beTech :: Evolve Already

On Wednesday, March 26, Madelyn Wessel and Bethany Nowviskie will present their experience in making the Library’s Blacklight project (http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/) open source.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, March 26
* 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
* Byrd Seminar Room in the Harrison/Small Library
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/harrison/facilities.html#byrd)
(http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Blacklight is an OPAC (online public access catalog) developed at the University of Virginia Library; it has been made public under an Apache 2.0 license. Blacklight was the first project made possible by beTech Labs and is the first project to come out of beTech Labs as open source.

Madelyn Wessel is Special Advisor to the University Librarian and Liaison to the General Counsel, focusing on a broad range of library system legal issues including intellectual property, copyright, licensing, and special issues arising in the area of digital scholarship.

Bethany Nowviskie is the Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at U.Va. Library. She is active in digital humanities and is an advocate for academic open source.

The Richmond Java User Group talk “Getting Started with Grails” is tonight (Wednesday, March 21st) at 5:30 PM in Glen Allen, VA.

Grails is an open-source web application framework that’s all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and the powerful and dynamic Groovy language. Together with these elements and Groovy’s ability to integrate seamlessly with your existing Java code, Grails finally legitimizes rapid web application development for the Java platform.

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I’ve just spent the majority of my weekend trying to install and learn about Joomla CMS, only to be disheartened when I came to learn how pitifully it supports web standards and Web 2.0 style app development. By the sizes of its developer and user communities (aka the “Joomlasphere”), and the near-fanatical loyalty and enthusiasm I detected as I visited Joomla-related sites, I assumed Joomla would have long been tweaked to rock out with things like CSS layout and integration of some of the new-fangled javascript dhtml/ajax/animation libraries. Not so, at least not without undue hacking and headaches. Read this and weep (look under the “Mambo” entry, as Joomla is a branch of Mambo.) I did, after successfully installing Joomla and spending about 10 hours this weekend reading documentation, installing extensions, and configuring the bastard.

After looking at the PHP code of the main Joomla content component, and seeing how riddled it was with tables, and realizing how inextricable tables were from its core, I proceeded to search for another CMS. This time I was going for something that was built to support web standards and Web 2.0. A quick Google search landed me at the MODx site. Wow! It seemed too good to be true. From their website:

“MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts—hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.”

MODx is written in PHP—support requirements are minimal enough for it to work on the UVa unix web cluster—it’s open-source, it’s free, and it looks remarkably well organized. I successfully installed it in the twilight hours yesterday, and have yet to really take it for a test drive. When I do, I’ll post my impressions and/or battle stories. One quick note: if you install it on the UVa web cluster you’ll want to rename some of the files to have .suphp extensions and put a little rewrite hack in an .htaccess file in your root. I’ll post specific instructions for this in the next few days.

At the Adobe MAX 2006 Conference in Las Vegas last week everyone was going hog wild about the new Flex Application Framework and IDE for building the next generation of Flash based web applications. Something that I got pumped about was the fact that you can push data from the server to the client. Also, some other cool items to mention are:

• The Flex Builder 2 on Macintosh Beta is available for free
• If you don’t want to spend any $, no trouble… the Flex SDK is Free!
• It runs on a J2EE environment, and the IDE runs on Eclipse. The Java folks are hyped about it.

A belated happy 15th birthday to the World Wide Web. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the source code for his WorldWideWeb project on an alt.hypertext Usenet discussion group and changed the World forever.

In the historical blink of an eye, the web has transformed business, government, and everyday life far more than any other technology in human history. Beyond the obvious effects of the web revolution, we are now just beginning to experience the benefits of the once underappreciated ideals that drove Mr. Berners-Lee to share his creation with the rest of the World–simple information exchange and open collaboration (e.g., open-source software). Who would have thought in 1991 that Microsoft Windows could be bested by an operating system created by volunteers (Linux) or that individuals could actually have a voice in politics (via the blogs) or that encyclopedias would be threatened by amatuers (Wikipedia)? It’s a brave new World. Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

My newish Dell Latitude barfed up the blue screen of death the other day. Sadly, nothing could restore the beast—a clean install of Windows XP was the only remedy. I only hoped that there was a way to save some of the recent work files from the hard drive. A co-worker mentioned that maybe, just maybe, I could boot up with a Linux CD and try to read the drive.

To make a long story short, I just happened to have an Ubuntu disk lying around that did the trick. Ubuntu fired right up, mounted the old Windows NTFS drive, connected to my Home Directory, and copied my precious files to a safe place on the network. Wow! And it all ran from memory so I didn’t even have to install it.
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Java junkies that felt excluded from the Web 2.0 house party can lace up their shoes—it’s time to dance. Recent developments are opening up new possibilities for Java developers in the realm of Web 2.0.

Sun’s Java DB is an all Java relational database management system based on Apache Derby. All that’s required to run this little 2MB gem is Java Virtual Machine, which means it can reside in the client’s browser. Even when offline! Java DB is starting to develop a following as developers realize it can maintain Ajax’s database dependent functionality even when the connection to the server is lost (see JavaDB: An idea whose time has finally come?). It may even give new life to the applet.

Speaking of Ajax, Google just announced the Google Web Toolkit (GWT)—a Java development framework for developing Ajax applications. GWT allows Java programmers to do their thing and let the GWT compiler create browser-compliant HTML and JavaScript. It offers all the cool stuff including reusable UI components, real debugging, and automatic browser compatibility. Hmmm, wonder how this compares to Sun’s JavaServer Faces Technology.

And the last little nugget of Java news is that Sun is promising an open source Java soon. According to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, it’s not a matter of when but how. Interesting days indeed.