Andy Pemberton
Jul 25 2011
Poll: Best Mobile JavaScript Framework
It's tough to develop mobile apps - there are a large number of platforms and specialized skillsets to consider. One promising trend out there is developing mobile apps with web standards - HTML5, CSS3, and cutting edge JavaScript frameworks.
The problem is: there are many JavaScript frameworks out there. Several of the best have components or plugins for optimizing web applications for mobile devices and delivering native-feeling apps with web standard technologies. So, time for a showdown - which is the best? Which has the best upside?
Feb 25 2011
Where Drupal Doesn't Work, Part 1
I've planned to write this article for quite a while, not to profess my love for Drupal, the open source PHP-based web content management system, but to discuss some of Drupal’s weaknesses and scenarios where Drupal isn’t the best fit. Many of these ideas are relevant to other open source and vendor web content solutions as well.
Because there’s a lot to talk about, this is the first in a 3-part series.
Most of my colleagues know that I'm a big proponent of open source software and particularly of Drupal. I started freelancing and building sites with Drupal during the early days of Drupal 5 and have found it to be a great platform for building content-managed sites in many cases. Fast forward 4 years and we at CapTech are running large scale, enterprise projects implementing Drupal.
Also exciting, over the past year or so, Drupal has started to gain more popularity among the "independent" analysts, seeing frequent mentions from Gartner and Forrester.
Feb 14 2011
Update: IE9 Geolocation in February Release Candidate
As you may have heard, Microsoft dropped an official release candidate of IE9 over the weekend. Among many other improvements, they've incorporated an implementation of the W3C Geolocation API. You can get the IE9 release candidate at: http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9.
You may recall I wrote about this earlier in an earlier blog entry on Geolocation and heard from Microsoft that they had not announced support for Geolocation:
We haven't announced support for the Geolocation API. As you're no doubt aware, in general we do not comment on if and when a particular feature might be part of a future product and I don't have any news to share on this particular topic.
I'm very excited about this news, especially given my conversation w/Microsoft and the feedback I added during the IE platform preview period! Here are a few screenshots of the implementation in progress, using the demo application I put together at http://www.andypemberton.com/geo
Sep 01 2010
IE9 W3C Geolocation Support
Update 9/2/2010: I heard from Adrian Bateman, Microsoft's Program Manager for Internet Explorer, on the W3C Geolocation mailing list:
We haven't announced support for the Geolocation API. As you're no doubt aware, in general we do not comment on if and when a particular feature might be part of a future product and I don't have any news to share on this particular topic.
So, not good news, but I'm holding out hope! A few other members on the list had points on Microsoft's ability to implement Geolocation.
I pulled down the latest IE9 platform preview yesterday to check its support for the W3C Geolocation API.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be supported yet. I've seen rumors that it may be supported, but I'm not sure how to confirm.
In the mean time, I built a little application that will tell you if your browser supports W3C Geolocation and attempt to Geolocate you: http://www.andypemberton.com/geo/
Nov 13 2009
Spring 3 Example Portlet and Overview
Spring Source pushed the first release candidate of Spring 3 a little more than a month ago; it took a little longer than expected, but nonetheless I've been waiting on this release to play around with the new Portlet MVC features.
For portlet developers, the most notable enhancements are in the support for the Portlet 2.0 spec (JSR286), primarily offered through a new set of portlet-specific annotations. There are also various enhancements to Spring Core and Web MVC that will be useful on portal projects and standard java web projects.
I've built an example portlet application to show off some of these new features; it's downloadable below as a deployable WAR (tested on JBoss Portal 2.7.2) and a mavenized eclipse project (zip).