web 2.0 ish
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We recently were in the car market because of a bad transmission on our Toyota Corrolla. As I was browsing thru the different online car dealers websites, I ran across a few that really impressed me from a tech/geekie view. These sites were using lightbox for car photos, had some really nice icon work, their search had multiple filters you could apply, real nice rollover effects on their grids, all really good web techniques were being displayed. I started noticing a trend that these sites were being made from the same mold, not exactly cookie cut, but defiantly produced by the same web shop. Today I figured out they were all produced from dealer.com.
Here is the list of technology they are using to make car sites really nice for once and what other technology they use that I could gleam from their source & site:
- Thickbox - I’m a big fan of this lightbox cousin.
- jQuery - You know I love jQuery goodness.
- Validation - They have their own validation routines that they are able add a <script> tag and plug in an array with fields that need validation. Not bad but they should look at my javascript generic form validation script which works in a similar way to jQuery.
- Jive Live for the online chat sessions, although I thought Jive Live was defunct now but maybe not. Either way I’ll give them a pass for using Java
- SEO friendly markup. Not a lot of of table tags and a nice usage of friendly seo markup on important keywords. Although I think they could do a better job on URL, meta tags, and title tags.
- Icon/Images/Navigation. They stand out here, text style is pt so it scales to my dpi setting. Images are clean, navigation is standard (which is good), icons are meaning full and big enough to give a real impression.
- Ext JS - A really nice framework for AJAX grids and other ajax aspects.
- Java - Ah, dang I was so impressed until I found this out :). Half joking of course. In a world of dynamics language being the thing, it’s funny how I now feel more comfortable thinking about doing Java then say Ruby or Python.
- MySQL - Another proof that MySQL scales, although they must have some really good DB guys to put their system on it.
- CVS - Hey you guys should be using Surround SCM
- Hibernate - Yes another good choice here. I’ve never messed with hibernate but ORM is a good thing.
- Flex - No thanks, would prefer Silverlight
So here is a run down on their architecture and my choice if I was the evil mastermind behind the scene:
| |
Dealer.com |
Mine |
| Javascript Framework |
jQuery |
jQuery |
| Imaging Javascript |
Thickbox |
Thickbox |
| Ajax Framework |
Ext JS |
ASP.NET AJAX |
| Server Side Language |
Java |
C# |
| Database |
MySQL |
SQL Server |
| ORM |
Hiberate |
LINQ |
| Rich Application Framework |
Flex |
Silverlight |
Written by Tim on April 10th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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Firefox 3 beta 5 is shipping soon or maybe already shipped, either way I got my hands on it today to play around. It’s much further along then the last 3 beta I tried (2,3?). Extensions don’t work and never will unless each extension developer updates their stuff to either tell firefox it is compatible or actual code changes to make it happen. I’m not a fan of the architect of their compatibility system, I think things should try to work and if not let you know an extension broke firefox and let you disable it. Microsoft Outlook does this very well.
Fast
Firefox 3 beta 5 is silly fast, so much so that I was browsing an internal web app today, thinking, "hey who ajaxified this thing?". Turns out the web app is still doing traditional post backs but FF is so fast you can’t tell, the screen never "refreshes" only by looking at the green loading indicator at the bottom can you tell.
Gmail has become paininfully slow on FF 2. With FF 3, the thing is blazing fast again. You know the FF & Google guys must be working on things together like this. Gmail search is still slow though.
Memory
Better then FF 2 which is a memory hog but still not great, it easily got up to 100 mb after an hour of using (2-3 tabs open at once).
Conclusion
I’d be using this thing as my main browser if my extensions would all work, at last I’m back to FF 2 because I’m tied to my extensions.
Written by Tim on April 2nd, 2008 with 11 comments.
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Although I have never done any mobile programming I went to the Google Android Developer session at CodeMash anyway. I wanted to get a peek on how the big Goog was going to market and sell to developers.
I was not disappointed, this was the most educational session I was at. First of all Android is java based like EJB. I do not do Java and have no real idea what EJB is. That being said, this is what I took away from Android.
- UI - XML layout like XUL, striking similarities to Microsoft Silverlight interface design or vice versa if you want.
- Should use Eclipse for your IDE
- Views & Controls terminology is the same i.e. a view is a control and vice versa.
