http://www.pathf.com/blogs Running commentary about agile development, user experience design and Ajax. Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:33:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Flickr Image By Darwin Bell Every web site that has some concept of user login also has some concept of user roles. Administrators have special editing access or behind the scenes report views. Users with different relationships have different ability to view the other user's data, and so on. In my ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/roles-testing-for-security/ I'm excited to announce the arrival of Blackbird, an open-source JavaScript logging and profiling utility written by G. Scott Olson, a former colleague from my days at Orbitz Worldwide. A previous iteration of Blackbird provided no-nonsense, cross-browser logging on a variety of projects within Orbitz. Since that iteration, known as ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/blackbird-takes-the-pain-out-of-javascript-logging/ I've been using GWT to resurface interfaces of a variety of legacy applications -- J2EE, PHP, Rails -- and more often than not that means working with JSON returned from the server. One thing that I've found is that GWT's JSON support is kind of chatty. That is, you have ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/making-gwt-json-not-quite-so-painful/ The IDEA conference is being held in Chicago this year, and once again MAYA Design hosted the preconference workshop on Information Architecture. Some thoughts from the morning’s discussions. Why diagram? We diagram in order to depict the information space in such a manner that allows us to visually validate to the ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/idea-preconference-workshop-06-oct-08/ 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 ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/html5-ajax-history-management-and-the-ajax-experience-2008-boston/ Updates to past posts: TankEngine Thanks to Gregg and Jason at RailsEnvy for mentioning TankEngine on their podcast. The git repository now has 54 watchers and 3 forks. Thanks, everybody who is watching. I'm hoping for some updates soon. Plugin testing This is always what I'm afraid of, I write a big post on ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/a-look-back-at-past-post/ First thing that came to my mind when I initially heard about the iPhone was the multi-touch possibilities that would start changing the way we create Flash/Flex interfaces (hopefully through SDK extension supporting multi-touch on Adobe's side triggered by iPhone release). It looked very promising and natural to me in the ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/flash-player-on-iphone-gossip/ Hold on to your hats; Microsoft has just made a radical change in business model. A couple of months ago I wrote about the competitive advantage that firms using Linux and Amazon's EC2 cloud computing had over their competitors. Server-on-demand providers like Amazon's EC2, Joyent, and others have reduced the capital necessary ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/microsoft-to-jump-on-board-ec2/ Lets face it, most people come to Ajax conference for the eye candy. TAE Boston 2008 is no different, and the jQuery, Dojo and other sessions are packed. That's great. I love good eyecandy. But the shame is that many folks skip the less sexy presentations, such as today's presentation ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/tae-boston-2008-the-unsexy-presentations/ 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 ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/the-ajax-experience-2008-hope-to-see-you-in-beantown/ 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 ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/tankengine-new-plugin-for-rails-iphone-development/ In a project that I am currently a part of, we inherited Ruby on Rails from our client's system and project front-end was designated to be developed in Flex. RubyAMF came naturally. I have been working with two other AMF frameworks prior to this: AMFPHP and WebOrb. My experience with both ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/simphony-of-ruby-on-rails-and-flex-through-rubyamf/ Jason Fried from 37Signals spoke yesterday at the ITA "Speaking of Success" event, about the history of 37Signals, their philosophy and culture, and the critical business decisions they've made to get them where they are today.The software biz is fundamentally broken. Too many products fail because of the obsession of ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/build-half-a-product-not-a-half-assed-product-tips-on-clarity-and-focus-from-jason-fried-of-37signals/ Windy City Rails was the best Rails conference I've ever been to, which is easy for me to say since it was my first actual Rails conference. But even speaking from a fairly uninformed point of view I found it very full of quality. In case you didn't know, it ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/tips-tricks-from-windy-city-rails/ Monopsony - the market condition that exists when there is only one buyer. We all have heard the term "monopoly" and even know a little bit of what it means - a market where there is only one seller. But the related term "monopsony," a market where there is only one ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/betting-your-business-on-the-iphone/ Shalk Neethling has written up a nice, streamlined tutorial on how to build a model in GWT using the GWTx project's support for java.beans.PropertyChangeSupport. The basic idea here is that while the browser is the View and the server side is the Model and Controller in MVC, you really should structure ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/gwt-tutorial-building-a-model/ CSS 2.1 is more like a Swiss Army knife than a fully stocked toolbox. We can accomplish a lot, but we have to get creative with the standard attachments. Floats, relative positioning, the box model - each tool must performs double or triple duty because they're the only ones we've ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/what-does-your-css-swiss-army-knife-look-like/ 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 ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/windy-city-rails/ ZK 3.5, the latest version of the server-side Ajax framework, is out with a raft of new features. Three of those features really stand out for me: Comet server push Customization of look and feel Performance monitoring Server push via polling has been available in ZK for a while, and Comet in the ZK ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/zk-35-released-with-comet-support/ One of the great advantages of Flash technology is cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. That is almost entirely true but a few things did slip Adobe. A big issue that was overlooked is support for mouse wheel event on Mac OSX. A pretty basic functionality you would think. If your interface is ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/09/mouse-wheel-scroll-event-in-flash-player-running-on-a-mac/