I know a few people who could use this, I’m not usually one to post short posts with just a link but this one made me laugh so much with recognition I’ll be sneezing coffee for the rest of the day.
IDE Feature Request: The Yagni Development Assistant
FYI: YAGNI: You Aren’t Going to Need It
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As we all know the Waterfall approach is probably the best project delivery mechanism ever conceived and it is ideally suited to custom software projects.
</sarcasm>
More in this vein can be found on the Waterfall 2006 homepage.
As a bit of fun send this site to the some old guard PMs and see how long it takes them to realise it’s a spoof.
Found this great website (although its still in alpha) named meebo.com. Basically what it is is an web based Instant Messaging client. It supports MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger protocols which is all the major ones excluding Jabber and Google Talk. The beauty of it is that it uses AJAX to give a rich user experience. So you get realtime feedback on who’s online what messages people are sending you and so on. It using standard windowing metaphores and so you can move the messager client and associate windows around the page as you desire.
Anyway, its cool, try it!
Having read about Where’s George a site that lets users track US dollar bills, I decided to take a look for a British alternative and found Dosh Tracker. It’s not as professional as Where’s George but does the trick. The principle is simple; you enter the serial number on british notes, where you got it and a basic description and it tells you if anyone else has entered it before and the details. So far I have entered £160 in sterling but not found a match, but I’m willing to keep trying for a bit long.
I have set the new Google Personalization service as my homepage and selected a couple of RSS feeds to be delivered there. Which is all very nice, but it’s hardly going to revolutionise my life especially as the Slashdot RSS feed never updates. Which, seems, as they only have about 5 feeds is a fairly glaring bug. In fact it’s piss poor for a major portal.
Any suggestions for a new homepage?
So I have finally got around to updating my oldest (surviving) website The Humor Archives. This website has been around in some shape or form for 10 years and has up until two days ago been running on the same back end code; written in Perl with a hand rolled database (yes, I wrote my own database for it).
So what did I use to rewrite the site? Well to understand my decisions we have to look first at the none functional requirements of the site. It must be able to run on a single processor Pentium III with 384Mb of main memory, not only that but the sites operation must not negatively impact the other 20 or so sites running on the same box! Further the redevelopment must not take me more that a week of evenings to complete. As a final requirement all the sites URL must remain the same (I’ll come back to this).
OK, these requirements seem fairly doable but what volume of traffic do we have to serve? To be honest it’s not a super high traffic website; the figures break down like this: daily visitors: 6-7,000; page requests: 70-80,000. These are averages and so as a quick thumb in the air guess I would say about 30 maybe 40 concurrent user sessions at peak.
So with these requirements I obviously choose Java as the base technology, firstly because I know it well but more importantly Java provides me with a means of limiting the impact of this site on the overall performance the physical machine. By limiting heap size and various other jvm teaks I can get the most out of the box by pooling and reusing resources. The pooling and reuse starts at Sun J2SE 1.5’s super cool garbage collection and general optimisation and works up through Apache Commons DBHP to Hibernate’s EH Cache and beyond - it all works transparently and it works well.
First of all I started with a proof of concept using Tapestry (3.0.1), which I have to say I really liked, the component model is fantastic and something that I hope other frameworks will learn from. However there were a number of things I wasn’t completely happy with. Firstly I found the configuration files to be overly complex and under-ly documented, secondly I didn’t like loosing control of some of the lower level concerns such as session management, creation and so forth. For my site to be truely efficient I aimed to have it truely stateless but a number of Tapestry components were using sessions. Secondly I was having to seriously hack the framework to get ‘friendly urls’ or rather the same urls as the old site. Getting the old urls to work was as simple as configuring and installing urlrewrite the problem was getting tapestry to generate within links the old urls. Tapestry for very noble reasons manages all url creation which is a good thing in most cases but not for mine. I understand that Tapestry 3.1 will bring in more support of ‘friendly urls’ but that is currently in Alpha.
I took a look at Spring after my adventure with Tapestry but found the documentation to be lacking and so abandoned that fairly quickly - I also wasn’t liking the monolithic configuration file it seems to favour. So in the interests of timeliness I converted the tapestry site to Struts (you gotta love the ASF). I did think about using JSF but had already spent two evenings farting around with Tapestry and Spring and wanted to get something up and running ASAP.
So to conclude (about time it has take almost as long to write this blog as it did to write the site) these are the technologies in use (roughly from the bottom of the stack to the top):
Oh and I also managed to use CSS for all positioning which was sweet.