There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.

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Adobe has done a good job at allowing Air applications integrate well with the desktop.

Adobe isn’t the first to use internet delivery technologies for desktop applications. Mozilla’s XULRunner allows developers to create and package multi-platform programs based off the same technology that powers Firefox. However, Adobe has done a good job at making it simple to publish very traditional AJAX apps as desktop apps.

Adobe’s big problem is they only support Windows and Mac. There is no Linux support, at least not yet. One of Adobe Air’s big selling point is that it makes it easy to create cross-platform applications. However, without Linux support, the most Adobe can advertise is dual-platform apps.

For a great demo Air app, look at this complex YUI example.

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This container creates a spot where a title can be placed and where some javascript can be placed. It then includes another template file which will put content in those spots. This included template, inside.tpl, would look like the following:


{fill-spot id="title"}Jacob's Super Page{/fill-spot}
{fill-spot id="js"}alert('hello'};{/fill-spot}
<h1>Hello</h1>
<p>This is a sample template file</p>


The template language would also need to be flexible enough such that if the included template didn’t fill the spots, then things continue to work without without crashing, as if the spots had been filled with nothing.

The problem is that many template language translate their template into some sort of source code, and usually that source code turns out to be in a procedual language. This means that templates are parsed from top to bottom, so by the time the inside template is included, the template parser has already parsed the spots above it, and can’t go back and fill those spots (because that would require parsing the container template twice).

A posible solution may be available in some template language which would allow you to parse the inner template first by placing it at the top of the container template, capturing its output, and displaying it later. This would result in a less-elegant container template that might look like the following:


{capture to="inside-contents"}
{include file="inside.tpl"}
{/capture}
<html>
<head>
<title>{define-spot name="title"}</title>
<script language="Javascript">
{define-spot name="js"}
</script>
</head>
<body>
{show id="inside-contents}
</body>
</html>


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What the heck is a parametric search anyway?

It is important for web sites to clearly present an interface, without making the user think. Puting an abstract term like parametric search just confuses users.

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It makes me feel good when I see things that I’ve written appear in real-world applications. It is also nice that the source code is open, which means that anyone can look at it and appreciate my website address.

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GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.

Sometimes, I’m away from one of my own computers, but I still want to do a little bit of Octave work. I’ve written just a tad bit of PHP code that allows me to access Octave over the web. You can type in your Octave code, and it will return the output results and output graph.

Because I would rather not hammer my server with octave requests, I won’t be showing a demo, but I’m making all the source code available, and you can put it on your own server and try it yourself. I’m hosting the project at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/web-octave/

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A lot of the ideas for features have come through my experiences with Plone, a content management system written on top of Zope in Python. Plone is an excellent CMS, but it is a little complicated, and my CMS should be quite a bit easier to hack on.

I’m calling my project Harvest or Harvest CMS, I haven’t decided which one yet. It goes along with my domain, peargrove.com which I use for various project hosting.

As the project gets underway, I’ll post a link to the project page or project blog or whatever else comes along.

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Google has a nice set of modules, available for both iGoogle and the Google Desktop (which is part of Google Pack).  These modules are called gadgets, and many of which can also be syndicated onto third-party websites.

For my homepage project, I thought about using a combination of custom gadgets as well as other third-party gadgets.  However, in order to syndicate a gadget through Google, you have to provide gadget attribution back to Google.  For a page with many Gadgets, this begins to look unprofessional.

That is why I started a project called whatsits.  Whatsits are the same as gadgets, except I changed the name to differentiate between how they are served up.  The whatsits project is hosted at Google Code Project Hosting.

The whatsits project provides a number of scripts that are used to take an xml gadget description file, and provide all the methods in order to serve up the gadget on third-party web sites, but without having to show any attribution back to Google.

The project is only one day old, but I’ve already been able to use it to serve a custom gadget up in an iframe.  Currently, the biggest task of the project will be re-writing Google’s gadget javascript library, which I plan to do slowly as I need particular functions.

Anyone who would like to assist in the project can leave a comment and I’ll get a hold of you.

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The ratio of logins to logouts isn’t good. One website I checked only had logout numbers that were 2% of the login numbers. Another site did better, but the percentage only went up to 20%. This means that 4 out of 5 users aren’t logging out through a logout button.

The number of users who logout through clearing their cookies, either manually or through quitting their web browser application, is a much more difficult number to ascertain. It is also hard to gauge how may users may be the only user with access to a computer and are thus not even interested in logging out.

Websites which integrate the logout button as a critical element of their web site security plan should re-evaluate their plan.

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