The midVentures25 event is happening this Thursday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event.

midVentures25 is the first Chicago-based startup demo day & conference: 25 of the best investor-ready early-stage startups will demo their products in an open-floor expo.

The top 5 startups will have a chance to pitch to an audience of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, bloggers, media and Chicago's tech community. A panel of expert advisors will ask the tough questions -- ultimately choosing one company to win over $10,000 in services.

The focus of midVentures25 is to show the national technology and investment community that the Midwest has an abundance of early-stage innovators within the technology, consumer, and sustainability space. You can expect to engage thought leaders in education, art, media, business, science, and technology during the conference.

There are a lot of great innovations that continue to come from the Chicago community, as we know from the early stage clients we've helped towards success. We're looking forward to an event like this that brings the people that make this happen together. It should be a great evening.

Related posts:

1. Pathfinder sponsoring Day of Mobile in Chicago
2. Upcoming Pathfinder Appearances
3. Why Chicago is Rails-town, USA

This should be a very cool event , and we're excited about interacting with other mobile developers in the Chicago area. We look forward to seeing you there!

Day of Mobile is an all day event for mobile developers and enthusiasts that will take place at IIT on March 6, 2010. The overall goal of the event is to better prepare both Chicago's application development community and companies with mobile initiatives for the upcoming mobile revolution. We will cover a myriad of different topics relative to mobile development and strategy such as platform SDKs, cross platform development, multimedia, CMS/SMS, mobile business models and many more. The event will begin with a breakfast at 8AM and conclude after a keynote speech and hackathon awards ceremony at 4PM. Throughout the day, there will be talks running concurrently with one another in two adjoining ballrooms.

Related posts:

1. Pathfinder sponsors the midVentures25
2. Why Chicago is Rails-town, USA
3. Q&A with Trace Johnson of Chicago-based mobile-payment start-up Mpayy

We've been building a lot of mapping/GIS data visualization applications over the last few months, mostly using flex with various back end services (ArcGIS, google and yahoo maps, open source mapping frameworks.) One of the more fun little projects was putting together this flex widget for displaying maps and graphical data together on a timeline. It's meant to be distributable so that anyone with a blog can display it. We put it together using presidential election data and national debt, not because we thought the correlation was particularly significant, but because the data was available going back a long time. The widget is pretty flexible; it can go against a local data source or a web service, and we can easily modify it to show different kinds of data. We'll be coming out with a few more of these over the next few months, hopefully with some more 3D maps, drill down on geographic level, as well as more charting and other visualizations. If you'd like to use this one, or have ideas for other data sets and visualizations you'd like to see, let us know.

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA
3. Flare on PureMVC in Flex example

Vu360, the latest Pathfinder product, was launched by our client the Blue Book of Construction earlier last month.

It’s an Internet-tethered desktop application that enables easy viewing, markup and takeoff of PDF and TIFF documents for the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Some of the features include:

• Blueprints for projects seeking bids can be downloaded and annotated from the online plan room.
• Once a contractor is done annotating and marking up a blueprint, the file is easily saved back to the online plan room for viewing by the developer, general contractor or architect.
• While work is underway, the blueprint is saved on a users local computer. The tool does not require a persistent Internet connection to function.
• The tool includes a multitude of notations and graphing unique to the construction industry.
• The tool makes it easy to perform item counts and calculate length, perimeter, area and volume simply by drawing a square, line, cube or irregular, ad-hoc polygon directly on the blueprint.
• Sub-contractors can search BPM Select, Blue Book's repository of contracting supplies and products within the tool. When quoting installation of flooring, for example, a sub-contractor can link to a product sheet for the specific type of wood flooring they propose to use.

So far it’s been getting rave reviews from customers, including this one:

"VU360 is an incredible tool, and it’s sooooo easy to use. I cut back on my “job” estimate by at least 80% actual time. That would have been enough to impress me but, on top of that, I was able to export the figures to Excel."

We like those kinds of reviews. They tell us we’re doing something right when we design and develop software.

