HTML5 Features in Google Web Toolkit

I went to my usual weekly meeting at Skills Matter, this time about HTML5 and the Google Web Toolkit.

Before the meeting started, I got talking to one or two people, unusual as I'm usually too tired to be a good conversationalist in the evening. At one point, someone asked what we all did and here we had four completely different approaches to the idea of work. There was the two salaried, one of which was a telecommuter. Another was a small-businessman and the fourth was what you might call a flexi-worker. He worked three twelve hour shifts in a bar (thirty-six hours) and then had four days off to work on whatever he wanted. The start-up guy was trying to promote a planning and organisation utility called Plancake. Ironically, throughout our conversation he was continuously writing things down on paper and post-it notes with a pen.

Tonight was a talk by Dmitry Buzdin, a Latvian, and was about how the GWT copes with the changes in HTML5 (A friend of mine pointed me in the way of this useful web page on the subject). GWT is a compiler that takes Java code (or Java-like) and converts it into JavaScript enabling it to be run client-side in a web browser.

The Cloud

A recent conversation reminded me about my recent exposure to the Cloud, a word which has been banded around a good deal recently. It's been used regarding new technologies and is the latest bandwagon to jump on, but try to determine what the cloud is and the focus is on the technology, partly because anyone with any interest in the subject is a technologist of some kind. This is missing the point.

The Cloud does have a technological angle but the main aspect is a commercial one. It allows companies to scale their web applications easier and more economically than in the past, allowing small companies to compete with much larger companies with greater resources.

For example, a three-man company, consisting of a business analyst, web developer and a QA specialist, develop a treasury web application. To deploy the application such that one customer can use it requires that either the customer hosts the application, the company does, or an ISP or other third party does. The first requires that the customer buys the relevant hardware/software and is responsible for maintaining it. The second requires that the development company do the same. The problem with the third option is that, previously, the inflexability and cost is was prohibative, especially if the application is complex and as the number of customers increases. It's this third aspect that the Cloud, and it's technologies, have changed. By making available complex and powerful resourses, and making them scalable at an incremental cost, the small company can provide the services that the large company, with it's own dedicated servers, can. Added to this is the fact that smaller companies have much better operating costs than large ones.

Spring Roo

The London Java Community (LJC) meeting this month was regarding Spring Roo. This seems to be a CASE tool for depoying Java objects to the web, giving similar functionality to Ruby-on-Rails and saving programming time doing so.

The event was well attended, with nearly a hundred people, and introduced by what were termed "lightning" talks, lasting about ten minutes. One of these described the LJC's involvement in the Java Community Process, which determines what the specifications are for the Java language and, more importantly these days, what happens with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which powers not just Java but a host of other languages.

Black Crusade

Fantasy Flight Games, as has become a tradition, have created a free introductory adventure for their new W40K RPG, Black Crusade. Called Broken chains, it's available here.

Cloud Foundry

I attended the London Spring User Group seminar on the Cloud Foundry. This is styled as "Platform as a Service (PaaS)", which extends services such as Azure and AWS to allow deployment of web services (in the larger sense) involving multiple technologies. The talk was given by Russ Miles, who had the habit of walking up and down, causing the video podcast to have to re-focus every so often. Russ demonstrated the public service by deploying Java, JavaScript and Ruby code and then did the same with a private Cloud Foundry he's set up on his own server.

Information is Beautiful

I was watching a program on statistics the other day and they referenced this (clicking in the image will take you to the full diagram):

UK Games Expo 2011

I was in two minds about whether to go to this as it was in Birmingham, a good three hours drive, but in the end I relented. And it did take me three hours as I got lost in the city suburbs trying to find it.

It was different from Salute, in that instead of being in just one giant room, it occupied lots of differnt rooms in what is Birmingham's Masonic Lodge. Unfortunately, the Talisman sessions were the day before, which would have been very enjoyable, but there was plenty to look at and quite a few games being played. There was a model of the Battle of Towton (War of the Roses):



and someone has thought up a game of Catch the Pidgeon:



And I bought some stuff.

The first is a collection of game poems, which is an on-going project. It's a party game (or several, really) but unusual, and I was intrigued.

Next is an RPG called Polaris. It's as much a work of fiction as an RPG, and has me somewhat baffled.

The third is a hard science-fiction RPG called Shock.

As I was leaving, I was stopped and asked for my identification:

The Casio F-91W

The other day I found my watch. It had been missing for about a week, but it was in the pocket of my trousers all this time. Unfortunately, the trousers had just been through the wash and the watch was a right-off: the strap was broke and there was water in the casing.

So I bought myself a design classic: The Casio F-91W.
Possibly the worlds most popular watch, and certainly one of the cheapest, so I bought two, just in case.

MongoDB User Group Meeting

I went to the MongoDB Usergroup meeting at SkillsMatter, who run these things. The Guardian were hosting it (they are in the process of converting their Oracle DB's to MongoDB) and SkillsMatter have produced a videocast of the event.

It was similar to the one they did at the MongoUK event, but talking more about how Mongo fits into the future strategy at The Guardian.