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Showing posts from December, 2006

Google web toolkit now completely open source

Google announced that as of today its GWT (Google web toolkit) is available under Apache 2.0 license. GWT, incase you didnt know is a java to javascript compiler which can churn out intelligent cross-browser compatible javascript code from pure java code. Switching from javascript to GWT has a bit of learning curve, but its completely possible that it will overtake most if not all the other Javascript toolkits out there. My biggest pain point while working with other javascript based toolkits was detecting compile-time errors and debugging runtime errors. And in long run, I expect browser compatibility issues taking up significant development time to keep up with the various browsers out there. GWT like most other toolkits keeps its core code seperate from users javascript, and thus can take away some of the long term maintainance issues. But since GWT is supported by google, there is a bigger chance that this one will stay in the market much longer than others out there. While most

"101 Top 10 lists", because I hate "Top 10" lists

Most of the "Top 10 lists" come under the catagory of things which can't be believed or ignored. To begin with, these are personal, regional, professional or age/gender based recommendations which can and do change from one set of people to another. And the fact that "Top 10" means there are more contending for the higher spot, these lists get outdated almost as soon as they make it to a web page. Now here is a list of 101 "Top 10" lists put together which seemed to attract my attention. Notices that the list is in alphabetical order and that the author doesn't really say that this is the "Top 101" either. I'm not surprised that there were so many "Top 10" lists, but am a little curious who will come up with the "Top 1001" next time.

Zamzar - Free online file conversion

This is a cool idea for a website. Convert almost any popular file format into another one. The name Zamzar probably means that all other words in the dictionary is taken, but what it does is truly remarkable. Not because its is difficult to do, but because no one thought about it before.