Disqus - Latest Comments for heathjohns

Re: Firefox OS challenges the closed mobile ecosystems Written by Holger Hussmann

heathjohns — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 02:34:19 -0000

If there's any way to get a dev phone, I would be insanely interested. I'm old enough to remember what being a dev under the Microsoft shadow of the late 90's/early 00's was like and developing for Android/iOS has that flavour (and worse in many respects). I appreciate Google's nods towards openness, but I think people are forgetting how much the corporate world resented giving up power to the web, and how liberating it was for all of us who create. Firefox OS feels to me like a narrow path between the closing canyon walls of the two dominant OSs, one that leads out into the open air again. I'm very anxious that it succeed; in my opinion there's not a more important technology being developed right now. I would love to be able to participate in some way - my contact is heath@elesi.org

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:57:48 -0000

Yes. I've talked about what I've implemented, but I won't specifically advocate it until it's seen some road-miles.

The site's only a little over a month old at this point...

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:55:27 -0000

The nice thing about being a non-profit is that there's no argument against open sourcing. I intend to release the whole site under an OSS license when things settle out a bit.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:54:15 -0000

Right now there's no Javascript-less option. I'm working on a front end to fix this, however. This will cover IE6, mobile, screen readers, web spiders, etc. It's going to be very simple but fully functional. Think the HTML-only option for Gmail.

However, you are right about the document model. Urbantastic is very much an application, not a CMS system. Just as it doesn't make sense to index Gmail, it wouldn't make sense to index us.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:46:34 -0000

It's still being written, but there's a front end which will cover all the minority users: IE6, mobile, screen readers, web spiders etc. It will be very simple, but fully functional.

In our particular case we're not interested in having Google index the dynamic content of our site - we have much more in common with Gmail than, say, a CMS system.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:42:25 -0000

Hey Anoush!

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:41:59 -0000

Yes, it's definitely a factor. I typically put all of the checks on the back end first, and then duplicate some of them on the client. The ones I duplicate are usually just for user experience's sake, and so end up being slightly different anyway.

There's an effort called ClojureScript that might help with the code duplication. But as it stands, though, I actually like having to two separate checkpoints in place. I've caught some of my own mistakes this way, and in the worst case scenario are far more likely to give a false negative than a positive, which is a better failure state than an inconsistant db.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:32:19 -0000

Thanks for the link... I've been meaning to check it out - it means a lot to hear that there's a high-volume site that uses it.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:28:19 -0000

I'm running Nginx which serves up all the static content, and also forwards certain requests (based on the url) to a different port. On that port I'm running Clojure, which uses the Jetty library to present an HTTP interface.

That Clojure server is where the "business" logic resides, and it, in turn, sits on top the CouchDB database (again, connected via HTTP).