18-Oct-2005

TrickyDicky in Zenit Translations posts an article, Fishing, a translation of El pescador by Telémaco5 published in La Maldición de Sísifo on 17-Oct-2005.

What is Ruby on Rails?

Epaminondas Pantulis in Sobre Raíles posts a link to the article, What Is Ruby on Rails by Curt Hibbs, which is a good introduction to the features of Rails, the web application framework written in Ruby.

The 10 main web log usability errors

Patxi Echarte in EsLoMas.com posts a link to the article, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes by Jakob Nielsen in Alertbox. Patxi picks out the following areas in which mistakes are often made:

• No information about the author. Although a web log is not a business, people like to know something about the author of a web log and a short biography increases the trust that the reader has in the content.

• Navigation. Lots of the same errors are made in web logs that are made in web pages, the subject of an earlier Nielsen article. In a web log, it is very important that the title of the article gives a good idea of the content, or people will just pass it by. It is also important to describe the content of a link so the user can judge whether it is worthwhile to follow. It is a mistake to use the calendar as the only form of navigation, and categorizing posts helps users access what they are most interested in.

• Publication. The frequency of publication should be as regular as possible, although it is not easy to determine what this frequency should be. Mixing themes in posts is not good practice as it forces the reader to spend time of subjects that may be of no interest. Remember that once published, the web log may be be discovered by a future employer so be careful about what you write and how you write it.

Java application launcher

Juanjo Navarro in más que código has published a site, Java Application Launcher, where he has collected a number of freely available Java applications that can be launched from a web page using the Webstart . This technology has passed relatively unnoticed, but has a number of very interesting features:

• Java desktop applications can be packaged and deployed on a web site with a URL.

• When the URL is accessed, the application downloads automatically and executes locally.

• Subsequently, the application is accessed through the URL, but the system recognizes that the application is already installed locally, so only downloads any updates that might be required.

Java Application Launcher already contains applications for office productivity, multimedia, software development, education and games and can serve as a virtual desktop that is accessible from any computer connected to the internet (and has Java installed).

Software and the concurrency revolution

mig21 in Yet Another Programming Weblog posts a link to the article, Software and the Concurrency Revolution by Herb Sutter and James Larus, in which they focus on the implications of concurrency for software and its consequences for both programming languages and programmers now that multicore processors and multi-processor machines are becoming common.