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.

Update site URL: http://codehoop.com/bpmn2/

It’s an update site, not a website! See https://github.com/imeikas/BPMN2-Editor-for-Eclipse/wiki for the website.

In addition to fixing the code to support Indigo, also Graphiti framework was upgraded from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0. Update includes a few other minor tweaks, nothing major.

About project future and hosting

As some of you might know BPMN2 Modeler proposal got accepted as an eclipse.org project, named soa.bpmn2-modeler (yay!!!), so the migration is already on the way. But until that gets finished the latest update site will remain available at http://codehoop.com/bpmn2/. Github repo will become inactive as the git.eclipse.org gets up to full speed.

Please note that while Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler offers one of the most complete BPMN2.0 modeling support in the industry, it’s still a prototype and is not recommended for production use!

While on it also added keyboard shortcut so you can switch on-off the wrapping using Ctrl+Alt+W (M1,M3+W in “Eclipse Language”).

Trust me, it’s a useful plugin : )

Latest version can be installed from the update site: http://ahtik.com/eclipse-update/

Word Wrap project site

Thanks to the shortcut I’m not even waiting anymore to have it fixed in the very deep core of the Eclipse platform as the changes would be massive and simply switching it off before launching a debugger is good enough for now.

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 ; )

Java JRE in itself supports proxies for HTTPS but it does NOT support SSL connections over proxy. For that you’ll need to create a separate proxy tunneling socket and layer it on top of the actual SSL connection. So far so good but there’s a nasty exception that can take you ages to figure out:

Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Received fatal alert: unexpected_message
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:190)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:136)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.recvAlert(SSLSocketImpl.java:1682)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:932)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1112)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1139)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1123)

There can be many reasons but one of the unexpected ones — make sure to add

Pragma: no-cache

to your http proxy CONNECT request header! Otherwise you’ll get this exception.

How Multitasking Kills Productivity

Quadruple Your Productivity by Setting Deadlines

What is The Eisenhower Matrix

Any feedback is more than welcome!

Please make sure your survey is filled in latest for tomorrow, July 16th 19.00 UTC.

See http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/timeline for details.

.. and have fun! : )

Feel free to contact me or any of the program admins in case of any troubles!

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!

Direct link to flyer: Eclipse DemoCamp Tallinn PDF Flyer.

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