August 17, 2008

Web Programming: Data Portability - Gnip & OpenSocial

Data portability is a topic which is becoming more and more important, prominent example is OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial allows you to build apps/widgets for many big social networks out there, based on one API (OpenSocial). This helps the developer of an app to make it available for all supported platforms without the need to re-write it for every social network/online community out there.

A different approach is the one from Gnip. They want to act as a data stream coverter, providing you with data from many services in the format most appropriate for your app. Below you find the services offered by them (or what they will offer soon):

Gnip Notifications	Data Consumers: Poll for new data the moment it exists. Avoid throttling & decrease latency from hours to seconds. Data Providers: Reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
Gnip Polling (soon)	Offload API and RSS polling to Gnip and receive full content updates via your preferred protocol (REST, XMPP, ATOM, etc).
Gnip Transformation (soon)	Receive standardized cross-service XML markup and turn integrating with new APIs into a plug-and-play experience.
Gnip Identification (soon)	Let Gnip offer suggestions for your users’ profiles through a variety of identity discovery mechanisms.

This is an basic overview of their service (from Gnip’s site):

They support many well known services, in which data streams you can hook into as an application developer, among them are e.g. MyBlogLog, Flickr, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc.

Chem them out at gnipcentral. Do you have some experience with this service or are you thinking about using it? Let us know and leave a comment.

Tags: atom, comet, data portability, gnip, rest, rss, xmpp

Filed under Web, Web Tools, programming by marco

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August 2, 2008

Software development: Sooo many methodologies

Dev Process, from Chet Haase's Blog

A friend just pointed me to this older blog post by Chet Haase (his blog), titled Crystal Methodology. He is describing different methodologies of how to develop software and has some interesting twists added to every single one.

One example excerpt:

Scum

In the Scrum development model, the focus is on short iterations and constant communication. The Scum model, however, focuses on the individual. In particular, each engineer works completely on his or her own, producing code at an alarming rate. Changes are integrated and merged willy-nilly, causing untold breakage due to the complete lack of communication. At each fault, the offending code, putback, and engineer are indentified as scum and are tossed out of the project (this step is called “Hack-n-rack”). The resulting code and team are thereby better over time, having weaned out the weak members through natural selection. As it’s inventor, Dr. Feen Bookle, PhD, Mrs, QED, JRE, said at its unveiling at the Conference On Terribly Important Academic Philosophies and Theories on Software Process Methodology Discoveries (CTEAPTSPMD), “Scum will always float to the top. Skim it off and you’ve got just the juicy bits left. Plus the bottom-feeders.”

If you spent hours, days, week or years in the field of software development, so basically spent your life with developing software, you will really enjoy this read!