September 30, 2004
With Firefox and del.icio.us I rediscovered the use of bookmarking.
I always found bookmarking too tedious for several reasons.
First, I gave up on categorizing bookmarks because I never found a hierarchy that satisfied me. So all my bookmarks end in the "to classify" folder and never moved from there!
Another inconvenient is that bookmarks are tedious to share between different computers. I don't want to transfer my bookmarks between all the browser I use on different computers. So what I wanted are bookmarks stored on a server. But then it couldn't be integrated in the browser and I'd have to go to the web page every time I want to go to a page I bookmarked.
So, at the end of the day, I restrict my bookmarks use to only two specific cases:
- bookmarklets (such a BlogThis!, post to del.icio.us, ...)
- web pages that I want to access through customized keywords (dict:, bug:,...)
For the rest, I rely on the browser location bar history and Google. But this solution is not good enough.
At the same time, I started to use del.icio.us to keep an eye on interesting web pages. Del.icio.us comes with handy bookmarklets which makes it easy to add a bookmark to del.icio.us without going to the web site. Del.icio.us has also interesting social effects and is in itself a source of information to check what other people are bookmarking.
However, to use your bookmarks, you still have to go to their web site.
Finally, enter firefox 1.0 PR and its live bookmarks. I added a live bookmark on my del.icio.us feed and voila! I had what I wanted: shared bookmarks, integrated in the browser that I can use as is (I don't have to go to del.icio.us site anymore).
Cedric also gave me a good idea: I added a second live bookmarks for the del.icio.us bookmarks I tagged with "toread" for pages I plan to read later when I got some time. It quite easy to categorize my bookmarks in the browser, I just have to use del.icio.us feeds for the different tags I use. But all in all, a feed for the "toread" tag and another for all my bookmarks seem enough.
September 24, 2004
I just saw today that there is a new option in Bloglines to keep a blog article as new.
Below every article, there is a "keep new" checkbox which will mark permanently the article as new. I find it handy when in the morning I quickly browse the weblogs and want to read more carefully some articles later. The problem with bloglines, it that once you've selected a blog, all the new articles are marked as read. Even if you haven't read all of them...
Bloglines already offered a similar feature for that (Clipping) but I find the user interface too tedious (to much clicks and setting) and the clipped article does not given enough hints about the weblog it belongs to.
This new checkbox solves partially one of the biggest disadvantage of Bloglines for me, the inability to mark articles of interest. It's great for temporary marking (e.g. for mail to read later in the day) but it's not very useful for "reference" articles since the display hints are the same for unread articles and articles marked as new.
For these reference articles, I still prefer to bookmark them in my del.icio.us bookmarks.
September 21, 2004
There's been some noise concerning an eventual web browser from Google. Most bloggers bet on a Gecko-based HTML browser with features specific to Google applications (such as Gmail, Picasa or Blogger). If what Google targets is a Google-branded Firefox with specific extensions, I'm highly unimpressed. We can already get most of this stuff quite conveniently and I don't see any added values. The Google brand won't be enough to make me switch from neither Firefox nor Safari.
However if you take into account Adam Bosworth, things may get more interesting. A Web Browser from Google would be a perfect fit for Adam's Alchemy project (Alchemy is in fact a BEA project but Adam was the driving force behind it).
From that perspective, there seems to be a lot more potential for a Google Web Browser. One of the advantage I see is that it could simplify and make it possible to get a push-based Web that Adam envisions. If you look at Gmail, Google has already started to push information to the browser, I almost never update Gmail web page because it is refreshed often enough that I got my mails already sitting in the Inbox. What's more, it is not a big "Refresh" with all the page being reloaded, they use XmlHttpRequest to only update the relevant portions of the page.
Frankly, I don't see all the potential that Alchemy can bring to the Web experience but I'd really like to learn more about it.
p.s.: Sometimes I feel that my weblog is dedicated only to Google! I definitely need to post some Java ramblings...
August 24, 2004
Yesterday I read Werner Vogels's weblog. I had the opportunity to meet and talk to Werner at HPTS'03 and consider him one of the finest people to learn from for anything related to distributed computing. He was recently hired by Amazon.com and in his weblog he explains why he accepted to work for Amazon instead of a company such as Microsoft.
His analysis is spot on and describes why companies such as Google or Amazon offer such interesting challenges compared to traditional software companies like Microsoft, Sun or BEA. It explains why some of the top software people and most prominent figure of the IT field (Adam Bosworth and Joshua Bloch to name a few) left "traditional" software companies for these internet application companies.
