freemarker vs velocity

There is a feature comparison sheet on Freemarker site, listing why Freemarker is a superior templating engine to Velocity. Not very objective you may say, but there are certain features, like the use of JSP tags and XML transformation capabilities that Velocity lacks. Freemarker more closely follows the MVC pattern, in that Velocity allows you to change the model from the view (e.g. request.session.removeAttribute(attrName) will remove the attribute) while Freemarker does not let you do so. I do not think that any of the two engines is a serious contender for a full blown web engine to be honest, but I would be interested to see some speed statistics, especially for uses in high volume messaging applications where every single message would need to go through the engine. Furthermore, the quest for separation of the model from the view reminds me of that other quest for over-validation. I don't want templates that change my model, sure, but I don't want to have to recompile my classes just because an email wants person.surname in addition to person.name in it, either.

alfresco

There's been an interesting development in the area of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space during the last couple of years, that goes by the name Alfresco. I've been meaning to write about it for quite some time when I got tickled again by one recent email of theirs, announcing the release of Alfresco Community 2.1. For those of you not familiar with it who still think that ECM is all about boring apps organizing boring docs made by boring cos, think again. Alfresco is open source based on best-of-breed technologies, including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, jBPM, MyFaces, Rhino etc and providing a rich set of interfaces like CIFS/SMB, FTP, WebDAV, Web Services, REST. It was started in 2005 by John Newton co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects and has since been downloaded some 600,000 times and installed at more than 12,000 sites and going strong. I wonder what the implications will be on the likes of IBM (FileNet), Interwoven and Oracle.

life is beautiful

Here's an idea: after the usual spam checks, pass every incoming email automatically through Snopes, as a last resort to spam prevention. These emails are hard to detect as the senders have usually added their very own personal comment, and most of the time they are among your trusted friends. Therefore, you not only stumble upon the email in your inbox instead of it being automatically thrown to your trash can, you are fooled by the sender into actually opening and reading the email before you realise it is yet another hoax. Worse still, you have to go manually through Snopes, just in case it is real. Life is beautiful is one of these hoaxes that was first circulated on the Internet back in 2002 and got sent to me again... today.

bumptop

Vista has surely spiced up things a bit, as far as user interfaces go, and Mac's new Leopard is really beautiful. But how about rethinking the whole desktop and the ways one can interact with it? Anand Agarawala has done exactly that, with BumpTop, a physically-based, casual user interface that pushes the desktop metaphor with physics, piles and the pen. For the more inclined, Anand's Masters Thesis (Enriching the Desktop Metaphor with Physics, Piles and the Pen) and a paper co-authored with Ravin Balakrishnan say it all.

alpha, beta, gamma, loves you, delta

We all know the various software development cycles. Alpha used to be mostly for internal testing. Beta represented versions released to the wider public for the purpose of real world testing. Nobody dared call their version Gamma out of fear that people would confuse that with their Gamma Phi Beta sorority. So most stuck to Beta, using enumerations to denote post-Beta releases like Beta I (or 1), Beta II (or 2) etc. Then Microsoft figured that an operating system was entitled to a brand new concept of post-Beta test cycles and, that system being Windows, they probably were right. So they started issuing what they euphemistically called Release Candidate versions to the public. Of course, you could always find some very peculiar versioning conventions if you looked hard enough, like Knuth's TeX ever approaching Pi numbers. By the time open source software became de facto, and releases were mostly Web Server software updates, Release Candidate sounded too formal and rigorous, so Gamma became the new Beta II. Now Flickr calls one of its recent releases "LOVES YOU", instead of Delta, Gamma II, Super/Post Candidate Release I, signalling a new era of version naming standard. Who knows what the next release will be? WILL MARRY YOU perhaps.

trendalyzer

Google recently acquired the Sweden-based Gapminder, the "non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development", makers of the amazing Trendalyzer®. Not many people have heard of them up until now, but the visualization and real-time interaction possibilities are just mind blowing. Have a look at this demo. Now I know what you must be thinking: how can I have something like that in my webapp? I'm afraid you'll have to resort to good old jfree chart.

get humanized

I recently came across Humanized, a company that tries to bring the command line to the common man, by exposing operating system or application operations as simple commands, that can be typed at any time. For example, by holding down [Ctrl] and typing "open with" or a part of it, it will automatically open whatever has been selected with the application of your choice. This is part their Enso Launcher application, the other one being Enso Words. Enso Words lets you do all kind of things you would normally do from within a word processor through the humanized command line, from spell checking to word counting. A pleasant change.

Microsoft/AOL giveaway

Not really. This is an old internet hoax, dating back in 2004, claiming that Microsoft and AOL are running a tracked email test paying people for participating, urging them to forward a silly . Now, why am I making such a fuss NOW, many years after this hoax first appeared? Because there are gullible people out there that keep circulating these phony messages believe or not, and they did send it to me!!!!
Well, sorry folks, but there aint no free lunch yet. Now get back to work.

random pin generation

Automatical random PIN generation has been all the more common now, especially in mobile applications. There is a very good utility around by Stephen Ostermiller, that lets you generate random sequences of arbitrary length and arbitrary alphabets. You can download the latest Ostermiller Utils from http://ostermiller.org/utils/ostermillerutils_1_06_00.jar and then use it directly from command line (java -classpath utils.jar com.Ostermiller.util.RandPass), or more commonly through your Java application:

String pass = new RandPass(new char[]{'A','B','C'}).getPass(8)

happy tree friends

The Happy Tree Friends are cute little cartoon animals that get themselves into dire situations, always ending up in mayhem. Created by Kenn Navarro and Rhode Montijo, their short horrible stories can be watched on www.happytreefriends.com or on G4 videogame tv. Unbelievably insane and funny. Highly recommended to comic lovers.