Rhino on Rails brings a scripting language back to the server-side! It sounded familiar and then I saw this cartoon and realised that it had all happened before…..

Am I late to WPF - Windows Presentation Foundation? I think I am, but not for long. Some pretty amazing applications are built with in WPF especially Mindmapping applications. There is even a Brisbane based company, NovaMind building cool Mindmapping software for both Mac and Windows Vista. Gives me hope that cool jobs do exist in Brisbane! I look for something more interesting than database driven development! So here’s my list of things that I’d like to do in my spare time to make 2008 more interesting:

• Data mining, machine learning, social network formation and analysis
• Firefox extensions
• Diagramming applications
  Heres where WPF will come in handy! I think this will be fun and a good break from the database driven application boredom!
• Roleplay Edu apps
  WWF - Windows Workflow foundation would make a superb foundation for building roleplay applications (really just workflow but not for business). It even integrates perfectly with ASP.NET. I’ll be posting on this again soon.

So if you are looking for a freelancer to do projects that fit into any of the broad categories I outlined above, drop me a line…..

Lily is a visual programming environment that breaks the confines of the browser to create extremely arty mashups. There are the usual search, maps and images mashups that we have learn’t to grow tired of but the arty stuff is fun and inspiring in a non-functional art exhibit kinda way. The SVG Midi Sequencer may just be my favorite.

The closest Asteroid to fly-by earth in almost 2000 years - WOW! By close we mean approx 500, 000 kilometers - which is a pretty close shave…

GIT — a lightweight super fast version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds. If you have time to experiment check it out. Branching and merging are meant to be super simple. I like using the word ’super’ today!!!!!

You know those O’Reilly book covers with the animal pics, well now you can make your own with O’Reilly Maker. I really like the cover for Hybernate

W3C have released the HTML 5 draft and you can check out the differences from HTML 4.

Heres a summary:

• More structural tags
  eg header, footer, nav, section, article and dialog (as in spoken dialog)
• Media
  eg audio and video
• Graphics
  The long awaited canvas drawing area….
• Additional input tag types
  eg datetime, number, range, email, url
• Programmer bliss
  2D graphics api, client-side data storage, content editing api (contenteditable) and a drag and drop api
• Gone but not forgotten
  Elements not used: acronym, tt, strike and dir
  Elements used too often to detriment: frame and frameset
• Programmer Gotcha’s
  Remember when bold was b and then changed to strong? Well b is now bold again and strong is importance! Applet is replaced with object.

Overall the feature inclusions are exciting even though they are about 5 years late.

I’ve only really explored Maven. I was hoping that I’d get a chance to look at Ant and some of the Ruby inspired build tools, but msbuild looks like the only tool I’ll need to be exploring for a little while - my new job is quite .NET focussed. Anyway this Blog post does a great job at listing the pro’s and con’s of Ant, Maven and Gant. Gant is a Groovy powered build system which the Grails guys are using.

Updated: Oops forgot the link!

Blackboard has been making acquisitions: Xythos, a content management system that already powers the Blackboard Content System and an Emergency-Notification system. I have a problem with an LMS needing to purchase a content system, because I thought an LMS was already a specialized content system. I’d really like the LMS world to evolve to include Activities as first class citizens. No more activities that sit in the Tools area, no more a single activity types (eg Forum, Chat room) for a whole course with weak links from content that break each time your course needs to rollover to the next semester. Lecturers and Students need to be empowered and the only way this can happen is with flexible content and activity authoring tools. It is not only the Lecturer that needs to add content to a course, why can’t we move to a more collaborative decentralized authoring system - Students should be given control of selected areas in an LMS. The question for Blackboard is whether the purchase of Xythos will make this happen?

In many ways Blackboard already has the key to re-usable Learning Objects. I’ve not struggled with the definition of a Learning Object. A Learning Object is a sequenced collection (linear or hierarchical) of content (text, media, etc) and embedded activities (forums, blogs, quizzes). A course withing Blackboard can contain both content and embedded activities to a certain extent. Some activity tools in Blackboard lend themselves better to being embedded within content in Blackboard. The activities/tools available from Learning Objects (the company) are all instance based as multiple tools can be embedded within a course - an example of a Building Block (extension/addon) being more flexible then the in-built tools. A course in Blackboard can be exported to an IMS-CP zip file, which can then be imported to another Blackboard course on either the same Blackboard server or another Blackboard server with the same Building Blocks installed. This is Learning Object sharing at a course level.

Blackboard could make this sharing much more fine grained by simply allowing any node (ie sub folder) in a content/activity hierarchy to be exported. The same goes for importing. At the moment content can only be imported at the Table of Content level. It should be allowed at any point in a content/activity hierarchy (ie any sub-folder level). In other words it would be quite easy for Blackboard to make reusable learning objects that incorporate both Content and Activities, by simply tweaking there current import/export code and establishing a repository to store and tag the IMS-CP zips.

I spent a good deal of time, migrating content with embedded activities from an in-house LMS to Blackboard. Migration was achieved via the IMS-CP Blackboard import/export format. Essentially I built a tool to export entire courses to the IMS-CP format, which then got imported into Blackboard. This in part proves that the theory of using the Blackboard IMS-CP zip as a re-usable learning object will work!

BTW - All my Blackboard knowledge and news comes from Micheal Feldstein’s Blog.

I bought “Patterns of Enterprise Architecture” while shopping at Borders today. I’ve been meaning to purchase the Martin Fowler book for a while, but never quite managed to add it to my Amazon.com shopping cart. Just flipping through the pages, I realised just how much this book has influenced the design or patterns I had only just discovered 2-3 years ago. This includes popular ORM patterns such as ActiveRecord and DataMapper. ActiveRecord, powers Rails & DataMapper which integrates nicely with Merb. While it is true that Ruby really brought these patterns to life, Martin includes comprehensive examples in both Java and C#. I hope to explore the additional ORM patterns …