Jonathan Weiß

"Design Patterns" in Dynamic Languages

• Language: English
• Speaker: Neal Ford

Software architect Neal Ford gave a wonderful presentation about how easily goals of the design patterns from the Gang of Four can be reached using dynamic language features.
He pointed out that these patterns build another language on top of C++ to make it »suck less«. Today, with the abilities of dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript (yes – you did not thought that, do you?), you do not have to build this helper constructions to solve the problems the design patterns were made for.
I can not tell you much about this session since I stopped writing and just enjoyed listening to Neal shortly after he began speaking. Just watch his slides and look at the examples to get the idea.

Getting Real - der "Weg" der 37 Signals

• English title (might be): Getting Real - 37 Signals' "way"
• Language: German
• Speaker: Frank Westphal

Extreme programmer Frank Westphal talked about his work with the 37Signals and their "way" of work.

• The gorgeous Signals' book "Getting Real" is available for free online. Cool! :-)
• Development should be done in a iterative way: launch quickly and listen to the users' feedback.
• Small companies can not keep up with the arms race of bigger companies which fight each other with features. Those companies can only build less (to save time and money) but concentrate on the essentials.
• Build the interface first and work with an HTML prototype – not with a Photoshop file.
• A project has four main factors: time, complexity, quality and budget. Launch when time or budget is gone to keep your quality.
• Let the users solve their problems in their own way, no not force them.
• Scaling will be a problem at last (if at all). Frank did not mention it, but in the future scaling problem can be solves using a cloud hosting platform like Google App Engine or Amazon S3.
• »Specifications are wish lists created at the completely wrong time.« — I never liked a sentence so much. :-)
• Implement small but difficult details later.
• Admit mistakes or failures to the public to create confidence.

I totally enjoyed this session! It must be wonderful to work in this lightweight, iterative way on projects.

Silverlight-1.0-Anwendungen mit JavaScript entwickeln

• English title (might be): Developing SilverLight 1.0 applications with JavaScript
• Language: German
• Speaker: Oliver Scheer

On Monday, the 26. May, Microsoft Evangelist Oliver Scheer talked about programming SilverLight with JavaScript. Here are my thoughts about his presentation in order of appearance:

• The Skeleton structure of a Silverlight application reminds me pretty much of a qooxdoo skeleton: one HTML file, one loader JavaScript file and the actual code as second (or more if you use parts) JavaScript file(s). The only difference is that in Silverlight a XAML file is used to store the UI description.
• A funny thing that I noticed: the example website, tafiti.com, does only work correctly in "emulate IE7" mode.
• I do not like Microsoft's naming conventions inside XAML files (e.g. LeftButtonMouseDown).
• It is really nice that Visual Studio offers Intellisene for JavaScript files, but I am not sure how powerful this is. There are several IDEs with similar features, but they all get stuck when a JavaScript framework is used that extends the native classes or brings in it's own inheritance "syntax". By the way: this is the reason that qxDT is currently developed. qxDT is an Eclipse extension based on JSDT which will enable validation, code completion and more in Eclipse for qooxdoo projects. I will write more about this as soon as I have some time. :-)
• Anyway, to enable Intellisense you have to download and add some JavaScript files from codeplex.com. Then you have to convert every SilverLight object into a JavaScript object before you can use Intellisense. There are three problems with this solution:
  1. After this conversion you will use a different API than before. You can edit this Intellisense.js to make the API look the way you want, but it is still different from the native API.
  2. Since you use a different API you have to keep this JavaScript files in your project if you deploy it. Even if an optimized version of this converter exists you still have to use a third-party-component in your project.
  3. Every convert call is costly and I have not seen a possibility to cache the converted objects.
• Oliver did not mention if this is going to change with SilverLight 2.0 and I am really interested when Microsoft is going to do enhance Intellisense to work out the box with SilverLight.
• The presentation itself was pretty good. I would have preferred to see a bigger coding part instead of showing how easily GUIs can be build, but since this is an advantage of SilverLight I do not want to complain.

