Andre’s Blog

October 3rd, 2006

Dave and I just got to our _lovely_ hotel room in Silicon Valley/Santa Clara for the AjaxWorld Conference & Expo. We’re pretty exhausted, but managed to get some Pizza which ate while watching oh so uplifting news:S

Anyway, Dave’s talking about “Ajax Debugging and Quality Assurance” at 11:30, once you’ve moved passed the Ajax 101 which you should’ve by now you’ll need to know about the tools and techniques that he’ll be discussing. Some of the tools of particular interest include: FireBug, JSUnit, Selenium and CruiseControl.

I’m leading a BOF about Usability at some point…but I’m not entirely sure when. I’ll post again as soon as I know.

Birds of a Feather Sessions:And then, for good measure, AJAXWorld 2006 also offers a welter of BOFs led by some of the industry’s biggest names:
Usability BOF – Andre Charland
JSON BOF – Douglas Crockford
Dojo BOF – Dylan Scheimann
Open AJAX BOF – Jon Ferraiolo
jMaki BOF – Greg Murray
Ruby on Rails BOF- Thomas Fucchs
Rico BOF – Bill Scott

AJAX World Conference & Expo Speakers and Agenda Announced @ AJAXWORLD MAGAZINE

Dave and I will try to get a podcast in while we’re down here, so stay tuned. I’m down in Santa Clara after this for the Open Ajax Alliance meetings until Saturday morning. If you’re around drop me an email or give me a ring.

technorati tags:ajaxworld, ajaxworld2006, ajaxworld06, davejohnson, andrecharland, usability, debugging, ajax, qa, performance, jsunit, selenium, firebug, bof, presentation, santaclara, siliconvalley, nitobi

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September 27th, 2006

So first off we launched our site (www.openajax.org) last week! Which we’re all very excited about:) Right now we have over 50 member companies, and this is growing substantially. Jon Ferraiolo told us today that he’s received more than 50 emails in the last business days since the new site went live. A good sign. With the new site we also received a donation, the domain OpenAjax.org which is much cleaner and easier to remember than www.openajaxalliance.org, yah! It was pretty loose to joing at first, all you had to do was email and Jon, have a chat and he’d determine if it made sense. Now you have sign an agreement that mostly has to do with IPR issues and the steeting committee has to approve you, so we’re getting serious.

Microsoft still hasn’t joined, maybe they never will:( One can imagine they have some reservations abuut jumping with IBM and a bunch of open source projects with out considering it carefully. Mind you Atlas has a kind of interesting license, from an MS perspective anyway. Still I think it’s important for them and the rest of the group that they get on board, come we’re all grown ups!

We’ve also published an Ajax white paper which is a great semi technical resource to get up to speed on what Ajax is, what it can do for you and how to go about doing it. Check it out here or download the PDF here.

The white paper is nice but it’s mostly a marketing piece and something for the media and analysts to grab onto. The actual work product is the OpenAjax Hub which is an open source project, that will facilitate different Ajax frameworks, JavaScript libraries and components to work together in the same app or on the same page. Of the 50 some companies involved in the effort there’s only a handful of people writing code, but I’m sure this will change with the first check-ins to SourceForge. The goal is to have something usable by early 2007!

So what is Nitobi’s involvement? Well, I’m on the marketing committee with Alexei, Dave’s working with Declarative Markup and James is working on interoperability stuff. Unfortunately none of us have all the time we’d like to have to devote to this valuable industry effort…but that’s what the way things roll sometimes. So what do we do? Well for staters we have conference calls every 2 weeks, where we discuss what we do and what we have to. They’re pretty typical committee conference calls, you never get as much done as you want to or think you could but things are moving along. The tech committees actually write code and discuss interop and architecture issues, the maketing folks have come up with website, white paper and press releases. So not bad. But we are not a standards body so don’t expect any;-)

We’re having our second face-to-face meeting next week at the Sun offices in Santa Clara, right after AjaxWorld. This will be my first and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone in person.

