Standardizing RESTful JSON

Kris Zyp: The notes in this post are based on the behavior of server implementations of JSON REST including Persevere, CouchDB, GrassyKnowl, Amazon S3, and RoR’s ActiveResource, and on client implementations including Dojo, Jester, and Persevere JavaScript client.

It looks like Joe Gregorio may have started something.  Again.

AWDwR3 Beta 5

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta 5 is now available.  The current list is much more manageable.  The people who have participated in the beta have been tremendous, and the forums have been quite active.  Meanwhile, I’ve converted all of my personal Rails apps to Phusion Passenger. ...
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Wii Fit Update

I’ve lost ten pounds since I got a WII fit, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story.  Losing another 10 pounds (gradually: over the course of 3-6 months) would put me into the fitness category in terms of body fat percentages, and would seem to be a worthy goal.

I’m not convinced that the exercises contributed significantly to my weight loss.  It is possible that early morning stretching and aerobic exercise set my metabolism for the day.  But more importantly, at least for me, is the daily tracking and graphing.  I often see up to two pound fluctuations day to day, even when the measurements are taken at the same time and same conditions.  But the ten day...
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Tilting at Windmills

Damien Katz: "The web is built on REST. Therefore REST is good" Bullshit

I’m not sure what the purpose is behind creating a strawman based on a caricature of what some people view as best practices and then proceeding to shoot it down.

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Tasty Rails Caching

Tim Bray: This matters if your Web app is maxed on some combination of CPU and database, and a noticeable proportion of requests don’t really need a page-rebuild, and your existing caching and last-modified setup isn’t getting the job done.

While I agree with that, I claim that the potential benefits are much more than that.  Much more.  Furthermore, the upcoming Simpler Conditional Get Support is not the only arrow in Rail’s quiver, and not always the best one.

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Live HTML5 Parser

Henri Sivonen: So without further ado, here’s Live DOM Viewer with an HTML5 parser running as JavaScript in your browser.

Wow!  I’m impressed by the speed.  I can definitely see myself tweaking, if not outright developing, the SVG images I create using this.  I can also see this being used in a comments live preview function.

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AWDwR3 Beta 4

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta 4 is now available.  All chapters, with the exception of Web Services which is likely to be replaced by a chapter on ActiveResource, have been updated to work with Rails 2.1.

I’m now looking for suggestions on what new features are in edge Rails today that deserve specific focus and expanded coverage in the next beta.

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Minor Edits

Ciaran Gultnieks: what follows is a fairly simple hack to allow you to specify that a particular edit is minor, and thus get Wordpress to leave the last-updated date alone

I’ve extended Ciaran’s change slightly... by adding an if check preventing the checkbox from being shown if the entry has yet to be published.

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Minimalist Markup, now text/html Compatible

Bug 311366 is resolved in Firefox 3.0.1.  It may, in fact, have been fixed earlier; but my initial testing was flawed.  Thanks go out to Anne van Kesteren and James Graham for spotting the problem that was preventing me from seeing that it was fixed.

Demonstration of an minimalist HTML5 page served as text/html.

Open Standards

Simon Phipps: Field-of-use restrictions have no place in open source.

+1

Updated Decimal Implementation

I’ve added decimal literals and support for both unary and binary operators on top of SpiderMonkey.  More details here.  Code here.  Mozilla tracking here. ...
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New ASF Platinum Sponsor

Sam Ramji: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

Thanks!

Open Web Foundation

Eran Hammer-Lahav: This morning at OSCON, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

If this group evolves to the point where it finds the right balance of enabling and getting out of the way, this foundation could be a very handy thing to have around.

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Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

slides for OSCON 2008 presentation

A number of the members of the audience were more informed on the subject than I was (excellent!).

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Life after Bug Tracking Systems

Avery Pennarun: The git developers don’t track bugs. If you find a bug, you can write about it on the mailing list. You might get flamed. And then probably someone will ask you to fix it yourself and send in a patch.  This is unlike almost all other open source projects.

Sometimes ideas take time to percolate.  When I first saw Avery’s post, it didn’t quite sink in.

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Stalled Tickets

Joseph Scott: we can definitely use more people looking at the XML-RPC and AtomPub code.

My experience matches Jeff’s, namely that post 2.3; contributions of time in terms of showing up on the IRC channel; producing and commenting on both bug and feature requests; and in terms producing actual patches, rarely produces the desired result.

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Tracking Towards Decimal Support in Firefox

Bug 445178 (decimal) – Implement Decimal Support

Thanks John!

Update: Downloadable standalone SpiderMonkey executables for Darwin, Linux, and Windows.

Hello Decimal World

js> print(new Decimal("8.5")); 8.5

OK, so it is not much yet.  But it is a constructor, a toString method, and a finalizer.  And it makes use of decQuadFromString and decQuadToString from the decNumber library.  And it is in the context of a real codebase, namely SpiderMonkey, which is what Firefox uses.  And it is in a public repository that you can clone, pull, and download from; and perhaps even try building yourself or patching.

Decimal in ECMAScript

Monetary units around the world are often expressed in terms of decimal numbers.  You would think that by this time computers would be adept at handling such, but as this page indicates, sadly such is not the case for JavaScript today.  This befuddles businessmen and causes application developers to focus attention on unnecessary details unrelated to solving the problem at hand.

One of my tasks is to write the spec text for future revisions of ECMAScript to address this by introducing a notion of a Decimal class.  As currently envisioned, this will be accomplished in three layers.

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Above All

My son voluntarily enlisted in the Air Force yesterday.  He heads off for Basic Training on October 28th.

I’m not yet sure of the details, but apparently his assignment will involve the maintenance and service of on-board radar equipment.

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