- No intellisense yet on the xml gui, plus xml is case sensitive
- Programs can be created as application or as a service. Services have a longer life span
Overview
Again, I haven’t done any mobile program so correct me if I’m wrong here, but Android seems to function differently then any other mobile OS. For one, Android programs (including programs you write for Android) never really die. So when a user clicks close on an application, it still exists, running in the background. That’s why when you click on the same application it is instantly there, no startup wait or anything. I know on my Blackberry 8830, programs take a second or two to start up so they can’t be running in the background like Android does. This makes things much more fluid to the end user. Android deals with all these applications running by systematically killing applications that haven’t been used in a while and or "learns" the end users tendencies from what apps they use. Brilliant. When an app is killed by the OS, the program can see this event happening and can store its current state, file or on SQL Lite, so that when the end user fires this app back up, no data is lost. One thing is that programmers must put this logic in their app. Google isn’t Microsoft, they don’t seem to want to hand hold developers thru this.
Another feature Android is pushing is a new messaging system to replace SMS, although SMS will still be included. SMS is limited to the number of character able to be sent. This new protocol will have infinite character length. The reason is Google wants to be able to push XML to the device, similar to how Blackberrys work. This XML can have specific commands tied to specific applications that can be fired off. There is a lot of possibility here.
Although I’m certainly not a Java guy (we do have one in the family), Android is something I have to make room in my schedule to whip something together.
Written by Tim on January 15th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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General Thoughts
Google provides the most coverage of the categories, although typically not the best. They have some real improvement to be made here. Yahoo! seems to do the best for coverage and quality. Microsoft is lacking on a few fronts but their find a business (which is probably the best feature of a mobile service period) feature was clearly the best. Google services are slow, so are Yahoo!. Microsoft is the fastest.
Rating scale 0-3, 0 if they did not offer the service.
The Winner
I’m a gmail guy so I find myself in Google’s Gmail Mobile most of the time, Google understands mail & map applications. Yahoo! has the leg up on Google for the other areas besides Find Business. Microsoft does a really nice job with their category/movies/find a business, it has the most potential. But still the winner goes to Google Services.
Written by Tim on October 24th, 2007 with no comments.
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Errr, I take back what I said about using Amazon S3 as my personal backup tool. After playing around with Windows Live SkyDrive, it’s now my picked solution, mainly because it’s free. Although Amazon S3 has much more potential for applications using it then SkyDrive, SkyDrive is perfect for a quick & dirty backup solution. They have a really nice Active X upload tool that makes it a snap to upload more then 1 file at a time. Microsoft finally beat Google to the punch by offering online storage. Only drawback so far is the storage, 500 MB, but I see this being raised eventually and of course Microsoft is well known for selling a higher platform which at this point I’m willing to pay.
Written by Tim on October 2nd, 2007 with 3 comments.
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So the Google guys made http://calendar.google.com iPhone specific. That’s great, if you have an iphone, otherwise it looks like crap (on my BlackBerry 8830).
Google,
- The iPhone is no way the market leading smart phone so why are writing specific apps for it?
- The iPhone is not ready for the enterprise so all the goodness you are putting in for iPhone specific apps doesn’t help us enterprise guys. You do want to sell your office apps to the enterprise right?
- Can you update your generic smart phone apps? They all have a tendency to lock, especially gmail.
Observation: It’s been long rumored that Google was coming out with a smart phone, but with these iPhone specific apps coming out I am starting to doubt anything but maybe a WIFI only cell phone. Either way, any Google phone would be a direct competitor to the iPhone. Things would sure get interesting on the relationship between Apple & Google if they started to compete against each other.
Cell phones have had an interesting history, and smart
phones are a technology that everyone is getting excited about. With new
smart phones, you can listen to
streaming music, send emails and browse the Internet.
Free music is just a click away!
Written by Tim on September 25th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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One of the easy email blunders is to tell someone you attached a file and forget to attach it - DOH! Depending on who you are sending it to (like the CIO say) it can be quite embarrassing. I really try not to make this email foul but occasionally do.
I’m in Gmail today creating an email with an attachment and click the send button and something funny pops up.
Oh DOH! - I forgot to attach the file. Gmail is smart enough to remind me? Kinda of, it looks for the verbiage like “attach” and pops this up if the email doesn’t have an attachment. Sweet!
