Medieval Programming

I just purchased the domain rap-book.com and put there a placeholder site. That domain will be used as companion website for the book and host demos and source code as well as provide errata. And it provides me some new spam free e-Mail accounts

Comments regarding design and possible content welcome.

something strange is going on here. My Outlook just sent out some amount of Spam mails.
Well I assume its my outlook, especially as the mailer demons that return me the messages that could not be sent with some header information including my PCs name and outlook information. yikes!
Avast did not find anything, nor did the Vista Defender, nor did Spybot… I am a bit clueless right now….
There was an RPC exploit recently but they said it was only for XP, and my Vista is not showing any pending updates. Strange….

[Update]
I changed my gmail password every day. And today the same thing happened to me again. I am also behind a hardware firewall. This is driving me crazy. So my best bet still is that there is a vulnerability at gmail which allows placing mails in outbox without password.

[Update2]
Wow, there is a flag for SPAM that tells outlook to send more spam if the spam was deleted?
“x-confirm-reading-to header” – Well done Microsoft.
To stop the plague:

in gMail go to Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter -> Subject: Not Read -> Delete It (checkbox)… Create Filter

Check the Link Trevor posted below for answers

today was the last day of the AjaxWorld conference in San Jose, CA. It have been good 2 days, and the last was a bit disappointing. As it seems the Expo was just planned for two days, so everybody from there left late Tuesday. Also there were a lot less people here to listen for the last talks.
The talks however were really good. Elaine Wherry from meebo gave a really great and interesting talk. The slides are on slideshare. She had an unconventional style to present how it is to run a startup that out of sudden gets really busy. She told about sleepless nights and the concept of quick fix or homerun, which I might explain in a later post as it is really interesting and worth looking at it.
When she showed a graph of meebo user count, which was growing from less than 1 k to 5k users one thought: wow that is a large increase of user count.
She took a while to talk about that she knows for every spike and abnormality in the graph what the reason was, so this was really fascinating. Even more fascinating was the next slide which she left uncommented. the Graph changed scale and now shows up to 80 Million users. If you now recap what she said about sleepless nights during the first graph, it must have been a nightmare on the second.
But during the remaining slides she explained why she then could sleep better and what they did at meebo to create a scalable architecture.
Jeffrey Barr from Amazon held a good session about “the cloud”, or to be more precise: The Amazon Web Services. They do look attractive by themselves, but having them presented in such a good way makes you even more wanting to try them out.

That’s it for this conference. I am really tired and will sleep on the flight back. See you in Germany.

Ill follow up with a summary of the new and noteworthy of the conference later. In meanwhile: have a good day in Europe

Today has been day two of the AjaxWorld conference and the two main topics on my agenda today were JavaScript and what Enterprises need.

The most delighting talks of the day were focusing entirely onto core Javascript. Douglas Crockford gave a really interesting session about “Javascript the good parts” and explained why JavaScript is as it is and why that sucks. He talked also about his code quality tool JSlint, that will help one to eradicate bad code and leave good code in place. He said he is sorry for the case that JSlint will hurt our feelings about code quality. As an example about bad code he showed and explained this nice example, which I will leave for you to find out why it sucks (or by Dougs book)

function a(){
return {
  ok: "hello"
}
}
 
function b(){
return
{
  ok: "hello"
}
}
 
alert(a().ok);
alert(b().ok); //wont work. you know why?

Mike Girouard followed that directly up with a really great presentation on why he things that JavaScript is really beautiful. I can really recommend checking his presentation.
It was refreshing to see with all the high level abstraction fancy stuff here and there that also people care for the nifty stuff of a language. I am getting into the joy of discovering more and more about Java and Javascript and really like that. I personally find that much more interesting than any high level abstraction, because the abstraction hide the beauty with too much make up

Other sessions were addressing the issues we still have. Too many toolkits, too much useless technology. When companies want to utilize RIA to modernize their application infrastructure, they need something that we still need to invent.

Also this day had a negative highlight. A guy which I won’t name, from a company which I won’t name, had a general session in which he presented their product. Well he did the talking, but the slides were changed by his personal assistant. Also the demos were given by here. Well not actually given. She moved the mouse according where he said. I find this not acceptable, and not professional. Well it somehow fit to the arrogant presentation with the somewhat dubious content inside (“unfortunately eclipse does not provide debugging capabilities in production systems” – remote debugger anyone?)

After having quite exhaustive flights on the weekend (guys, 7 hours in Chicago O Hare are no fun), I spend today 13 hours in great sessions.
I will be preparing a slideset on some of the key information I was able to gather today for our company blog, so just a few words on more or less private stuff.
Boy, last time I was in US I did not notice that in US everything costs extra. I thought 219$ for the room is expensive, but its not. it is 219+tax+hbid+pid (whats those two?)+newspaper (which you can cancel) and its not including breakfast. Luckily I could get hold onto meeting room wifi, free for people with the AjaxWorld password, otherwise I would have to pay also for wifi extra.

The conference as such is better than I did expect. Quite a lot of good topics, and many interesting people to meet. Only one negative point for today: I came 5 minutes late into Jeremy’s presentation on integrating AJAX into Spring, cause I talked to a few oracle people still. When I came into the room he was just going over some SpringSource service offering slides. I have seen them soo many times already, so why can’t the SpringSource guys just stop showing it? I headed directly towards another session, onto a JavaScript based distributed database, called nextDB.net . Even when this was also advertising, it mainly was about the conceptual issues one could have with a browser accessible DB. So dear guys at SpringSource: please skip your 15 minute SpringSource portfolio slides, then I might join your talks again.

My personal highlight was a presentation from the founders of Kaazing, who talked about Server-Side Events and WebSockets. Good stuff, and I am very eager to try it out.
From company perspective perhaps the most interesting finding was the product called KITE from Keynote.
More about this then later.
Heading now to the aftershow party

its time to reveal some details on my book project. Now that the contract is settled, I think I can talk about some details on this project.
I was contacted by a german publisher some months ago and asked if I would like to write a book about symfony. I wrote back that I do know symfony quite okay, but I think it is not worth writing a clone of two great books available already (two more coming soon). I replied that I would like to write about some fancy Java Web stuff, but got a response that they would like to have a Spring, or Hibernate book, or something about jQuery.
Again, nice topics but nothing where I think I could make a difference.
We lost contact and I started thinking. I quickly got fond of the idea to write a book about the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform. I have some deep inside knowledge, and also recently played around with it. Admittedly I am not the best RAP expert in the world, but I do know what it is good for and how to apply it in really large scale projects. I collected some materials and made an initial draft of the contents.
After talking to a few people I decided to pitch the idea to Apress. They were excited about the idea, well at least they say so. We agreed on writing a short introduction book on RAP and the technology and such stuff. Since this week now I am holding a book publication contract for an Apress first press book. Yeah
Half of the book is written in a good draft by now and my energy is slightly decreasing, so Ill take a break now, fly to San Jose this weekend and get new ideas at the AJAX World Conference.

In case you have questions you would like to see answered in a book about Eclipse RAP. Just shoot