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Humans value cognition highly and computers are our best tool at boosting cognition. That great potential in an important area is what elevates computers to this higher status. Are computers our next evolutionary step or our ultimate downfall? It's an old question well exploited by science fiction writers turned cult leaders.

They do have a message about software development that you can read without purchasing any of their product. I have endorsed their book, Getting Real, and you can read my endorsement here without purchasing any of my product.

Seriously, where is the line between information and advertising? IMHO, if the link takes you to a page where there is no possible way to part with your cash without going someplace else, then it is information. Have you been so betrayed by capitalism that you can't tolerate any exchange of money at all? How can you afford to eat?

Good advice. Mod parent up. From a technology perspective, a Version Control System, Test Driven Development, and Continuous Integration can go a long way towards improving quality. If the OP is in a MSFT shop, then you are most probably stuck with VSS or TFS. VSS is file based so it is not very good for distributed development. You will need to enhance VSS with SoS if you have remote developers. TFS doesn't have that problem and also has support for TDD's unit testing. If the OP is willing to use OSS, then there are plenty of good options available. There is plenty of good advice here as to OSS VCS. There are various unit testing frameworks for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, C++, you name it. Also, check out Cruise Control for Continuous Integration.

Technology alone cannot solve quality issues, however. Changes in methodology, process, and even corporate culture may also be needed. Take a look at my site for more advice on that.

You're right. The value proposition that newspapers bring is the investigative reporting. That is why the online presence of a newspaper shouldn't be powered by wordpress.

Any newspaper that wants to get their online presence right just needs to study the NY Times. It's really all about the economics of distribution. Column inches in a paper is expensive. Disk space on a web server is cheap. Use the web site as a searchable archive for all content but run ads on the site to encourage users to subscribe to the print edition. Also give away banner ads as an incentive to companies to advertise in the print edition.

The same holds true for broadcast media and some companies such as NPR and CBS are finally boarding that clue train.

You're right. The value proposition that newspapers bring is the investigative reporting. That is why the online presence of a newspaper shouldn't be powered by wordpress.

Any newspaper that wants to get their online presence right just needs to study the NY Times. It's really all about the economics of distribution. Column inches in a paper is expensive. Disk space on a web server is cheap. Use the web site as a searchable archive for all content but run ads on the site to encourage users to subscribe to the print edition. Also give away banner ads as an incentive to companies to advertise in the print edition.

The same holds true for broadcast media and some companies such as NPR and CBS are finally boarding that clue train.

Coincidentally enough, I was in a bookstore yesterday looking at this book and considering whether or not to buy it. As someone interested in Web 2.0 (technology and economics), I thought that I might pick it up and give it a read. Also, the book was already discounted.

My impression after scanning the TOC and leafing through random pages was a sense of the author attempting to pander to that crowd who is interested in adding the Web 2.0 check mark to their business. It's kind of like a digital "keeping up with the Joneses," a "been there, done that, bought the tee shirt" attitude without any real sense of commitment to the basics behind the movement which is mainly an almost evangelical fervor for federated democracies that support collective intelligence and the long tail.

Ditto. I am also a big fan of embedding mini-languages in bigger systems and of ANTLR for all the reasons you state plus a few more.

Three cheers to Terence Parr for this remarkable technology.

I have not taken the step to upgrade to version 3. I hear that the grammar specifications are significantly different. I have a question. Is it worth all the rewriting of grammar and migration of scripts to upgrade? Has anyone here used ANTLRWorks? I am really pleased with version 2.7.5 so it is hard to get motivated.

The poster equates Web 2.0 to "java, shockwave, and ads" and gets modded as insightful? Riiiiight.

Even if you were only focused on the technical aspects of Web 2.0, you would realize that these so-called Web 2.0 sites used AJAX and neither java nor shockwave. An even more relevant description of web 2.0 would include such terms as collective intelligence, user generated content, or the long tail.

Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.

I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.

Obviously the ludites^H^H^H^H^H^Hate adopters would frame their reluctance as risk aversion. As any entrepreneur will tell you "no risk, no reward." In the case of the marketplace, late adoption can have high opportunity costs as it is very typical that the ones who come into a market first get the highest share of that market.

Snide comment aside, I really don't mean to put down the late adopters. Everyone has a different comfort zone in the risk/reward spectrum. This notion of diffusion of innovation has been around for years and popularized by the book Crossing the Chasm. I recently blogged on a related topic about getting to market quickly with your software product.

Three of those four vendors have published their own AJAX libraries for outside consumption. This accelerates adoption which is important from the standpoint of going mainstream.

