Does it make sense to say that I got podcasted?
Anyway, I did – or at least I had a good conversation when my network connection didn’t drop out. I haven’t listened to it yet – not sure I enjoy listening to myself.. But as I said on twitter – now I’m a legend in my own lunchbox.
In shipping software I spoke briefly about me.edu.au (which is still taking a good amount of my time). Recently, though I’ve been spending a lot of time preparing education.au’s Java based federated search product (the Distributed Search Manager – OpenDSM) for release as an open source product. That’s been an interesting experience – the code is pretty old, and was glued together using static references. I had to pull it part, replace the static references with factories (changing to dependency injection wasn’t realistic for this release at least) and put it back together. It’s kind of odd working on a project like that – the code almost causes me pain at times, but with a product that is stable and reliable I don’t want to make too many changes just because I don’t like the style.
Some readers of this blog may be interested in it, because it allows federating of results from multiple Solr servers (or OpenSearch services) together into a single result set. That’s useful in quite a large set of places.
It’s also the first time I’ve been paid to create open source code as an explicit goal – most of my open source work has been for pragmatic reasons, not as a goal in itself.
It’s Friday afternoon, so here’s some random stuff:
Many Java developers complain about the length of time it takes to deploy their webapps for development, or to start the embedded WebTools server in Eclipse, or to use the mvn jetty:run process with Maven.
At work, we’ve created a solution using class which starts up Jetty and gets it to serve your webapp from within the IDE. This means you have start up times of seconds, and can debug without using remote debugging.
Happily, we’ve been able to open source this, too, so people can try it for themselves rather than just here me talk about it.
The source code is here, but you are probably better off using Maven, adding the following repository to your pom.xml:
<repository>
<id>EdAuUtil</id>
<url>http://maven.uat.educationau.edu.au/EdAuUtil</url>
</repository>
and adding the following dependencies:
<dependency>
<groupId>au.edu.educationau.opensource</groupId>
<artifactId>EdAuUtils</artifactId>
<version>0.9</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-util</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
<artifactId>jasper</artifactId>
<version>6.0.13</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-ant</artifactId>
<version>0.8</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
Then you can run the class au.edu.educationau.opensource.devsupport.TestWebServer from your IDE. I need to generate the javadocs and put them up somewhere, but for the moment the code is reasonably well documented.
Last week there was a bit of news traffic about some of the content that is on Ning. Whatever…
I think the really interesting story to come from those Quantcast stats (if you trust them) is the Share of Vists. 86% of the vists to Ning come from regular or addicted visitors?! That’s some pretty good stickiness.
So it turns out that it’s 2008 and the thing to do is to do predictions for the next year. Here’s my 2:
Update – 1 more thing:
OpenSocial will succeed in a big way – not because of support from the big players (Google etc) but because lots of small open source web projects (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc) can easily add support and will finally have a standard way of creating cross-platform compatible software.
Custom vertical social network, with feed integration (kind of like the Facebook activity stream, but driven by RSS), communities and single-sign on across a number of other applications.
Open Social support coming soon. I should do a post on how the open source implementation of that works. For the time being, though, this is all the code you need to show a Google Gadget into your app:
<c:import url=”/ifr”>
<c:param name=”url”>http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml</c:param>
</c:import>
One I hadn’t heard before:
Rosenberg’s Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.
via http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
IANAL, but how can Audibie possibly be legal? Since the doctrine of inducement appeared (ref Grockster) I can’t see how the DCMA safe-harbor provisions would save them. Perhaps they are relying on the fact that they don’t host the files themselves – although that didn’t save Grockster or Napster.
It’s interesting to think what Facebook’s liability would be over an application like this. Facebook have a currently have a copyright policy which passes responsibility for DMCA takedown requests onto the application author. Audibie have posted their takedown procedures, in accordance with the DCMA.
If I was Facebook I’d be pretty worried that might not be enough.