Mahyar SEPEHR

Last week event was the Spring Source Conference in La Défense.
It was organized by Julien Dubois (SpringSource France) and Didier Girard (Sfeir).
It answered some of my questions as:

• Why Spring Source bought support for Apache?
• Did they really change their release policy?!
• What’s next? Roadmap etc…

One main concept explained by Peter Cooper ( SpringSource)  was a 3 steps concept: Development, Deployment and Support.

Spring Source aims the 3 fields.

For example, a Tomcat Source Commiter from SpringSource gave a brillant demonstration of Tomcat Tunings: launch parameters depending on the server CPU, maxThread etc.

The Enterprise package is quite simple: they offer the hole services in One Package.
Some improvement i noticed in Spring3:

• Hibernate Model Validation
• REST support
• More and more Annotation facilities in configuration files and classes.

And of course the main buz: SpringSource acquires G2One (Groovy and Grails)!

ISO 8859 is a full series of 10 multilingual character sets for writing in alphabetic language, including seperate languages as Latin1 (West European), Greek, Arabic or Hebrew. Unfortunately the basic alphabet for the Arabic language only and not containing the four extra letters for Persian.
Here the best page i’ve found which explains it. It also displays every ISO letters AND the hole charset codes are downloadable.

http://www.unicodecharacter.com/charsets/iso8859.html

By the way, this page converts encodings

And of course, the Wikipedia Unicode page.

Simple question, isn’t it? But if I say: give me the three steps to ensure that your (x)html is for sure in utf-8, would you give them to me?

Let’s just ask the W3C Internationalization for the answer!
Another usefull link just to make sure that every character sets & encodings in web pages are under control…

Last week, SensioLabs organized a breakfast with symfony. Symfony is an open-source framework written in php5.
Php5 codes are far more structured with Symfony’s MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework.
Combined with frameworks as Doctrine, a php ORM (object relational mapper), it brings to php5 the capacity to be compared to J2EE or .Net Web Application.
Security, cache, Url Rewriting, but also different level of loggers, seperate deployment (dev, test, prod), and much more!

Yahoo Bookmark, Delicious, ebay already use symfony… For information, more than 40% of dynamic websites are in php… Isn’t that exciting?!

As a User Interface actor, I must often describe web applications.

This is a difficult step of the project : how to find the best word to describe one functionality? you have an idea, your collegue understands something else, so does the client

One solution is made by this nice web-site:
Web Patterns: A UC Berkeley Resource for Building User Interfaces

Anyone can suggest a pattern. Every pattern is illustrated by screenshots with links to the corresponding website.

Simple & efficient!

Mule is the most widely used open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It is a lightweight Java-based messaging framework that allows you to quickly and easily connect your applications and enable them to exchange data. It allows you carrying (routing) data between applications within your intranet or across the Internet.

Ross Mason, coofondator of Mulesource was in Paris this week to introduce the new version of their solution ESB Mule 2.0.
One of the major changes seems to be the configuration file which is much easier: you do not need to specify Mule Classes, but only include some key words.

Few months ago when one discussed of User Experience in development, it was interpreted as a GUI (Graphical User Interface) discussion!
The main domain of use was Fat Client Applications as Swing in Java or equivalent.
Time has changed. I was to a conference named Ergonomy for Web Interfaces.
It was introduced by Patrick Maruejouls and Aurélien Visa from the Nextedia Communication Agency.

It took place in the amazing building of Chambre de Commerce de Paris. You should definitively visit

The user experience context was quite huge: web applications, institutionnal websites, marketing websites done in Flash.

Of course we discussed of Benchmarks, personas, storyboards and even Fitts law.
But the context was also interesting. Whereas the speakers try to follow their presentation map, the audience asked them interesting questions which were not related to user experience (Search engine optimization, RSS, Buzz tracking, etc). That made me think: as web technologies grow more complex and teams expand with more and more specializations, communication will only increase. Today, if I say, Confirmation Page, I maybe mean a pop-up window, but you maybe understand a new layer in the current page.
Today, possibilities are huge and as for web standards: there are rules but you can also do it in other ways. There are somwhat Traditional Methods or Modern Methods. Those methods are so close to brand new technologies internet offers (Web2.0, flash, etc) that all concepts available and relevant today have to be reevaluted tomorrow.
Thus, issues our speakers suggest are Best Practices based on experiences.

Conclusion : Ergonomy in web interfaces always begins today and “User Experience” begins with User so the internet user is the main part of the story.

My Waoooo Effect Trophy goes to Microsoft Surface… strange isn’t it?

Talking User Experience to my dear collegue Armando Gomes and how to communicate about it in a web project, he introduced me to UWE.

UWE (UML-based Web Engineering) is a software engineering approach for the development of Web applications.

The project web site : http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/projekte/uwe

Here a nice introduction in pdf

Codathlon

Yesterday i took part of a Codathlon session organized by Didier Girard about the hottest Google tool of the moment.

http://sites.google.com/a/codathlon.com/20080508-gae/Home

Google App Engine

Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.
GAE is a hosted runtime environment for Python web applications. But other languages are coming.
http://appengine.google.com/

My first impressions

Vincent Bostoen introduced the GAE & we began coding our first web application.
The install is very easy: pyhon & GAE.
We had our GAE account created so we could very quickly deploy our web app.
The local development does not mean downloading a jboss, an oraclexe, etc on your computer:

dev_appserver.py helloword

and then just check your localhost:8080 !!!

Deployment does not mean installing a web server, a database, configuring the matrix flows etc.
No you only update your web app:

appcfg.py --email=yourgmail update helloword

and then you test your online url configured

the url is based on a regular expression,
which lets you configure any url you want: bye bye mod_jk, urlrewrite, ...

You can access to some nice Google APIs as:
DATASTORE API (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html)
USERS API (Google Account)
So with a few code lines you can develop and deploy a real web app. That was the most impressive & frightening!

We finished by testing a post from a GWT (Google Web Tools) page to a GAE…

A nice & sunny 8th May!

Just found a very nice example of web app using GAE : AMAZING
geodatastore

Some of us were waiting for that for a long time.

But the result is really nice and it was worse it!

http://dojotoolkit.org/key-links

for once a really api documentation