ok .. geek jokes aside.

Like I said in my previous entry, its been a while since I’ve posted a Tech entry, so I decided to put in some explanation, and some of my thoughts on this topic. This is only Slightly technical, so its not too bad.

Web 2.0 is not a new version of the web. The way that computers are being linked to each other thru the internet has not changed much fundamentally. So what is the hype about this web 2.0 thing about ? I’m no expert so feel free to challenge me where I’m wrong.

Remember those days, when you went to a fantastic restaurant and walked away damn pleased, so you recommend it to your friends, and your friends recommend it to their friends, and soon, the information gets well known? Thats the power of social networks. Even multi-level marketing/network marketing firms recognise this potential and push their sales through this channel. Of course everyone who tried it added their own opinions as well, adding to the recommendations.

Fundamentally, thats what web 2.0 is about. Social networking. Participation. Its about having social circles contributing, passing on and sharing information,  and we’re living in it now. Blogs, social bookmarking, social networks … are all tools that are currently driving this hype (as I am typing this, a sudden horror just struck me … this is a huge topic). Lets look at the internet 10 years ago (if anyone can remember that far). The traditional model was everyone had information. They published their own websites, had the information, just no good way of passing it on.

A notable pioneer to the drive of social networks on the Internet was SixDegrees. SixDegrees was cool that time, it was based on a socialogy experiment that proclaimed that people are all connected to each other by six degrees of separation. This was perhaps the first social networking site. It allowed people to be connected to each other, send messages to each other, post on bulletin boards and let people see whom they were connected to.

Innovation driving other innovations, driving evolutions. From standard personal websites 10-15 years ago that we prayed people would stumble upon, we now have flickr, del.icio.us, friendster. Blogs are born every second and the information is now everywhere. People share photos, links of what they were reading, tag and categorise what they read, and have data feeds (syndication) to bring the information to our fingertips.

Of course with evolution, the whole web started to change. Social networking was just a driver. From here, other technologies also evolved, namely
1) rich clients
2) web services/api
3) mashups
these services overlap each other, we now have rich client browser word processors, spreadsheets,  instant messengers. We have mashups of technologies, like flickr on your blog, or bus scheduling with google maps. The fast paced changes were driving mega corporations to change. Companies were getting bought up, and the dot com era seems to be making a comeback.

The web was growing, and changing. It’s still a far cry from what Tim-Berners Lee (father of the internet)
envisioned what his version of web 2.0 would be like (google : semantic
web), but we’re slowly getting there.

Some notable websites/applications driving 2.0
1) Friendster   (social networking)
2) Blogspot/Blogger    (blogging)
3) Flickr                (photo sharing)
4) Del.icio.us       (social bookmarking/tagging)

Of course, web 2.0 can’t be simply explained away by an ignorant techie by me, and there are thousands of articles already written on these topics already.

ok. a bit of rambling here. The Straits Times published an article about blogging, and bloggers just 2 weeks ago. Although I only glanced through the article, it showed me that the press still have a rather negative view about bloggers, portraying them as attention seekers. Thats just a frog in the well speaking… I wonder how the reporter got the job to write the front page article.

Anyway, for those who just stumbled into my blog, I’ve just migrated to this new location. My old blog was at http://darrelchia.blogspot.com . This was hosted by blogger/blogspot. After using it for a few months (until the last saturday actually) everything was fine. Until I realised that I probably needed to categorise my blogs … after all, I write about technology, photography and my ramblings, and guess what ? *arrrggghhhhh* blogspot doesn’t support categories / tagging.

So the first option I looked at was a hack that would put categories on my blog. There are about 2-3 known workarounds, which involved using multiple blogs, using an external site (delicious, technorati), or some wierd configurations in blogspot. I found all these easy to adapt, but inconvenient to use at all. So the final solution was to migrate.

My requirements were simple. First, is, tagging/categorisation. Second, customisable templates/cascading style sheets. Third, easy to migrate over from my existing blog.
Basically, I spent a day looking through various blog hosts sites and here’s what I gathered.

