible enhancement: a symbol in the box below each for the various interfaces they support (mouse, keyboard, focus, etc).It sounded like a great idea, so I spent some time working

Bird's Eye View of the GWT API

2006-07-29T18:11:00.000-04:00

Last week, I wanted to "see" the whole picture, and put together this chart which shows the heirarchy of all of the user interface components that ship with GWT. Originally I wanted to include all of the interfaces as well, but I couldn't find a way to do it that wasn't totally confusing.In the chart the orange rectangles represent abstract classes, and the while one are concrete classes.

See A Need, Fill A Need

2006-07-24T08:37:00.000-04:00

The title refers to the animated movie Robots. In the movie Rodney, a robot with aspirations, goes to the big city to become an inventor. His motto is "see a need, fill a need". I have been trying to do the same thing with the GWT Widget Library, trying to fill the need where I know there is one. Based on some polling a few weeks ago the biggest need is for more widgets. 68% of those polled

CJD seeks FOL

2006-07-04T09:06:00.000-04:00

Our world is a strange place. I started the GWT Widget Library with the intention of giving my code away for free. But I have found that it isn't quite that simple. You can't just give it away, you must license it.I often find myself driving down the road, and see a pile of used baby toys with a sign that says "FREE". I now look at it a little differently. What I see is a lawsuit waiting to

Calculator Widgets for GWT

2006-07-02T08:24:00.001-04:00

One of the latest additions to the GWT Widget Library (GWT-WL) is a small set of calculator tools and widgets. This article will look at how you can use them in your project, beginning with the simplest use case and then working our way to building custom implementations.PopupCalcButtonThe PopupCalcButton is a widget that allows you to add a pop-up calculator tool to any TextBox. The code for

Coding SVG With GWT

2006-06-25T14:27:00.001-04:00

If you have been reading my prior posts you will know that I have a strong interest in GWT, and have been doing a lot of work with it, even in production systems. GWT is the acronym for the Google Web Toolkit. It allows a developer to write code in Java, and have it compiled to JavaScript that can run in any modern browser. For more details check out the GWT site, and check out my prior posts.

Trivial GWT Example

2006-06-01T20:06:00.004-04:00

Editor's note 5/24/07: As you probably know, Adam and I just finished writing GWT in Action, a Manning title. Last week we were asked two pick two chapters that would be released for free. One of those, chapter 10, covers the GWT-RPC mechanism in some detail. Seeing that this entry is the most popular on the site, that was probably a good choice. So read the entry first, and if you still

GWT Widget Library Has Moved

2006-05-29T11:35:00.000-04:00

I am moving my news specific to the GWT Widget Library to http://gwtwidgets.blogspot.com/. I am doing this to make it easy to find the latest versions of the package. I do expect to make reference to the library here, but more in the respect of rants, comparisons, how-to's, and such.So on that note, I would like to announce the release of GWT Widget Library 0.0.2.Cheers.

GWT Widget Library Additions

2006-05-26T09:13:00.000-04:00

The next release of the GWT Widget Library should be out by Tuesday. The main addition thus far are the ImageButton and ToggleButton widgets. Both of these support the usual JPEG and GIF, as well as PNG.If you are unfamiliar with PNG it may be because IE6 does not have proper support for it, although there is a workaround. The new button widgets take advantage of the workaround and allow the

ANNOUNCE: GWT Widget Library

2006-05-24T09:12:00.000-04:00

The GWT Widget Library is a library of widgets and wrappers for the Google Web Toolkit. Currently this is a very short list, which will expand in time.This is being distributed under the GNU-LGPL.Version 0.0.1 Features: Scriptaculous Effect Wrapper Download:Gwt-Widget v0.0.1Examples:Example of using an effect with options: Effect.highlight(widget, new EffectOption[]{ new EffectOption("

How to Package GWT Components

2006-05-23T14:11:00.000-04:00

This is a response I sent to the Google Web Toolkit group in response to questions about how to package user created components into a JAR file for reuse. The full message thread can be found in Google Groups.I created a widget called "Heading" which wraps the text in the appropriate

HTML tag.The contents of the JAR file look like this: META-INF/META-INF/MANIFEST.MForg/org/hanson/org/

Google Web Toolkit: We Got Bugs

2006-05-21T08:39:00.000-04:00

I was bit by a few bugs myself when trying out Google's Web Toolkit. If you are unfamiliar with it, you can check out my recent post on it. In this entry I want to list the problems that I found in the hopes that it will help others, and as a reminder to myself.Internet Explorer 7 IssueIf you try to run or debug an app with IE7 installed, you will see this error:"Failed to load module ... .

