Mark Edgington

Without a doubt the highlight of the day so far. The panel of the days presenters covered the whole spectrum of cloud computing from current position to future issues. I have five pages of notes from this so not one for my N810 or my thumbs will go dead. The key points of interest to me where the fact that the cloud is almost a renewal of some old technology ideas that did not quite make it, mixed in with standard tried and tested ideas and innovative pricing. If there was or will be a key issue it has to be Security (trust), i think it would only take one major security breach (loss or steal of data) and it could take down a company; many will have to base themselves firmly around trust so one to watch.

I posted about pipes about a year ago and it has since increased its modules from 20 to 50 and makes up 1/3 of all mash-up calls to Google. I really need to play with it some more, it really is very cool, bringing a lot of power without the need to code and enabling those that can to spend more time on the applications that consume the data.

My last five conferences had been in San Francisco, so the howling winds and buckets of rain which destroyed my umbrella did not put me in the best, or driest of moods. However, i had registered for DSL with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons, so i held hope. They did not disappoint, presenting a work in progress for a new book that covered Internal, External and Language Workbench definitions of DSL.

While DSL have been around for many years, this attempt at clarification, was clear and well thought out. The definition :

• computer program
• language like in its nature
• limited expressiveness
• domain focused.

The easiest entry point seemed to be Internal DSL (those created within your current language of choice, or by investigating and branching out into other complementary languages External DSL’s, i.e Groovy or JRuby to complement Java. A potentially more difficult External DSL’s route was to write your own DSL, this offering great power and control, but potential high-complexity as these are home spun definitions, lexers and parsers and this will be alien to many. Finally of great interest were Languages Workbenches, which in the case of Jetbrains MPS is a multitude of DSL’s that go together to form the MPS tool for creating DSL’s. This and other similar work has the potential to change the way we work, some are near to production quality, so we will see.

My take out was that the use of DSL’s needs to get more prominence, in a similar way to Agile development; which has taken years to gain main stream prominence. Through the use of DSL’s developers will gain skills and solve problems in a more elegant fashion, so it’s a definite win and with a Martin Fowler book on the subject it should get wider prominence.

(Written on my N810, so excuse grammar and spelling)

I am happy to announce that my team have just launched the new Sky Travel site . It is a complete re-development form the ground up and integrates with multiple providers to provide a breath of product offerings.  It has been built using open source Java technology (Tomcat, Mysql, Apache) and uses the Spring and Hibernate frameworks.  The site is fully content managed and uses the open source Incendiary Blue CMS.

Found this on Digg 12 Invaluable Sites for Web Design and Design Inspiration.

Withe the announcement of the Open Handset Alliance Google entered the mobile phone market. not with a phone as many had expected, but with an open source mobile operating system called Android. Android was purchased by Google back in 2005 and has been augmented to form a complete software stack for mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs and high end MP3 players. The software stack is split into four layers:

• The application layer
• The application framework
• The libraries and runtime
• The kernel

Cell phone users work within the applications in the application layer. Android developers write those applications using the application framework. Android applications differing to standard mobile application deployment in that the applications that come with the phone are no different than those written by a developer. If successful the move to drive an operating systems would provide Google with a platform to deploy its tools, applications and advertising models to a much greater degree of the worlds population. The list of partners, while impressive is missing a few big names, most notably Nokia. We will have to wait until next year to get hold of a device and see how it functions. At present you can watch some videos at youtube

 My team have just launched the new Mazda 6 pre-launch site.  Its written in .Net 2.0, using Episerver as a CMS to create an HTML site feeding into a Flash component.  It’s integrated into a Sieble Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  It is rolling out across 21 countries and will be enchanced in the coming months to become the launch site for the new Mazda 6.

The success of Facebook looks to have ruffled a few feathers at Google and they have recently launch OpenSocial. this is a set of three common APIs, that will allow developers to access core functions and information from a social network:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The aim to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works across current and future social networks.Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have proprietary code . Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit is that developers can create applications using the technology they already know and leverage there creation over multiple social sites.

Open Social launched with partners spanning two two categories hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. Developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

I have recently released content management system that i co-wrote. It’s a lightweight content management system that uses standard data and data structure formats to represent content structure and content. It is Java for platform independence, and utilizes tags or Java objects to incorporate content into HTML pages. It has some great feature for relational content and a rich security system. It’s been used on sites for Daimler Chrysler, Disney, St Gobain and more recently Essent and is soon to be deployed on Sky Travel.

The sourceforge project can be found at Incendiary Blue on Sourceforge infromation will grow and a site created in the coming months.

My team have just launched a site to show off the new Mazda2 . Its written in .Net 2.0 feeding in XML content to a Flash video and integrated into a Sieble Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system across 21 countries.