James' Blog

Google Wave

Is a new developmental demo to explore what email would look like if it were implemented today instead of 40 years ago. The system keeps data on a central server instead of creating a copy for each recipient. Ultimately, this gives you (and everyone else) the ability to modify messages on the server. What that means is that it becomes an incredibly cooperative process because people can immediately see what is updated on a wave (the message). It leads to a bunch of different tools and gadgets that allow very impressive recording/playback and collaboration. Effectively, this char by char updating, from an html5 interface developed in GWT, looks almost like an instant message. Other features include drag and drop, inserting various media, and collaborative games.

*Twave is a twitter wave. Implements interface to post updates using Twitter.
*The system is very impressive, but it is still a little bit buggy since it’s still in development.

http://wave.google.com

Google I/O

This was one of the best conferences that I have ever been to.  Food was amazing, very informative talks, lots of snacks and drinks, oh and don’t foget the free gphone! WOW!

But seriously, I attended mostly the App Engine talks and it seems to be a force to be reckoned with.  More on this later…

Recent Android Application

The MovieTix application uses a native Android client application which accesses RESTful web services exposed on the internet via HTTP. The architecture that we used was based on the standard 3-tier model. The client tier is represented by the native Android mobile application. The web tier uses the Mongrel application server, which uses the Ruby on Rails framework. Lastly the database tier uses MySQL.  The data is passed between client and server by using XML representations of the data as rendered by the Rails controllers.  Once the client receives the data SAX is used to parse the data instead of DOM so that we don’t need to load the entire XML object into memory.

Partners: David Kuo, Ryan Zhou

AndroidMobileTix

8 Photos

 

ColorTrack-Realtime WPF application

Most recently created application using Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and a few different national instruments devices.  WPF is a new windows UI library that is the next evolution of windows forms.  It provides flexibility by using XAML which is an XML based markup language to describe the UI.  The actual C# code is separated from the XAML markup.  The application reads data from various national instruments devices and displays/logs that data for the user.

Android vs. WPF vs. ???

Why do I compare Android to WPF?  They both seem to use some type of proprietary XML markup language to create their UI’s.  I suppose that this can lead to greater separation between UI/View code and codebehind/controller code.  MS has some software called Blend that generates the XAML for you with a WYSIWYG. Using the expression blend software from MS is suppose to allow graphical artists to be able to create UI’s without knowing too much about coding.  I wonder if this is really the case.

Obviously this idea isn’t new since web programmers have been using HTML/XML/XHTML for a long time now separating their view code from  server-side code.  Are we moving toward some direction here?  I wonder what other new technologies are adopting this web programming paradigm.

More Android fun facts

1. Linearlayout doesn’t support scrolling natively, so you can use a ScrollView instead.  Problem is the ScrollView can only have one element inside of it so you have to wrap all you stuff with, say, a LinearLayout to put inside the ScrollView.

2. When you start an activity within you main activity, you can pass data to it using something called a Bundle.  Look here

access Android Log file

adb logcat

from a terminal window

Android Network Calls

<uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.INTERNET” />
add this to the bottom of the manifest file right before
Someone said the new sdk requires permission for network calls.

log on OSX (leopard)

tail /private/var/log/system.log

private/var/log/apache2/error_log

had to “touch” it to create it, don’t know why

.htaccess AllowOverride

Was trying to test some rewrite rules with a site. For some reason modrewrite didn’t SEEM to be working. After banging my head against the wall a few times I found out that the
AllowOverride was set to none, where it should have been all.