Static CDN serving for “dynamic” websites

It is clear that static pregenerated websites behind CDN scale better than any php+mysql CMS (wordpress, drupal, joomla).
This has boosted a number of site generators like jekyll. But why now? Why not before?
Because for most of the sites there was some dynamic element of the site that couldn’t be regenerated easily. Comments, mostly.
Quite a few dynamically generated sites have become static by the introduction of Disqus etc commenting system that just sits into your browser without any server-side integration. Getting the same level of integration at the server side would bring much more complexities – depending on the frameworks, language, version compatibilities etc.

It does not end with comments. There are “1-liner” shopping carts, chatrooms, customer feedback, customer support, visitor analytics, games. These either complement or integrate with your site and more services appearing rapidly. I hope to see more variety in apps in this field like theming/styling websites dynamically, A/B testing, JavaScript-backed content caching, AWS SimpleDB-like storages for a unified datamodel integration. Turning upside down things that previously had to sit at the server-side.

One step forward with static CDN is javascript-fetched content. This is already happening – browser JavaScript is used to fetch content for the website. But there is a pending problem with this – until about a year ago search engines did not run nor index javascript-fetched content. So the search engines must catch up in order to provide the best search results. The good news is that Google and others are already doing that! They started to run JavaScript with their V8 crawler. But it’s no way guaranteed that your JavaScript is neat enough for the V8-powered crawler. In order to keep search relevant they must keep up and start running more and more JavaScript for indexing. It’s expensive but to a certain degree we can expect JavaScript-enabled indexing crawlers to take over.

Security

By keeping 3rd party components outside of your server walls your internal systems are better protected from being compromised.
On the other hand this risk is passed on to the end-user by being exploited to any code 3rd party chooses to run in her browser.
Thankfully browsers are relatively safe sandboxes and this security threat is close to visiting any regular website. The main difference being that JavaScript provider (3rd party) can potentially tamper your webpage content and has access to your website user info and page content. So you must trust any 3rd party javascript component 100%. From the security perspective it seems favorable for the service provider to keep 3rd party integration at the browser level.

Power of insight

Browser always sees more about your user than your server because it’s closer to the user. Being closer is better.

Browser era MVC

With JavaScript data loading and pushing the widely used server-based Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture falls apart. At least server is not the Controller it used to be. Browser becomes the new Controller and Server is just one of the Model-providers.

What are other less covered upsides and downsides of moving more action to the browser?

Success stories like MineCraft keep popping up from time to time. Behind the scenes it’s built with Java. As of today MineCraft has ~24 million registered users, of which ~5 million have bought the game. Most of them with a price of €19.95 (but they did start with a huge discount). In the last 24 hours, 60K people registered, and 8K people bought the game. (Source: http://www.minecraft.net/stats).

We keep hearing that desktop apps are hard to install and maintain. I don’t think Java is a cumbersome environment if 12-16 year boys and girls manage to get tens of thousands MineCraft servers running at their homes. Millions of regular Minecraft players run Java apps without an issue. There are thousands of plugins and mods written in Java for MineCraft server and client. Java is great for that but it’s way too easy to bash the platform if the real problem is usually in the product and distribution!

Let me share with you some of the user conversion stats in one of our own desktop apps, TimeGT. TimeGT is a task and life management app that is written in Java. It has an installer for Windows that includes Java runtime environment so user doesn’t have to install Java by herself. So far 99.1% of users who register their account at the website end up installing the app successfully and logging in with their username. That means essentially that every ~100th user has an issue with the desktop setup. For TimeGT case it’s very likely Mac issue as we don’t provide a .dmg file and running it in Mac is painful.

Eclipse IDE requires Java. OpenOffice requires Java. So does Adobe Photoshop. I believe it’s safe to say that you can still build great and massively popular stuff without falling into building on top of technology which was initially poured over with millions of dollars mostly to sell more ads, own more of your screen estate. Don’t get me wrong.
Of course web apps are perfectly natural for oh so many user cases. I’m still overly excited and thankful that web got a technological and distrubution kick at this scale. Oh. And building beautiful things is so much easier with the web instead of hacking with a Java Swing or SWT UI toolkit. Just know where the fine line is.

The road ahead with desktop and Java

I guess the challenges evolve around maintaining updates and supporting platforms (read: devices).

I’m not worried about the updates. It’s a feasible engineering task. In TimeGT we have automatically pushed updates (yes, requires restarting your app but so does Android and iPhone app!).

But getting your Java app to devices like Android and iPhone is not fun. I’m not sure how it all gets to a sensible place where you don’t have to over-abstract for the sake of single-sourcing yet avoiding idiotic rewriting of app in different languages.