I'm currently on a mission for a big internet company and I totally share his point of view. The scale and range of such applications is just so challenging and completely different from the various middleware projects I was previously involved in.
As I wrote this blog, I just saw that Cédric Beust has also left BEA for Google. Congratulations Cédric!
August 20, 2004
I've worked on an Open Source JMS implementation (JORAM) before and I was quite curious to see what ActiveMQ would bring to the table compared to existing implementations (e.g. OpenJMS or JBossMQ).
I was mostly pleased with the way ActiveMQ leverages other Open Source efforts (e.g. for transport protocol or message persistence), brings some fresh and interesting ideas (such as their REST API) and plays nice with other projects such as Geronimo, Axis or Spring.
The project is still young and may need more eyes before being ready for production but I believe it will quickly become a real contender in the Open Source field:
JBossMQ has been certified as a part of JBoss but I'm not aware of any standalone use of JBossMQ.
JORAM will also be J2EE certified as a part of JOnAS. It can be used as a standalone MOM but it has some limitations (e.g. message persistence) which has hampered its adoption
OpenJMS is a joke
I'll talk later about the fact that there isn't yet an Open Source ESB project which has gained momentum. An Open Source JMS implementation is a key part of such an ESB initiative. It seems to me that ActiveMQ with all its qualities, its willingness to play nice with other Open Source communities and its Apache 2.0 license is a likely candidate to be a key component of such an ESB project.
Anyway, congratulations to the ActiveMQ guys and keep up the good work!
July 29, 2004
I wrote a little too quickly in my last entry: my blog was mainly about the Java enterprise stack but there are also several others entreprise stacks which lurks in the dark side matter of the middleware.
July 28, 2004
That's a great news for ObjectWeb that MySQL AB joins the consortium.
If we now look at the range of the members and products of ObjectWeb, it appears that the consortium now spans almost all the stack of entreprise application:
What is missing to cover the whole stack?
- a web server but Apache httpd is ubiquitous
- an ESB (JORAM is just a MOM, nothing less, nothing more)
- a portal
- anything else?
Right now, I don't see another Open Source organization which covers such a wide range (Apache and JBoss, Inc being the other ones I think of). That may prove a key advantage for ObjectWeb if companies can get all-in-one support for ObjectWeb products through its members.
But ObjectWeb has also to take care to not spread too thin. The consortium has the bad habit to separate too much the work done (try to count the number of mailing lists and workgroups!) and to not encourage collaboration between its projects enough. To become more succesful in the Open Source space, ObjectWeb should be less a cathedral and more a bazaar.
As for MySQL AB and ObjectWeb collaboration, I'm particularly excited by the prospect of an out-of-the-box clustered MySQL thanks to C-JDBC...
Anyway, congrats to MySQL and ObjectWeb guys!
July 25, 2004
Thanks to the many comments I had about the split bookmarklets, I updated them and here they are:
the main changes are:
- they work on on Internet Explorer 6 (many thanks to this anonymous commenter)
- Firefox throbber is stopped once the frames loading is finished
- the scrollbars appear only in the frames and not in Firefox (on some sites, it still does not work...)
I'm by no means a JavaScript wizard but I find quite amazing the difficulties to get such a simple javascript code to work on different browsers. With that little experience, I'm even more impressed by web applications using JavaScript like Gmail (Oddpost is also worth to take a look but they made their job easier by only targeting Internet Explorer).
July 25, 2004
Another big coup for Google after Joshua Bloch...
I had the opportunity to meet Adam Bosworth at HPTS'03 and the man has clearly a vision for the future and he's one of the real innovators of the software industry.
It seemed to me that BEA was not the right company for him: he's done most of his work on the client side (Access, Explorer, even Workshop) and the core business of BEA remains on the server side (with Weblogic Server). I was reading with interest his weblog and his toughts on mobile computing (what about his Project Alchemy now?).
He is a key acquisition for Google: Google has huge resources on the server side which could help realize a push based, event driven Internet that Adam's advocating. Besides, now that Google is moving nearer to the user space (on the web with Gmail and Blogger, on the desktop with Picasa and a future local search engine) they will benefit a lot from Adam's experience and vision.
Google is adding a lot of "names" before the IPO. It may be for the HR and the buzz generated by such hirings but they can't be wrong by taking Adam Bosworth and Joshua Bloch...
July 20, 2004
I'd like to receive subscribed RSS/Atom feeds in my webmail ,Gmail, but I can't find such service.
I found Info Aggregator but it doesn't meet my requirements since it send mails to an IMAP server at BlogStreet.
I also gave a try to Bloglet but it refuses several RSS feeds which should work (at least they work on other aggregators).
Does one of you know such a service?