Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

The One Where I Say Something Nice About .NET

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I’m working my way through  Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, by Steven Sanderson, published by Apress. So far, I like it, for values of ‘it’ of both the book and the framework.

The book — well, the reviews on Amazon were glowing, and they’re basically right: clear prose style, ideas well expressed, and enough critique of other Microsoft technologies that you can tell it’s not a Microsoft Press title.

The framework … is interesting. It mostly abandons the ASP.NET model of server-side controls, postbacks, and viewstate in favor of plain HTML and CSS. (Though there are still advantages to using their HTML helper functions rather than coding up raw HTML yourself.) For pity’s sake, they even make jQuery available for your AJAX hacking pleasure.

What has always bothered me about “classic” ASP.NET was that it seemed to be an attempt to transplant the VB/WebForms style of development — drag-and-drop controls, a low-level event loop — onto the web. It’s a layer of abstraction over the web in an attempt to hide that fact that it is the web.

And it shows in terms of performance. Outside of low-latency intranets, the underlying architecture doesn’t support the chatty postback/viewstate implementation needed to emulate a desktop GUI event loop.

ASP.NET MVC, in contrast, feels like a web-native architecture. It’s designed around the strengths and limitations of HTTP, rather than fighting against it.

On top of that, it encourages the strong separation of concerns implied by ‘MVC’; it nudges the developer towards unit testing and test-driven development; and with the source code placed under an OSI-approved license, it represents a step by Microsoft into the world of Open Source.

All in all, I think ASP.NET MVC is quite cool.

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RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I’d been hearing the terms ‘PubSubHubbub’ (silly name) and ‘rssCloud’ a lot lately, and decided I ought to figure out what the heck these people are talking about. Just in time, along comes Josh Fraser with a guest post on TechCrunch, RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win.

Both [PubSubHubbub] and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”

While Fraser favors PubSubHubbub, he apparently agrees that the name just doesn’t work, and refers to it throughout his piece as ‘PuSH’. If fate is kind, that name will win out. (Or else it will get submitted to IETF, and given a nondescript acronym, a la Jabber’s rehabilitation as the more businesslike XMPP.)

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You Say Netbook, I Say Smartphone

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

According to CNET, HP is diving headfirst into the Netbook market. The interesting part of the article, though, is not so much about HP, as about netbooks in general, and how they are being marketed in Europe and Asia:

It’s a dramatic increase, and the difference is all coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where Asus and Acer have been incredibly aggressive about their Netbooks, the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. Of the 10.9 million units that are estimated to ship worldwide by the end of 2008, 8.1 million will go to EMEA, says IDC.

Acer and Asus have done well in the region, as evidenced by Acer’s quick rise to the top of the portable PC market there. But they’ve been aided by local telecom companies, who are subsidizing Netbooks in exchange for a signed wireless service contract. It’s a model that in the past few months has thrived in Europe.

Dell signed up Vodafone for this kind of deal on its Netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 in September, but HP’s mostly been on the sidelines in this regard, and representatives for the company haven’t indicated if a similar deal with wireless providers are in the works.

Wireless service contract to subsidize a Linux-based device optimized for mobile Internet access. Other than the physical size of the device, how is this different from Android (and, Linux notwithstanding, the iPhone)?

At some point in the near future, somebody is going to put Android on a netbook-class device, and the shape of the future of client computing will become clearly visible. And the day that happens is the day that Microsoft’s desktop monopoly will be truly broken.

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I For One Welcome Our New Android Overlords

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

As everyone knows by now, Google has released its new SDK for mobile phones, Android.

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This early look at the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.

The SDK includes basically a one-stop shop for application development infrastructure: an OS kernel (Linux), a virtual machine (interestingly, not the Java VM, though Java is the main development language), a SQL engine, a communications stack, 2D and 3D graphics toolkits, a GUI stack, and so on. Everything a developer would want in a deployment platform.

As you, my legion of loyal readers, will know, I play Second Life. The SL client is based on OpenGL. When I saw that Android supported OpenGL, it naturally occurred to me that one could create an SL client for Android. It would suck to use SL on a mobile phone, of course; tiny screen, no keyboard, etc.

But then, there’s surely nothing in the spec about a maximum screen size for Android, and no reason you couldn’t have a physical keyboard. In fact, if you were to take an Android system, built to run efficiently on a phone-class device, and put it on a laptop-class processor, it would fly…

Whoa.

What can a desktop machine do, that an Android-based mobile phone can’t do? Mostly it’s a matter of form factor; a mobile phone isn’t big enough for a full-sized keyboard, multiple USB connectors, a DVD slot…

But is there anything that says Android can’t run on a laptop- or desktop-size device? If Android catches on, isn’t it inevitable that someone will put it on such a device? And given how many smart people work at Google, don’t you think they already considered that? that they may in fact have planned on that from the start?

Lots of people have been wondering when Google will come out with an operating system offering that will compete with, and maybe displace, Microsoft Windows.

I think it just happened. And no one noticed.

Posted in Open Source, Tech Industry | 1 Comment »

Philip Rosedale at OSCON 2007

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

I missed this year’s OSCON (grumble, grumble). I had even more reason to want to go this year, because of the keynote address by Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) [video link] of Linden Lab.

One interesting thing that Philip mentions: apparently a Teen grid user from the UK has developed a limited-function browser-based client, so that she can log into SL, and can chat, IM, teleport, etc., from within Firefox, without downloading an official client (or any client, apparently). Cool stuff, I’ll see if I can track it down.

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