SpellCoder

Meera pointed me to another very cool article she's written, RESTful Web Services in 60 Seconds, and (because I've been in an intensely groovy frame of mind for a few days now), I immediately associated it with my earlier experiments with Groovy and web services, in a blog entry entitled Groovy Web Service from the end of last year, based on some key learnings from the official Groovy web service site, (which has expanded a lot since then, I noticed today). At the time, I needed to hack things q... [read more]

For a while now I have been working on an application called IronEditor, this is a simple application designed to make it easier to pick up and start coding against the DLR based languages. By taking advantage of the DLR's Hosting API, the application can execute code for any language built on top of the DLR platform.

Ruby is a powerful language, I don't think any one will disagree on that. Well, this is about web services with Ruby :-), quite interesting...

WSO2 announced that it has extended its support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance through enhanced authentication. Version 1.5 of the WSO2 Identity Solution for strong Web authentication based on open standards and open source is now generally available and adds support for OpenID, a feature for decentralizing single sign-on. Additionally, WSO2 has joined the OpenID Foundation and is a founding member of the Information Card Foundation, which was launched June 23, 2008.

Is this even possible? Yes, trust me, if I can do it, so can you. You may ask, from Groovy and Grails in one day, how did I shift gears to web services. It all started while I was reading and working the samples from chapter 9 Web Services of “Beginning Groovy and Grails from Novice to Professional“. With the help of the sample provided in the book, I was able to get a RESTful web services for the Grails application.

Open source software is software in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. These three open source software downloads are all free and can be great additions to your site, making for a better user experience, more return visits and more unique visitors per month.

My notes from CloudCamp conference on cloud computing, held last week in London.

Tech.NewsJunk.Com was born on the 4th of July, just like the United States of America. I chose a holiday so the expectations wouldn't be too high, cause I knew at first it would be hard to find the kinds of stories I was looking for, news about products. Not interested in mergers or trends or personnel changes at tech companies. Just product news and reviews, that's all. http://tech.newsjunk.com/ Well, it's starting to pick up. Maybe we're learning where to look. And the flow is up. It's not e... [read more]

Introduction to WPF's MultiBinding. The tutorial includes full source code and easy-to-follow examples.

Kevin Mitnick has proven that the weakest link in any security system is the person holding the information.

SitePoint are giving away PDF copies of the book "Getting Started With Flex 3" for the next 60 days. All you need to do is complete a one-page quiz about Adobe Flex to access the download.

They have little or nothing to do with why I say: if you want to be a top-notch programmer, you can no more afford to ignore the C and C++ languages than a civil engineer can afford to ignore the difference between a plumb line and a snap line, a right angle and an oblique one.

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don... [read more]

The answer was horrifying. It is still not done and production ready. The JavaFX project has been around for quite some time now, and it is still not done. It does not seem to be even remotely close to production quality. It just stays unfinished. Meanwhile, Adobe has great success with the flex framework. Microsoft is pushing its silverlight technology, and will prevail on the Microsoft-minded and VisualStudio-triaged developers soon. But what does Sun and Java has to match up with? The unfinis... [read more]

Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees. In this article, I discuss the asymptotic efficiency of operations on skip lists, the ideas that make them work, and their interesting use cases. And, of course, I give you the source code for a skip list in C#.

Although Maven has its benefits, its documentation is often spartan and scattered, and sometimes it can be quite painful to figure out how to accomplish a task, although once you've figured out how to do it, it's usually not terrifically hard to repeat it in the future.

Today Brian Aker announced a fork of MySQL, called "Drizzle". Drizzle is a slimmed-down MySQL, in a lot of ways what MySQL should have been before MySQL AB became more concerned about their deal with SAP than their core user base.

A pixel that uses a pair of mirrors to block or transmit light could lead to displays that are faster, brighter, and more power efficient than liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Researchers at Microsoft Research who published their novel pixel design in Nature Photonics say that their design is also simpler and easier to fabricate, which should make it cheaper.

This is the fourth in a series of five articles that walk through the implementation of a simple but practical Pivot application called Stock Tracker. The previous article discussed "web queries", Pivot's native means of communicating with remote data services. This section focuses on data binding. The final article will cover Pivot's support for localization.

One of the important themes running through Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and that story’s associated foundational histories, is corruption. The taint of corruption is manifest throughout these stories in several ways and stems from a variety of sources, but the corruption of the One Ring is the most conspicuous of these manifestations. It is also the one we get to see evolve, transfer among, and grow in several of the main characters. There’s a design lesson here.

I just had an e-mail exchange with someone looking for a VB lead in Colorado Springs. I think they are going to have trouble filling it with an existing VB expert, and it occurred to me that someone who had led a successful VB 6 -> C# project could fit the bill, if they knew some key things about VB. I told the recruiter I thought the right person with a C# background and the right (respectful) attitude could be a good fit with two weeks work. But in the back of my mind I’m thinking “what resour... [read more]

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL.

An analysis of IE6 usage statistics from three different sites, and an attempt to determine from current trends when IE6 will become irrelevant

Stripes book is now available! Get it while it's hot! http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fdstr

This blog post shows a simple Powershell command that searches a log file for errors and warnings and adds the matched lines to either to the errors.txt file or to the warnings.txt files. It takes advantage of the most powerful operator in Powershell, which is the switch operator. In my example here I exported the log file from the Wonderware SMC logger.