Just finished my presentation on Open source and Architecture in the Wellington Software Architect Forum.
We have covered these topics:
1) Definition, Licensing & players
2) Open source based architecture examples
3) Best practices
4) ROI, TCO and other TLA
5) Open source tools for architecture
6) Want to be an open source developer?
7) Future FOSS trends
You can download the presentation here.
IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.
Up until now IPWEditor has integrated only with FCKeditor. The major feature in this release is integration with TinyMCE, a popular WYSIWYG editor.
Developers can now choose to run IPWEditor with either FCKeditor or with TinyMCE editor using the same IPWEditor code.
IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.
As reported by some members of the community, due to jQuery issue with IE 7, IPWEditor 1.0 had some issues around IE usability.
Thanks to these inputs and some refactoring around the jQuery limitation, these issues were resolved in this IPWEditor 1.1 release. Continue reading
ThickBox is a cool visualization tool based on Jquery JavaScript library. ThickBox helps you display photos in a cool way and is useful in many web projects.
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ThickBox does not work when the HTML pages has other JavaScript libraries such as Mootools.
Debuging the error reveals this:
$(domChunk) is null
Code snippets posted online are a great source of knowledge and simple way to share experience and to reuse code. As developers we always look to see if there is a ‘code example’ which we can modify to our needs. As bloggers we find code snippets very useful to get our information out to the readers.
The problem is that creating these code snippets is a complex and cumbersome task. You need you replace all the < with &alt, wrap the code in <pre> and <code> tags and then use a Syntax Highlighter to make our code look nice. Every time we change or fix the code you need to reiterate this process.
AutoSnippet solves this problem by automatically generating the code snippet from the source code (HTML, CSS and Javascript). No more cumbersome repetitive tasks and no more inconsistencies between example and real code.
In this article I will show how to generate automatic snippets for your blog and source/code websites.
The following code snippet on the left is automatically generated with SyntaxHighlighter. As a developer you just write the code and the autoSnippet generates the snippet itself.
The following code snippet automatically generated with SyntaxHighlighter.
To get the ‘snippet only’ affect you need to put the source div over the target div.
again, as a developer you just write the code and the autoSnippet generates the snippet itself.
AutoSnippet can integrate with other Syntax Highlighter. Here is AutoSnippet at its simplest form.
Auto snippet is easy to use- it is a jquery plug-in and uses SyntaxHighlighter for syntax highlighting. Both of SyntaxHighlighter and jquery are common and well established open source projects. AutoSnippet is easily extendable and is released under the MIT open source license.
Formal documentation and download can be found here.
An In-Place editor, such as jQuery Editable plug-in, lets you seamlessly replace texts on web pages with inputs, for on-the-spot editing (see example 1). WYSIWYG editors, such as FCKeditor, provide easy, word-like editor on the web (see example 2). Basically, the two are advanced User-Interface JavaScript tools that help users edit content on the web in an easy, intuitive and productive way.
Wouldn’t it be great if we combine the two to create a really cool, web 2.0 user experience for editing content on the web? Unfortunately, FCKeditor and Editable are not fully compatible and some tweaking is required to make them interoperable.
In this article will demonstrate how, with little modification, FCKeditor can be integrated into Editable to create an In-Place WYSIWYG editor (see example3).
If you want to skip this documentation and just go to download the code and examples you can do so here.
Free software means that computer users have the freedom to cooperate with whom they choose, and to control the software they use. To summarize this into a remark distinguishing libre (freedom) software from gratis (zero price) software, Richard Stallman said: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’.1
The reality is quite different from this philosophy. Up until now open source software was, for most people, free beer rather than free speech. Well, the beer party is over, and cooperate companies have a new business model strategy called SAAS.
Continue reading
Visuals aids such as photos, are very important because they help you pass information and feelings, attract attention, maintain concentration, and help explain abstract concepts. Most professional presenters use photos and other images in their presentation. I personally find that the audience is better tuned when I present images than words.
The problem is that most images cost money – most photographers want you to pay royalties for the images you use.
Lucky enough, there are many images released under an open source license called creative commons
Continue reading
Oracle is going to buy Sun and control Java and MYSQL.1
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In an interesting post in ZDNET ,Mr Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu is claimed to state that:
“.. he doesn’t seem too worried that the proprietary software company will kill Sun’s open source Java, OpenSolaris and MySQL jewels, in spite of Oracle’s hold on the database market.”
I am not sure I completely share his optimism. I am not so much worried about Java, there is no competition there. But think of it -If you were Oracle’s CEO, You just got the chance to kill the number one competitor product- Wouldn’t you want to kill MySQL?
Even if you do not do it immediately, would you want to invest in two competitive technologies? It just doesn’t make any sense business-wise.
Additionally, I don’t buy the “so what? Open source products can be forked” story. I do not think Java and MySQL would have been so successful without a solid company backing them up. I really hope that Oracle will provide this solid support and investment in the future of Java and MySQL.
My hope it that Oracle cares about its public image in the open source community and that this will drive Oracle to keep MySQL and Java open and alive.
No Dolphins were hurt in the making of this post.
The combination of Relational Data (database) and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is not a match made in heaven. The way we work with objects is totally different than the way we access Data. The problem is that in most projects you need to access data and write Object Oriented Classes to display and manipulate that data.
Continue reading