Course Review

As the subject Web Apps comes to end, it’s time to reflect on the things I’ve learned, liked and disliked. Let me start off by saying that the Web Apps was by far my favourite subject this semester. While some were quite interesting (Behaviour in Organisations), the main thing to do is memorize the textbook and reproduce the professor’s opinion in numerous essays. Web Apps started off slow but got more and more intense during the semester. The first assignment was both a lot of fun and very challenging. I can proudly say that I finally got CSS. Especially the fact that you can realize most of the layouts you create in Photoshop or drawings is quite fascinating. The second assignment is a whole different ballgame. Very intense and hard, but after all we are here to learn something and while I am working on my post grad assignment simultaneously I can see the learning effects resulting in faster output. I think I’ve spent days on Twitter 2.0 trying to figure out how to save to xml. In my postgrad assignment I am using the same technique and everything flows. Well, kind of. Two projects at one time is very confusing. I tried to let me guide by the marking scheme and stopped once I was sure I’ll get a good grade. There are still some features missing so it’s going to be a long Monday. Calling my postgrad a beta would be lie… Very stressful times. I am spending my days in front of the computer trying to include every feature. But hey, if I think about it, it becomes clear that this is what I like. So it’s cool. Two more days until the presentation I am sure that I learned a lot of things which makes me happy because that doesn’t apply to every subject I took this semester.

Bond World Cup Final

In a couple of hours, two Web Apps students will take part in the Bond World Cup Final. I am talking about soccer, of course. After a long season, Gerpan (Germany and Japan) are facing Latin in the grand final. Lorance and me are part of the Gerpan team and we hope we are going to win. Or do we? The problem with winning is that you have to celebrate and deadlines, especially for Web Apps, are in our heads. It’s a very tricky situation. Do we want to win and waste one whole afternoon (and probably great parts of the evening) or should we lose, take a shower, have dinner and finish our projects?

Not so fast, Google!

This morning I saw a short report about a new search engine on CNN. Like most of the students these days, I’m surfing the web while “watching” TV so I decided to give it a go and checked out cuil and well, it looks like a search engine… The magic happens when you search for something. The search results are arranged in colums with pictures which gives them a nice look and feel. The “Explore by Category” feature on the right hand side suggests additional related topics which provide a bunch of useful links “onmouseover”. For someone who is using AJAX heavily at the moment, cuil is a nice application of useful ideas.

Cuil claims to search 121,617,892,992 pages, an acclaimed three times more than Google. Well, the search result for “Bond University” showed 110,040 results while Google showed approx. 8,630,000. The quality of the results is hard to compare. You will eventually find what you were looking for by going to the homepage or refine your search. Cuil seems to be a great starting point for queries about unfamiliar topics, that is because while you type your query, suggestions are displayed and the layout and exploring by category helps you to find your way through the web.

The best feature, in my opinion, was not shown while testing both search engines with the example “Bond University”, so I typed in “AJAX” – since it haunts my dreams anyways – and WOW, there it is: Tabbed search results. The first tab, obviously, is about the Asynchronous Javascript and XML, the second one is about the famous soccer club AJAX Amsterdam (think Geelong, Aussies). The third one about a lovely place called Ajax, Ontario and the fourth one, mmh, it’s that soccer club again. Well, no one’s perfect at the beginning. But organizing the search results has one major adavantage: If you can’t or don’t want to limited search results by smart queries (AJAX AND Programming), cuil does that for you which is very convenient if you are unexperienced or have absolutely no idea what you are looking for.

One problem for small websites which are featured on CNN is serious traffic. While testing, I experienced one timeout which was resolved by a simple key press (F5). Google needed five years to become decent, cuil started well with some great ideas. If these guys can keep it up and don’t sell out to Google too fast, we might actually see some competition which is always good for users.

