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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Thu, 25 Aug 2005

Quick Ant tip

I was writing a short Ant script to generate the static HTML version of my blog, back everything up and then push it up via FTP to the hosting web server. The FTP task gave me a little trouble, so I'm passing the solution on in the hopes it will save someone else some time.

I know that Ant's FTP task is an optional task and requires the Apache Commons-Net jar to run. This is a known thing for me. So when I set everything up, I looked in Ant's lib folder and saw ant-commons-net.jar I thought "Great!" and kept going.

But somehow, ant-commons-net.jar is ~not~ the same as commons-net.jar. I gave up this evening, downloaded the official version, dropped it in my ant/lib folder and now FTP works. Why? I have no idea... if anyone knows why the Ant team is bundling a jar file with such a similar name, I'd love to know why!

Jared

posted at: 21:37 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Ajax is hot!

I use Technorati for much of my blog searches. Yes, it can be slow and it's not nearly as reliable as Google or Yahoo, but it works enough to keep me happy. Why? It's got a great UI for showing my saved searches (a "Watchlist") and it also shows me the top searches for each hour (which I find terribly interesting).

For the last several days, I've finally realized that among all the debate about Pat Robertson, Intelligent Design and Lance Armstrong, there has consistently been a single technical topic in the top ten.

Why is this significant? Because blogging isn't exclusively the realm of the technical anymore. The technorati have built the tools that allow the non-technical to blog and they now own the space. Religion, politics and current events rule most of the blogoshphere.

Except for Ajax.

As I write this Ajax is ranked number three in all searches. What is so compelling about Ajax that makes it so popular?

First, Ajax exists in the browser, not on the server. Your Ajax-enabled application can use Microsoft's Asp.NET, Sun's Java, or the latest greatest entry to the web space, Ruby on Rails. It doesn't matter what server-side technology you use, from VB to Perl to Python, you can take advantadge of Ajax. It extends existing technologies.

Next, Ajax makes your web application look fast. Fast like an installed desktop application, not fast like a souped up web server. Ajax fools your users into thinking nothing is happening while it slips off to fetch data in the background. We all know that users waste lots of CPU cycles just reading the screen. Ajax just puts that wasted time to work!

Third, Google made Ajax hot. When they rolled out Google Maps, using Ajax technology, every non-technical software manager in the world believed that Ajax could make their application scale too. They didn't realize that Ajax only helps stretch your scalability by downloading data in the background where the user can't see how slow everything gets when your application is under a heavy load. Google has a thousands of machines that help their applications scale with or without Ajax.

So it's cross-language, makes your web applications blazingly fast, and has been proven in the field by Google.

All in all, those aren't bad reasons to be popular.

posted at: 21:14 | path: | permanent link to this entry