There's one reason I like JSON way more than XML, and its name is RSI.
You're typing any of this stuff by hand? You're kidding right?
JSON and XML are appropriate as a wire protocol for app 2 app communication. JSON is appropriate only when the receiving application is written in java script. There are only two scenarios that I can think off right off the bat that I might hand type XML. One is a configuration file (e.g. WEB-INF\web.xml) and the other is a GRDDL style personal vanity site which isn't going to be that much more typing than HTML.
Typing lots of content using any markup language just doesn't scale.
With regards to JSON vs XML in AJAX apps, I am currently reading a Christian Gross book called Ajax Patterns and Best Practices. He prefers XML over JSON because of the man-in-the-middle code injection vulnerability with JSON. In order to convert the JSON formatted string to a java script object hierarchy, you must evaluate it. You always use an XML parser on XML. I really prefer JSON because java script that calls the XML DOM is a lot more complicated than java script that just references another java script object hierarchy. If you are really concerned about this rare form of intrusion, then scan the input string for injection markers before passing it to eval.
I would be interested in other developer's opinions on this.
Most of the time, we continued on with existing mid- or high-level characters. DnD isn't responsible for gaming systems that require people to start from scratch and grind through low levels.
What we need is a character definition format file standard and commitment from all the RPG companies to honor the importing and exporting of a character in that format. Imagine if you could import your Baldur's Gate or Diablo II character right into NWN, Morrowind, Oblivion, etc. The character would get adjusted to work with the new world so there wouldn't be a compromise in game play. People new to RPGs would still start out the same way they do today. It's most probably not feasible to retrofit those games but new games would and that would make the future of RPG more exciting and lower the commitment barrier for RPG players to purchase new games. How hard would it be to come up with some XSD or RELAX NG of the d20 system? Pretty easy, I'd say.
Getting things working in IE is a pain due to its lack of standards support
There are lots of folks who have already incurred this pain for you and have written books and/or javascript libraries that you can use to mitigate the pain.
The reason that both Java Applets and Active-X applets failed where AJAX has taken off is that JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest are available as part of and are deeply integrated with every modern browser.
Mod parent up. Given two application stacks of equal feature/functionality merit, choose the one with the least TCO. The more software dependencies, the more likely that there will be problems with the client side install, the higher the TCO.
I am not a big fan of Java Script and would prefer to code Java applets. However, the prototype library and the debugger mitigates most of my complaints.
Contrary to the title, it's not MS-Office that google is going after, it is Exchange.
Every Exchange admin I have ever spoken with claims that it is a nightmare to set up and maintain. There is a trend now to outsource that functionality. Google is targeting that market.
Dungeons and Dragons - OK, not necessarily a computer game, but still. It's influence on computer games has been incredible. A major inspiration behind nethack, almost all of the MUDS in the world, and who knows how many other dungeon crawling games.
DnD was very innovative for its time. Never Winter Nights is a computer game that is very true to the d20 system. There have been many computer game adaptations of DnD but I believe that NWN should be recognized as innovative in how it incorporates elements of a TPS style game, like Diablo II, and still be true to the turn based format of DnD.
I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.
The proliferation of adverts was so offensive to me that I chose not to RTFA. Was Noam Chomsky mentioned? I believe that his theory of formal languages remains to be very important to computer science. For example, what application developer has not used regular expressions?
I work at a small ISV which just bought SourceForge, Enterprise Edition which is an Apache/JBOSS/PostgreSql/CentOS app for managing SDLC. For a company of our size, they package this as a VMWare image. Installation is incredibly easy. I can definitely see how free virtualization can be a big boon to companies selling and/or consuming web applications for small deployments.
There's a lot more to object orientation than simulating a vtable with an associative array. How can you have encapsulation without persistence or visibility modifiers?
Most of the dynamic language evangelists claim that the ability to add or modify methods at run time is a good thing. I believe this to be the part that takes getting used to. I can see the value of adding or modifying methods but feel that this should be done declaratively (e.g. Ruby or.NET 2) instead of by manipulating the associative array directly in code. I am okay with aspects and method interception even though some implementations use a dynamic approach. The developer experience is still declarative.
