Timothy Fisher

Too often I hear people talk about adding AJAX-enabled fancy UI elements to their website or web application to make it more “Web 2.0″ style. While many Web 2.0 applications do include these elements of AJAX,  gradients,  and glossy style, those features are not what characterizes them as Web 2.0 applications.   Web 2.0 is about the culture of participation.  Web 2.0 is about the Internet as a platform.   A typical Web 2.0 site becomes more interesting and valuable as it’s community of users grow.  Web 2.0 puts the user and the content they contribute as the primary actors in most of it’s use cases.  A Web 2.0 site makes it’s data available to be mashed into new applications. Let’s consider an example.  Imagine that you own a website that presents information about baseball to users. You may hear advice that you should make your site more Web 2.0. That person migh... (more)

What Is JSONP And Why Is It Useful?

By now most web developers are familiar with Ajax and the benefits that it provides.  In short, Ajax allows you to communicate asynchronously from the browser to a server.  This is usually done using the XMLHttpRequest object which is now supported in all major browsers.  Anyone who has used Ajax extensively is probably also aware of the cross-domain limitation placed on it.  The cross-domain limitation means that you can only communicate from the browser back to the domain from which the JavaScript was served.  Browser restrictions prevent you from using Ajax to communicate with... (more)

How to Generate Boxscores with Ruby from Live MLB Data

As an avid baseball fan, I’ve always been interested in the statistics that surround baseball. More so than in any other sport, baseball is a game ruled by statistics. In this post, I will describe a program that I wrote in the Ruby language to generate box scores for any Major Leage Baseball(MLB) game by using the live XML data provided by MLB. Ruby makes it easy to do using plain Ruby along with just a few libraries. Live MLB Data The amount of raw data that MLB makes available is extensive. It includes all of the traditional boxscore statistics plus deep detail on every pitch t... (more)

Managing and Documenting Your Project XML Style

XML seems to be popping up everywhere. In this article, I'm going to touch on an often overlooked but potentially very powerful use for XML technology: XML for project management and documentation. Thanks to the open source community, there are some marvelous tools available for incorporating XML into your software development processes. Throughout this article I refer to a project's infrastructure. I use the term infrastructure to refer to things such as a project's directory structure, developer mailing lists, build processes, deployment sites, source code configuration manage... (more)

Opening Up Java Projects to Open Source

As open source technology is gaining more popularity in the press and among the general population, there still seems to be a lack of knowledge of what is available via open source amid many software development projects. While the mainstream media and the average computer user thinks of Linux whenever the term open source is brought up, this article looks at the amazing wealth of technology available to Java software development teams. For years there have been promises of code reuse resulting from the use of object-oriented programming. The open source community is delivering o... (more)