Liddle Thoughts

A long time ago I ported the XUL library Thinlet to work on Mobile devices. I still get a few questions on this and I setup a website called ThinletMobile.com where you can download the source of the Amazon Explorer that utilises this. The Amazon Explorer was ported 4-5 years ago now and it still looks good on J2ME devices. It works with MIDP v1.0 and above. You can run it in your browser using Java WebStart here.

TouchGraph is an intersting tool that allows you to explore links between keywords and exposes this to you graphically. Its a really nice way to visualise keyword and link analysis and I’m guessing would be a useful tool in your kitbag for SEO.

After being asked for more features for the REST API in the Mobile Feeder project Kamran and I believe the next step forward may be to use Restlet to deliver these features. Restlet can be run inside a normal servlet container such as Tomcat so it fits the paradigm that we are aiming for, which is that is a low barrier to entry for ubiquitous access mechanisms.

JSR-311 also looks interesting as an effort to provide a high-level annotation centric API for RESTful services. Actually Jerome Louvel who was the main contributor to restlet is an active member of this expert group so maybe restlet may end up being a reference implementation.

Restlet is an open source project distributed either with a CDDL license or a GPL one (with a Classpath exception). The project consist of a Restlet API, a reference implementation (Noelios Restlet Engine) and a set of extensions. The ethos of Restlet was a path to more modern containers that aren’t tied to a blocking I/O model like the Servlet spec is, which really isn’t that suitable for distributed applications.

The integration of Restlet would allow us to implement some of the features required for the lightweight GS Rest API we’ve implemented such as Security etc.

Many other products have already integrated restlet such as Mule, RunMyProcess, Groovy, Oracle 11g, and Nuxeo.

Nothing is set in stone yet but any comments on this direction are welcome !

I’ve had a few questions around the Mobile Feeder OpenSpaces project that I thought were worth answering here. The first questions I received was around Scalability - how scalable is the REST interface ? It is very scalable because all calls use the same proxy i.e. In the JSP page there is a method JSP initialise in which does it one operation for SpaceFinder (it is like servlet initialise) and after that all operations use the same proxy.

I’ve also had some questions around support for Delete, Security and SQL - all of these can be achieved and Kamran and I have put them in the roadmap for the REST API.

Yet another example of why we need a change of government became blindingly obvious to me today. An article in the Telegraph outlined the Royal Mail taking a decision to ‘cut’ Saturday post deliveries. I mean come on, why is service in the UK getting worse not better as we move forward?

I’ll tell you why, because the government privatized core services and infrastructure that are fundamental to the running of a country - Travel, Energy, Water and Communications. They put them into the private sector and in many case into the hands of foreign governments as in the case of Gatewick and Heathrow.

These companies don’t care about the quality if service as in most cases they have a monopoly (guaranteed by the government), and anyway they can always rely on the government to bail them ( and for that read ‘me’ and ‘you’ who pay the taxes to allow this to happen) as the recent network rail fiasco demonstrates.

Essential public services should be state owned. It’s a no brainer, which only goes to demonstrate that the government hasn’t got one….

Again all comments and thoughts here are representative of my own personal opinions (still allowed those…just about in the UK)

The Mobile Feeder Project is now available at OpenSpaces.org. This has been put together by myself and Kamran Yousaf and demonstrates:

- Using PHP with GigaSpaces
- An example of a REST interface for communicating with the Space
- Showing how Atom entries can be hosted in the Space
- An example of how GigaSpaces can be used to add resilience and scale-out to Web 2.0 type projects

The REST inteface is particularly interesting and is implemented in a servlet engine using JSP.

This is a very simple REST API and supports two operations. Put and Get.

The URI to get or put data is: /cache/

A HTTP POST request will put the HTTP post data in the space keyed on the passed key.

An HTTP GET request will return the value associated with the key or empty string if nothing is associated with the key.

This is useful where Latency is not important and you only have the option of using HTTP to interact with a space i.e. The client environment does not allow you to use Java, .Net or C++ integration with GigaSpaces.

It seems my 11 year old nephew Eric continues to rack up press for being the first schoolboy to be awarded an independent record contract in the UK - see below:

No, its not another post on Labour DamnIT is a rather clever JavaScript library that will send an email when a user hits a problem with Javascript on your site - very neat !

So Mr Brown, you think that the economy is the only reason you turned in the worst election results of recent times. May I so humbly suggest that the following also played there part:

Youth Culture problems
Safety and Violence
Stealth taxes, such as taxes on Bins etc
Open Door immigration policy
Increasing Big Brother privacy violation
Totally lying about having a vote on further European integration

Now I am from the North East of England from working stock and I should be your core voter….and I can honestly say that I cannot imagine a time when I would ever vote Labour again……since Labour as been in power it seems to have done everything it can to take the “Great” out of “Great Britain” - R.I.P Labour (I hope) - Amen to that……

Ever had the problem of wondering what your site looked like on the plethora of different browsers that there are ? IE, Safari, Flock, Firefox, etc etc. It’s a huge pain, but this is where BrowserShots comes in. You give it a URL and it will generate screenshots from many different browsers and versions which you can view online or download - very slick….