I agree that the DOM and browser disparities are an issue, however, those issues are mitigated by modern libraries such as prototype.
One big advantage to java scipt's associative array is an object approach is that is what allows JSON to work. JSON is a very easy way to serialize in arbitrarily complex object hierarchies into java script which is a good thing for complex AJAX apps. The down side to this approach is increased exposure to man-in-the-middle attacks that can run arbitrary code client side.
MSFT has been doing this for years. It has nothing to doing with establishing good relationships. This is market research pure and simple. You are a lab animal. They tell you stuff then they gauge your response. From that, they extrapolate how the marketplace of developers will respond to certain announcements. Obviously, they are trying to court the Linux crowd. The objective, however, is to lure Linux developers away from Linux and towards MS-Windows.
I would be interested in what the/. community thinks of Microsoft's Inductive User Interface guidelines. Do you remember in the first part of this decade, they started cranking out the next version of their consumer windows applications (e.g. Money) with these really simple, web-esque GUIs? That was all driven from their usability research at the time. The basic premise is this. A screen with a single, clearly stated, explicit purpose is easier to understand than a page without such a purpose. Sounds a lot like do one thing well.
Absolute layout considered harmful because the resulting GUI looks very unprofessional when the containing window is resized. It is difficult and very challenging to create a GUI builder that does not rely on absolute layout, however, it is not impossible.
What I find interesting is the psychology in perceiving different types of GUIs. We don't expect the contents of a web page to resize when we resize the browser window because we view the browser window as a window on the web page document and not the page itself. This is not true for your typical business software windowing application. I wonder why?
In theory, I'm not against the use of a GUI builder as long as it provides a way to use all of the layout managers that are available. I've just never seen one that could scale in complexity to the needs of a real world application. Sooner or later, the functionality requirements drive GUI elements to be created based on configuration settings and/or business rules. That is where you hit the wall with the GUI builder.
The last time that I was around Microsoft evangelists, the topic of mono was raised. Instantly, the smell of fear was so thick in the air that you could cut it with a knife. I suspect that it was mono that was the motivator behind the recent deal between MSFT and NOVL. I hope that I am wrong but I won't be surprised if http://www.mono-project.com/ quietly goes the way of http://www.hula-project.org/
Correct, and the developers are also stake holders. Nothing achieves compliance like buy in which is accomplished by having the developers participate in the establishment of best practices. Use pain points to motivate the establishment of best practices. For example, the next time you hear a developer complain about the lack of documentation on a particular component, suggest that the establishment of a developer wiki board could be a good best practice to introduce.
I have installed Fedora numerous times only to be disappointed with the number of bugs in a very obvious unfinished product. I know the latest release of Ubuntu has had its issues, but I haven't gone to it as I have been very pleased with Ubuntu LTS. It is the stable version comparable to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it is available to all
I suspect that you will find CentOS to be of interest. Basically. this is RHEL with the trademarked and copyright stuff (e.g. logos) removed.
What has been your efforts in attracting developers to this position? Have you only posted it on your corporate site or have you advertised it on the various popular job boards such as monster and dice? Also, working through head hunters can get you some leads. The best way, however, is to ask your current developers for leads and pursue them yourself.
I am currently evaluating SFEE and I find it to be a great product. Good work! I hope you find who it is you're looking for.
Yes, that is true. Find the new job before quitting the old. Personal and professional growth is absolutely a part of the decision criteria for selecting and staying with a job. The fact that it has taken the original poster years to figure this out does not say anything positive about his or her drive.
Read some books. Here are some recommendations.
The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike is an all time classic. This one is my strongest recommendation.
Is object oriented programming the next step for you? Here is a classic by Grady Booch.
I find Martin Fowler to be a great author on next step kinds of topics for software developers.
Are design patterns the next step for you? The original GoF book is my recommendation.
Are relational databases your next step? My favorite book on this subject is a LAN Times Guide to SQL.
