Jeremy gives the big announcement of Yahoo! giving developers access to its search data. You can do 5000 queries a days opposed to 1000 for Google. It would be tough to build a business off of that but it's more than enough to developer some cool applications.
So, I've decided to share my Project Revelation Ta-da list. I do this as a way to cement my goals as well as possibly enduring public humiliation if I don't complete (m)any of them.
Brian Oxley gives a good overview of some of the nice design decisions the developers of Joda Time made.
Ryan Tomayko posts one of the best takes on the whole Rails vs. Java issue which seemingly sprouts up every few days. Read it.
I think the key to overcoming this problem is just to keep on talking. Over time it will become apparent that you can't measure dynamic language approaches under the static language microscope and then maybe we can just get on with things and start figuring out where the two environments can work together. It is perhaps not an accident that some of the most beautiful places in nature are the coasts where two strange environments meet.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has a list of their top ten most critical web application vulnerabilities. Even though they seem to be common sense, it doesn't mean that there aren't still plenty of sites which are still vulnerable.
Security audits, whether internal or external, can be very painful but they are also needed in today's networked world.
JetBrains, the folks behind IDEA, are putting together an online magazine, OnBoard.
I just found it today and so far I've found some good stuff like a look at Listeners Dependency Injection and the Structural Search and Replace used IDEA which is very helpful when refactoring your code base.
I don't think I can really say anything about this right now. Too much shock and too many emotions.
C. Max over at The Millions gives a one-stop shopping post about book news via RSS. I've just added a few more sites to my feed list.
DWR looks to be a wrapper for the hip XMLHttpRequest idea. You can specify Java POJO's and DWR will take care of the Javascript necessary to call it.
It also looks to have integration with Spring which could be cool.
Carlos Sanchez gives 5 Maven features which all developers should love. I will be the first to admit that I've never been really fond of Maven. I saw its inception on the Gump mailing lists and then the takeover of the Turbine build system.
I will say though that if more emphasis was put on these five things, I bet more developers wouldn't have quite so bad a taste in their mouth when it comes to Maven. I do disagree with Carlos about not reinventing the wheel though. While these five things are great, they are not enough for me to just throw out my build system and rework it in Maven.
Witch looks to be a cool application switcher for OS X. Not only can you switch applications but you can also switch to a particular window of an application.
Karl Baum posts about using Spring to allow for the setting of properties without resorting to rebuilding / redeploying.
Marcus shows the process of going from Ant - Maven - Raven (Ruby-based build system) and back to Ant. I wouldn't be surprised if more people won't be doing that.
High on my list of things to do is to look closely at our build system and clean it up. We are still using Ant but I think we can utilize some of the more recent additions. Things like imports and macrodefs.
My co-worker Chris Holland has put together a look at various applications which can help you lock down your Mac.
Jason is trying to calm folks down about the current scandal related to the new Google toolbar. It has a feature which will rewrite certain things on a page and create a link.
For example, a FedEx tracking number would be turned into a link to the FedEx site so you could go directly to your tracking.
I am tending to agree with Jason on this especially in the sense that a user is consciously downloading the toolbar and turning the feature on. It wasn't like the SmartTags incident of a few years ago where Microsoft was seemingly just going to include the feature in IE without any warning or way to turn it off.
All of that being said, it is good that people are thinking critically about any company, no matter what their street cred.
Steve Jenson gives a great syllabus for learning to build distributed systems.
It looks like you can spend a weekend and strip all of the cruft from Spring and come out with just the IOC implementation.
Too bad, it's JDK 1.5 only since I'm doing all my development on the Mac. This would be fun to play around with.
Looks like another attempt to get folks who use Python in SoCal together. I never made it to any of the Meetups though I don't really think they had any because the numbers weren't there.
Hopefully, this try will work out better.
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.and how to get open source developers:
So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software)."Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
Erik Benson gives an overview of how he uses Bloglines to aggregate all of his data.
Pitchers and Catchers report today.
Finally, the year can actually begin.
Mike from Atlassian has started a new blog, interviewing developers. Should be an interesting one to keep an eye on.
Masukomi posts her feelings about the need to rewrite everything after becoming part of a project. I think that's a totally natural thing and one that I've felt whenever I've been somewhere for longer than a month. And while I don't consider the current project I'm on to be filled with crap, there are always places to improve things.
One good thing about coming into a project from the outside is that you aren't worrying about the politics of the code when you look at it. You are only focused on how you can make it better, not necessarily who wrote what and how that would be very difficult to change.
Trails is not necessarily a Java rewrite of Rails but it might be a distant cousin. You can also see more about it at the main developer's blog.
James Todd posts on how to run a private instance of MyJXTA which does not try to connect to the main public network.
Ivy looks interesting. It's a dependency manager which can be a standalone program or integrated with Ant.
Bruce Snyder blogs about a new Continuous Integration tool, Hudson. It looks to have started as a rewrite of Damage Control from Ruby to Java. I haven't tried it yet but I like the ability to remotely check on builds. That can be very useful.
More info can be found on the developer's blog.
Good overview of the best time to use each.
This leads to a good rule of thumb. If you're updating the page with new or updated information, you most likely don't want a history event. So, use XMLHttpRequest. On the other hand, if you're working in resposne to a user request, it would often be better to use the IFrame approach in order to preserve back button behavior.
Looks like Jython is getting back to work. It would really be a great thing for the developers to get at least within sight of the current Python libraries. Yet another thing to keep my eye on.
Looks like JetBrains is licensing the IDEA IDE to open source projects. I think that is amazingly cool. I've never been an IDE guy but using IDEA for about a year now has at least allowed me to be a bit more tolerant of them.
Very good overview of checking email on a public wireless network. It would be great if these sort of things could either become a standard of a mail application or if the process could be a bit more automated, things like changing the incoming/outgoing hosts automatically would just be awesome.
Looks like the dates for the LayerOne conference have been announced. Plus, they are going to be in Old Towne so now I really don't have an excuse not to go except I think that weekend is same as the LA Times Book Festival. Oh man, the horror, the horror...
Journalisimo, a very cool new blog detailing analog writing, posts about a Paper Enigma Machine which looks quite amazing. Enigma machines were used by the Germans in WW2.
This past weekend, I purchased and read Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. It was definitely a great read and deserving of the attention it is getting now.
From blogs and newspaper reviews to a recommendation from ESPN.com's Daily Quickie, many people are being told about the book.
I'm currently in the middle of two books, Getting Things Done and a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. I don't think that is a normal combination but it's fine for me.