Arggg... Blogger!

2006-05-21T08:34:00.000-04:00

I have a simple request for Blogger, Wordpress, and other blog providers. When I edit the HTML for an entry, don't modify it!Both of these services will alter your HTML after you save it. This causes a problem for example, when you want to post code in a

tag.  In Blogger it will place a <br> tag after each newline in the entry, and fills your textarea with line break tags.  In
</article>
<article>
<h1>News: Google Web Toolkit</h1>
<p>2006-05-20T22:39:00.000-04:00</p>
At Java One one of the big announcements was a Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The toolkit allows a programmer to write Java code and compile that code to JavaScript. This allows the programmer to leverage the abilities of their IDE, unit test their client side code, and easily create RPC services.    Here is a sample Java class which adds some elements to the page when the page is loaded. package
</article>
<article>
<h1>Will CSS Libraries Lower Dev Costs?</h1>
<p>2006-05-15T09:41:00.000-04:00</p>
Yahoo! recently launched a developer site which has a slightly different offering than the usual "Web 2.0" widget libraries.  One of these offerings is a CSS library which consists of a set of three CSS files.  Here is a list of the different files, and what they are for.Fonts CSSOffers cross-browser typographical normalization and control.Reset CSSOffers cross-browser normalization of the
</article>
<article>
<h1>I'm Naked!</h1>
<p>2006-04-04T21:03:00.000-04:00</p>
April 5th 2006 has been designated as the first annual CSS Naked Day. The day is meant to promote web standards and accessibility by showing that a well designed web page is still completely accessible when styling has been removed. In my last post I promoted web accessibility, so I felt compelled to participate.  So if you have a web site, go naked with us!  Standards and Accessibility Links:
</article>
<article>
<h1>Web Accessibility</h1>
<p>2006-03-27T09:03:00.000-05:00</p>
Some quick quotes, then some commentary...   "The percentage of people with disabilities in many populations is between 10% and 20%." - http://www.w3.org/1999/05/WCAG-REC-fact#demographics "...the number of people using the Web is steadily increasing, and for people with disabilities access to this technology is sometimes even more critical than for the general population..." - http://www.w3.org/
</article>
<article>
<h1>Why should you write tests first?</h1>
<p>2006-03-24T12:43:00.000-05:00</p>
(this is a response I posted to the question below regarding test-driven development)Saulius said: "All this sounds nicely, but what about those situations when you need something done yesterday?"This is one of those things that is difficult to explain if you haven't done it.  I get this question a lot, and it is hard to convince someone to test first.I think that perhaps the only way to answer
</article>
<article>
<h1>Favorite Tech Podcasts</h1>
<p>2006-03-21T12:45:00.000-05:00</p>
A coworker was talking about a tech podcast he is listening to, and asked if I knew of any other podcasts that I would recommend. The following is my short list, in no particular order.  Boag World http://www.boagworld.com  Two Brits going on about web development and maintenance. Hosted by Paul Boag, and his side-kick Marcus. The discussion is entertaining and informative. On occasion coworkers
</article>
<article>
<h1>Coding A Tight Ship</h1>
<p>2006-03-07T11:34:00.000-05:00</p>
Good programmers get that way by making mistakes, and seeing the mistakes of others.  I saw a mistake made by a colleague not too long ago which caused a problem that was very difficult to track down, and I learned from it.  The mistake was changing shared objects that should not have been changed.  Specifically, the objects were cached objects used all over the system, so changing the objects
</article>
<article>
<h1>Creating JDBC Templates With Java 5</h1>
<p>2006-02-26T00:13:00.000-05:00</p>
Note: please excuse the code formatting. Apparently by beautifully formatted code, which looks great in Writely, looks pretty bad when I got it on to Blogger. I will try to clean it up in the next few days, but for now it will need to stay as it is.  In a recent Java project I was writing my Data Access Object which uses JDBC, and I wanted to simplify the code and promote code reuse. JDBC code
</article>
<article>
<h1>I Am A Wikipedia Newbie</h1>
<p>2006-02-20T16:54:00.000-05:00</p>
It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realized the company for didn't have an entry in Wikipedia. My employer is a fairly large networking solutions and managed services provider that is publicly traded, so I was a little surprised. A little over a week ago I decided that my company needed to have a Wikipedia entry, so I seeded it with a small snippet.  I was very happy indeed to see my company
</article>
<article>
<h1>Java 5 Generics - Aiding The IDE</h1>
<p>2006-02-17T09:32:00.000-05:00</p>