Office Live vs. Google Docs

The first thing that stands out when you log in to both services is the fact that Microsofts login page features a small advertisement. This is a good thing because users can hope that the service will stay free. Office Live features templates or blank “workspaces”, Google Docs has the folders. Microsoft’s service lets you upload any kind of file up to 25mb of size while Google limits its service to html, txt, doc, rtf, odt, xls, ods, tsv, tsb, ppt and pps. It misses the highly spread pdfs as well as pictures. Furthermore, the maximum file size allowed is 500kb or 10mb for presentations.

While sharing is available in both services, Office Live distinguishes between two different roles, editor and viewer. Versioning is supported by both.

Mobile access is available for Google’s solution while Office Live features comments and an activity overview.

IT (un-)enabled Group Projects

Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.

JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text format, independent yet within the conventions of programming languages. Its main function is to handle data. An example for a tweet could look like this:

JSON:
{
“userpic”: “profilePic001″,
“username”: “Johannes”,
“message”: {
“updateText”: “This is my update”,
“dateCreated”: “01.01.2001″,
}
}

XML:

/images/profile001.jpg
Johannes
This is my update
01.01.2001

*WordPress keeps deleting the XML tags

jQuery

jQuery is an open-source JavaScript library developed at BarCamp 2006 by John Resig. Its aim is to simplify the interaction between HTML and JavaScript.

Minify in the context of jQuery means that your code is being compressed by jQuery’s compression tool. Basically, this avoids frustration on the user side by decreasing download times for websites. To even further reduce the amount of code the “chainability” of jQuery code is helping: Each of the individual methods return the jQuery object, allowing you to continue applying methods to the current set of elements.

Postgrad Assignment

Since I strongly believe that IT should make people’s life easier, I came up with the idea to design a website where tickets for Bond events, especially the ones hosted by the Student Council, can be bought. the long queues even in this slow semester are a reason why at least part of the available tickets should be able online. In addition to that, I assume it would make life easier for the members of the student council since they don’t need to show up on multiple days until al the tickets are sold. Even if only the remaining tickets would be sold online, it would be a convenient service.

The site would obviously contain basic shop elements (either realized with PayPal or manually) and needs several control mechanism:

- user authentication (Student ID)

- check if tickets are available

- Payment method

- Purchase history

- Receipt by email or print from purchase history

- RSS to inform students about upcoming events

…

When I started thinking about the project I started to sketch the index page with Photoshop and this is my result so far. If the project gets approval, I’ll start converting the Photoshop sketch into a CSS layout.

Layout Demo for Postgrad Assignment

What’s your password?

Have you noticed how even as a student you have two dozens of passwords to log in to several applications and services? Add IM’s, private emails and you get a recipe for disaster. But for us, it will get worse. Most companies still think the more passwords you have the more secure their system becomes. Wrong. First of all, it is more expensive because people end up calling the help desk if they lose their password and let’s be honest: The more passwords you have to remember, the more likely you end up needing support of some sort. Secondly, people start sharing passwords with co-workers or write them down on sticky notes. Not very secure, is it?

Several companies are working on single sign-on solutions but no real breakthrough is in sight. Well it looks like life long learning will involve memorizing passwords for us for quite some time. Basically, a password is something we know. Something we have could be a key card, but what if you lose it? Something you are would be biometrics but that’s not a 100% reliable and as of now expensive.

Well, no real solution here for you, just many questions. Maybe that would be nice postgrad project – most likely resulting in a high destinction, a dropout and millions of dollars.

AJAX or thanks again Google

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and was introduced by Google in 2005. It is not a new language but new way to use already existing standards to create rich user experiences online like Google Mail. The main advantage of AJAX is that it lets you reload only certain parts of a website unlike the regular procedure of reloading the entire document even if only one character was changed. This is archived with the XMLHTTPRequest. The progress of a response by server can be accessed with the readystate property. With an if statement the status can be retrieved. The possible responses are: not initialized, request has been set up, has been sent, is in process, and is complete.

Web Applications built with AJAX deliver higher usabilitity and a desktop app like feel.