This post is dedicated to the one who brought so much joy, action and laughter to our family. The faithful soul who slept to my feet for over ten years. I can not imagine coming home without you greeting me.

Robby
Summer 1995 – 01.06.2008

We will never forget you!

On Tuesday we released the first version of qooxdoo 0.8 as a alpha1. We are proud to present this major version (containing so many improvements, new features and additions) to the public for the first time. Be sure to see the new default theme and the qooxdoo animation demos.

Demo of the new default theme

All details can be found, as usual, in the release notes.
Have fun. :-)

This month you three chances to meet us in Karlsruhe: Thursday, the 8th at the NerdNight, 26th to 28th at the webinale and at the Dynamic Languages World Europe.

• NerdNight is a recruiting event which should help us finding new coworkers at 1&1. Andreas will talk about qooxdoo, of course. ;-)
• During the webinale we have two power workshops:
  1. GUI Development with qooxdoo (Sebastian Werner, Fabian Jakobs)
  2. Advanced Web Application Development (Sebastian Werner and other core developers including myself! ;-))
  3. and one session within the RIA day:
     qooxdoo - Killer apps for all browsers (Andreas Ecker)
• At the Dynamic Languages World Europe we have three sessions:
  1. Advanced Object-Oriented JavaScript (Andreas Ecker)
  2. Selenium RC: Automated Testing of Modern Web Applications (Thomas Herchenröder)
  3. JavaScript Tooling - Minimize, Lint & Co (Fabian Jakobs)

Be sure to read Andreas' post for more information.

Exactly one year ago I published my first post in this blog. Until now I have been assiduously writing 43 posts in 16 categories, which results in an average amount of 3.6 posts per month. ;-)
I am a bit proud that I managed blogging (more or less) frequently, because this is my third try to do blogging and I always stopped after very few posts.

My reasons for blogging are:

1. somehow every developer has a blog
2. I wanted to have some kind of personal knowledge base
3. I like writing as a way of focus my thoughts on something and express my opinion
4. I wanted to practice my English
5. I always somehow liked the idea to actually write thoughts or feelings down and then look at this texts a few years later...

I make much use of the possibility to schedule posts and write entries when I have time and (sometimes) tweak them a little bit before they get published. For example every Optimizion Monday entry is published on the first Monday in each month.
I also like just writing down thoughts that are on my mind and observe in which way the entry is going while writing...

• Gmail Custom Time™
• Acid 3: Opera first to 106
• JIRA Solver. You had issues.
• qooxdoo 0.8 to support Netscape 4
• StarCraft II: Tauren Marine
• gDay™ with MATE&trade: Search tomorrow’s web, today!
• Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price
• Flying penguins found by BBC programme
• Classy Query
• Legend of Zelda Movie Trailer Debut
• New Initiative in Hyper-Localized Social Tagging
• New WoW Hero Class Revealed: Bard
• IE9 to include alternative ‘CSS.2012′ standard
• The Daily WTF: Website.RenameTo("The Daily WTH")
• Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11

Congratulations to Opera Dektop Team at Opera Software and to the Webkit team at Apple for successfully mastering the Acid 3 test.

Opera passing the Acid 3 test

WebWebkit passing the Acid 3 testkit

While Opera Software technically won the race, Apple released nightly builds for everyone to run the test themselves. Anyway, I do not care about which rendering engine actually was the first to pass the test. I am just amazed by the effort both teams invested to meet demands of the test and so get their browsers closer to the web standards.
Also the agility of the browser vendors is impressive: it only took 15 days for the first rendering engine (Webkit) to pass the Acid 2 test and 23 days to pass the Acid 3 test.

Of course it will take longer to release the next stable browser version which benefits from the engine development (the first official Safari update came have a year after Webkit passed the test), but we can be sure that future browsers will have more standard support than ever.