BarCamp Tampa Bay 2010 is coming up

It is an unconference, which means that there are presentations throughout the day but they are done by willing attendees instead of pre-planned speakers.

The topics and the presenters are diverse, but will appeal to anyone who works (or has an interest) in technology and the internet. This is an event for web designers, developers, marketers, copy writers, SEOs, sys admins and anyone who operates a business with a web presence to get together and share their knowledge.

Largest software development environment in the market

Read an interesting article over on Carsonified's "think vitamin" blog this morning. Ryan Carson and co are the folks behind the highly recommended Future of Web Apps Conferences (FOWA Miami, 08 was brilliant)

http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/web-development-is-moving-on-are-you/

This quote sums it up nicely:

    Web development turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets to one of the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years. The web as the platform is a hollow dream no longer ‐ you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host anything yourself and you can even get the data from other sources. With this radical shift comes a lot of change for developers, but the question is, are you keeping up?

Blue Monday

From a British tabloid:

     If you woke up feeling blue today then the chances are you are not alone. For Monday, January 19, 2009 is going to be the most depressing day in history, according to experts.

Cold weather, fading Christmas memories and broken New Year resolutions mean this period is usually miserable, but the effects of the economic downturn makes this year worse than ever.

Millions will feel so glum they will decide to stay in bed and up to a quarter of workers are expected to call in sick, research suggests. Psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall has devised a mathematical formula that pinpoints today as Blue Monday.

This article caught my eye as I remember seeing another in an American paper how a survey of Americans revealed they were "too optimistic" about the current economic crisis. Interesting to see how different cultures (or at the least the media's portrayal of them) differ when faced with comparable problems. However the British may be glum but have an ever lasting staying power which allows them to "pull through" anything. My Grandma said it best when I asked her what the British peoples response was to the Blitz in World War II... "We mustn't grumble". I can only imagine, 1 in 3 houses are nothing but rubble, food shortages, possibility of invasion and... "We mustn't grumble". Gotta Love it.

The evolution of web design...

Very interesting article by the folks @ 37Signals concerning the iteration of design. Specifically the iterations a sign up form goes through. What makes this article stand out for me is how the author focuses on ONE page which on its own goes through half a dozen iterations. It's far more common place (and not as interesting) for design articles to focus on an entire site and therefore only give you the broad strokes.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the-new-highrise-signup-chart

JSON

I have been looking out for something like this. A JSON parser built into your web framework. A lot of AJAX examples pass back simple name-value pairs. This can grow cumbersome as the amount of data grows however. JSON, Short for JavaScript Object Notation, JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write, and for machines to parse and generate. JSON is based on the object notation of the JavaScript language. However, it does not require JavaScript to read or write because it is a text format that is language independent.

I came across the Grails/JSON integration this while reading fellow Java and Grails developer James Lorenzen blog entry:

http://jlorenzen.blogspot.com/2008/07/grails-json-parser.html

Your Personal Brand

I have been following the micro-blogging trend over at twitter.com (follow me here: twitter.com/jameshatton). I'm sure I'm not the first to comment on this but it hit me today that one of the trends with the modern web, or Web 2.0 is to use your own name. In the earlier days of the web it was standard to use a pseudonym or alias... starting with hacker names I suppose such as DEATH-OVERDRIVE or NEO. This kind of caught on with other crowds with people naming themselves CatPerson or ILoveIcecream89. With the rise of social networking however people seem or the more willing to use their real names and real photos - if for no other reason then to ensure their friends can find them.

This reminds me of a talk by Gary Vaynerchuk I was lucky enough to attend at the Future Of Web Apps in Miami last year concerning your "personal brand". I could never express it as well as Gary himself... if you've never heard him speak here's your chance: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/2008/07/01/the-personal-brand-gold-rush-is-going-on-where-are-you/

Web Services and Dynamic Languages

I have been brushing up on my web services skill set. The Java platform has a really nice implementation now with JAX-WS particularly JAX-B when combined with Intelli-J. The Jet Brains folks provide good tutorials for both Apache Axis and default Sun web service implementations. I have experimented with both.

However an area which is currently lacking concerns the combination of web services with dynamic languages such as Groovy particularly a Grails friendly integration. It is not always ideal to handle every web request RESTfully and if you have to use SOAP then JAX-WS makes life *a lot* easier.

The main question I have now is if you have a java web application to serve as your web service and a GRAILs application to serve as your web user interface is there anyway to share the Grails controller with the web service to prevent duplication of a persistence layer? My reading continues...