Tuesday, January 20, 2004

AT&T Wireless EDGE Developer and Integrator Training. I just got the AT&T Developer newsletter which has a link to a Placeware (M$ LiveMeeting) webcast of a conference last month for EDGE developers. It's pretty interesting... right off the bat I learned that my Nokia 6200 only uses 2 of the 4 channels that EDGE offers, and that with a dedicated modem, you'd have twice the throughput. EDGE Developer and Integrator Training This training Webcast provides insight on building applications for the new AT&T Wireless EDGE network. Peter Rysavy, a wireless industry expert and executive director of the Portable Computer and Communications Association (PCCA), leads this 3-hour session. Learn about EDGE technology, application development considerations, networking details, security, and more. Presenters: * Peter Rysavy, President Rysavy Research Length: 3 hours divided into 4 sections with Q&A after each section Agenda: * Section 1 o Benefits of EDGE Technology o How EDGE Technology Works o Supported Computing Platforms * Section 2 o Applications Software o Communications Protocols * Section 3 o Networking Details o Security Mechanisms * Section 4 o AT&T Wireless Network Interfaces and Services o Migrating applications from CDPD It's a 3 hour presentation, so I haven't seen the whole thing (and not sure if I will) but it's definitely a great resource if you're interested in next generation mobile services. -Russ Comment [Russell Beattie Notebook] 10:38:20 PM    comment []

URL Rewrite Filter. I found this great library last night while implementing something similar, and was able to toss what I had done (which was just short of sucky) and use Paul Tuckey's URL Rewrite Filter instead. It's basically a Java version of Mod rewrite and it does everything that I wanted it to, and it does it better than what I had come up with. It's implemented as a Filter, which is great. I had implemented my rewrite code as a Servlet at first and was refactoring it into a Filter when I discovered this library. It's a bit heavy on the libraries (2 MB's of jakarta stuff), but the code is BSD and looks pretty clean. The best way to understand it's functionality is to look at the sample URLRewrite.xml file that came with it: Redirect one url <rule> <from>/some/old/page.html</from> <to type="redirect">/very/new/page.html</to> </rule> Redirect a directory <rule> <from>/some/olddir/(.*)</from> <to type="redirect">/very/newdir/$1</to> </rule> Clean a url <rule> <from>/products/([0-9]+)</from> <to>/products/index.jsp?product_id=$1</to> </rule> eg, /products/1234 will be passed on to /products/index.jsp?product_id=1234 without the user noticing. Browser detection <rule> <condition name="user-agent">Mozilla/[1-4]</condition> <from>/some/page.html</from> <to>/some/page-for-old-browsers.html</to> </rule> Isn't that pretty slick? Notice the type attribute allows both redirects and forwards which is great for testing, and the user-agent stuff is *perfect* for serving up different pages for different platforms (i.e. mobile phones). I was hacking my way along to something like this, but hadn't gotten there yet. This is much nicer and is ridiculously easy to slipstream into any app because of the way its implemented to call .jsps and servlets as per normal. That's a great find for today. Thanks Paul! -Russ Comment [Russell Beattie Notebook] 8:18:42 PM    comment []

Technorati Gets A New Engine. If you've never checked out Technorati, now's a good time to do so. The service hoovers up blog links and postings and offers a search engine which does a great job of monitoring the zeitgiest, and your (or any other) blog's place in it. The possibilities of such an engine are extremely interesting. In any case, Sifry & Co. have taken the wraps off a new beta release. David Sifry, the CEO and man-behind-the-curtain, blogs the changes here. He concentrated on infrastructure: "We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in." This means faster indexing and querying, and a more scalable back-end database. There's still bugs, and still open questions (I love this one, for example), but go bang on it for yourself...... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 8:17:37 PM    comment []