Vu360 is free, so if you’d like to download it and play with it, just go to the Blue Book and check it out. We’d love to get your feedback, so let us know what you think of it.

You can also check out the case study in our showcase for more project details and agile development goodness.

Our client, the Blue Book of Building and Construction also has a 40 minute tutorial for Vu360.

Related Services: PDF Application Development, .Net Application Development, Custom Software Development, User Experience Design

Related posts:

1. Launched: Rapid Reporting Employment Chek
2. The Desktop Application is Dead…Almost
3. Are You Building an Application or an Antique Web Framework?

Rails Test Prescriptions, the eBook put out by Noel Rappin, Director of Rails Development at Pathfinder, has been picked up by Pragmatic.

Congratulations to Noel - he's done a great job of furthering testing best practices in rails, and this is a great reward. As he said "I’m very excited by this. I’ve wanted to work with Pragmatic for as long as they’ve been publishing books, and I’m thrilled that this particular project will be able to get wider distribution and access to Pragmatic’s editorial expertise and skill."

* The current free “Getting Started with Rails Testing” ebook will continue to be available. If, at some time in the future, there’s a better Getting Started tutorial in the Pragmatic book, it may be offered as a replacement.

* The update site for current Rails Test Prescription owners will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

* There will be one more official update to the current Rails Test Prescriptions, probably around the end of August. This will wrap up the chapter or two I’m working on, and tie up some other loose ends.

* After that, errata and information about changes to test tools will most likely be handled via this blog and an errata page on the rails test prescriptions site.

This is Noel's 4th book with a major publisher, following Professional Ruby on Rails, wxPython in Action and Jython Essentials. We're happy for Noel and happy to have him at Pathfinder.

Related Services: Ruby on Rails Development, Custom Software Development

Related posts:

1. More Kudos for Rails Prescriptions
2. Rails Test Prescriptions is now on sale
3. Announcing Rails Prescriptions

Daring Fireball had another insightful article on the contrasting product strategies of Microsoft and Apple last week. Well worth a read in it's entirety if you're thinking about your own product strategy.

A few observations were particularly trenchant and relevant to me in light of my own recent experience:

Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

The truth of this was particularly relevant to me because just a few hours before reading this, I had spilled a full glass of water all over the keyboard of my laptop. An occupational hazard of talking a lot with your hands, but one I'd successfully resisted for the last two years, since my last such incident. It's a still rather painful memory.

I had spilled half a glass of wine on my pc, thanks to my one year old daughter's enthusiastic hand waving (it runs in the family.) As I frantically tried to sop up the spilled liquid while turning off the pc, I heard the hiss and crackle that told me I was in trouble. The next day I went in and had one of our infrastructure folks see what they could do, while trying to restore onto one of our spare pcs from my backup. It was very frustrating, wasted about two days of my time and quite a few hours from our staff, but I eventually got back up and running, minus a half day's and an evening's work that had been on my laptop.

Contrast that with my experience last week: I had since switched to a mac, have loved it, and switched my wife to a mac as well. My wife loves it, and I now hardly ever hear her calling "hon, it's not working" from her home office, something which happened at least a few nights a week when she had a pc. My experience last week just reinforced what a good decision it was. When the spill happened (a nearly full glass of water, all over my keyboard) I did the same thing as last time, shut down the computer, sopped up the wetness, turned the laptop over and called support. No sizzle. Within an hour, I was back up and running on one of our spare macs with practically no data loss, thanks to my continuous Time Machine backup. Worth the extra money? For both me and my company, the answer is a resounding YES!

Related Services: Custom Software Development, User Experience Design

Related posts:

1. Microsoft to Jump on Board EC2
2. Agile Business, Microsoft and the Threat of Cloud Computing
3. Your SDLC or Your Product – You Decide

Pathfinder and Rapid Reporting just launched EmploymentChek, the first employment verification tool that captures employment information from individual employers as well as automated subscription services.

Employment income is usually the primary means for an individual to repay a personal loan. Industry analysts estimate that 64% of all mortgage fraud is income- or identity-related, and that 21% of borrower applications have employment misrepresentations.