Is the next step to be a team lead? Then you should really read Code Complete by Steve McConnell.
I'm surprised that there were no questions about the real crisis facing MySQL which is that their two most reliable transactionally aware storage engines, InnoDB and BerkeleyDB, are now both owned by their competitor Oracle.
Isn't anyone else here concerned with that or is it really true that MySQL is only used as a relationally aware ISAM?
Slashdot Mirror
You're typing any of this stuff by hand? You're kidding right?
JSON and XML are appropriate as a wire protocol for app 2 app communication. JSON is appropriate only when the receiving application is written in java script. There are only two scenarios that I can think off right off the bat that I might hand type XML. One is a configuration file (e.g. WEB-INF\web.xml) and the other is a GRDDL style personal vanity site which isn't going to be that much more typing than HTML.
Typing lots of content using any markup language just doesn't scale.
With regards to JSON vs XML in AJAX apps, I am currently reading a Christian Gross book called Ajax Patterns and Best Practices. He prefers XML over JSON because of the man-in-the-middle code injection vulnerability with JSON. In order to convert the JSON formatted string to a java script object hierarchy, you must evaluate it. You always use an XML parser on XML. I really prefer JSON because java script that calls the XML DOM is a lot more complicated than java script that just references another java script object hierarchy. If you are really concerned about this rare form of intrusion, then scan the input string for injection markers before passing it to eval.
I would be interested in other developer's opinions on this.
What we need is a character definition format file standard and commitment from all the RPG companies to honor the importing and exporting of a character in that format. Imagine if you could import your Baldur's Gate or Diablo II character right into NWN, Morrowind, Oblivion, etc. The character would get adjusted to work with the new world so there wouldn't be a compromise in game play. People new to RPGs would still start out the same way they do today. It's most probably not feasible to retrofit those games but new games would and that would make the future of RPG more exciting and lower the commitment barrier for RPG players to purchase new games. How hard would it be to come up with some XSD or RELAX NG of the d20 system? Pretty easy, I'd say.
There are lots of folks who have already incurred this pain for you and have written books and/or javascript libraries that you can use to mitigate the pain.
Mod parent up. Given two application stacks of equal feature/functionality merit, choose the one with the least TCO. The more software dependencies, the more likely that there will be problems with the client side install, the higher the TCO.
I am not a big fan of Java Script and would prefer to code Java applets. However, the prototype library and the debugger mitigates most of my complaints.
Contrary to the title, it's not MS-Office that google is going after, it is Exchange.
Every Exchange admin I have ever spoken with claims that it is a nightmare to set up and maintain. There is a trend now to outsource that functionality. Google is targeting that market.
DnD was very innovative for its time. Never Winter Nights is a computer game that is very true to the d20 system. There have been many computer game adaptations of DnD but I believe that NWN should be recognized as innovative in how it incorporates elements of a TPS style game, like Diablo II, and still be true to the turn based format of DnD.
If they can't apply the theory, then they don't know the theory.
How could I forget to mention http://www.openoffice.org/ which is a great office productivity suite and http://www.eclipse.org/ which is great developer IDE suite? All OSS, of course.
I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.
When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.
I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.
The proliferation of adverts was so offensive to me that I chose not to RTFA. Was Noam Chomsky mentioned? I believe that his theory of formal languages remains to be very important to computer science. For example, what application developer has not used regular expressions?
I found this one minute risk assessment tool to be particularly lucid on the issues.
I work at a small ISV which just bought SourceForge, Enterprise Edition which is an Apache/JBOSS/PostgreSql/CentOS app for managing SDLC. For a company of our size, they package this as a VMWare image. Installation is incredibly easy. I can definitely see how free virtualization can be a big boon to companies selling and/or consuming web applications for small deployments.
There's a lot more to object orientation than simulating a vtable with an associative array. How can you have encapsulation without persistence or visibility modifiers?
