Late last week I refactored the draw code in Slick JS (http://github.com/sidelab/slick) again. I’ve been pretty frustrated that I didn’t get the drawing logic right first time, but I think I’ve come to terms with it. Here are the major changes.
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posted on the July 5th, 2010 No Comments »
I’ve been particularly quiet on the blog and twitter of late, primarily given I have been working very hard pulling on two javascript libraries (well it was one, but I’m separating them – you know they were causing trouble). While I won’t go into a lot of detail here, as there is still a lot more work to do, I will try and give a brief introduction to both and why on earth I’m writing yet another javascript library.
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posted on the June 24th, 2010 No Comments »
Through the wonder’s of twitter I found out about the Random Hacks of Kindness event that is going down in Sydney in about a week and a half’s time (Saturday June 5 – Sunday June 6). Personally, I think this is one of the better hackathon’s I have seen organised as it’s not only about talented devs getting together, but also about building apps that can potentially make the world a better place. Something I’m sure we’d all like to get involved with.
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posted on the May 26th, 2010 2 Comments »
As I get back into “coding for money” again after a couple of years of being paid to manage people, projects, technology, etc. I am once again diving into different languages to look at what are going to be the truly productive and innovative languages over the next few years. As I do this, I reflect on some of the syntax and library clutter in my mind from having coded in a number of languages over the years, and wonder which of those I’d be most happy to forget (Johnny Mnemonic style) to make room for the new ones…
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posted on the May 24th, 2010 12 Comments »
Last week I started a 5 day exercise to re-evaluate the various frameworks that are at the disposal of developers for the purpose of iPhone and Android cross platform mobile development. This time, the focus was on what the various frameworks had to offer if I was to build a mapping application for multiple different mobile platforms.
This is part 1 of the wrap up from that week – a comparison of the native bridges for cross platform iPhone and Android web app development.
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posted on the May 18th, 2010 3 Comments »
Well, I’m now officially out of the corporate world and Sidelab has been in business for a week now 
. On the cards for this week are 5 days of non-chargeable work (eek) that I have allotted to determine whether a mobile mapping application can be implemented using some of the iPhone and Android mobile development toolkits that are currently available (PhoneGap, AppCelerator, RhoMobile, etc). Targeted platforms at this stage are iPhone and Android only.
To add an extra layer of complexity I will be doing this using the deCarta Mapping Platform rather than Google Maps, as I’ve had some experience with the deCarta platform in the past and found it to be technically very good.
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posted on the May 10th, 2010 2 Comments »
After writing a post that has recently sparked some controversy, I felt that it was only proper to offer up some more observations about the way various languages perform at a baseline (yes – read hello world style applications) on Google AppEngine. The primary purpose of both this post, and my previous post on comparing Google AppEngine language performance is to show that while Google offer Java on AppEngine, the performance of Java Applications for low-traffic (or growing) sites may not be what you are expecting on day one.
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posted on the April 25th, 2010 4 Comments »
I am quite convinced that Google AppEngine is a very significant piece of “cloud computing” technology. More than other cloud components, it has been designed to scale from small, low request count websites to the big suckers. That is, until you come across your first Loading Request in the world of the AppEngine Java (and friends – Scala, Groovy, etc).
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posted on the April 20th, 2010 13 Comments »
It’s been a while since I posted my comparison of the various iPhone and Android Web Application Frameworks, and quite a few things have changed since that time. Nothing completely disruptive or game changing, but things are definitely moving along.
The latest piece of news that I just received an email about is Appcelerator’s 1.0 release of its Titanium platform, which is obviously a bit of a milestone for the guys over there at Appcelerator.
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posted on the March 16th, 2010 No Comments »
Well it’s 2010, and I definitely had a distractable end to 2009 (with a distinct lack of blogging). So to kick off 2010, I thought I’d start trying to get a few of the “low hanging fruit” ideas that I’ve had over the last six months written and working.
The first of those will be an experiment using Google’s AppEngine as a front-end proxy to a less robust website, hosted on low-cost hosting. Whilst not sure, I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be able to give my self-hosted wordpress blog a layer of resilience with some app-engine mem-caching goodness.
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posted on the January 10th, 2010 1 Comment »