I have not used silverlight either. Those whom I have spoken with about it are jazzed about it because you don't have to use java script as the programming language. IMHO, there are serious problems with java script. Not that there's really a problem with the language itself. Rather, the problems show up in how the code engines are implemented. I have gone into more detail about this here. Good programmers can live with these shortcomings either by rendering most of the GUI via HTML and using java script only lightly (i.e. validating event handlers) or by using good libraries and debuggers.

I claim first serious post.

Most of these questions appear to me to be either leading questions, whose intent is to foment desire in the questioners product(s) and/or service(s), or marketing questions.

Some of the questions are legit, however. For example, those questions concerning security, performance, unit testing, and analytics.

With regards to the question about which framework to choose, I have posted my favorites here.

To me, the term scripting has nothing to do with the level of abstraction. Rather, it is more about whether or not the source is directly interpreted or compiled into an intermediate form. Having said that, I must admit that it would be awfully silly to create a low level language that is interpreted.

From most of the languages that he lists, it looks to me that what he is really talking about are Dynamic Scripting Languages. Scripting languages that are also dynamic provide a lot of flexibility and can genuinely be categorized as different from static languages in an interesting way. I have blogged on this recently as part of a larger article on OSS.

Plone is great if it is a good fit between the requirements and developing custom document types within a CMS framework. The architecture is highly layered. The low level way of developing under plone has a non-trivial learning curve to it. The high level way is to use what is known as plone archetypes which makes it really easy to create custom document types. The skinning of the custom types becomes very easy using Zope's METAL technology which is a very cool page templating system.

I have discussed plone previously here and here.

Plone is great if it is a good fit between the requirements and developing custom document types within a CMS framework. The architecture is highly layered. The low level way of developing under plone has a non-trivial learning curve to it. The high level way is to use what is known as plone archetypes which makes it really easy to create custom document types. The skinning of the custom types becomes very easy using Zope's METAL technology which is a very cool page templating system.

I have discussed plone previously here and here.

This is a good list. Allow me to weigh in with a few more of my own.

• Nexuiz is a fun networked 3D deathmatch FPS.
• Sauerbraten is a great, mindless FPS for both networked and single player mode.
• You should definitely give tremulous a try. Its innovative, asymmetrical approach to team based network play is outstanding.
• You can read a review that I wrote of these games and many other FOSS projects.
• A lot of these games are on a live Linux DVD that I reviewed recently.

You have proposed that the web browser eliminates the running of any script or program client side. Barring obnoxious advertising, the reason why java script (or, more precisely, AJAX) is compelling is that the screen repaint from a traditional HTTP GET or POST reloads the entire screen. This "flash" is disorienting to the end user and can break up their natural flow.

I have recently blogged on this subject in my Top OSS for Coders article.

IMHO, STL is the best thing that has ever happened to C++. It really fills in some important gaps in C++, making it almost as easy to code in as Ruby, Python, Java, or C#. I have blogged on this previously.

The articles for the in depth blog are made up of multiple sections. The left hand side navigation takes you to the different sections of each article. The secondary horizontal navigation takes you to the different articles. Although each page from the in depth blog is smaller than a blog entry from the mundane blog, if you added up all the section pages for any article, you would find that the articles from the transition choices site are larger than the entries from the blogspot site.

Thanks for the feedback on the colors. It's time to change them anyway.

I agree that there is room for both. That is why I have two blogs. My blog at the transition choices site is really for more more elaborate, in-depth articles. My blog at google's blogger site is for the more mundane reaction to today's news.

As you can plainly see, the transition choices blog site is more organized like a article publishing portal than a typical blog site. It has a three level navigation hierarchy, support for mini-sites, a rudimentary portal organization, an extensible search facility, and content syndication. All that and it's open source too.

I agree that there is room for both. That is why I have two blogs. My blog at the transition choices site is really for more more elaborate, in-depth articles. My blog at google's blogger site is for the more mundane reaction to today's news.

As you can plainly see, the transition choices blog site is more organized like a article publishing portal than a typical blog site. It has a three level navigation hierarchy, support for mini-sites, a rudimentary portal organization, an extensible search facility, and content syndication. All that and it's open source too.

I've seen stuff like this before. Poorly architected system gets rewritten in another programming language. This is a no-fault, blameless way of throwing out the old, useless system and replacing it with something that is, hopefully, better.

If you claim that the old system is too crufty for a reasonable maintenance cycle, then someone might get their feelings hurt and strive to defend the old code. A language change is more politically acceptible because C++ can't defend itself from being bashed.

The truth will set you free, however. If the old system is bad because you have a bad architect and that architect is setting the architecture for the new system, then after great expense, you will still have a loser.

If the old system is crufty because of six years of scope drift and the current architect is good, then figure out why the old system is crufty and incrementally refactor it until the maintenance cycles become reasonable again.

I agree and have recently gone into more detail about this in a blog entry.