Chris Double's Radio Weblog

2005-11-05T04:56:28Z

I've decided to move from using Radio Userland to a Blogger weblog hosted on my own domain. I've been using Linux for the past couple of years and it's proven too painful to keep using the Radio Userland software under Wine. No more posts will be added to this weblog, or any of its categories.

The new weblog is here and the atom feed is here.

2005-11-05T04:56:28Z

Ben Simon has announced the release of the 'Scheme Pet Store'. It is a port of the J2EE demo application to the SISCWeb framework. SISCWeb is an open source continuation based web server for SISC Scheme.

2005-11-05T04:56:28Z

Backbase, a rich internet application toolkit, have released version 3.1 of their community edition. Looking through the release notes there are some interesting changes and additions:

Support for control focus in controls that allows navigating between controls using keys.
Additions to the BXML language for scripts, drag/drop constraints, and other things.
Lots of new controls! Bar charts, line charts, organisational charts, combobox, select, date picker, a 'Flash' control, and sidebar.
XPath 2 support.
The explorer demo has more stuff explained.

Overall lots to play with.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

Heiko Wengler notes that Joseph Strout's idea for implementing better text input methods has already been explored by IBM - ShapeWriter.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

Joseph Strout sent me a link to an idea he had for improving text input methods in devices with no keyboards. It sounds look a good area for experimentation, especially the pen/stylus input method. From the sounds of it you end up remembering 'gestures' for words, or parts of words, to enable faster input. The gestures are mapped to a hexagonal grid of letters optimized for the input language.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

The author of the MySpace Javascript worm talks about how he was able to use javascript injection techniques to propogate the worm. Most interesting is the write up on how he got around MySpace's attempts to prevent users from doing just that.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

From Helen's Techblog: Snippets, a site for storing small code snippets which can be tagged, searched for, etc. Pretty neat. There's a distinct lack of Lisp snippets there though...need to work on that.
They have a 'series 60' tag for mobile phone programming snippets on the Symbian OS which looks quite useful.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

Soemthing I forgot to mention in my previous post about Backbase and Factor. The Factor file-responder does not serve the correct mime type for files with an extension of .css. I've fixed this in CVS or you can use the darcs repository at http://factor.modalwebserver.co.nz/factor.

2005-11-05T04:56:29Z

I played around with Backbase, a Rich Internet Application framework, last night. It's basically a way of building applications using lots of client side XML and Javascript based scripts with Ajax. The nice thing about Backbase is it is all client side - you can use any web server. To get things working with the Factor httpd is trivial.

First you need to download the 'free for non-commerical use' Community Edition. This is a .zip file that contains the code that the web server needs to serve. Unzip the Backbase_community_dev_3.0.1.zip (or Backbase_community_prod_3.0.1.zip for a production/non-development system). The important directory out of this is 'Backbase/3_0_1'. You want to make this available to the outside world via the webserver. In factor I did the following:

USE: httpd
USE: file-responder
[
  "/path/to/Backbase/3_0_1/" "doc-root" set
  "backbase" "responder" set
  [ file-responder ] "get" set
  [ file-responder ] "post" set
  [ file-responder ] "head" set
] make-responder

This creates a responder called 'backbase' that serves all files from the specified backbase directory. So accessing 'responder/backbase/skeletons/basic-startup.html' will load the test file if you installed the development version.

For your own backbase based applications you'll need to change the paths in your HTML file to point to this responder. Using the 'basic-startup' as an example, the 'script' element would reference '/responder/backbase/bps/boot.js' and the 'onload' in the 'body' element would be "bpc.boot('/responder/backbase/');".

I've only just started looking at Backbase so am not very familiar with it. I'll look at 'backbasing' some of the Anonymous Todo List to see what its like to work with. A very simple first addition was adding a new format to the View capability. Appending "&format=backbase" to the View capability URL uses backbase to display the todo list table. This immdiately makes the todo list table sortable, as well as styling alternate rows to be different colors. An example list is here. The real test will be to see how well backbase can be used for the editing and creation of the lists.