Just wanted to give a special mention to Jon from IBM, as I think he’s done a tremendous job getting things done and managing the whole committee process. Neither of which are small feats!

technorati tags:openajax, openajaxalliance, ajax, nitobi

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September 21st, 2006

Alright it only took a couple all nighters, a few pizzas, some sushi, a bunch of beer, focus, a blog fight with some analysts, lots of espresso, muffins and a weekend marathon but the long awaited Grid 3.2 is ready to roll:

Nitobi Grid V3.2 (September 20, 2006)

• Separated data sources from rendering, creating 6 distinct modes of operation:

• LiveScrolling Ajax
• LiveScrolling Local
• Paging Ajax
• Paging Local
• ShowAll Ajax
• ShowAll Local

Added ShowAll mode – Perform a single get on the data and render it all at once. Useful if all the the data is needed at once for JavaScript operations.

Improved loadtime performance ~100%. Grids appear more quickly on the screen.

Added new editors: Image, checkbox, link, password

Improved CSS styles for less parent-style intrusion. * Nitobi namespace replaces deprecated Nitobi one. “Nitobi” becomes “NTB”.

Added static databinding features

• Client-side sorting
• In-document xml data islands

Extended the Nitobi Framework The Nitobi Framework is the underlying toolkit that supports our components. It will soon be available as a standalone component, but can be accessed now when using the Grid. Some of the components which have been added to the API documentation are:

• Event Manager – Standardizes cross-browser DOM events. Provides a simple JavaScript publish/subscribe event pattern that can be used for general event notifications.
• Data Table – A complete client-side dataset object alowing easy synchronizing between client-side and remote datasets.
• Callback – Developers can now use the native Grid cross-browser transport method to perform their own Ajax callbacks. Its no longer necessary to use a 3rd party Ajax frameworks to do Ajax transport when using Grid.
• Cross-browser XML/XSLT Libraries – Perform XSL transforms on xml documents with full cross-browser support using the Grid’s native xml library.
• Documentation – Added the framework to the public documentation so the component methods can be used by developers in their own applications external to Grid.
• Cross-browser DOM Toolkit – Access the native Grid DOM library. Supports things like outerHTML, dimensional positioning.

Nitobi Knowledgebase – Whats New in Grid V3

Alexei really busted his ass to build 9 new Ajax samples with code and explanations to help develoers get started:

• Basic Grid Demo
• Live Scrolling Mode
• Paging Mode
• ShowAll Mode
• Remote Data
• Static Data
• Master – Detail
• Editors
• Copy and Paste

Ok enough with the blogging, go download it! Please send me any feedback you have!

Thanks again for your patience, understanding and support! I’ll put a screencast highlighting the new features up soon…

technorati tags:ajax, ajaxgrid, nitobi, nitobigrid, nitobitgrid3.2, aspgrid, phpgrid, jspgrid, javascriptgrid, javascript

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August 29th, 2006

I thinkby most accounts BarCamp Vancouver was great success! About 120 attendees, dozens of great sessions, a pre-bbq, great location, great coffee, decent wifi, a photo walk, dj and turn tables, break-even, great organizers and 2 kegs of free beer.

Big thanks to all the organizers, Bill and WorkSpace!

I managed to catch a bunch of different sessions, Jason Billingsley of ElasticPath had an interesting talk on SEO and the longtail. I took some kind of random notes here:

• Many want to be number for one”digital camera”
• but there’s a lot of money to be made for “sony 5mp digital slr”
• it’s very hard to become number for digital camera
• if you put together a 4 keyphrase you’re further along the buying process
• dig throough your logs to come up with the long tail list
• keyword generation tool Jason will post this on his blog
• they compete against IBM, MS, Oracle, but they are very slow to move on keywords so they got lucky
• EP has baked alot of this baked into their platform
• CSS vs Tables…CSS is better because:

• spiders get to content quicker
• your keywords are higher in the page
• this creates better content to code ratio

More in Jason’s blog post.

Dave and I talked about Ajax, I showed a bunch of cool demos including dave’s infamous Google maps/Ajax Grid/Excel Mashup. And then dave went off discussing some Advanced topics in JavaScript such as aspect oriented programming and inheritance. If you want Dave’s slide deck (you’re either David Gratton or Brian Leroux) email me;-)

technorati tags:barcamp, barcampvan, barcampvancouver, workspace, ajax, seo, longtail, jasonbillingsley, elasticpath, marketing, workspace, barcampearth

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August 22nd, 2006

[Update] Please add/suggestion sessison here http://barcamp.org/BarcampTopics so people can start to collaborate.

