Archive for May, 2007

• It’s a web application, not a web site!

  Why do the general public confuse web apps and web sites? Web sites are developed to market specific entities and establish a brand. A web application has complex business logic, that allows users to interact with the application. I guess everyone’s still in the web 1.0 phase, where anything on the web is static–no sharing, [...]

  May 26th, 2007

• Web Applications vs Desktop Applications, Internal Corporate Use

  With more web applications implementing desktop-like features, one can look forward to complex business software, that would typically be written for an operating system, being written as an internal web application within an organization. Incidentally, EJChart (http://www.ejschart.com/index.php), developed by Emprise Corporation, struck my attention.
  On the frontpage, you can see a demo of the statistical capabilities [...]

  May 23rd, 2007

• I love RSS–I hate XML namespaces

  An RSS feed reads this:
  <media:thumbnail>http://…etc/foobar.png</media:thumbnail>
  <media:largeThumbnail>http://…/thumb.png</media:largeThumbnail>
  While parsing the response XML document after querying a REST server, I found myself clueless as to why Mozilla Firefox (my main development browser) was confused about the “media:thumbnail” tag. Clearly, “document.getElementsByTagName” should grab all the “media:thumbnail” tags–at least in IE/Safari it does–but why not the Fox? Well, Mozilla Firefox seems [...]

  May 8th, 2007

• Google Search API vs Yahoo Search API

  After wrestling with Google’s search API, I found myself going back to the Yahoo Search API for many reasons.
  1) Putting a Google Search on your website feels more like a hack than an elegant implementation…
  2) Yahoo!’s search API allows you to do REST calls even on localhost as long as you have a valid Application [...]

  May 7th, 2007