I found an article on OnJava.com from last year about Generics.  In the article the author Budi Kurniawan states that...       "Generics are the most important feature     in J2SE 5.0"        "generics make two     contributions..."              "they add type checking to         collection types at compile         time"                "generics         eliminate the need for type casting when
</article>
<article>
<h1>You Can't Sell "Everything"</h1>
<p>2006-02-11T10:03:00.000-05:00</p>
[begin dramatization]        My car was a bit old, and giving me the usual troubles like   old cars do.  I went down to the local car dealership to see what they   had.  I wasn't quite sure what I wanted, so I was hoping that someone   there could give me some ideas.  When I got there I was greeted by a nice   sales guy named Jim.       Jim was very enthusiastic about their products, and asked,
</article>
<article>
<h1>Programmer's Cookbook and An Apology</h1>
<p>2006-02-09T23:49:00.000-05:00</p>
Programmer's CookbookI was thinking about all of those snippets of code that I often collect, as I expect that most other programmers do as well.  I wanted to start posting them here on this blog, but I decided to instead start a second blog specifically for these types of entries.  The new blog is called Programmer's Cookbook, and I hope that it will be useful resource as it starts to fill
</article>
<article>
<h1>Estimation: What We Don't Know</h1>
<p>2006-02-08T21:32:00.000-05:00</p>
I was listening to a talk about prediction given by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I felt that it has a strong correlation to project estimation.  He talks about how we focus on what we know when making a prediction, and not what we don't know.  This makes sense, as you can only estimate based on past experience.  Poor estimation on the other hand is often due to things that we didn't know or expect.
</article>
<article>
<h1>Meticulous Specification</h1>
<p>2006-02-05T23:08:00.000-05:00</p>
Like most programmers I disliked long specifications.  I didn't like reading them, and more importantly I didn't like writing them.  For me, all of this has changed, and I believe that this is a positive change.  In my line of work we typically deal with fairly small projects.  These are fairly easy to estimate, and more often than not we are being paid by the hour, and not by the job.   Recently
</article>
<article>
<h1>I can't do Ruby (a.k.a. strict typing)</h1>
<p>2006-02-05T14:52:00.000-05:00</p>
I took another stab at getting into Ruby this weekend, as it has long been on my list of things to learn. I have attempted this in the past, but something always drives me away. I guess one of the things that draws me to the language is all of the hype about Ruby on Rails, but I just can't seem to do it. This time what drove me away was the lack of strict typing, for reasons I will try to explain
</article>
<article>
<h1>Pre-Release Book Programs</h1>
<p>2006-02-04T09:33:00.000-05:00</p>
Last month O'Reilly and Associates started their Rough Cuts program.  It is essentially a beta program for books, where you can pay for immediate access to the book in PDF format, months before the book is released.  In fact it looks like the one title Ruby Cookbook won't be on the store shelves until September.  I think this is a great idea because it gives you access to new technologies sooner
</article>
<article>
<h1>Using the Scriptaculous JS Library</h1>
<p>2006-02-03T23:32:00.000-05:00</p>
This is a very short introduction to Scriptaculous, explaining what it is, why you care, and a few short examples. I am currently using this in a project, and will post additional entries as I begin to use more and more of the library.  Scriptaculous is a JavaScript library that is makes it relatively easy to add drag-and-drop functionality, dynamic drop-down menus, and visual effects.
</article>
<article>
<h1>Podcasting Comedy</h1>
<p>2006-02-03T08:43:00.000-05:00</p>
I have been quite a bit of time sampling the incredible number of podcasts that are available.  Some I come across because I head about it somewhere, and others I just stumbled across by pure coincidence.  My time is short today, so I will only cover a couple of these for now, specifically non-technical podcasts that I found interesting.  Ask A Ninja  Format: Video Length: about 2 minutes
</article>
<article>
<h1>Build What You Need... Then Sell It</h1>
<p>2006-01-30T08:54:00.000-05:00</p>
This entry goes back to the series of business ideas that I was writing about a couple of weeks ago. This entry though will take a slightly different approach in that it doesn't suggest product, instead it suggests selling a product that you may already have.  "We are our customer. Everything that we build, we build for ourselves. And we realize that if we need this, it's likely that hundreds of
</article>
<article>
<h1>Newsvine: A New Type of News Site</h1>
<p>2006-01-27T22:29:00.000-05:00</p>
My thanks goes out to Amber MacArthur for sending me an invite to the Newsvine beta. You may want to also check out Amber's recent interview with Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, on her podcast Inside the Net. Amber hosts a few podcasts that I will review at a later date, and has also hosted several tech television shows.  I am not sure where to start. Let me first say that Newsvine is still
