Mark Edgington

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 have tried and tried, but, i just can’t come to grips with facebook. The only functionality i like to use is the quick updates from my blackberry, but apart from that nothing. I find the fact that my photos are held in limbo annoying, to the point at which i won’t upload and poke, hug etc are just a joke to me, i get nothing from them. I tried some apps but most seem to be based on pyramid scheme mentality. Roll on the next incarnation.

I had to empty a locked item in the trash and needed to hold the option key, nobody seemed to know it was the alt key on a mac, except one designer and wikipedia.

A new service from Qik provides you with the ability to stream video to the web from your mobile phone. It currently works on most Nokia phones and has been used to good effect by Robert Scoble at Davos and Mac World.  This obvious, but well implemented solution is a great extension to video just stored on your phone.  how long will it be before we see it in daily news programmes with roaming citizen reporters.  Well worth a try if you have a Nokia, but watch phone bill if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.

I like simple ideas and Chirp is one of them. We all have an ever growing list of social network sites and Chirp aims to bring these together in one place. The thing I like about the idea is it’s a screen saver. I think this is smarter than trying to be a web page or true desktop application, as people are more willing to try a screensaver. Also I think it may be a great time to get an update on your networks; just when you return to your machine.

At the moment it only links into Flickr and Facebook, but more are on the way. I’m not biggest fan of Facebook, but many are, so this screensaver may be popping up on a desktop near you.

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.

At long last, after countless issue with Parcel Force i received my N810. I had been without one since selling the N800, but the wait was worthwhile. Its screen and keyboard are excellent and the battery life is as good as ever. The new interface is slick and a joy to use. My only issues are that the internal GPS is just too weak, in the manual it says something like ‘ works best in blue sky’ (it’s not kidding and i will be sticking to my Tom Tom for in car navigation) and the email client is poor (but can be rectified by downloading and installing Modest). The thing i’m most happy about is the ease with which you can install Java, just follow the simple instructions posted on Jayson Falkners Blog and your ready to deploy standard application, rather than just running applets.

A New Facebook application that appears to make Facebook an OpenSocial container. Could this be the beginning of a guerilla attempt to lure Facebook into OpenSocial? — see full post at oreilly radar.

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

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.