1) Blogspot.com – No categories / tagging. Doesn’t allow javascript to be embedded in template body.
2) Blogsome.com – I didn’t find any mechanism to support easy migration.
3) Livejournal.com – Template limitations (unless you pay).
4) Wordpress.com – Template limitations, plus I can’t embed javascript codes in. These guys are security conscious.
5) Xanga.com – Ads! arrghhh *major turnoff*

The final decision that I made was …. to put blog on my own domain. I installed wordpress (which is already available as part of my web host’s installable applications). To explain a bit, wordpress is a blog server software that you can install in your web host to run your own blog. Another notable mention is MovableType. Blogger/Blogspot, blogsome, wordpress.com all run off the wordpress blogging software, while livejournal (as well as a few others) runs off MovableType.

Using my own wordpress gives me lots of flexibility over my blog now. I can change templates, install widgets, plugins AND modify the source codes myself. The tagboard in the sidebar is a wordpress widget (which current blog providers don’t allow you to install).

Anyway, it was a pretty short search, and I’m happy here. Although some people have told me that the loading is a bit slow.

Anyway, lets examine the traditional HTML/JSP model first. javabeans and JSTL are used for data and business logic, HTML is used for layout, and CSS is used for .. well … styles and appearances. So now, we have 3 independantly configurable elements that co-exist to bring together our presentation layer.

One of the pleasing things I like about CSS is its strength in creating layouts and changing the appearance of the presentation layer. I can change the look of the site totally by just tinkering with the style sheets. One very solid example of this would be to look at csszengarden

Of course, now with the introduction of web frameworks, I wonder about whether the flexibility of such a setup is being lost. Of course, I can’t speak of all the frameworks, but recently, I tried out Oracle’s ADF-Faces, and there’s this on thing that really bugged me. The use of the ADF-Faces components locked down the look and field. So when we use stuff like tabbed panes, thats what we have. IF i did it in style sheets, i could change it to look like tabbed panes, drop down menus etc using CSS. Of course, I do like the idea that each component is tied to a backing bean, but what it enforces is just the “beans for business logic” concept and thats a general JSF thing. ADF-Faces does expose a template for changing the components, but of course, I took a quick glimpse at it and it looked complicated (for a man of my limited talents).

The bottom line is this, while frameworks are the in thing now in the industry, is such a move necessary, or is it an overkill ? Some points to ponder… perhaps I’d update this topic more when I have time to take a more detailed look at it. I’m busy working on some raster stuff that I have a very very limited experience in.

I remember sometime about 2 years ago, I attended an internal workshop/training conducted by an Australian colleague. He’s one of the company’s enterprise architecture consultants. Anyway he brought up a very interesting question that’s still stuck in my head.

Being technology people in a world leading software company, where innovation, research and development is critical, he asked us this (bunch of) questions.

Who is/are :
1) Tim Berners-Lee
2) James Gosling
3) Gang of Four
4) Booch, Rumburgh and Jacobson

Ok, i admit. I have no idea who 1, 3 and 4 is, but I’ve personally met James Gosling a year ago when I attended an event by Sun Microsystems. Ok, back to the question

1) Tim Berners-Lee. The person who invented the world wide web.
2) James Gosling. The father of Java technology
3) Gang of four, who gave us design patterns
4) Booch, Rumburgh and Jacobson, who gave the world UML.

Next question. What are they working on now ?

To be a successful computer scientist, we need to be aware of what is going on in the world. No doubt these people have contributed to shaping the IT industry to where it is now, we seem to have forgotten that these great people are working on other stuff now. After all, these people so have a powerful voice and presence in the community, and even a simple thought could spawn off what could be potentially the next big thing in the industry. In the industry, we have to recognise that, unless we plan to stay as a frog in the well and remain a lowly programmer for the rest of our lives.

Ok, i didn’t manage to find out what the Gang of Four are/were doing (or if they are still alive) as well as what B-R-J were working on, now that Rational is part of IBM, but the last thing i heard about James Gosling, he was still in Sun working in Software Tools. Tim Berner-Lee was working on something called the semantic web, or Web 2.0.

I haven’t really looked at any detail specifications or documents on what semantic web is, what I do know is a segment of Web 2.o covers what is called social networking. Its forming networks based on a I-know-u, u-know-him, he-knows-her kinda thing. So as we expand our social networks, we information can be disseminated. Something like that Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon experiment. If fact, we have started to see websites popping out that represent these ideas. Friendster, flickr, blogging … all these are physical evidence of the concept of semantic web. And guess what, these were some of the biggest things happening in the industry.

Anyway, enough said on this topic, before I embarass myself further with my lack of knowledge in these areas.