EmploymentChek is an addition to Rapid Reporting's existing web portal developed in Ruby on Rails.
Working within Rapid Reporting’s existing Rails environment, Pathfinder’s team delivered this highly-robust, first-of-breed solution in just over four months. EmploymentChek enforces anti-fraud best practices, and delivers extremely detailed reports including: extended public records findings and risk flags, responses to each interview question, interviewer’s subjective impressions, and detailed logging of unsuccessful interview attempts.

During development of EmploymentChek, the mortgage industry went through a period of downturn, which shifted priorities for the application. Pathfinder’s use of the Agile development process, which allows on-the-fly prioritization and reimagination of scope and features, allowed us the flexibility to meet the client’s changing needs in a volatile economic climate.

In addition, EmploymentChek’s service-oriented architecture allows for data vendors to be easily swapped out. This modular framework maximizes flexibility and eliminates the need for retooling the application when switching vendors, which saves time and money.

Take a look at the case study for more details.

Related posts:

1. Separating Reporting Environments In Production
2. Launched: Vu360 PDF Annotation and Markup Application
3. Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Windy City Rails is September 12, 2009

Here are a couple of upcoming Ruby and Rails-based appearances by Pathfinder personnel:

On Tuesday, June 23, Noel Rappin (referring to himself in the third person) will be the guest speaker at the Chicago Ruby.org monthly meeting. The meeting starts at 6:00 at Chicago Ruby's downtown loop meeting location, see the link for details. The working title of my talk is "I'd Like To Start Testing. Now What?" and it'll be an informal discussion of testing tools and good practice.

The schedule for WindyCityRails was announced this week. The conference is September 12, 2009 at the Westin Chicago River North. John McCaffrey from Pathfinder will be presenting "Super-easy PDF Generation with Prawn and Prawnto", and I'll be up there with "How To Test Absolutely Anything".

Other speakers include Ryan Singer from 37signals, Ben Scofield from Viget Labs, and Yehuda Katz from Engine Yard.

Registration through August 1st is $99, there are a couple of tutorial sessions also available for purchase.

This was a very well-run regional conference last year, and I'm excited for this year's edition. Hope to see you there.

Related posts:

1. Why Chicago is Rails-town, USA
2. Upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff conference
3. Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA

photo credit: Paul L. Nettles

We're starting a software development summer internship in our Chicago office this year. If you're a college junior, senior or recent graduate who want to learn the agile/OO development ropes while developing really cool products and services and earning $20/hr per hour (you should pay for the privilege, right?), give the internship posting a look here.

Related posts:

1. Software Development and Wasted Motion
2. Ruby on Rails Internship
3. Software Development and the Construction Analogy

There's more information in the case study on the Pathfinder web site, Sasha has written a related post on RubyAMF and Flex from the Flex perspective , and Justin has written one on Rails, AMF and Flex from the Rails perspective.

Related posts:

1. Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary
2. Rails, AMF and Flex
3. Pathfinder releases version 1 of its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica)

In just over a week, I'll be headed off to RailsConf for my second visit.

Here's an overview of some of the sessions I'm looking forward to.

First, of course, is my own: Below and Beneath TDD: Test-Last Development and Other Real-World Test Patterns. It's at 2:50 on Tuesday, May 5, in Ballroom B. I'll be talking about how Test-Driven Development can fail, how to recognize failure patterns, and how and why to move back to a successful process. No matter what your level of comfort is with testing, I think you'll get something out of this talk. It's going to be fun, and I'm excited about the chance to present.

I'm also going to be giving out free copies of Rails Test Prescriptions (well, it's an ebook, I'll be giving out free licenses). I haven't quite worked out the exact details yet, but it'll be similar to last year's plan, and will involve seeing me or attending my session. Follow the book on Twitter for information about giveaways. Follow me on Twitter for general updates about the conference.

And come up and say hi -- I'd love to meet people who read this blog or the Rails Prescriptions book.

Other talks and sessions that I'm particularly interested in include:

Monday:

Building Next Generation Web Apps With Rails and SproutCore. Very much hoping my flight on Monday gets me there in time to get to this tutorial. I'm interested SproutCore especially as a rich application alternative to Flash.