I’ve always been a fan of Outlook but I now prefer Gmail to it.
Written by Tim on September 5th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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I don’t do RoR….yet, I hear the good things about it so I’m really close into diving into it. Before I do I want to make sure RoR is going to be something I can use professionally too. Here is a 30 minute research into the jobs out there for RoR compared to Asp.Net & PHP. I searched for the phrases “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET” and radius of 100 miles from the zip code. There is no doubt some overlap of job posting but this is pretty clear indication of where things are.
8/25/2008
Where I live - Cincinnati Ohio, Midwest
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
45102 |
4 |
35 |
114 |
| Career Builder |
45102 |
1 |
36 |
89 |
| Hot Jobs |
45102 |
1 |
12 |
7 |
| Total |
|
6 |
83 |
210 |
Second up New York City, East Coast
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
10270 |
29 |
357 |
621 |
| Career Builder |
10270 |
8 |
184 |
356 |
| Hot Jobs |
10270 |
18 |
176 |
180 |
| Total |
|
55 |
717 |
1157 |
And now for the West Coast - San Francisco
| Site |
Zip |
RoR |
PHP |
ASP.NET |
| Monster.com |
94130 |
23 |
216 |
135 |
| Career Builder |
94130 |
17 |
123 |
67 |
| Hot Jobs |
94130 |
31 |
521 |
107 |
| Total |
|
71 |
860 |
309 |
So for me ASP.NET makes the most sense by far (almost 4x that of PHP). A surprise to me is on the West Coast, were it looks like ASP.NET is much smaller then else where. It seems that Ruby on Rails is very much in the incubator stage still, I guess I’m not turning on RoR anytime soon after all.
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Written by Tim on August 26th, 2007 with 45 comments.
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I had a vision today when signing up for Amazon S3. Here is the background: Amazon s3 is great, cheap storage, API, scalable, reliable, accessible from anywhere (Internet capable), etc… I plan on using it for my personal backup center putting things like my personal source code library, photos, & important documents. I get everything a enterprise company gets but at my rate. Great.
The one thing I’m dreading is maintaining folders. Lets be frank, directories/folders are anything but proficient compared to say search. That’s why Google beat Yahoo!. Yahoo! was a directory, you had to drill down to find results where as for Google you searched for them. Yahoo! later changed to be a search engine but people are starting to forget the thing was directory of links, users would submit links and Yahoo! people would categorize (not so automated would you say?)
So for Amazon S3, I’m going to have act like I work at Yahoo! back in the day, this is going to suck big time. That’s when the revelation hit me.
What if I could point Google or even better Koders/Krugle at my directory and search it? That would rock except some things I don’t want public BUT I still want it searchable just by me.
I already have my personal backup center in Amazon S3 now I need my personal search engine. I could easily write something that populates a simple html page with a directory listing of all the files I have stored/want indexed. I would then want to login to koders to search for code/files/documents etc….
Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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I’m really looking forward to Google’s version of S3, Google tends to do things better plus free ;). Until then I’m going with Amazon S3 for my personal backup strategy. Right now I have a media PC with a 100 Gig hard drive, that is mirrored that serves this purpose but we really don’t use it enough to justifying it running all the time. Plus in the bigger picture of things, this just fills my life with more work that I don’t want to do.
Links
- A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools - Mostly these are tools that work via Linux/OS X
- elastic8 - A nice list of these tools
- S3Fox - Firefox plugin - I’m probably going to be using this for my ad hoc client
- S3Drive - Provides a drive on your my computer that is your Amazon storage
- S3Browse - Uses a web interface to interact with your S3 storage.
- PutPlace - Promises to publish to S3, Flicker, etc… Still in beta
- Jungle Disk - Looks to be the premier paid software to give WebDAV support.
- I really like http://filicio.us ideas with tagging but it looks to new for me to rely on.
My Setup
I’m looking for a way to automate backups of certain folders at certain times, tag folders so I can search later on, an ad hoc way to get files. I’m looking to backup source code files, pictures, and important documents. For now I think I’m going with S3Fox until I find something more automated and with tagging/searching.
Written by Tim on August 22nd, 2007 with 1 comment.
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