Just a quick note from the BarCamp organizers to pass on some plans and news about the upcoming event. We’re all very psyched to be part of the first BarCamp Vancouver, and hope you are too.

*** If You Can’t Come, Please Remove Your Name From the List ***

There are currently about 12 people on the waitlist. If you can’t make it:

1. Visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverRegistry and take yourself off
the list.
2. Move the next person from the waitlist on to the list.
3. If they left an email address, send them a quick email letting them know
that they’re in.

A waitlisted person will be very appreciative.

*** BarCamp Costs and T-Shirts ***

Technically speaking, BarCamp Vancouver is free. However, we’ve got plenty of costs to cover (see our budget: http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouverPlanning), so we’re requesting a donation of $20. Everybody who makes such a donation gets a groovy BarCamp Vancouver t-shirt (you can view a PDF of the design here: http://tinyurl.com/osh68).

We’ve only got 120 t-shirts, so if you’re picky about size, register promptly on Friday night.

*** Schedule ***

The schedule, such as it is, looks like this:

Friday Night, 6:00pm – Registration and Rooftop Barbeque at the Bryght
offices
Friday Night, Later – Camping out at WorkSpace
Saturday, 8:30am – Breakfast
Saturday, 9:00am – Scheduling the day’s sessions
Saturday, 10:00am – Sessions begin
Saturday, 6:00pm – Sessions end

A note on scheduling: We’ve done the math, and we’re pretty sure that all 120 of us won’t be able to present in 8 hours. So, if you’re not so keen on presenting, don’t feel obligated to do so. Try to pitch in in other ways: contribute to discussions, help clean up, ask an organizer if there’s an errand that needs running, and so forth. If you’re sort of keen on presenting, check the list to see if there’s somebody you can co-present with.
There may be some preliminary scheduling on Friday night, but if you’re keen to present, show up at 9:00am on Saturday morning and participate in the scheduling round-up.

*** Locations ***

The main venue for BarCamp has been generously donated by WorkSpace (http://www.abetterplacetowork.com/). That’s suite 400 – 21 Water Street in the heart of Vancouver’s Gastown. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/qoha6.
The Friday night BBQ will be at Bryght’s offices, which are literally a half-block away at suite 400 – 1 Alexander St. You actually enter around the side of the building off Carall St. Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/mwsbm.

The Bryght offices are not wheelchair accessible (there’s a flight of stairs between the 3rd floor elevator and the 4th floor office). If you require special access, please contact us via the BarCamp Google Group and we’ll see about arranging access.

*** Food ***

Friday Night BBQ – We’ll be providing some weiners and such to roast, plus veggie options for the non-meat eaters. If you’re not keen on those options, you’re welcome to bring real or faux beast flesh of your choosing. Beer will be provided courtesy of AdHack.

Saturday breakfast – There will be a ‘continental breakfast’ starting at 8:30am

Saturday lunch – We’re ordering pizza
Other snacks include cookies from Midnight Kitchen, iced tea and sodas from Jones Sodas, bottled water and whatever else we can scare up.

*** Sponsors ***

This event is so cheap because of our fantastic sponsors. They are:

Uniserve
Business Objects
Belkin
Nitobi
ElasticPath Software
Bryght
Raincity Studios
EQO Communications
WorkSpace
Capulet Communications
Midnight Kitchen
AdHack
Sxip
Jones Sodas
T-shirt.ca

That’s it. Any questions, hit up the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/barcampvancouver. Otherwise, we’ll see you on Friday!

Technorati Tags: barcampvancouver,barcamp, barcampearth

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August 16th, 2006

There was a good piece on BarCamp in Canada over at itBusiness.ca that Grant Buckly wrote a couple weeks ago.  I especially like the title;-)

BarCamps aim to erase the line between presenters and audience. Some require that every attendee come prepared to give a presentation. Some events are less strict about this rule than others, but the ethic of all un-conference events is participation. “It’s not really just about attending, it’s about participating,” says Andre Charland, president of Nitobi.com in Vancouver and an organizer of BarCamp Vancouver, which is scheduled to take place in conjunction with BarCamp Earth in late August.

