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Blogs ยป Archive for October, 2005
Website testing with TestGen4Web and Firefox
So back again for another round. While “away”, further hair was lost and failed to gain useful employment as a forester. Meanwhile, number 2 child on the way in December. Enough already.
Ran into TestGen4Web today; a Firefox extension (needs 1.5 beta) to help automate testing of web applications, developed by Spikesource, a company making a name for themselves by testing Open Source applications.
Aside from having a slick UML diagram, it adds a toolbar to Firefox to allow recording and playback of “clicks” you’re making as you surf. Once you’re finished recording, you can save the steps as an XML file (format specific to TestGen4Web), for a later re-run.
And re-running isn’t limited only to the Firefox extension. The second half of this project is a code generator which parses the saved XML and generates code for execution either against HTTPUnit (Java), Selenium (more Java) or SimpleTest (PHP). That means it’s easy to re-run the tests on a daily basis via cron, for example.
If you’re now puzzled, a while back Marcus wrote an introduction to SimpleTest’s “Web Testing” capabilities: Coding a Login Box Shouldn’t Hurt – “How Automated Web Tests Can …
Working up a Sweat with Dreamweaver 8
Developing a relationship with an application is usually slow process and with really good software, it probably never really ends.
Opening the Dreamweaver 8 box for the first time a few months ago was all about ‘how different is it?’ and ‘gee, I hope they haven’t broken it’. I may well have a serious lack of imagination, but at this stage it always seems to me that the old version was perfectly good, and surely they could only wreck it from here? Sometimes I’m right, but this one seemed pretty good from the start.
Although it’s been almost ignored in most feature listings, ‘FTP in background’ was the feature that actually impressed me the most. I’ve got three, shiny, fingertip-sized indents in my keyboard from waiting in upload limbo.
Not long after I got to proof-read the final edits of Rachel’s Dreamweaver 8 ‘tour-de-force’ (still Word docs at that stage) and started to get a more serious appreciation for the improvements in the version 8. Thankfully Macromedia devoted most of their development attention to the areas that needed it most — namely CSS-centric design tools, standards and accessibility, while throwing in some nice code view improvements.
But is …
I/O Brush — Sample your World
For a long time DJ’s have made an artform from sampling their aural world and patchworking it together. Here’s a new tool that lets you do a similar thing with your visual world for the first time.
I/O Brush uses a combination of touch sensors and cameras built into the the center of the brush to sample anything within reach — from book cover to your t-shirt to your spagetti marinara lunch. Swishing the brush back across the screen allows you to paint live with your sample. This includes color, shape and motion as the accompanying video explains.
As the first of it’s kind, it’s probably larger and less compact than it may become, so this incarnation seems to be aimed at kids, but I could imagine a finer, cordless version of this offering some fascinating possibilities.
I’m not sure exactly how the current version would translate into commercial work, but it sure looks like a lot of fun.
(Via Drawn)
Bookmarks and back button history for AJAX apps
Aside from the accessibility concerns, which are indeed serious, the biggest problem with single-page AJAX applications (Web apps that work largely or entirely within a single page, like GMail) is that the standard navigation tools provided by Web browsers — bookmarks/favourites and the Back/Forward buttons — become totally useless.
Now, from the same clever monkey developing the AMASS client-side data storage system I mentioned previously, comes a very promising partial solution to these issues.
Really Simple History is a script that lets you associate page anchor names with application states (e.g. page.html#state). The script works by linking the user to a new anchor whenever the application enters a new state (e.g. editing a blog entry). The script then watches the current URL for changes to the current anchor (due to back/forward navigation), and triggers a function you specify so that you can update the application state accordingly.
Obviously it’s not quite as simple as I make out, but with the library in place, the code you need to write to support this is actually surprisingly simple. For now, Safari isn’t supported, but looking at how it works, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that browser supported before long.
.NET Framework 2.0 goes gold
Been waiting for .NET 2.0 to leave its seemingly perpetual beta cycle before trying it out? Well, today’s the day, people. .NET Framework 2.0 is out and ready to download. This includes ASP.NET 2.0.
Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are also available for those lucky enough to have an MSDN Subscription. The rest of us will have to wait for the official launch on November 7.