Small footnote on desktop coding experience

While Eclipse remains to be the most popular IDEs around and provides a wonderful Java editor and extending capability, it scares me how its initial advantage of being fast and snappy is diminishing and people keep turning their heads toward vi/vim, SublimeText 2 and TextMate even for Java and Scala. You might think that a real IDE with full AST parsing and class model navigation is required for any reasonably sized projects but I keep seeing people hacking more and more with their text editors. I hope to see a change here. Get an IDE that is as fast for coding as vim.

Eclipse core itself is super fast and gets improved all the time but as with Chrome browser – plugins slow life down. There should be more control on seeing which plugins conserve most resources and a quick method to kill them, just as you close tabs in Chrome.

One project contains many different file types, they must blend into one hacking experience.

For a quick background, BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) is the leading standard for business process modeling managed by the OMG. A new version called BPMN2.0 (released January 2011) brings numerous changes to the table, most importantly increasing the consistency and integrating orchestration and choreography in a way that makes BPMN 2.0 a great choice for business process engines.

Over the past few months we‘ve been very excited to work on a new BPMN2.0 Visual Editor for Eclipse. It is free and open source, hosted at github. This github repo is a temporary place and will find a new home soon.

BPMN2 Editor is built on top of the awesome Graphiti modeling framework and behind the scenes uses BPMN2 EMF metamodel.

For more details check out the more detailed post about the BPMN2.0 visual editor by Kris from jBPM.

Check it out, have fun, contribute, report issues and bear in mind that it’s still beta and actively developed ; )

Use AHTIK5217 at checkout! Discount is yours to keep until you cancel or upgrade subscription. Promotion code is valid for next 10 days (will expire November 30th, 2009).

Never heard about TimeGT? Check out timegt.com!

Inevitable for growth

At some perspective this has been an inevitable move — code editors have turned into big platforms. They are used for much more than developing pure text-based artifacts. To remain competitive you need to allow the maximum level of integration, openness and visibility. Which becomes impossible without open-sourcing all the core components. Controversially, using a permissive license (ASL, BSD, EPL, LGPL, not GPL) can turn your business into a charity organization.

Commercial offering

IDEA Platform plus Java, Groovy and Scala support are all open-sourced. It looks like IntelliJ is retaining some of the revenue stream by keeping Java EE stack closed-source, calling it IDEA Ultimate and offering it as a commercial product.

The Importance of Java Enterprise (JEE) Tooling

I think IntelliJ decision about keeping EE as a separate commercial product is a very important indicator for the whole IDE marketplace and particularly for Eclipse. Much to my surprise, at the last Eclipse members meeting Q3 call there were some very interesting download stats reported. Eclipse Galileo IDE for JEE gets 41% of the downloads! While Classic and Java combined were 34%! (Off-topic but rcp/plugin edition was 2%).

This 41% of JEE downloads does not include 3rd party distribution providers, many application server vendors have their own bundles with a pre-configured settings (for example GlassFish Tools Eclipse Bundle).

Indication for a better future

IntelliJ move and Eclipse Galileo JEE download clearly demonstrate how important is a good tooling support for Java Enterprise development.

IntelliJ move can also be a sign for Eclipse that there is now a friendly competitor who has put their bet on outperforming current Eclipse JEE feature-set with a commercial offering.

I have no experience with the IntelliJ JEE offering, is it better than the JEE tooling from Netbeans and Eclipse?

SimpleDB Management in Eclipse lets you access SimpleDB to create, edit and view domains, items and attributes without writing a single line of code. Additionally you can use SQL Scrapbook to write SQL select queries with the help of auto-completion.

See http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse for more information and download instructions!

Screencast about the Eclipse Datatools SimpleDB features:

AWS Toolkit including SimpleDB DTP integration is licensed under Apache License 2.0 so it is free to download.

SQL Error: ORA-01440: column to be modified must be empty to decrease precision or scale

There is a way out of this but it is a bit hacky. Let me know if there is a more elegant solution!
Following example also takes care of the situation when your column is not nullable.

alter table MYTABLE add AMOUNT_TEMP NUMBER;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT_TEMP = AMOUNT;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NULL;
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=null;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT number(10,2);
update MYTABLE set AMOUNT=AMOUNT_TEMP;
alter table MYTABLE modify AMOUNT NOT NULL;
alter table MYTABLE drop column AMOUNT_TEMP;

Take care!

To find out we (me and Ivar) did a little test-drive using recently announced Glassfish Eclipse Bundle that contains Eclipse IDE with bundled Glassfish J2EE server, optionally JDK and a lot of integrated plugins to get you started quickly.

After cutting out all the downloading, startup etc delays we ended up with a surprisingly short 10min demonstration! It was interesting that we barely wrote any code or XML — see for yourself! Tricky part was initial setup to get all the jars and configurations right — must be followed pretty much the same sequence as in the video!

Ok, here it comes, have fun Probably adding a few annotations and audio would help?

Any feedback is more than welcome!

MU WP was part of the common blogging syndicate that we set up for fun between me, Ivar and couple of others at Techlipse.com.