I was quoted in it a couple times. Neat to see canada having a strong emerging tech scene with all this Web 2.0 madness going on down south.  Get ready for BarCampVancouver next week!  120 signed up, it should be a great time!

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampearth, barcampvancouver, media, itbusiness, quote, andrecharland, grantbuckley

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August 11th, 2006

I’m going be giving a talk about blogging as a marketing tool at next year’s Massive Technology Show.

While “blogs” (short for “web logs”) are often associated with personal commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news, many businesses are learning how blogging can improve their bottom line.

Explore a new ways for your business to use blogging to improve marketing efforts and create better customer relationships.

More on the Massive site.

Massive is the largest technology of it’s kind in Canada with over 4000 attendees.  Lindsay Smith and the team do a great job, I’d recommend checking it out for sure.

Technorati Tags: blog, bloggin, strategy, marketing, massive, massive2007, speaking

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July 30th, 2006

Dave put together this cool little demo for the talk I gave at GeoWeb last Thursday.

We wanted to show closer integration of the desktop and the browser environments.  So we used a list of addresses (actually lat/long coordinates) in Excel, copied and pasted the list into the nitobi grid which was mashed-up with up with Google Maps.  It was pretty slick, I’m not sure if I emphasized in my talk how important this type of workflow is going to be in the future.  Users should have to make a cognitive switch between the desktop and web environment (IMO).  If you I can see the data let me get copy it, paste it, drag it, drop it or move through it with the keyboard.  Come on!  I want arrow keys, tabbing, I want to send email by hitting ctrl+enter like I can on the desktop, these are not hard to implement they just take some thought and care from the application designer.

Click here for the screencast.

Dave will have a more technical follow up post to this soon.  Likely he’ll include geo-coding for addresses and such too, since most people probably don’t think in lat/long coordinates or have lists of those kicking around;-)  This coming from the usability evangelist that I am…

Technorati Tags: ajax, gis, map, geoweb, mashup, nitobit, nitobigird, googlemap, ux, ui, usability

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July 28th, 2006

Megan Cole – my blog / Raincity Studios – [email protected] – How To Be A Sponge… or… How to embrace this new, very public life… Considering my fellow comrades, I am but a wee rookie. I’ll be the one soaking up all I can and blogging and vlogging it all. Oo – I’ll show y’all how to put back 12 Guinness in a single sitting.

Just one of the many wonderful Vancouver techies attending BarCamp vancouver. In other news we need sponsors. So step up to the plate;-) And let me know how we can work something out. There’s going to be one hundred of Vancouver’s best, brightest and most influential technologists and vocal bloggers there being exposed to your brand!

UPDATE: BarCamp Vancouver is Full! The 90th registrant was:

Kate Trgovac – Uniserve Communications Corp – Sr. Product Manager

Looks like Uniserve and ElasticPath are going to be sponsoring along side Nitobi, Bryght and Capulet. and WorkSpace .Woot!

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampvancouver, vancouver, sponsor

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July 25th, 2006

I’m speaking at GeoWeb on Thursday, July 26 at 10:35am.

GIS Applications on the Web: Possibilities and Limitations
  Speaker: Andre Charland, co-founder, eBusiness Applications Nitobi
Google Maps put Ajax on the map for consumers and developers alike. There is a growing trend towards porting GIS and mapping software to the web. In this presentation, Charland will speak to the possibilities and limitation of various Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies, including Ajax, Flash and FLEX. He’ll approach it from both the professional Web developer’s perspective of moving into a Web environment – an environment that is as rich and visually engaging as traditional GIS applications; and the user’s perspective – moving toward a desktop experience and usability issues.

I’m really looking forward to this talk as I think mapping and GIS is really cool and we’re only at the tip of the iceberg, not just on the web but for other devices too. I’m going to be on the look out for some cool topo map applications.

UPDATE: Here’s my slide deck in PDF and PPT. Here’s the link to a whole bunch of map mashups. I’ll upload the movies shortly.
Technorati Tags: geoweb, ajax, gis, googlemaps, presentation, vancouver, bc

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