Timothy Fisher

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 an arbitrary web service in the cloud.  In the past this meant that if you wanted to communicate with an external server using Ajax, your requests had to be proxied through your own server-side code.   This is where JSONP comes in.  JSONP stands for JSON with Padding.  Don’t get too hung u... (more)

Social Networking as a Service with EngineY

EngineY is an open source project that provides a complete social networking framework that can be run stand alone as a social network similar to a Ning social network, or it can be integrated with an existing website to provide just the social capabilities. It is a project that I have been developing over the past year or so. In this post, I want to talk about another way you can use EngineY, not as an application or framework that you would integrate into your code, but as a server that can provide all of the social features for your existing web applications. This idea came to... (more)

Downloading MLB Gameday Data with Gameday API

Let me start this post with a brief preface. If you are not a baseball fan who is interested in baseball statistics, this post will probably not hold much interest for you. However if you are, then you may be familiar with the MLB Gameday application and its data which is a great source of richly detailed MLB statistical data. This post will show you how to take that data from the MLB server and put it on your local machine for easier use, using the Gameday API. Many users of the Gameday like to download the data files to work with them locally. Currently most people use a rathe... (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)

Impressions of the Amazon Kindle 2 from a Kindle 1 owner

Is the Kindle 2 truly a next generation Kindle device? Unfortunately, I’d say the Kindle 2 is far from being a next generation Kindle. After reviewing all of the new features and its redesign, I would find it very hard for any existing Kindle 1 owner to justify paying another $359 to purchase the new Kindle 2. The cost of the Kindle 2 remains the same as the original Kindle at $359, with no discount announced for Kindle 1 owners. The features of the new Kindle are just not that exciting to a fan of the first Kindle. However, don’t get me wrong, I still love the Kindle, and for th... (more)