CHINETIK

One day you leave your office, your mind still buried in the recent project challenges. You walk through the park, checking latest messages on your handy, passing by giant rusty metal ball, leasing on the ships' anchor...

SEC, WHAT??

Excited, you step in, through strangely looking portal, and you are moved to China. To a grotesque China, though. The overwhelming presence of the BIKE is filling quickly your mind. Brave visions appear one after another; having one BIKE for entire family?

What about having the all the gold you earned through these years always with you?

Having your house BIKE with you, and caring your house everywhere with you?

During the lunch time you would use lunch BIKE with all kitchenware you are used to:

And even have a separate picnic BIKE, when there is time for picnic:

You're stuck somewhere between CHINA and TIK, moaning and screaming: HELP, HELP! Too much noise! Too much noise you cause in this sterile, artifical world. You find yourself escorted to the DEAD REFEREES.

They look at you making your blood run cold. Being dragged in front of jury you already know what will be the verdict: GUILTY!

You tremble, waiting for the unavoidable: PUNISHMENT. In the dark minds of the referees there is only one possible punishment: STEAL MONSTER

Before your bones are crushed your last question is what would happen if you haven't crossed this strange portal at the very beginning...?

Well, you would be already at home. So how dangerous can be a visit in a Tinguely Museum, Basel? Try it, if you are brave enough...

Atlassian User Group meeting in Zurich

I've been recently to the Atlassian User Group meeting held in Zurich. Such meetings allow Atlassian customers to talk directly to the vendor, and also exchange ideas and experience with using Atlassian products. So with no surprise I saw there many representatives from major Swiss companies like Swisscom, Raffeisen, and many smaller software/consulting companies which base their business on JIRA/Confluence.

A couple of Atlassian guys were also present at the conference, doing few demos and answering questions about the products. From what I saw Atlassian is now strengthening integration between various products. A demo of JIRA Hosted showed, that they work on tight integration between various products such as issue tracking (JIRA), wiki (Confluence), source code control (FishEye), peer-review (Crucible) and continous integration (Bamboo).  They claimed to have this integration layer available also for customers, that need to have everything installed behind company's firewall. Let's see...

Then I learnt a bit about a future plans for JIRA / Confluence. JIRA is soon becoming even more powerful with shareable project dashboards and editable workflow (it is major hindrance now to change workflow, even a bit).  Confluence will see a final version of SharePoint connector in the finite time, and also some major redesign to the WYSIWYG editor (I wonder what they do to improve switching between Wiki markup and visual mode).

What is not certain for me, is what is the strategy behind Confluence. From how people use it I can see, that it is becoming de facto much more than a traditional wiki tool, with the custom macros/screens programmed by the internal developers in big companies. Still, the user interface is an issue for non-techie users, although Confluence 2.8 brings major overhaul to the default skin. So I'm looking forward to the next versions coming.

And last, but not least I met Jens Schumacher, Atlassian employee #14 - he was there from the very beginning when JIRA was at version 1.0 - probably.

Overall - a good event. Even with plenty of German-only presentations, which gave me a real headache.

Web 2.0 Expo: Day 3

It was quite hard to wake up after the Web 2.0 official party - lots of interesting people met there.
Getting back to conference, I watched the presentation about the Web 2.0 design patterns, from Duane Nickull (Adobe).

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It's actually quite hard to capture the commodities between various Web 2.0 apps, knowing the platform differences, architecture differences, and the concept differences. His book actually asks more questions, that answers it provides.

Next one, entirely technical was How to make Ajax work for you.

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This is pretty amazing how many Javascript libraries have emerged, for solving common issues when dealing with Ajax-based development. I got assured that Dojo, despite its power is may lead to the dead-end, and jQuery now seems like a more reasonable approach.

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Mark Boulton on Typography design talk amazed me. So far I never watched a professional designer working, and there are so many things that need to be taken into account when you create professionally looking design. Starting from the golden ratio to divide the screen properly, ending with decision what type of dashes to use in the text.

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The next presentation: Disrupting the Platform: Harnessing social analytics and other musings on the Facebook API should be rather called: Singing the Praises of Facebook while ranting about OpenSocial. I respect that Facebook has chosen its own way and didn't joined OpenSocial, but giving the presentation about your product does not give you the rights to spread the rants about the other product. This is simply not funny. I hope that Facebook as a company behaves much more professional.

Web 2.0 Expo: Day 2

I was hoping to hear the case study about the company, that transformed itself into the Web 2.0 leaderless organization. But it failed. Dunno why but often the panels discussions are just boring. So I left this one and attended the Microformats presentation instead. Very technical in nature, but Brian Suda was really good presenter, and had interesting examples of using microformats in various apps.

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The next was the presentation about Interaction Design by Gregor Hochmuth. There is a lot of clever ideas in this approach. The best probably being the fact, that users will eventually loved the product you made for them. They will love it not because of its features, but because it allows them to accomplish certain tasks more easily. Very inspiring.

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Next one, talking about Developing for the Web of data, came from Tom Coates, Yahoo.

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(beware - presentation is not the final one)

He showed many examples, where data merged from different sources can be presented in the unified and useful way.

In the afternoon, one interesting presentation I watched was about how the Web 2.0 concepts can be brought into the corporations.

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(beware this is old presentation I put here. I will update the link, when I find the new version on the slideshare)

It turns out, that this is quite hard to enable social networks/communities in the traditional business such as Telekom Austria. What they achieved is public corporate blogs (also available in the Internet), and corporate wiki. But knowing the Web 2.0 revolution happening, it's still light years away. And it will be like this always, I'm pretty sure.

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Another presenter in this panel was talking about myheimat.de initiative. They had a very active local community which drives the development of the social network by proposing enhancements etc.