Tuesday, other than me:

The morning keynote is DHH. He's always interesting to hear speak.

iPhone on Rails with Mike Clark. We're increasingly doing projects that integrate mobile and web resources.

It's worth mentioning that Ballroom B is very nearly a testing track all day Tuesday. David Chelimsky on Mock Objects, Kevin Barnes on non-fixtured data, Larry Karnowski and Jason Rudolph on JavaScript testing, me, and Aslak Hellesøy on Cucumber.

That last slot on Tuesday is a very tough call between that Cucumber talk and Obie Fernandez on business practices.

Wednesday

Tough call in the 11:45 slot between Are You Taking Things Too Far, by Michael Koziarski and a Rails 3 talk by Matt Aimonetti.

I'm hoping to go to at least one of the legacy talks, probably Pat Maddox and BJ Clark's

The evening keynote is Robert Martin, called "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby Too". Very interested in this one. (Last year, Kent Beck, this year Robert Martin. Maybe next year's "Smalltalker Keynote" could be Alan Kay? Pretty please?)

Thursday

Webrat, which I've been using via Cucumber. I'm interested to see what this talk says about Webrat on its own.

The Rack talk looks interesting.

The Rails Envy talk on the year in innovation is probably a good one to attend to pick up some cool thing I've overlooked.

Hope to see you there!

Related posts:

1. RailsConf ‘09: After the RailsConfening
2. Welcome To RailsConf
3. RailsConf 2008 and Free Book Giveaway

We recently launched a new Touch Screen Kiosk deployed in both Adobe Air and Flex. Touch Screen Kiosks pose some interesting usability challenges, some of which overlap with those for the iPhone. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Touch Screen Kiosk Demo

Related posts:

1. Adobe “Open Screen” is not “Open Source”
2. the iPhone and Touch screen technology
3. Hedge Fund Analytics in Flex

This is the cover

Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping your Application healthy is now on sale. This is a beta, partial release.

Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to testing your Rails application, covering both the mechanics of writing tests and the style for writing good and useful tests.

I'm excited to be publishing this electronically in a way that allows me to keep the book up to date as Rails changes over the upcoming months and years. Your $9 purchase entitles you to all updated versions for the life of the book.
The current table of contents looks like this:

A basics section:

• Basics—creating test files, running tests
• Model tests
• Controller tests
• Integration tests
• View tests
• Fixtures
• Helper tests
• Mocks and stubs

The more detailed section currently has:

• Refactoring setups
• Testing style guide (incomplete)
• Fixture replacements
• Testing with Date/Time
• Faker

Planned for the future:

• Third-party view testing
• Security testing
• route testing
• Ajax testing
• Mailer testing
• File Upload Testing
• Refactoring assertions
• Shoulda
• RSpec
• Cucumber
• Webrat
• Dealing with legacy projects
• Autotest
• Tarantula
• Heckle
• RCov

Related posts:

1. More Kudos for Rails Prescriptions
2. Rails Test Prescriptions to be Published by Pragmatic
3. Announcing Rails Prescriptions

Related posts:

1. The Blogs Have Moved
2. PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?
3. Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Check out Rails Prescriptions

I’d like to read a brief statement, and then I’ll take a few questions.

Today I’m happy to announce the grand opening of
Rails Prescriptions, a purveyor of fine Ruby on Rails books and book-like products.

The first book from Rails Prescriptions will be titled Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping your application healthy, and will be available for order in January, 2009.

Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to automated testing for your Rails application, containing more than 30 individual prescriptions on various Rails testing features and techniques. I’ll be continually updating the book after its initial release to allow for changes in Rails, new testing tools, correction of the occasional error, and reader feedback. I want this book to stay in date as long is it has readers.

And now, your questions. I’m guessing:

What format will the book be released in?

The book will be a DRM-free PDF file. Additional formats (like a print-on-demand version) may be offered if there’s an outcry.

How long will the book be?

