Month: November 2007

Heroku: An Online Rails Development and App Hosting Environment

Heroku: An Online Rails Development and App Hosting Environment: Martin Sadler of WorkingWithRails.com just pointed me towards Heroku, an exciting new development in the Rails world. Heroku is an online environment where you can develop and host Rails applications.. all from the browser. This is pretty exciting stuff and, on paper, makes rolling out, tweaking, and playing with Rails applications a snap. Rather than blather on about how this could become a game-changer in the Web applications industry, instead I’ll point you to Heroku’s own excellent set of screencasts and feature tours.

Adam Wiggins, one of the three partners behind Heroku, has some more “from the trenches” detail in this post on his personal blog.

[Interesting, but potentially painful for all but the simplest stuff (for now?)]
Source: Ruby Inside

Argotic Syndication Framework 2007.3 Released

Argotic Syndication Framework 2007.3 Released: I am proud to announce the latest release of the Argotic Syndication Framework. This release provides ASP.NET developers with built-in support for some of the most common syndication features web sites utilize when publishing syndicated content. The framework now provides both server and client support of the Pingback and Trackback peer-to-peer notification protocols, as well as server and client support for  the XML-RPC communication protocol. Several ASP.NET web controls have been provided to make implementing automatic discovery of Pingback, Trackback, and syndication feeds a simple and pain-free process.
New features for this release:
[snip]Really Simple Discovery (RSD) support added to syndication HTTP handler. [Cool.]

Sparkle – Trac

Sparkle – Trac: Sparkle is a module that developers can stick in their Cocoa applications (five-step install!) to get instant self-update functionality.

Your app will be able to update itself, not just check for new versions: it’ll read the update information from an appcast on your server, download, extract, install, restart, and even offer to show the users release notes before they decide if they want to update. [Noice!]

Isomorphic SmartClient: Now Open Source

Isomorphic SmartClient: Now Open Source:

Isomorphic has made a leap of faith to a new opensource business model today. They have freed up their SmartClient Ajax platform by releasing it under the LGPL license.

The piece that has been opensourced “includes the typical set of Ajax UI components that are now available from several vendors, but goes beyond the standard offering with support for very large datasets, metadata management, advanced skinning and branding, WSDL/SOA binding, and many other features

Extensions to SmartClient LGPL, including the SmartClient Java Server, the SmartClient Visual Builder tool, and several industry-specific optional modules, continue to be available for purchase.”

It is interesting to see that the market almost seems to require that you are opensource, else the barrier to playing around is too high.

[I’m not so sure that last paragraph is true…]
Source: Ajaxian

Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0 released

Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0 released:

New versions of the JavaScript libraries that ship with Rails, Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0, have been released. You can find out about the numerous changes on the Prototype blog and on mir.aculo.us. If you’re running Edge Rails, just svn up and run rake rails:update:javascripts to install the latest versions into your application automatically.

Also of note: Christophe Porteneuve’s Prototype & script.aculo.us book is now out of beta and available for purchase from the Pragmatic Programmers. It’s up-to-date with all of the new features in both libraries, so be sure to check it out if you’re using Prototype and script.aculo.us in your applications.

[Cool!]
Source: Riding Rails

Facebook doesn’t need to be Adbook

Facebook doesn’t need to be Adbook: But the problem for Mark, for Jeremiah, and for all of us (including yours truly) is that we too easily default to framing our understanding of advertising in its own terms. We regard advertising as an independent variable: something ya gotta have. But in fact advertising is a dependent variable. The independent variable is the individual human being. As Chris Locke put it so perfectly nine years ago, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. [Check out the VRM stuff.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog