[See the very end for the “bit” part…]

The Sakai Product Manager, Clay Fenlason, has posted some notes on this ongoing discussion. He rightly points out that it is evolving and happening in large part on the “management list”, and that you should join up or watch the archives if interested.

The purpose of this post is to clarify what looks to be a basic disconnect on my opinion, since I was cited and don’t mean what it looks like Clay heard. He says:

But again our first practical example risks a misunderstanding - that the full process is only really about Sakai 3. There are even some knowledgeable community leaders that are coming to this conclusion and holding it forth as an insight.

It seems that Clay has drawn an interpretation from my communications where I would attribute the process primarily, or even exclusively, to 3.x, thereby grandfathering 2.x into some who-knows-what process. If he read it this way, it is fair to say that others might, too.

I feel quite the opposite, in fact.

(more…)

There are some gradual but quite significant changes coming to how the Sakai community works and releases software, and these changes are quite unclear.

I don’t think this is controversial or surprising. I do think that there are lots of ideas, fears, and desires for how this might work out. We are definitely having organizational growing pains.

Here is what I see as already present:

• Two new groups: the Product Council and Maintenance Team
• Release Management emerging as possibly distinct from QA
• A relatively new and evolving Product Manager role
• Two streams of software (2.x and 3.x)
• Tension about how each of these roles shapes either stream

Where I’m going with this is that three of us on the PC share a homework item of looking at what would be helpful support of our Incubation and Product Development phases. However, I have been confounded about the very essence of this assignment given the above list. See the email below for specifics — it also frames this post as a written reflection.

So, let me reflect.

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This is a corollary to something I’ve been struggling to articulate lately. Open source has made it; and because it has made it, people want to make it big. This is fine. I don’t have a problem with big companies, big projects, big money, and the rest.

Where I get uneasy is when people cultivate the sense that the fundamental distinction of free software is just access to source code, or the even simpler view of having no licensing cost.

No, this isn’t what really gets me. (more…)

So, I read one of those articles a while back where you feel a little bump and realize someone has lighted the path — with the best kind of light, showing the unnoticed obviousness. It’s like observing that HTTP actually works pretty well when you use it as carefully built, ten years after working around it furiously. It’s like noticing that really ugly (well structured, unstyled) web pages take the most beautiful CSS easily.

But I lost the article. And my recollection didn’t do it justice or support the point that you can script the snot out of a page without breaking Lynx. Then I read the Thread on Safari support in Sakai, mentioning Yahoo! Graded Browser Support. And something snapped; I thought this may have been where I found the article…

The article was on Hijax.

This is a cute name Jeremy Keith came up with for an approach to adding AJAX magic without breaking the basic function of web pages. It’s more or less a philosophical first principle of modern web development. You should read this article daily and soak it in like the Tao. -NB

I’ve just added JSONP callback support to Entity Broker. This allows you to make a data feed that can be used for mashups. The normal JSON feeds don’t allow for this because, when the script tag is added, the object literal just drops into the ether — it needs to be handed off to a function. Plenty of others are using this technique now and it’s well supported in things like jQuery; just search around.

The important bit is that you can either use the default callback function (jsonEntityFeed) or specify your own. You just craft a URL to the entity and optionally give a parameter. For example:

http://sakai/direct/entity-prefix/some-id.jsonp
http://sakai/direct/entity-prefix/some-id.jsonp?jsonCallback=myCustomCallback

If you are using jQuery, you can use the getJSON method to call an inline, unnamed callback like this:

$.getJSON('http://sakai/direct/entity-prefix/some-id.jsonp?jsonCallback=?',
function(data) {
alert(data.whatever.element[0].here);
});


It’s all pretty straightforward and tracked in SAK-16757. I imagine that this will get tagged at some point, but it’s just in trunk for now. Happy Hacking! -NB

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I was seeing somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute to get to the keychain login, and another 30 seconds to bring up a contact list. Clean out the logs, relaunch — about 4 seconds for each.

The logs live in ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default. Remove or archive them and watch it fly. -NB

We define “life is good” here as: you pass something without meaningful keys, you get an array; you pass something with meaningful keys, you get an object.

When you have a regular old array of values (or rows of a result set, in my case) and you filter it with, e.g., array_filter, you can end up with holes in the ordinal numbering.  This delights json_encode, which displays its exceptional, “just works” intelligence, giving you an object full of numeric indexes pointing at what you thought would be unnamed items in an array.  In some cases, this makes no difference but, in some, it can be a big problem.

Fortunately, I’m generally in tune enough with the stylings of PHP that I went straight to trying array_values — and now, all is right with the world. Just wrap any array_filter calls with array_values if you plan to turn the goods into JSON. -NB

“Self, is there an easy way to use the Eclipse debugger to fake some runtime/dynamic tracing?”

And the answer is a resounding “yes!”

If you set up conditional breakpoints at the places where you want those debug statements and inject some great println justice, magic is made. Eclipse is also nice enough to allow blocks of code or expressions. This means you can use just the println like an expression if you don’t care about the breaks, or make a println and a return if you do. See the screenshot for a somewhat nonsensical example.

All of this can be yours with a single startup of Tomcat and a tail -f. If you’re lucky enough to be hacking something in *-tool, life is even better. Save, mvn install sakai:deploy, relaunch your debug scenario, and keep an eye on that terminal. Somebody who knows what they’re doing with Eclipse could probably tell you how to even target an IDE view — catalina.out is fine for me, though.

…And for quick reference, you can right click on a breakpoint in the left-hand trough and select Breakpoint properties or use the Breakpoints view. On a Mac, Cmd-Shift-B toggles a breakpoint on a line, but getting to the properties with the keyboard is a pain (Opt-Shift-Q, B). In there, a natural-feeling sequence of arrows and Opt-Enter or a right click opens the dialog. Getting back to the editor is easier: F12.

Happy hacking! -NB