Not sure how meaningful this is because the page formatting is optimized for screen, but the PDF will probably wind up being around 200 pages give or take a couple dozen.

What’s the schedule and pricing?

The final book will probably be $9, and will be available sometime towards the end of January, 2009. Free samples will most likely pop up by the end of 2008 or so, and there will be a chance to buy a beta/incomplete version earlier in January, probably at some discount. But I haven’t decided on that for sure.

Once you’ve bought the book, you’ll be able to get free updates regularly for some extended period of time. I really want this book to stay up to date and useful.

January is like, weeks in the future. Why announce it now?

Because I want to hear from potential readers now. I have an outline with about 30 potential sections. But I want to know what’s important to the people that might actually buy this book. What tools would you like to see documented. What part of Rails do you find hard to test? Generally, what would make a book on Rails testing something you would actually use to make your work easier?

How can I make suggestions?

The two best ways are to email to railsprescriptions at gmail.com or head over to our Get Satisfaction link at http://getsatisfaction.com/railsprescriptions. You can also direct message me on twitter.

How can I follow the Rails Prescriptions news?

Subscribe to the Rails Prescriptions 24 Hour Window
blog. Also, I’ll be updating via twitter, follow me there.

How far along is it?

Something like 30% of the first draft complete at this point.

Why this book, this way, this time?

Well here’s a funny story. I started pitching a (different) Rails book to publishers, a process that started in June ‘08, and resulted in a tentative offer toward the end of October. That required me to turn in the book in April ‘09 for publication in August ‘09. That’s a long time, especially since there’s no easy way to keep a major-publisher book up to date.

So, I thought, I can do this myself and get it out in front of people a whole lot faster than 14 months. And I could keep the book up-to-date. And choose my own tools and layout. Suddenly this started to sound like a lot of fun.

Having decided to distribute my own book, it seemed like a book on testing would be a bit more fun to start with than my original plan. (If things go well, some form of the original book will be the second Rails Prescriptions title).

Sounds great. Now what?

Thanks for reading this far. Check out the Rails Presciptions blog and the twitter feed, and watch this space for more info.

Related posts:

1. Rails Test Prescriptions to be Published by Pragmatic
2. More Kudos for Rails Prescriptions
3. Rails Test Prescriptions is now on sale

You can see the site here. Come often as it will be updated on a regular basis.

The goal of this site is to shed more light on what is it that we do here at Pathfinder with the Flash Platform.
We would be very grateful to hear feedback about the site from any perspective.

The Site was developed using Flex Builder 3.

We were focusing on several things:

• Presenting our work in a manner that is fast and easy to consume
• Fast loading times of site and content
• Maintaining the same experience on any screen resolution, major browsers and OS’s
• Testing SEO optimization for Flash Platform
• Uniformity and reusability of interaction effects
• Ease of dynamic content maintenance

Presenting our work in a manner that is fast and easy to consume

We decided to present our work mostly using screen casts of apps being used. We thought that this would be the quickest way for our visitor to get a good taste of our work.

Fast loading times of site and content

We used Amazon's Cloud Front CDN to store streaming video content.  Setting up cross domain permissions was a little tricky.  Images loaded from Cloud Front would have a slight delay loading right after initialization of the site, otherwise they acted great. We're still looking into this issue as we think that using Cloud Front is potentially a great approach for storing content like images and videos, at a substantially lower cost than Akamai or Limelight Networks.

All content was optimized for web using Adobe Photoshop and QuickTime Pro. The Site’s interface is entirely created out of vectors, for screen resolution scalability and fast loading times. Vector content is either programatic, either imported from Adobe Illustrator as mentioned in this post.

Maintaining the same experience on any screen resolution, major browsers and OS’s

Flash does take care a lot of this business out of the box.

Though this is a Flex application, we chose to use good ol’ Flash Stage resizing method:
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL .

The catch with this one is that your flash movie size (width/height) in HTML has to be 100% or the line will not work.
It turned out that this was not a bad idea at all. It allowed us to focus on one layout of known proportions that will fit any screen size the same way.
Plan B would have been to use the standard Flex constraints system for display objects, but in this case the results were so different (naturally) that the site would have had tremendously different appearance based on screen resolution.