Web 2.0 Expo: Day 1

I was a bit late, because of my flight. So, with the croatian driver I managed to leave my luggage in the hotel and get into the Berlin Messe. Registration was rather quick, and I got into the real Expo.

My first impression about expo was: disorganized. That's true. Certain things are in different/remote places, you need to walk in the dead-cold winds between the buildings, etc. The worse thing was that they were not prepared for the amount of people coming, and my lunch was a virtual one. I ended up buying a sandwich and a coffee in the cafeteria.

Now to the speeches. Monday is a day of long 3 hour workshops. The morning one was the Stowe Boyd's show about building social apps.

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He showed with a good amount of humour the characteristics of good social apps, and pointed out the mistakes of the bad ones (yes, Basecamp was on the shit list). One exercise I found particularly useful was the mini-workshop in groups, where we had to break down Dopplr social app into pieces, and assess what are the missing elements in the puzzle to make it a successful Web 2.0 app. The outcome coming from different groups was quite interesting - on its own could contribute this this company 5-year business plan - 'coz there were there feature propositions, and potential business models explained :)

Second talk (I'm just listening to it now) is Kathy Sierra talking about Creating Passionate Users. One of the most compelling speeches I've ever heard. And it's totally not technology-oriented. It talks about how to engage users and create passion. You can use it to write an entertaining programming book, you can use it to create a product your users will love. You can use it to create a Web 2.0 app, that will engage its user community so that they always work in 'the flow' and move them to the next level of socializing with their network. One book I remembered - to be added to my reading list: A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives ...and the double life of a head-first girl example was just great...

And the keynote. Tim O'Reilly is certainly a great thinker and innovator in this area. He brought a lot of provocative thoughts in addition to commodity knowledge we've already had about Web 2.0.

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Although I'm not a fan of his presentation style. He is too much aggressive, and screams too much. Btw. he mentioned one very interesting book that came recently out of O'Reilly.

Btw. I got to know O'Reilly will be publishing all the presentations from the expo on the slideshare. Check it now!

Preparing for Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

I'm already packed, and just about to get some sleep before early morning flight to Berlin. The atmosphere is now heating up for the biggest Web 2.0 European event this year - Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. It's a big show, but despite this I'm looking forward to see some of the most influential guys in this industry. And gosh, hear about OpenSocial from the Google employee.

Moreover, I cannot wait to discuss why some of the former garage startups became in 2 year multi-billion companies.


During the event, I will be blogging here, but also recording my activities on Twitter. As I enabled phone in my Twitter, I can easily blog from the conference rooms, where WiFi access is, sadly, paid.

See you at the Expo, or at least, keep up with my posts here and on Twitter.

JetGroovy delivers first-class Groovy support in Intellij Idea

As I got addicted to Groovy programming language recently, I was constantly lacking a good editor, that understands Groovy syntax and can support programmer. Until today I haven't found a tool, that does more that simple syntax highlighting and possibility to run Groovy scripts.

I knew that JetBrains is cooking something, but wasn't sure where to find it. So I asked. They pointed me to the Confluence wiki space for the JetGroovy plugin - a Groovy support in Intellij Idea.

Unfortunately the instructions how to install the plugin from the sources weren't very clear, so I had to hack things around, but finally I managed to install the thing.

Short instructions (they are tested only for Selena 7020 build of Intellij Idea 7.0):

1. Download the EAP of IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 (codenamed Selena) from the download page. The current version is Selena build 7020.
   
2. Checkout the Groovy project from http://svn.jetbrains.org/idea/Trunk/groovy. The HEAD in SVN doesn't work properly with Selena 7020 so please checkout revision 8866.
   
3. Run Selena and open Groovy project.
   
4. Configure Select 7020 IntelliJ IDEA SDK as Project JDK
5. Add idea.jar from IDEA_HOME/lib to Intellij Idea SDK classpath
6. Add tools.jar (for Windows) or classes.jar (for Mac) from your Java SDK directory to the IntelliJ Idea SDK classpath
7. Add groovy-1.0.jar from GDK folder as Module Library
   
8. Run generate.lexer task from the Ant tool window
9. Run the Make Project command from IDEA's Build menu
10. Run the Prepare Plugin Module 'groovy' for deployment command from IDEA's Build menu
11. A zip file will be generated in the project directory. Unzip it to the IDEA_HOME/plugins directory
12. Restart IDEA

So I had installed it. And... well, I must say, it blown me away. I would probably need a book to describe all the features (actually I don't know which of them are already implemented or in what stage).

To put things simple, this plugin aims to offer most of the intelligent editing features of Intellij Idea for the Groovy language:

• syntax highlighting (with parser that really understand language syntax, and not just regexp-based)
• instant errors highlighting (for unresolved classes, properties, incompatible type assignments, inapplicable method calls) + intention to add missing imports
  
• code folding, code formatter
• comments and todo support
• execution of Groovy scripts/Grails apps
• easy configuration wizard for Groovy/Grails distributions
• debugging of Groovy apps
• compilation of Groovy apps into Java when needed
• GDK-aware code completion - this is a real killer - Idea knows all the extra Groovy method defined as a part of GDK and auto completes them. It makes use of the type inference where possible, and support also Swing builder.
  
• Resolve current variable,class,method and show source
  
• Surround code with popular constructs: if, while, try/catch, closure, etc.
• Introduce variable refactoring
• Structure view for Groovy scripts, file structure popup
• Find usages, and class search (by name)
• Full Grails support: SDK configuration, controller, view, domain class, job, script, taglib creation, build-in Grails generators

Knowing the current status and the roadmap, I cannot wait until this plugin will be finalized. But even in the current alpha state it looks very very promising, and provides the unsurpassed Groovy support in the Java IDE.