Posts from January 2008

Welcome to my Blog, maybe you’d like to add a link to your blog in the comments!

Back in June I blogged about Steve Yegge’s port of Ruby on Rails to Rhino (the JavaScript engine for the JVM) and his claim that JavaScript was the Next Big Language (NBL). In related news, Dion Almaer has just posted a new video interview (in the Google Code Blog series) of Steve Yegge himself talking about the Ruby on Rhino project, server-side and client side JavaScript. Its always nice to be able to put faces and voices to the names of people who have interesting ideas, and whose Blogs I am following. It’ll also be interesting to see what comes out of this project which Steve is pursuing at Google.

While visiting InfoQ to read the article on Project Zero that prompted my last blog entry, I noticed that there was a video on Fortress (the new scientific programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that I first blogged about some time ago). In the video, recorded at the JAOO 2006 Conference, Guy Steele’s keynote The Soul of a New Programming Language gives a nice overview to the language and its philosophy. As a former MATLAB power user and ex-Fortran programmer, I find the Fortress language, particularly its use of mathematical notation, very intriguing and worthy of further investigation.

Why prevarication? Because I’m supposed to be marking exams!

While going through my feed-reader today, I came across another potential framework, which I can add to the list mentioned earlier. This is Project Zero, an incubator project being developed by IBM. It uses the Java platform and the scripting languages Groovy and/or PHP and seems to be directly targetted at RESTful services development but with support for traditional web applications, AJAX and mashups. I guess that I am going to have to I develop a data model and evaluate the choices that I have before I get even more confused!

For a web application that I am developing as part of a research project I have decided on using Python for the business logic. The reasons being that the application will use fixed-point binary arithmetic, units, and data output as line-graphs. Python seems to have the libraries that I’ll need for this and is better suited for rapid development than Java.

Part of the requirements that I have been researching this last week have been concerned with the identification of a suitable web application framework for Python. I started out this week assuming that this would be Django and even bought the book! However, because this is research, I have the luxury of time so I’ve done some additional research and decided that the alternative frameworks TurboGears and Pylons were also worth a look. Searching Google for getting started screencasts and videos I discovered a wonderful video of a web application framework comparison presentation by Sean Kelly. In this presentation, Sean uses J2EE (Servlets and JSPs), Rails, DJango, TurboGears, Zope/Plone and even Enterprise Java Beans (JBoss) to develop a simple time-tracker application and reports his experiences. Rails, Django and TurboGears come out (roughly in that order), but the big surprise is that Zope/Plone comes out top! So, maybe I need to rethink!

I’ve embedded the video here as it’s not only a useful and timely comparison of web application frameworks, it’s also an example of just how useful and inspirational a simple presentation can be!

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=6297126166376226181&hl=en-GB

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Paulo Simões - Sep 3, 2010

Some months ago a I've tried to do something on Pipes. I bit tricky but really usefull to build PLE connections... Paulo

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Paulo, for very simple use-cases, for example aggregating some RSS feeds, doing some filtering, removing duplicates, pipes is very simple. For more complex manipulations, I think you do need more expertise and some programming experience. I'm very much a beginner! As I mentioned in my post, Tony Hirst (@psychemedia on twitter) is my mentor in this!

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psychemedia - Sep 4, 2010

Have OPML, will travel...Here's a recipe from @cogdog about how to Downe's OPML file and generate a custom search engine that will search over all the specified blogs...:http://cogdogblog.com/2010/04/19/two-timing-xml/And if you want "instant" results from the custom search engine once you've created it, @mhawksey can show you how:http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/2010/09/google-custom-instant/

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Cris - Sep 4, 2010

Your screencast was awesome, Chris. I created a dashboard in NetVibes, added it to my Symbaloo homepage and now I'm in the RSS feed business. Thanks so much!

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

You are very welcome! I have used NetVibes in the past but always went back to Google Reader. Using it to create a dashboard for an on-line course seems a very good idea though and I'll be experimenting further.

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Tony One of the problems with the simple pipe I came up with was the OPML parser block itself. Although Stephen Downes' OMPL is available as a URL, and therefore in a sense always up to date, the parsing into feeds seems to take too long and the pipe often times out before it can generate results. I need access to the raw data that is being used to create the PLENK2010 daily I think! But thanks for the tips, I'll follow them up.

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Chris Jobling - Sep 4, 2010

Not only did his blog show me how ... @mkawksey went and gone and done it! http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/search/plenk2010.html!

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Linn - Sep 4, 2010

Very interesting! I want try to use an aggregator. But to complicated right now. I just added the link to The Daily as a bookmark on my igoogle, to keep the course separated from the rest in the RSS-reader.

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Chris Saeger - Sep 6, 2010

This is great work. It is just what I was looking for. I was about to ask you for this kind of help in the plenk moode but got your blog info instead. Much easier to connect here. Thanks much, @chris_saeger

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Chris Jobling - Sep 0, 2010

I'm glad it's been useful.

Some new features (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting) were added to my institution’s Blackboard in the last upgrade. It’s very early days but I managed to try some of these out and blog about my first impressions. Here’s my blog entry. It’s hosted on Blackboard so I’m not sure if it will be publicly visible. My apologies if it isn’t! Some of my views are probably influenced by this Slideshare presentation posted by Alan Cann (of Leicester University) which compares *Virtual Learning Environments* (VLEs) and *Personalised Learning Environments* (PLEs).

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Today my wife and I took a walk in Singleton Park and the botanical gardens and I snapped one or two interesting views with my new camera. I love the dramatic silhouettes that large deciduous trees make in the winter!

This image has been converted to Black and White. There are more pictures on Flickr.

jing-test-cmd
Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling

I am grateful to OUseful.info for the post that lead me to try out a new Screencasting tool from TechSmith called Jing. Made by the same company that makes SnagIt (an indispensable screen caspture tool) and Camtasia Studio (a screencasting tool that I covet but can’t afford), Jing is a “couldn’t be simpler” tool for making screencasts that you can share.

The results can be shared with others as videos via (charged for service) Screencast.com [see the headline link for an example], as individual images via flikr (see the image on this post), uploaded to a web site using FTP or saved to disk. It’s a great tool. This should be great for sharing video “how to’s” but as an academic who uses a PC in lectures, it seems possible that I could actually record a lecture with Jing and make it available as a video screencast within minutes of completing a lecture. This is an experiment I’m keen to try next term.

Warning for Vista users: Jing suffers from a problem that I’ve seen with a few apps since upgrading from XP to Vista. When Jing is installed, the user permissions are not set up properly and you have to manually take ownership of the installation folder in Program Files to get it and its shortcuts to show up! After that, it seems to work OK!

André Roberge has created three screencasts on the use of Crunchy. Crunchy is an interactive Python interpretor that runs inside the Firefox browser and can be used to create interactive Python tutorials, library documentation, demos and tests. The principle is similar to “docucentric design” which was explored by one of my PhD students. The key benefit of the Crunchy approach is that documents are just web pages with embedded tasks. It is worth investigating whether Crunchy can be combined with a wiki to add some value to my current research project.

It’s been a while since I blogged, but the reason is that I’ve been on holdiday with the in-laws in Regensburg (Bavaria: see picture) and am undergoing the always time consuming task of catching up with RSS feeds and email. Nearly three weeks worth this time!

I’ve spotted a few interesting things in the feeds that deserve further investigation and commentary, for now just check out the links that are tickling my fancy. These are taken straight from my Google readers starred items.

In the meantime, Happy New Year to (all) my reader(s).