A company called GemStone Systems, who's focus is enterprise and performance, has a teaser site that's got a few people talking...

Ruby that scales™

http://ruby.gemstone.com/

What are they up to over there? Not sure yet, guess we'll have to wait for RubyConf '08... but it could be interesting.

I recently took a look at some simple benchmarks for a JRuby on Rails application... just to see where things stand. The results were not all that surprising.

While JRuby performs well against Ruby 1.8.6 in straight benchmarks, the Rails performance is still lagging a bit. But things are getting better.

One of the things that continues to amaze me about the Groovy language is how easy it is to accomplish seemingly complex tasks in a very short amount of time. Recently, I've been working on a Grails web application that stores a lot of geospatial information that I am interested in plotting on a map.

In order to accomplish this task I decided to use Google's Map API because 1) it's free and 2) Google Maps are awesome.

I was pleased. I had finished integrating the fantastic Javascript Image Cropper UI into a web-app that, among other things, searches a database of images for those that are similar to a given query image. The user could now upload an image and, with the help of the UI and some server-side JAI code, search the database using a cropped portion of the image...

...in Firefox, anyway.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

What does the new Adobe Apollo framework and runtime spell for future Swing development? With soo many people out there who already know flash/adobe products Apollo could capture quite a bit of the market.

This is not to say Apollo will replace enterprise level Swing devlelopment... but maybe it can? Send some simple requests to a smart backend server on the enterprise that does the heavy work and returns results to the view??? (leave comments)

Users want control. They want content, but they also want to be able to view it in the way that best meets their needs. My Yahoo! is a great example, and one that I use everyday. I can select which modules I want, drag and drop to reorder them, provide my own RSS feeds and more. I can even pick the color scheme that fits my mood.

Color is an important and often overlooked aspect of Web Programming as well, Richard. I quickly searched and found a good article for web designers on the value of choosing the right color scheme. But what if we want to ensure that each user experiences colors that fit into his/her own predefined environment? There is a way that we can do this without prompting them to pick a “skin” or “theme.”

Getting rounded corners on a webpage often means making custom pieces of images to “pad” the edges. It is tedious and increases the size of the page due to the additional images.

Nifty Corner Cube is a library of CSS and javascript that can help you create rounded corners without any additional images. (Examples: link1, link2, link3) With only two parameters (one optional), it is very easy to integrate with existing website. The link above explains how to use the package, however, let’s explore how it is done.

For those of you who were eagerly awaiting (who wasn't?) the approval and ratification of the JEE 5 specification, and more specifically EJB 3, here is a free book on the subject which can be downloaded from here. Hope you find it useful (at least is free!).

It remains to be seen whether JEE 5 will catch on with the developer community at-large when other (lightweight) alternatives already exist (a.k.a. Spring) that have made great strides and proven successful in terms of productivity and overall quality. There have been some threads already questioning the future of JEE in general.

Recently, I had wanted to be able to add a header and footer to every web page on a site, but I didn’t want to actually change any code.

The web application in question was hosted on a Tomcat instance that was reverse proxied though Apache 2.2 (which is real easy to set up thanks to "mod_proxy_ajp" that comes with Apache 2.2).

So how did I do this? Well, Apache 2 comes with a super convenient module called "mod_ext_filter" that lets you re-write a page using any executable that takes the original page on "standard in", and writes out the new page on "standard out".

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with two of the latest web framework offerings. Of course both advertise to dramatically increase the ease of web application development (while shouting the obligatory, "AJAX!"), yet they are quite different.

Adobe Spry framework for Ajax
Although I found the Adobe Spry demo applications to be compelling, they ran a bit slow for me (yes, running locally). I also didn’t see much new here; just a combination of things that had wowed me previously. For example, the transitions between images in the Photo Gallery were a bit rougher than LightBox. The RSS Reader was well put together, although I can’t see myself using (and maintaining) something like this when so may other (integrated) options exist. The Product Table seemed a lot like the Accordian example found on the Rico web site.