Ask a stupid question :-)

Got this from a friend – it's pretty funny – ask for directions on Google Maps from Paris, France to New York, NY. Here's the link. Check out #20. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean - 5572 km :-)

Guess you get what you ask for ...

Cocoa joins the family

We've got a new baby – that's one of the reasons I haven't been able to post anything for a while. She's really keeping us busy but in about 10 days has settled down nicely. She's close to house trained (just a couple of accidents) and is getting more and more used to her new surroundings. She's so cute :-)

Of course, frevvo is taking up a bunch of time as well. I've been experimenting a lot with frevvo and REST and it's clearer and clearer to me that it really could be the killer app for REST. It's so cool to imagine that with REST+frevvo, people in companies can start taking advantage of the whole mashup phenomenon within their walls. Very cool stuff.

Howto: IE6 and IE7 Ajax caching fix

My company's product frevvo Live Forms makes heavy use of Ajax, especially in the Form Designer. We had to work around a number of interesting "features" in good ol' IE6 (and now IE7). One of IE's stupidest quirks – among the many endearing features that have cost us hours – is that it caches responses to Ajax requests. Doh! By definition, Ajax requests are supposed to be dynamic so caching the responses is one of the dumbest things around.

frevvo's architecture is essentially a Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern in the browser. I'm doing a bit of hand-waving here but the model in the browser is essentially a stub that updates the actual model on the server using Ajax. When designing a form, if you move a control around or modify one of its properties, your browser will update the server model via Ajax. For large forms or large schemas, browser performance at initial load time is a big issue (more on this later) so Live Forms dynamically generates the XHTML for a Section in the form when it is expanded or a complex element in a schema when it is expanded.

Unfortunately, IE6 and IE7 cache the Ajax responses. No matter how often you refresh, IE will still show the old XHTML. Fortunately, the workaround is relatively simple – just add a random number or timestamp to the URL, as in the block of code below (uses Ajax.Request from prototype):

editControlType: function (controlId, onSuccess,
                           onFailure, options) {
  var requestUrl = this.controlUrl(controlId) + "/editor" +
                   "?edit=true&random=" + Math.random();
  Object.extend(options, {
    method:'get',
    onSuccess:onSuccess,
    onFailure:onFailure,
    onException:this.onException
  });
  new Ajax.Request(requestUrl, options);
}

This is the only reliable solution I've been able to find. Cache control headers don't work reliably either – I haven't been able to figure out IE's algorithm for this. It appears to ignore cache-control headers most of the time.

With the unique random number parameter, IE now thinks it's a brand new URL, and does not display the cached version. Whew!

For the record, I'm not randomly biased against IE. FF and Safari have their own set of issues but, honestly, they're nothing compared to IE.

Web Oriented Architecture (WOA)

My friend Jérôme Louvel wrote about web oriented architecture on his blog and it led me to these posts by Nick Gall and Dion Hinchcliffe.

I like Nick's shorthand version: WOA = SOA + WWW + REST, Jérôme's definition: an application of the REST style for building Web services based on straight HTTP and XML documents, and the image towards the end of Dion's article.

I've been contemplating my company's product frevvo and it's connection to the SOA world and it seems to me that we put the WWW (the face) in WOA. Let's say you have a REST style application – all it uses is HTTP, JSON and POX (plain old XML) – and have created some services. How can users consume these services – does the WWW above simply mean "use HTTP to access them"?

frevvo lets you create front ends – things that users can touch and feel (in their browsers, of course) and that can interact with these WOA services. Without it, a WOA has no face and without a face, it's hard to create a user-oriented application.

Incidentally, frevvo is, itself a REST style application (HTTP+JSON+POX): we'll be publishing the REST API soon. The server-side was heavily inspired by Restlet (Jérôme's project). Unfortunately, Restlet was nowhere near ready at the time but we hope to adopt Restlet in an upcoming version. It's very cool – check it out. And, hopefully, when you create your web applications using Restlet, you can put a face on them with frevvo.

frevvo and Metaserver

Wow! We've finally released Version 1.0 of frevvo. As usual, it was harder and took longer than we expected. Part of it was for good reasons: we got some interesting feedback from our Beta users and we decided to take the time to implement a couple of features.

It sure was quite a journey – we had plenty of ups and downs but fortunately many more ups than downs. It's been quite different from my last company (Metaserver, which was acquired by Whitehill Technologies). Unlike last time, we didn't raise any money, didn't try to rapidly grow before we had any customers and just took a different path – we've behaved like a small company. And, interestingly it's not been much harder to do. I suppose the fact that nowadays the cost of software, hardware etc. is essentially zero helps but we haven't really missed the people that we had last time, at least so far. It sure looks like the trend – so many products/companies are launched in less time and with far less money than before. We'll have to wait and see if more of them end up being successful than last time but I've got to believe that fiscal discipline from the get-go is a good thing.

Anyway, congratulations to Yuri, Nancy and Leandro and thanks for all the hard work that's been put in over so many months to get frevvo out the door. It's a cool product for sure and one that we hope is going to prove very useful for a lot of people.

Yale Golf

For golf-lovers everywhere, check out these great pictures of my home course - the Yale Golf Course. It's an amazing golf course that's really come on strong in the last few years thanks to our new superintendent.

Now, if only I had more time to play there :-) Hard to do that when you're also working on a cool new startup. Someday ... but, if you come down to the New Haven, CT area drop me a line.

Geek Culture

I stumbled upon this awesome geek culture gallery. Some of these pictures are cool and some are downright scary :-)