Ajax Pub Nite
May 12th, 2008 @ 7pm
The Rhino (1249 Queen St. W)

Come join us at an excellent neighborhood pub for a pint while we
discuss web application development, Javascript, web standards, and
whatever happened to “remote scripting”.

There is no price for admission, but there are likely to be several
eeePC laptops on hand to take advantage of the free wifi. Perhaps this
month we can get a Helma server farm working?

Hope to see you all there!

James Newton-King has released a new version of Json.NET that apparently has a new easier syntax that allows for developer friendly querying and creation of JSON code.

Pownce (a Kevin Rose project) has released version 2.0 of their API and apologized for taking so long in getting it out. They claim that it has been made developer friendly and they hope to start to compete with twitter on the 3rd party client metric… hmm… we’ll see how that goes. It sounds to me like we are getting into the realm of GMail 2.0…

Jeff Atwood posted a hilarious storming viewpoint on DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) calling him a “Douchebag”—its a must read as Jeff calls David on “…gets off on putting other people down.”

Hot off the press it appears that Joey deVilla (Global Nerdy, The Accordion Guy)—(formerly of Tucows; NOW formerly of TSOT) has moved on to work for B5 Media! As stated this morning he has moved on… the question now is why?

Have a great day all!

Remember Monday March 10th is the next Ajax Pub Nite!

There has been a recent surge of interest in more light weight approaches for rapid web application development, highlighted by the rise in popularity of RubyOnRails, especially amongst the Java/J2EE developer community.

But using a framework like RoR means Java developers need to learn not only a new language, but a new class library and completely different ways of working, giving up their very valuable experience and knowledge of the Java and J2EE.

Helma, a server-side Javascript web development framework offers a compelling alternative. Built on the Java platform and using technologies (Servlets, JDBC, etc) familiar to Java web application developers, it provides much of the same functionality as RoR while still letting Java developers have easy access to any Java libraries they need. Likewise, using JavaScript as the scripting language means that Java developers have a more familiar language to work with and one they may already be familiar with if they are building AJAXy, Web 2.0 style applications.

Helma is also being featured in the latest OpenExpo which looks to be shaping up to be a great event. (Note: You might need to know German to get the full value of the event – no I do not speak or understand German but google translate does a decent job)

It was also featured in a Linux Journal in and around September 2007 (I’ll post the issue when I look it up again) from it I started HelmaBlog.com which can help you get a simple feed reader project under way.

Helma is worth checking out if you are into JavaScript development. I’m working on a comparison of Helma and Grails and Groovy On Rails – we’ll see where that goes.

How bad are the ones I came up with, you ask? Well, for your entertainment (and my personal embarrassment), I present you with my list of rejected site taglines (I want to warn you in advance that a lot of these—if not all of them—are kinda out of left field, and didn’t quite represent both the Ajax and Pub Nite aspects in a way I liked, which is why they were rejected), so bear with me):

• “Asynchronously requesting since 2007” — Maybe? possibly a better variation of this?
  • “Dynamically serving content since 2007”
• “Enhancing web experiences while impairing our own”
• “No longer just a cleaning solution”
• “Now with 10× more beer”
• “Now with more scripty goodness”
• “More XmlHttpRequests than you can shake a stick at”
• “$("#pub").load("nerds").find(".nerd").each(function(){ $(this).drink(); }).addClass("inebriated");” — Too geeky/obscure? Maybe not this one then. The string values can change if we wanna adapt it though. (Optionally, could’ve tacked on fadeOut() to the end of the chain (just for kicks), but I didn’t want to infer anything that isn’t necessarily so.)

Brent took some photos, as did I:

You can view the rest of them in this Flickr set. If you’ve got photos of your own from the night, be sure to add them to the Ajax Pub Nite Flickr pool or tag them with “ajaxpubnite” (preferably both). Once again, a big thanks goes out to everyone who showed up. Hope to see even more of you next month!