Testing SEO for Flash Platform

As mentioned in this post Google doesn’t index Flash dynamic content. We had to go back to standard SEO techniques for Flash Platform.

To name a couple:

• We embedded a lot of text content in the Flash file itself.
• We filled the HTML wrapper as any HTML page sans the body content.

Uniformity and re-usability of interaction effects

We wanted to have standard effects for particular interactions.
For interaction effects we created various effect classes that would have two parameters in constructor:

• Targeted UIComponent
• Function to be executed at the end of effect.

All the timers and listeners for the effect are stored in the effect class.
First parameter makes the effect useful work for pretty much anything.
Second parameter proved useful for execution based on the effect timing.

Ease of dynamic content maintenance

Since there is not a whole lot of content to be maintained, we decided to have all the content catalogued in two XML files, one for the Case Studies and one for the image gallery. This has proved yet again to be the fastest and easiest way to setup and maintain small scale content.

Related posts:

1. Google Analytics Tracking Component for Flash Platform
2. Performance Optimization for Flash Player
3. Flash Technology vs. Flash Developer

The Ajax Experience last week in Boston yielded lots of exciting developments on the Ajax history management front:

• My talk itself drew a crowd of 110 people or so despite its 8.10 a.m. start time. I received good questions from the audience and didn't notice too many people heading for the doors when they realized how deep into the nitty-gritty technical details I was getting. Instead of using Keynote or Powerpoint for my slides, I built a basic DHTML application. That way, one artifact could serve as both my content and a demo of Really Simply History, the Ajax history and back-button library I maintain. You can view the application - and the slides - at Pathfinder Labs.
• I did not meet my goal of releasing an alpha of Really Simple History 0.8 in conjunction with the conference. But I did accomplish a ton of work on the library during the build-up to my talk. I'm now hard at work finalizing the alpha and preparing updates to the project's Google Code-hosted homepage.
• The most exciting Ajax history development was the face time I enjoyed with Nathan Hammond, creator of JavaScript State Manager (JSSM), and Brad Neuberg, original creator of Really Simple History. After my talk we enjoyed an impromptu Ajax back-button summit and hammered out a shared agenda for the future of both my library and the topic in general. I'm pleased to announce that Nathan will be coming on as an RSH co-maintainer with the goal of merging RSH 0.8 and JSSM into a single, stable 1.0 library. I'm also excited that Brad, Nathan and I - plus other authors of Ajax history libraries who wish to participate - will be issuing a position paper on the current history implementation in the HTML 5 spec. Ajax history experts, please contact me via Pathfinder if you want to weigh in.
• As for the conference itself, it was my first time attending The Ajax Experience and I really enjoyed it. The topics were many, varied and well-presented. My favorites included Douglas Crockford's discussion of JavaScript's good parts, which could have been a simple book promo but turned out to be far more; the panel discussion between the leaders of YUI, Dojo, jQuery and Prototype moderated by the inimitable PPK; and my colleage Dietrich's un-sexy but vital look at how to resurface J2EE apps for Ajax using the Google Web Toolkit.

  I have to say, the crowd here felt like my tribe. The guys running around with the word "JavaScript" shaved into their hair put a smile on my face. Ajax developers are often third-class citizens at other conferences. They're either jammed together with designers and user experience folks, or thrown into the midst of Java and Ruby developers. That wasn't the case here, and I dug it highly.

  My least favorite aspect of the conference had nothing to do with the crowd or the content; it was the depressing lack of vegan food. One meal was 90% vegan, but most were 0%. Given the conference center's distance from civilization, it would have been nice if attendees' diverse dietary needs had been taken into consideration. On the plus side, I think I lost five pounds.

Many thanks to the folks from Tech Target for the awesome speaker support. My name, so amusingly misspelled on the monitor outside the ballroom where I spoke, had been corrected by the time I took the podium.

And special thanks to Ben, Dion and everyone at Ajaxian for throwing such a jam-packed event, letting me speak at it, and doing so much for the Ajax community over the years.

