Software Developer specializing in Web2.0 websites
Mike is a software developer and small business owner (www.cambridgeweb.ie) specializing in Web2.0 websites and custom software development. Mike heads up the OrlandoJUG (www.orlandoJUG.org ), GatorJUG (www.gatorJUG.org), and just co-founded the (drumroll) West African Java User Group (www.senejug.com). He tech edited the new book "RSS and Atom in Action", by Dave Johnson www.manning.com/dmjohnson. He loves to blog (www.mikelevin.net) and also produces a popular podcast called Swampcast ( www.swampcast.com). You can reach him at mike at swampcast dot com.Presentations by Mike Levin
Web2.0 and Java
Community, metadata, ranking and websites that grow over time are attributes of Web2.0. What else? Come to Orlando, breath some fresh Florida air and feel the sunshine!. Then, stroll over to the Central Florida Software Symposium and find out. Mike Levin will tell you all about Web2.0 and show you some snippets in Java.Michael Levin's Weblog and Swampcast!
Software development, technobuzz, and everything else.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Online social networking combines the best aspects of email, bulletin boards, instant messaging and chat rooms. The largest online communities have populations that number in the millions. The biggest complaint is that online communities isolate the users from the "real world".
However, consider some advantages. Suppose you travel to a wonderful place and meet people you‘d like to keep in touch with. An online community is just the ticket. In fact, better than email, online communities allow and encourage interaction. The conversations persist and can be shared. Privacy is usually specified so the content can pe private, public, between friends, etc.
Another advantage is practical. Business communities are a terrific way to manage work searches.
And, in areas like geneology and membership with former organizations, online communities can reunite people who otherwise would have a hard time finding eachother efficiently.
Web2.0 is all about sharing information dynamically. Social networks, as a subset of Web2.0, are gaining momentum and efficiency.
(That's Dave Johnson of SocialSite on the right & Michael Hauser of www.betterbadnews.com)
Now, for some specifics. Dave Johnson, one of the founders of JRoller, this splendid community many of us enjoy free of charge, has been working on a new social networking tool called SocialSite. It's open source, utilizes the OpenSocial standard, a common API for social applications across multiple websites, and you can use it with Java, PHP or Ruby. I learned about Social Site by accident at JavaOne 2008. If you follow the link, you'll see some pictures I took there. Discovery is one of the greatest benefits of attending conferences.
I recently decided to try social networking in two settings. I wanted to create an online community for developers in user groups. And, I wanted to make a community that focused on healthy living. My efforts in community building have been very successful, but the online aspects were fragmented. They included websites, groups, and mailing lists. Of course, I wanted to use Java. So, when I found out the Dave was developing SocialSite and that SocialSite would enable extending an existing website to have community features, it was my first choice. But, since it was still under development, I looked further and found Marc Andreessen's Ning. Ning is written in Java and PHP. I put together Zoobird, a "dangerously organic" community, using Ning. After some experimentation, I also built Codetown for the development community.
I‘ve learned a lot in the couple of months that Zoobird and Codetown have been alive. The users are thrilled. The underlying architecture of social networking is revealing itself through the main features: profiles, privacy, discussions with categories that can live in groups or solo, and the ability for users to interact by making friends. These are just a few. Geolocation is absent, but I hope to see it in the future. I recently gave a talk on building social networks at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2008 (OSCON08) and found the audience very curious about what I had learned.
In the coming months, I‘ll share more of what I‘ve learned. Please share your experiences here as comments, too! A lot of this information is not well known.
I invite all of you to join Codetown and Zoobird,and explore the features and delightful community.
Stay tuned!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
EWeek: "Mobile phone vendors Motorola, NEC and Panasonic unveil seven new Linux-based smart phones for the LiMo Foundation."
Here‘s a quote from a Forbes article: "Forbes.com: What was your reaction to the Symbian news?
Morgan Gillis: Directionally, it's exactly right for the industry. It is bringing open technology and open governance into the mobile sector so that applications developers and content providers can write much more efficiently for handsets. It will set off a wave of innovation. Philosophically, that is what LiMo believes too...There is a naive view that open is always good and closed is always bad, but within the industry, the governance model and the licensing approach matter. We are pursuing a strategy [that] we call collaborative source. It's not quite the same as open source and definitely not proprietary. LiMo members are required to share fixes and optimizations they create individually. That's really important as a mechanism for removing fragmentation. In addition, companies working within LiMo agree not to assert patents against each other. This protects our smaller companies. Between our members, we have 300,000 patents currently.
It's not known yet whether Symbian's patent license contains all that. This is also distinct from Google's approach. Google's license does not require licensees to share anything with others."
Monday, August 4, 2008
I'm just back from OSCON. The prevailing opinion was interesting. Java wasn't included in the tracks. In fact, one talk stated that one of the mistakes you can make starting a project is to choose Java. Now, people. Here's the skinny. Java is fine. So are C++ and C. Fortran rocks, for that matter. I've watched the market transition from C to C++ and heard the whimpers. From C++ to Java and heard the excitement. No more memory management. No pointers! Hoorah! Yep, objects are hard. So are schemas. It's always been hard to decide whether to pluralize table names. Java runs on the VM. So, it's slower than C. Python is interpreted. Blah, blah, blah. Sun has gone through the motions. Now, Java is big and open. But, people. Here we go. In general, you'll rarely hear a complaint out of me. This one's got my goat. There's nothing wrong with Java. Aside from the fact that it's a little hard. The whole deal with open source has always been support and documentation. Yes, you can march down to the store and buy a shrink wrapped copy of .Net and go like the wind. ASP is so well documented. There are components galore. But, you pay for it. You want to play, you gotta pay. And, you don't always get what you pay for. Sometimes, you get so much less and it's so aggravating that you feel like switching and never looking back. That's just about what I did last time I did a project using VC++1.5. Compatibility, export issues, costs. OK, I did look back. I look at the job market and see that ASP/Microsoft/.Net still leads the pack in development jobs. Java is right up there. We have shops here in the Swamp who still have huge JSP codebases. What does that tell you? Legacy code lives on. When it works, people are reluctant to change it. Bottom line: Java is an experiment that worked. My excitement lies in the languages that run on the JVM. We're not going to walk into every shop as an architect. But, we now have a new tool to pull out of its sheath: JRuby, Jython, and the ability to write other languages on the JVM. I am baffled about Java not being part of the OSCON tracks. But, this was my first OSCON and I am sure you'll explain to me that, until recently Java wasn't open source. Right? Time for a cuppa Joe.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Oscon08 ::: Open Source Startups - My day today will take me into the world of open source startups. I'm anxious to hear lessons learned and strategies to make the start up juices flow with vigor.
Gotta love that!
Karma to Kami and Mitch.
Next on the list is a workshop on creating location aware Web2.0 apps on an Open Source Geospacial Platform.
Stay tuned...
http://del.kfk.pl/ but I am not grokking it. Help! 