Thoughts and commentary on the latest internet technologies
International Software Applications – Part 1
Web and mobile applications today should be designed and built from the ground up to support international markets, unless there is a strong business case to restrict them to a single market. The availability of tools and frameworks to provide your application with international support (including multiple languages, currencies, locales, etc.) lowers the barrier for application development teams, but the technology build is only part of the challenge of supporting international markets. In Part 1 of this two part post, we look at the basics if international software, and how to plan your project to best support the demands of international applications.
Magnolia Training – A Simple Edit in Magnolia CMS
This example follows a site editor making minor changes to a page in a Magnolia CMS website and then publishing that change for public viewing.
Magnolia Training – Getting Started with Magnolia CMS
Magnolia CMS is an easy-to-use open-source content management system (CMS) with many advanced features. Here, we've collected together several articles and blog posts relating to Magnolia CMS.
SmartPhone Use and Market Share
When budgets are limited, web product owners can face a daunting task of deciding which SmartPhone device to support first. With market share changing so rapidly, this can be a difficult decision. We've pulled together some statistics on SmartPhone use to help with these kinds of choices.
Google Search Appliance improved, but how much?
As reported by the Real Story group, the latest Google Search Appliance (GSA 6.8) now has faceted search, amongst other things. We blogged on the GSA last year, noting how - although the GSA has some powerful features - its administrative interface and feed control were both somewhat lacking. It seems that the main new features are: faceted navigation, a SharePoint 2010 connector (useful for intranets), and Active-Active mirroring. How many of the glitches we found back in 2009 (such as poor ampersand handling, batch import control and index purging) are now fixed is not clear, although a side-effect of the new faceted navigation seems to be that the search result estimates are now accurate.
Report-back from Magnolia training
Two Priocept developers, Chris and Adam, went to Basel last week to get trained up as Magnolia developers. Here's a quick report-back.
Performance of Java vs. Ruby
The Twitter Engineering team (@twittereng) has just achieved an impressive 3x performance improvement for Twitter search queries, largely, it seems, by replacing Ruby-on-Rails web applications with new applications built on Java, coupled with a switch from MySQL to Lucene for the data store.
Disaster Recovery – planning for the real world
Earlier this week, thousands of Vodafone customers around the south of England lost mobile service (calls, SMS, data). The cause? Theft of equipment at one of Vodafone's operations centres in Basingstoke. It appears that Vodafone has or had a single point of failure (often referred to as 'SPOF') in its infrastructure, surprising, since SPOF is usually one of the first aspects of a complex system to be identified and removed/mitigated.
Selecting a Web Content Management System
Selecting the right Web Content Management (WCM) system presents unique challenges for organisations keen to make the most of what can be a significant and strategic investment. New modes of customer engagement – from e-commerce to social media and online marketing – turn many older assumptions about WCM on their head.
Antique computing – Jacquard Loom
Although the Jacquard Loom does not compute, is does feature stored programs in the form of external punched cards. These programs are not tied to a specific machine, and a machine can be supplied with numerous different punched cards, and therefore can weave many different patterns.