Cross-browser XForms
XForms is a complex but powerful replacement for HTML forms that relies heavily on cutting-edge XML technology. As a result of its complexity, browsers have been typically slow to implement it. But with working plugins for Internet Explorer and a pre-release extension now available for Firefox, the time is right to give this technology another look.
The last time I mentioned XForms, it seemed like the technology — at least in mainstream Web browsers — would never see the light of day. It required a plugin to work in Internet Explorer, Mozilla couldn’t find people willing to work on it, and Apple and Opera had both labelled it as impractical for various reasons.
Then, in August last year, Novell and IBM announced they would develop XForms support for Mozilla browsers. Now, those efforts are finally starting to pay off. So does that mean we can start writing XForms that work across browsers?
To find out, I installed the latest version of FormsPlayer for Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla’s XForms extension preview release for Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, then started writing XForms.
XForms can fit right into an XHTML document, but the Firefox extension requires that the document be …
A singularity of information
I was talking with a friend over coffee last night. He’d just read an article in which the author posited that we are approaching a ’singularity’ – a point in time where technology transforms the very nature of human life.
This isn’t a new idea. There have been conferences and papers and books written about this stuff for years. But the tie-ins with some of the Web 2.0 concepts of harnessing collective intelligence have led many Web developers to wonder if the Web will be where this singularity makes its debut.
Every day, people invent new ways to get things done on the Web. For my particular job, the biggest problem I have to solve is staying on top of the ever-rising tide of news, products and ideas swirling through the world of Web development. Were a technological singularity to come about, all that information would somehow be filtered and streamed directly into my consciousness.
Personally, I believe that what will hinder the arrival of a technological singularity will not be the speed of technological innovation, but the rate at which people are willing to adopt that technology. Many futurists predict humanity’s merging with computers at a biological level …
A special kick in the butt just for you
You know who you are.
You’re gliding along, doing okay.
But, if you are honest with yourself, you haven’t done much marketing in the past few weeks, or even months. Marketing has become a lower priority.
You used to hustle hard with marketing. You used to do at least one marketing activity a day. You had to, because you had no clients.
Now you are doing okay. So marketing has fallen behind.
Here is a kick in the butt for you:
Start marketing again. Get lean and mean like you used to be.
Otherwise, you will be un-busy like you used to be.
Do one marketing activity a day. Just one. Call a client and ask for a referral. Call a colleague to exchange leads. Write an article. Set up a speech. Get out an e-newsletter.
Do it now.
Selling Text Links
Thanks to the emergence of link popularity as a cornerstone of search engine algorithms a whole industry of the buying and selling of text links has developed. This has bearings on both website revenue and search engine optimization as Dan Thies recently discussed.
Its actually a pretty controversial issue, on one hand text link advertising has existed longer than Google, but obviously Google (and link popularity algorithms in general) have made it much more prevalent. The search engines of course don’t like people trying to manipulate their algorithm, but what about if the text link is simply bought for the traffic it provides? It seems that whether or not buying or selling text links is “black hat” or not depends on the motivation of the buyer, but the opinion that really matters is the search engine representative reviewing your site trying to decide to penalize you or not.
Yes, people have been penalized and banned for selling text links, this is especially true of people who publicize the fact that they are selling text links. The most publicized such case to date was Google’s banning of Search King. Google won that …
MySQL 5.0 stable release
MySQL 5 is out. This stable release is now recommended for production use, so if your installation of MySQL 4.1 is getting dusty (or worse yet, if you’re still on 4.0), now might be the time to look at updating your installation.
This release of MySQL effectively brings it to feature parity with enterprise databases like MS SQL Server and Oracle, with many new, long-awaited features:
Stored Procedures and SQL Functions
Embed a portion of your application’s business logic directly into your database to improve performance of frequently-needed data manipulaton operations.
Triggers
Further offload business logic from your application. Respond to changes in your database by executing custom operations in response to events like row insertions, deletions, updates.
Views
Define particular table columns or joins that are accessible to certain users without granting them full access to sensitive data in the relevant tables.
Cursors
The database can keep track of your application’s current position in a large result set, so that you don’t need to cache such large result sets in your application.
Information Schema
Access information about your database tables through the virtual information_schema database.
XA Distributed Transactions
Perform transactions (multi-step operations that must succeed completely or not happen at all) across multiple database servers, or even non-database systems.
SQL Mode
Switch modes …