Most of the dynamic language evangelists claim that the ability to add or modify methods at run time is a good thing. I believe this to be the part that takes getting used to. I can see the value of adding or modifying methods but feel that this should be done declaratively (e.g. Ruby or .NET 2) instead of by manipulating the associative array directly in code. I am okay with aspects and method interception even though some implementations use a dynamic approach. The developer experience is still declarative.
I agree that the DOM and browser disparities are an issue, however, those issues are mitigated by modern libraries such as prototype.
One big advantage to java scipt's associative array is an object approach is that is what allows JSON to work. JSON is a very easy way to serialize in arbitrarily complex object hierarchies into java script which is a good thing for complex AJAX apps. The down side to this approach is increased exposure to man-in-the-middle attacks that can run arbitrary code client side.
MSFT has been doing this for years. It has nothing to doing with establishing good relationships. This is market research pure and simple. You are a lab animal. They tell you stuff then they gauge your response. From that, they extrapolate how the marketplace of developers will respond to certain announcements. Obviously, they are trying to court the Linux crowd. The objective, however, is to lure Linux developers away from Linux and towards MS-Windows.
I would be interested in what the /. community thinks of Microsoft's Inductive User Interface guidelines. Do you remember in the first part of this decade, they started cranking out the next version of their consumer windows applications (e.g. Money) with these really simple, web-esque GUIs? That was all driven from their usability research at the time. The basic premise is this. A screen with a single, clearly stated, explicit purpose is easier to understand than a page without such a purpose. Sounds a lot like do one thing well.
Absolute layout considered harmful because the resulting GUI looks very unprofessional when the containing window is resized. It is difficult and very challenging to create a GUI builder that does not rely on absolute layout, however, it is not impossible.
What I find interesting is the psychology in perceiving different types of GUIs. We don't expect the contents of a web page to resize when we resize the browser window because we view the browser window as a window on the web page document and not the page itself. This is not true for your typical business software windowing application. I wonder why?
In theory, I'm not against the use of a GUI builder as long as it provides a way to use all of the layout managers that are available. I've just never seen one that could scale in complexity to the needs of a real world application. Sooner or later, the functionality requirements drive GUI elements to be created based on configuration settings and/or business rules. That is where you hit the wall with the GUI builder.
The last time that I was around Microsoft evangelists, the topic of mono was raised. Instantly, the smell of fear was so thick in the air that you could cut it with a knife. I suspect that it was mono that was the motivator behind the recent deal between MSFT and NOVL. I hope that I am wrong but I won't be surprised if http://www.mono-project.com/ quietly goes the way of http://www.hula-project.org/
Why was this moderated insightful instead of funny?
Correct, and the developers are also stake holders. Nothing achieves compliance like buy in which is accomplished by having the developers participate in the establishment of best practices. Use pain points to motivate the establishment of best practices. For example, the next time you hear a developer complain about the lack of documentation on a particular component, suggest that the establishment of a developer wiki board could be a good best practice to introduce.
I guess that you don't see any value in bookmarking or in caching for performance.
Actually, there is something close to what you are describing. It is called a Linux live CD with firefox on it such as knoppix.
I suspect that you will find CentOS to be of interest. Basically. this is RHEL with the trademarked and copyright stuff (e.g. logos) removed.
What has been your efforts in attracting developers to this position? Have you only posted it on your corporate site or have you advertised it on the various popular job boards such as monster and dice? Also, working through head hunters can get you some leads. The best way, however, is to ask your current developers for leads and pursue them yourself.
I am currently evaluating SFEE and I find it to be a great product. Good work! I hope you find who it is you're looking for.
Yes, that is true. Find the new job before quitting the old. Personal and professional growth is absolutely a part of the decision criteria for selecting and staying with a job. The fact that it has taken the original poster years to figure this out does not say anything positive about his or her drive.
Read some books. Here are some recommendations.
I'm surprised that there were no questions about the real crisis facing MySQL which is that their two most reliable transactionally aware storage engines, InnoDB and BerkeleyDB, are now both owned by their competitor Oracle.
Isn't anyone else here concerned with that or is it really true that MySQL is only used as a relationally aware ISAM?