Juixe Techknow

I was ten minutes late to the first session of the CarsonWorkshops The Future of Web Apps conference because I took the wrong bus. By the time I got to my seat, the auditorium was full with techies illuminated by the glow of laptops and Dick Hardt was on stage talking about Identity 2.0. Dick Hardt is the founder and CEO of Sxip Identity. Dick stated that a good indicator of future behavior is past behavior and our future behavior can be gathered from the fragments of our digital identity that is held on disparate systems.

Not to long ago, Yahoo bought Flickr and Delicious. In the case of Flickr, users are asked to login with either a Flickr or Yahoo account. In the case of Delicious, Yahoo chose not to confuse the matter and left the login system alone. Dick reminded the audience that in the case of Ebay, who owns Paypal and Skype, chose to keep the distinct user systems in place for each site.

One piece of advice suggested by Dick Hardt, and repeated by other speakers, was to integrate your login system. If you have more than one website, try to use the same system so that you can provide seamless access to your new service to existing customers. Typical users have way to many logins to remember as it is. I have accounts in Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, Skype, and a more. As Dick made me understand, it would be nice if my Slashdot karma could translate well to my Ebay seller rating.

Technorati Tags: sxip, identity 2.0, identity, web2.0, development, fowa, carsonworkshops

I received an email asking me how to best enhance the comment model from the Acts as Commentable plugin. It seems like a user of the plugin wants to add some rails validation to the comment model class. I have to admit that I would have just edited the plugin code in place, in fact this is what I have done in the past. I didn’t want to brush off the question because it seems like a legitimate concern: how to add validation and methods to models provided by Ruby on Rails plugins? Well, the answer is easy because in Ruby a class’ implementation can be reopened at any time. In this case we have to open the Comment class and evaluate new code:

[source:ruby]
Comment.class_eval do
def my_new_method
# do something
end
# do something else
end
[/source]

For this to work we need to place the above code in the application_helper.rb file.

Technorati Tags: acts as commentable, acts_as_commentable, rails, rubyonrails ruby on rails, rails plugin, rails plugins

It is soo true that if you work for a startup you end up wearing multiple hats. I work for a very small startup and I wear more hats that the Queen of England. One of those hats is of a Visual Basic developer. Most business applications are not fancy or web two point ooh-y, they usually involve some charts, some graphs, and some integration with Microsoft Office products.

As most script kiddies know, with a little Visual Basic code you can write scripts to open, write, and send emails, generate excel documents, print word documents, and so much more. Fore example, here is a little bit of vbs code to automate the send button (now if you can automate running the script):

[source:vbs]
Set objOutlook = CreateObject(“Outlook.Application”)
Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace(“MAPI”)

‘ Need to have open a new email window for the following
Set objInspector = objOutlook.ActiveInspector
Set objMailItem = objInspector.CurrentItem

‘ Send the email, after the user presses the okay
‘ button on the confirmation dialog
objMailItem.Send
[/source]

Now, if you want to pop up a message dialog with the subject of the last email you received, just run the following lines of code:

[source:vbs]
Const olFolderInbox = 6
Const olFolderSentMail = 5

Set objOutlook = CreateObject(“Outlook.Application”)
Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace(“MAPI”)

Set objFolder = objNamespace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderSentMail)
MsgBox “Subject: ” & objFolder.Items.GetLast.Subject
[/source]

I have a few more example of Visual Basic code manipulating Microsoft Office products here. If you want to run similar COM code but in Java you can do so using Groovy and Scriptom. I have already mentioned Scriptom before so I will refer you to that post.

Technorati Tags: scriptom, groovy, java, com, visual basic, outlook, scripts, visual basic script

I took the Summer of Rails challenge and put together yet another social bookmarking ajax rich site! Yurlz is all about your urls. Yurlz allows you to share, distribute, comment, rate, and discuss your favorite websites by bookmarking and tagging them. Yurlz was put together using Ruby on Rails, Yahoo! UI library, Acts as Taggable, Acts as Commentable, amongst other rails plugins. Even though I still consider Yurlz as a work in progress, much like every Google product is still in beta, Yurlz is fully functional and open for beta testers, I mean users.

Even though the summer is coming to an end I will continue playing, hacking, tinkering in rails for my autumn of rails project. Oh, yeah, and after that I also have a winter of rails project in mind involving all my favorite rails plugins.

Now if anyone has any tip, hints, or criticisms (either constructive, destructive, positive or negative), feel free to drop me a line here. Yes, I know what you are all thinking but all the kewl dot us domain names are already taken. I was going to get belar.us but I didn’t want to make any semi geopolitical statement.

Technorati Tags: social, web2.0, social website, bookmarks, links, yurlz, urls, rails, rails plugins, act as commentable, acts as taggable, summer of rails

Dave Naffis recently wrote Ruby on Rails, Ajax & CSS Star Rating System, a quick and simple tutorial that describes the steps necessary to integratin a star rating system into your Ruby on Rails application. The tutorial makes good use of the Acts As Rateable rails plugin previously covered here. About the development effort required Dave says, “Gotta love rails. 10 minutes of coding and you have a complete Ajax and CSS star rating system just like the pros use.”

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, ruby on rails, plugin, rails plugin, activerecord, acts_as_rateable

I was inspired to write this comparison between the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Flex 2 by reading Comparing the Google Web Toolkit to Echo2. I felt that the comparison between GWT and Echo 2 was like the proverbial distinction between apples and oranges. I thought that a better comparison can be drawn between GWT and Flex 2 (perhaps this is more like comparing tangerines with oranges).

To begin with, both GWT and Flex 2 are Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks whose code is downloaded and executed on the client side, in the browser. Both frameworks share a lot of the same web two point OMG hype and both GWT and Flex 2 are backed by industry heavy weights, Google and Adobe respectively. Even though both the GWT and Flex 2 SDK are free as in beer, as of this writing they are not open source, or free as in freedom.

When I first heard of GWT at JavaOne 2006, I thought that the idea of compiling Java into JavaScript was novel. I think my exact expression was ‘WTF?’ This was my same exact sentiment when I first learned that Flash can be used not just for vector based animations and games but to generate the UI for business applications. ‘Whoa..’, as Neo would say.
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