Related posts:

1. The Ajax Experience 2008: Hope to see you in Beantown
2. IE8, HTML5 and Ajax Navigation: The future of Really Simple History
3. A mea culpa, and a launch date, for Really Simple History 0.8

I'm posting today from Boston, where my colleague Dietrich Kappe and I are proud to be presenting at The Ajax Experience 2008.

At 5.10 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday 30 September), Dietrich will present "Saving Your Investment: Transforming J2EE Applications into Web 2.0 Using GWT." This 90-minute session will introduce noobs to the Google Web Toolkit; school experienced GWT developers in the security implications of leaky client-side business logic; and delight business folks and bean-counters alike with the money-savings possibilities of retrofitting a legacy webapp instead of building a new one from scratch.

At 8.10 a.m. the following day (Wednesday 1 October), I will present "Making Friends with the Browser: Ajax, Back Buttons and Bookmarks." In it, I'll look at the state of Ajax history management, from new libraries such as the JavaScript State Manager and dsHistory to my own project, Really Simple History. I'll discuss the problems and tradeoffs inherent in any browser history manager. I'll also examine the impact of new browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on this small, rapidly evolving corner of the Ajax world.

We look forward to seeing some of you there and reporting back about the rest of the conference.

Related posts:

1. HTML5, Ajax history management, and The Ajax Experience 2008 Boston
2. Ajax Predictions for 2008
3. Comet 2008: The State of Play in Reverse Ajax

Picture of me at Windy City Rails taken by John McCaffrey

Last Saturday at Windy City Rails, I had the pleasure of announcing TankEngine, a new Rails plugin for targeting iPhone and Mobile Safari. ("git" it here)

Now, I know, I've done this already, so why a brand-new version of the plugin with a new name?

Good question. The original plugin was basically a wrapper around the iUI JavaScript and CSS classes. After working with iUI for a while, it turned out that I had a few differences of opinion with iUI (which I still think is a very nice piece of work).

• iUI is effectively optimized towards a drill-down list, and especially one where all the list data is sent down as a single page. This is somewhat restrictive for a Rails application.
• iUi has a custom history mechanism for managing going backward through the list, but the mechanism causes conflicts with any other DOM-id based JavaScript on the page.
• The CSS structure for iUI makes very strong assumptions about the structure of the underlying HTML

Again, not a criticism of iUI, just an acknowledgement that it wasn't quite meeting my needs.

Which brings us to TankEngine, which offers the following.

• A jQuery-based JavaScript layer, for managing iPhone-esque look and feel.
• A more flexible mechanism for deciding which requests get the iPhone content.
• An updated CSS page, based on the iUI original, but a bit more flexible, and also using WebKit specific CSS where appropriate.
• A lot of helpers for lists and toggles and the like.

There's still work to be done on the API, and adding some other iPhone style elements, but if you've got some needs in this area, check it out.

Related Services: Ruby on Rails Development, iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development

Related posts:

1. Rails Development for iPhone with rails_iui
2. “Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 2: Displaying iPhone content to the client” Also up on IBM Developerworks
3. “Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 3: Developing advanced views for iPhone” now available on IBM Developerworks

WindyCityRails Logo

A quick plug for the WindyCityRails conference being held tomorrow here in Chicagoland. I guess it's technically not a "plug" since the conference is all sold out, but it does promise to be a fun day. So think of this post as a promise against a longer post on Monday with a round up.

The headline session is a Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson. David Chelimsky, lead developer of RSpec is also speaking. And we have three talks from Pathfinder as well.

John McCaffery will be doing a presentation on JavaScript practices including testing and debugging.

I'll be doing a talk on iPhone web development, and a talk on testing that I hope will also be fun.

Expect some round ups early next week. If you can't wait that long, I'll probably be updating my twitter feed all day with any interesting info.

Related posts:

1. Rails Performance, Code Metrics, and Locking Down your Application: Tips & Tricks from Windy City Rails 2008
2. Upcoming Pathfinder Appearances
3. Why Chicago is Rails-town, USA