rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Tuesday, 10 September 2002

Apple Releases iCal [Slashdot: Apple] Happy Day! Downloading... When do we get iSync? 11:58:40 PM  comment []      Rare deal for Microsoft. Nintendo second-party becomes Xbox first-party [The Register] Does this mean we could see Donkey Kong for XBox? Noway. 11:42:06 PM  comment []      Around the World Game I leave a message for someone - probably one of my referrers, that person then copies that message and puts it on their blog for someone else to read - purposefully choosing someone I don't know. The messages always has a link to the blog it's meant for and the blog it's from. Now, this continues for a while, and suddenly I see a message for me on another blog I read a lot. Cool. Now I should be able to back-track, following the links to the original source (maybe me). It's like a combination of a chain-letter and a doubly-linked list. There's always a pointer to and from. And you know the name for it? Blog-whispers! (It's like Chinese whispers but for blogs) IMHO (like Chinese Whispers) you should be able to change one word each time you post it, as long as it still makes sense. That would make it much more fun? 11:39:37 PM  comment []      Charles: I'll have my free beer, thanks. Gah - did I say anyone? I meant the first person. And I should have restricted it to non-Aussies . Anyway the winner was Ashley Walsh who emailed me less than 20 minutes after the post went up. Damn. Heroes exported give us hope, River pushed back the envelope. 11:56:36 AM  comment []      Ack, Russell has me figured out - amazingly accurate actually. I usually trawl through my news in the morning while I do email and drink coffee, then get down to the days work, then post again late at night before I go to bed. Spooky. Night Russ 11:09:17 AM  comment []      JIRA Resellers. I see the need for JIRA authorised resellers. In hardware it is not a-typical for the resellers to get 40% off of retail to cover their pre-sales and post-sales support commitments. So, Mike, it may be an idea to start using your extended network of JIRA marketeers in a more official way? Just a thought for what it is worth ... [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] Now this is an fascinating idea. We already have a reseller program, but it's for partners looking to integrate JIRA and sell it into different markets. I've never thought of utilising a network of blog 'marketeers'.  Do you know of any company that has tried blog-marketing? Would bloggers go for it? Basically, I envision it would be like a software affiliate program targetted at bloggers. You plug JIRA on your blog as much as you like - to help you out, we provide a bunch of good looking graphics and HTML snippets that you can integrate into your look and feel. At the simplest level - for each sale that comes within 60 days of a user being referred from your blog, you earn $US 100. I think there would have to be a lot of creative freedom about how the 'ad' was integrated into your blog though, blogs are very personal websites and noone wants to have ugly ads on their personal space. Also the whole process needs to be very transparent to the blogger I think. We would need to provide an interface into our CRM system for you to login and view the number of clicks, downloads and eventual purchases in real time. Of course you'd receive a cheque monthly. I guess the big question is, would you do it? Do you care about earning money from your blog? Is a $100 blog-marketing program more attractive to you than something like TextAds where you make a few cents per click? If anyone is interested in being a trial marketeer for JIRA, email me. Brett has got me fascinated to see if blog-marketing would work. I'm happy to get a guinea pig. 11:06:36 AM  comment []      Karl has some fascinating ideas on why he'll never be popular as a weblogger. I'm not sure I agree with all the sentiments. I read Karl's blog even though he's not a hugely popular fellow. Personally I don't really care what blogrolls he's on. I'm even learning about Philly from him! (Did you know my sister moved to Philly two months ago?) For me reading blogs are all about learning little things from far flung people. Sure I like reading Java blogs because that's an area of passion, but I don't want to read (or write) only Java blogs. That's boring. (PS Like Charles, a free beer to anyone who can tell me without Google where this blog posts title comes from - "He'll never be an ol' man river...") 10:17:25 AM  comment []      Still Wondering about WebWork. Doesn't Webwork include a tag library of its own? Perhaps the key to using Webwork is to avoid using the tag library and just use the control part of the framework? Maybe one of the things holding back the increased acceptance of WebWork is that people think it is yet another web framework, when in reality it is a command pattern framework as you say in next post? [All Things Java] Yes, WW includes a tag library - and it's a damn good one, because it's totally flexible. Everything is driven through the ValueStack and the expression language because WW is a 'pull' MVC framework. The concept of using a stack is a strange one (I didn't get it originally) until you consider the inherent nature of any sort of 'web templating', which is by nature hierarchical (template A includes template B etc). The stack has many, many cool uses which I don't have time to think through and articulate at this hour, so how about I take the Rickard approach and just give you a nugget a day? Flexibility is very important in web apps. Webwork is built to be flexible, malleable and simple. The presentation layer is really only the ValueStack and the EL, with some tags or directives to make for nicer syntax. Oh, and if you're comparing WebWork to Struts you'll notice how few tags there are... and then you'll notice how you suddenly don't need all those tags! Sometimes, power comes from simplicity. Another random thought - sometimes I think Struts vs WebWork is a little like Windows vs Unix. Struts is becoming larger and more bloated in an attempt to solve all the worlds problems. WebWork is a small, simple, powerful framework that works together with components. For instance WW + SiteMesh is a killer combination that Struts tries to do by itself (as I understand from Tiles). Both WW and SiteMesh work well alone, but together they are more powerful. (Yes, I know the operating system analogy is a bad one - and I know *ix is bloated too - just work with me here, you get the general gist right?) Of course you don't need the tag library. Lots of people use Velocity as their view layer, and there are directives to help. Alternatively you can now generate Jasper reports straight from the ValueStack. Or you can generate XML from the object graph of the value stack. And thats enough deluded raving for one day - night all. 12:25:52 AM  comment []