</article>
<article>
<h1>JDOM 1.0 Released!</h1>
<p>2006-01-26T23:56:00.000-05:00</p>
The title is a little misleading.  Yes, JDOM 1.0 has been release, but it was released about a year and a half ago.  For me it is a new discovery though, and one worth mentioning for those who haven't used it.  Why is JDOM 1.0 worth the mention?  Well, they did good.  They took the DOM specification, and built an API around it that doesn't hurt my head when I use it.  It is almost exactly what I
</article>
<article>
<h1>Writely: Word Processing on the Web</h1>
<p>2006-01-25T21:51:00.000-05:00</p>
Introduction  I'm not exactly sure how it started, but we got into a bit of a discussion at work today.  On the one side you had the naysayer, who said that podcasts weren't practice, too expensive to host, and that streaming was the way to go.  On the other side we pointed to Liberated Syndication who will host your podcast for $10 without regard for the amount of bandwidth you use.  They we
</article>
<article>
<h1>Review: Web 2.0 Show (podcast)</h1>
<p>2006-01-25T08:01:00.000-05:00</p>
I think Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc, said it best in an episode of the Web 2.0 Show, "Can I ask you a question, who the heck are you guys?".Josh Owens of Fairfield Ohio and Chris Saylor of Miami grew up together in the outskirts of Cincinnati, playing LAN games.  Now they are the hosts of the Web 2.0 show.  Nobody knew who they were, but now they are being noticed all because they
</article>
<article>
<h1>Passive Mentoring for Companies</h1>
<p>2006-01-24T08:33:00.000-05:00</p>
Mentoring assumes some sort of agreement between a mentoree and a mentor.  I typically don't go this route.  Instead I look in my environment for someone that I admire for their skill, and attempt to emulate them to some degree.  That isn't to say that I strive to be a copy-cat, but I learn from them what I like, and then build on it with my own personal experiences.  In the end I really only
</article>
<article>
<h1>Copying from Blogger to TWiki with Perl</h1>
<p>2006-01-22T19:59:00.000-05:00</p>
Blogs are a great tool, but sometimes you want to integrate them with other bodies of work.  In my case I have this blog, hosted on Blogger, and on a private network I have a TWiki system (a flavor of wiki) where I would also like the articles to appear.In the new "Web 2.0" world I would probably do this by plopping some JavaScript inthe wiki, and have it dynamically render the feed from my blog.
</article>
<article>
<h1>Wikipedia, the Company Index</h1>
<p>2006-01-21T08:03:00.000-05:00</p>
I don't know how I got where I was going, but for some reason I got there.   I was listening to an podcast interview of Scott Sigler, where he was talking about how he started perhaps the first podcast of an audio book, which ended up helping him get his book published.  I had never really thought of using a podcast for that purpose, and started wondering what else people might be using podcasts
</article>
<article>
<h1>Quotes: Joichi Ito</h1>
<p>2006-01-20T08:18:00.000-05:00</p>
"You don't try to force a behavior change, what you do is you look for behavior change and you create products for it" - Joichi Ito, The Future of BloggingIn Joi's talk, he was specifically targeting what the record companies have been doing by suing people for file sharing.  He alluded to the fact that the record companies are fighting the file-sharing trend instead of embracing it, and this
</article>
<article>
<h1>Hosted Component Services</h1>
<p>2006-01-19T19:16:00.000-05:00</p>
This is yet another idea, from the idea series.  This one is somewhat similar to both Website in a Can and The Component Marketplace, actually you might say that they are compatible ideas.  This one though solves a slightly different need.The NeedYou have your own site, maybe even host it internally.  You need to implement a blog/calendar/etc, and you need to do it on the cheap.  Doing this
</article>
<article>
<h1>The Component Marketplace</h1>
<p>2006-01-18T22:01:00.000-05:00</p>
I heard from several people that read my last article Website in a Can, that said, "I had that same idea".  That was encouraging.  What was even more encouraging was that nobody told me that it wouldn't work.  There were discussions on what the start-up cost might be, but not about if it was a viable idea.  Very encouraging indeed.But what else might make sense to sell?I am going to write this
</article>
<article>
<h1>Website in a Can</h1>
<p>2006-01-17T21:36:00.000-05:00</p>
Let's say you run a small business, or maybe a small organization.  You have decided that you must have a web site, and perhaps you have one already.  If you look at the cost of building a site, it may be well outside your budget.  As an example, I will use the official website for the town of Milford New Jersey.  I know that Milford is a small town, but frankly this is just embarassing.So let's
</article>
</main></body></html>