Galpin on Rails on IBM

A couple of pieces that I wrote on Rails appeared on IBM at the end of last year. I didn't even realize it until today when somebody emailed me about one of the articles.

The first article is part one of a four part series on using Rails, XForms, and DB2's PUREXML tables together. I also wrote part two, but another writer wrote parts three and four. Only part one is up so far.

The second article is the third tutorial I wrote on using Eclipse as a web development platform. Part one was about using Eclipse for Java web development, and part two was on using it for PHP development. The last tutorial is on using Eclispe (via RadRails) for Rails development. Note, the link for part two shows the intro page to part one. If you login, it correctly gives you part two. Clearly some kind of technical glitch for IBM!

GWT and XForms Series, Parts 3 and 4

The last two parts of the GWT and XForms series I wrote for IBM are up now: Part 3 and Part 4. Part 4 is fun since it is more "icing on the cake" kind of stuff as opposed to the core integration of the two technologies. I really wanted to work in some info GWT's ImageBundles. It's a slick implementation of the CSS sprite pattern.

Continuing down that tangent... I'd like to see an ActionScript implementation of that pattern. It would be cool to take a dozen images in Flex Builder, have it create a composite, and then use that for any references to those images in your Flex application. Of course maybe it's not needed. If you knew you needed those dozen images for your app, you could just embed them all in your SWF. That's going to be even more efficient since you won't have to make the HTTP request for the composite image. Obviously there are advantages to externalizing, since you could change the composite image without recompiling your SWF and without having to worry about referencing a new version of your SWF that's not being cached by users. It also allows for localization of the images. Enough rambling on that topic for now.

New GWT + XForms Series

I wrote a four-part series for IBM on using Google Web Toolkit and XForms together. Somehow IBM snuck part 1 and part 2 by me on their site. The tutorial uses JSNI a lot and touches on some of the latest features in GWT.

New Articles on IBM

There's a couple of new articles that I wrote that are now available on IBM developerWorks:

The Geronimo renegade: Using integrated packages: Codehaus' Woodstox: This is an article all about Geronimo's StAX implementation, Woodstox. If you're an old veteran of XML parsing like I am, you have to love StAX. Woodstox is not only an excellent StAX implementation, it is a killer piece of software. We use it in a lot of places at eBay because it is so fast.

Use JavaScript to make your XForms more robust: This is a very cool article about mixing JavaScript and XForms together. XForms has become kind of a forgotten technology, which is a real shame. It has so much to offer. I think part of the reason it is forgotten is because people don't realize that it is standardized and integrated with other technologies. It plays nice. It's not some one-off technology that lets you do some cute things in a sandbox. This article shows how everything in the XForms world is accessible through JavaScript. It's not a read-only kind of access either. You can modify models and forms, etc. I'm planning on writing some more on XForms and how it integrates with a certain well known AJAX framework that is usually referred to as a three letter acronym...

XForms Article on IBM developerWorks

IBM recently published an article I wrote on XForms. There have been so many times in the last five years that I've looked at XForms on behalf of whoever I was working for. It was always such a promising technology. It just needs browser support. It's funny that Mozilla has a great plugin that they don't include by default. Of course it's really just a matter of Microsoft. If IE included XForms support, it would get rolled into Firefox the next day. But of course they don't do this and instead re-invent the wheel...