I tried out clearspring’s platform today to develop and deploy a widget. It is as easy as drinking milk and eating cookie. In less than 15 minutes, I was able to develop a widget and publish it to major platforms like facebooks, Yahoo, Google, MSN and Netvibes. If I were to do this for each platform, it will probably take me days. They clearly have a wonderful platform. The question is how they are going to monetize it. If it is going to be based on advertising, they will probably need to put some ads on all the widgets that they host. If it is not based on advertising, they will need to charge a fee but that won’t be happening because the service is now free and users will scream if they start charging. The other revenue model could be charging Enterprise. Assuming that business might want to create business widget and used them within their intranet, clearspring might provide them a good platform to do that with a fee.
No software can last forever. My first commercial rails app (revolution health’s symptom checker) has been retired. The reason for the retirement is that we want to replace one that doesn’t require paying license fee for the backend and data. The original one used rails as front end and talked to a Cold Fusion backend app (which we licensed through Mayo Clinic) through web service. Just 3 days before we retired the old app, the old symptom checker get mentioned in Rachael Ray (the TV show). Yes, very ironic. It reached its highest moment and then it died. But better die at the top then live at the bottom. Here is the segment:
I was able to get Groovy installed on my Mac installed, up and running in no time. I can now start playing with it. It is pretty simple, just download, uppack and change two environment variables and you are good to go. The only thing about Groovy is that there aren’t many good examples or tutorial yet so show case the language. I will spend more time to play with it and see if I like it. I will also spend some time check out Grails also.
We (the place I work) are having a debate on if we should move our infrastructure to VM that run ruby instead of default Ruby interpreter that is built natively for different OS. Running Ruby on VM can provide a better security and simplify the upgrading and deployment process. So there is a business case for it. One bad thing about Ruby is that there are a lot of compatibility issues between releases. So that will complicate things more. Anyway, so if we do want to go with running Ruby on VM, then we need to make a decision on JRuby or Rubinius. Rubinius is a Ruby VM that built specificly for Ruby so there is probably some advantage of using it because it will be optimized for Ruby. But Rubinius is still very beta. Recently they just rewrite it in C++ from C. Also there is probably no other language will be running on Rubinius (at least for the near future). So JRuby might be more logical choice because it is more mature and there are many languages now running on java VM. So it seems to me that JRuby will probably a better bet.
There is an article yesterday that Microsoft, Google and some other major players have agreed on EHR standard. The standard is drafted by Markle foundation’s connect for health. The standard document is here. This could be very interesting. It covers a variety of principle and guidelines on Consumer Policy and Consumer Technology. I am going to spend sometimes to read through the documents. I am sure that I will be falling into sleep but I need to read them to build a better PHR.
I ran into this website called: LimeExchange which allows company or individual to post projects and other companies or individual to bid to work on them. The idea is not new. It just add some web2.0 and social networking community features on top of it. The only thing bother me so far is that there are way more workers than employers. I only see a few projects under software development and there are over hundreds of developers registered with the sites. Another funny thing is that most of the developers are from India and the projects are also from India too.
Most of the time, the latest software or practice are usually improvement of the previous existing ones. However, sometimes they are not. For example, wiki is great for a community to edit and share information but it may not be good for as a central repository for all documentation even though there are a lot of people are using it that way. There is always a cost to move to the latest. Sometimes the cost to bring enough benefit that it is worth it. However, a lot of time it won’t. It will only help to build up people’s resume. Software industry is constantly trying to replace the current with the latest even some of those ideas are just repackage of old ideas.
The process of deploying rails app for a single domain is pretty simple and is documented in the following link. I ran into problem when I tried to deploy another rails app for an alias domain running on the same share host account. So here is the general steps:
- create a rails directory for your new app. Let’s call it mysecondapp. Upload your rails app in mysecondapp directory.
- create a symbolic link to mysecondapp (let’s call the new symbolic link mysecondlink)
- create your alias domain and have the root path point to the symbolic link: mysecondlink. Let’s say your alias domain is myseconddomain.com. It’s content root will be mysecondlink.
- This is very important step: change your dispatch.cgi for dispatch.fcgi to include the following line: “RewriteBase /” to set the base to the root directory so that it won’t try to find the dispatcher based on the related directory to the current content directory.
That is it. Godaddy’s support is no help. Asked them and they just give you the run around.
I just tried to upgrade to rails 2.0. Got some error when starting the server. Google it and then find out I might need to upgrade to a new version of rubygems. No problem, do an “sudo gem update –system”. Then run gem command. Shit! Got this error: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner. Now, I can’t even do gem install or uninstall. Now what? How can I go back to previous version of rubygems? More Googing. After another hour, find a post can fix the problem by adding this line require 'rubygems/gem_runner' to /usr/bin/gem. After that, gem is finally working. Run script/server again. Another problem: can load openssl. Google more. Find out need to install the libopenssl-ruby. Did that and finally everything worked. Time well spent? No!!! I am getting too old to waste time on doing upgrade.
Just downloaded JavaFX and played with the demo. I am sorry to say that by looking at the codes of the demo, it seems too complicated to do some simple thing. How come Sun doesn’t learn from some of the mistakes in Java? First, why create a new scripting language, why not just use Ruby, Python or any existing scripting language. If you are going to create something new, make it simple and take advantage of scripting language feature like dynamic typing. Why still does static typing? Crazy!!!