Jesse Ezell Blog

Blogger Interviews

Dave Winer has put together all of Chris Lydon's blogger interviews and made them available in a single downloadable zip. > 200 MB, but add that to the list of media to listen to for the next two weeks.

Java = SUV Part Duex

"My friend Curtis, an old-time Silicon Valley monster C hacker, AIMed me to say that he'd seen the Slashdot article:

'My problem with Java is that it makes hard things hard, and easy things hard.  The amount of hassle doesn't scale with the complexity of the problem.  Whereas with PHP you can write "Hello World" without having to read a 200-page book.  Java is a train wreck with dozens of classes with slightly different methods that do similar things.  On the other hand, it kills me that the PHP database interface is so bad.  Actually PHP just kills me anyway...why they had to invent a new language, I'll never know.'"
[Phil G's Weblog]

Carl and Mark Get Wasted

For the most part, I really enjoy .NET Rocks. However, as Roy points out, the latest .NET Rocks, the one where Carl and Mark hang out at the bar, is a total bomb (just like the last time Carl and Mark babbled about themselves). I turned it off after I wasted 30 minutes or so of my life that I can never get back... (hell, it was so bad, that I'm not even going to put a link to them in this post).

So, lest you go through media withdrawls, here are some other places to spend your time for the next two weeks:

http://microsoft.sitestream.com

TechEd 2003. Lots of good stuff.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv

I highly recommend the “rebuilding MSDN with angle brackets” talk, as well as Don's talk. Both are from SellsCon.

http://www.vslive.com

Past keynotes are available. Some pretty cool stuff in there (like Whidbey previews).

http://www.theserverside.com

J2EE stuff mostly, but they have some pretty interesting interviews on there nonetheless.

Joel on Offices

Looks like Joel finally moved in...

Microsoft Dishes Out More Cash

“WASHINGTON -- The federal judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial ordered the software company Monday to pay Massachusetts $967,014.52 in attorney fees, less than half what the state had sought.”

[Wired]

Xopus Released

Q42 has finally released the commercial version of their browser based XML editor xopus (no COM components, this thing is a pure DHTML based WYSIWYG XML editor). Xopus is pretty slick, although its architecture makes it difficult to integrate with .NET (not impossible though, I posted a bit of code a while back to do this with an older version)... unless of course you were creating a DHTML based SOA, in which case you would probably have much better luck... it is just those darn postbacks and server controls that don't fit their model.

.NET Alerts

MessageCaster is offering a free three month trial of their .NET alerts service. Apparently they have two editions, one of which requires zero deployment. Interesting... maybe the setup fee with these guys is a bit more affordable than with MS?

Free Stuff from MSDN

If you missed you chance the last time MS was giving out the application architecture books, here is another one (if you don't have VS.NET 2003 yet, you can also enter a drawing for a free copy).

The Managed Code Is Faster

“For a long time, in Mono we used libxslt: we would dump all the data from an XmlDocument, or a XPathNavigator into a temporary file, and then use libxslt to do the heavy lifting.

This approach had various problems: libxslt was not designed to be thread safe (a requirement for us: on ASP.NET we need to be able to do xslt transformations from multiple threads), so we had to add big locks around the xslt invocations. Also, it was not possible to create a context for the transformation, so extension functions were global to all the transformations. The only solution was to shutdown and restart the libxslt engine every time we did a transformation, not really optimal.

Fixing the problem was not going to be easy. Libxslt is a very large piece of code, and Daniel estimated that re-implementing it would take about a year. That is why I discouraged 16-year old Mono developer Ben Maurer from working on this project. He was not really ready to spend a year of hairy coding, and would likely not be able to do something even as fast as Libxslt.

Ben ignored my advise and went on to implement a managed implementation of XSLT. The idea was to remove the libxsl dependency: remove the temporary files, fix the extension object problem, and the locks.

In the course of a couple of weeks this summer, Ben had the basics of XSLT done, and he recruited the help of Atsushi to help with problems and missing features in the XML core, and Piers to fix and improve our XPath implementation.

The three hacker team in less than a month did a tremendous amount of progress implementation was able to be used instead of Libxslt for Monodoc.

The surprising news this week is that Ben has made Mono's managed XSLT faster than the C-based libxslt. Faster on a number of the XSLTMark tests and on other practical stylesheets (including the stylesheet used in Monodoc). The performance can be attributed partially to some performance improvements Atsushi did to our handling of XPathDocuments. The other part was the tireless work of Ben in doing performance tuning in our implementation: from profile-driven changes like removing calls to foreach on ArrayLists with loops to architectural changes. The biggest improvement was adding an interface for resolving functions/variables at compile time.”

[Miguel's Weblog]

Lazslo and Longhorn?

“This is great news for Laszlo!  Macromedia has acknowledged that Laszlo's approach to developing rich Internet applications (RIAs) is the way to go!  You can't expect large, complex environments to be built with a timeline!  That's not what we designed them for!

Timelines are for fine tuned, small experiences, which can then be used for what's known as "user interfaces".  But that's only one part of the complex job of building a user experience  and that's where Flash's timeline (and Director's as well) both fall flat.

Yes - there are other visual metaphors (like wiring kit 'graphs', iconic languages or flow charts) that can be used for programming, but when it comes down to it - there's nothing like the flow of a text based environment.  O-O (object oriented) extensions have improved the state of text based environments, but it's still around typing characters into a text editor - as the 'control' paradigm.

David Temkin, Oliver Steele and the team at Laszlo realized that years ago - and have a development system that's shipping now - based upon that premise.  One advantage developers will have in using the Laszlo system, is that all investment they put into the code now, will be leverageable when Microsoft comes up with their new "GUI thing" in Longhorn.  Laszlo currently outputs RIAs to the .swf Flash format, but they don't want to "lock" their balls into Macromedia's vice, any more than I want to.  So look for future versions of Laszlo to do -what macromedia won;t do.  Support more than just the .swf format.

This is - of course - key to any developer. making sure tha their destiny is not locked into ONE scenario - ONE engine.  You wanna be able to move your stuff - wherever you want to go - easily. That's what the Laszlo systems provides.  A path moving forward.

So now Macromedia announces their version of Laszlo's approach.  It's called the Flash MX Professional 2004 and here's what Norm Meyrowitz had to say:

"Flash MX Professional 2004 is a tool designed for top-of-the-line Flash developers or for people used to using forms-based programming metaphors like [Microsoft Corp.'s] Visual Basic or [Borland Software Corp.'s] Delphi," Meyrowitz said.

The only problem is - Norm forgot to credit Laszlo with the idea.  I don't mind it when bigger companies that the innvative dieas of young start-uyp.s  Just give them credit - for Christ sakes.....“

[Marc's Voice]

Update: As David points out, Royale is a completely seperate product (not Flash MX 2004, like Marc suggested). Dave also says Macromedia's Royale plans predate Laszlo, which I wouldn't be suprised about. Using XML to declaratively build flash content is nothing new, we worked on a product that did just this over a year ago. However, Marc's point that Macromedia will never think outside of the Flash player with Royale is most definately correct. So, Laszlo is definately a much cooler product if they are promising support for Longhorn / WinForms as well... maybe that means they will have a .NET Laszlo server ready to go some time too?