Platformability

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  PubSubHubbub - the not quite real time web

  Martin Tyler 10:59 am on 8th March, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Comet (12), pubsubhubbub, real-time web (13), rss

  There seems to be some confusion with some articles I have read about what PubSubHubbub (PuSH) does with regards to the real time web. This article should clear up some aspects of PubSubHubbub.

  PubSubHubbub is a protocol to turn the polling (pulling) style of communication for RSS and Atom feeds into a push mechanism. This is great for those blogs that update very often, but most blogs will be much less frequent, so polling them for updates is very inefficient.

  So does PubSubHubbub mean that all our news readers (apps or web based) suddenly become real time for any feed supporting PubSubHubbub? Do they get a new blog posting pushed to them as soon as it is published? Well, no, it doesn’t mean that at all.
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    Daniel Inniss 10:01 pm on 9th March, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Its only a small step for the server to push the updates to the readers. Obviously its not necessary to use the HTTP protocol with readers but i still think its a small step

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  Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07

  CaplinTech 12:55 pm on 7th March, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: tech (4), Twitter (4)

  • This week's first CaplinTech blog post: From @martintyler – Why we don't need HTML5 WebSocket: http://bit.ly/OgvD5 Excellent post! #
  • CaplinTech blog post by @patrickmyles – The banking exodus from IE6 begins? http://bit.ly/96cXGe #
  • RT @leggetter: A summary of interesting real-time web blog posts and news articles gathered over the past month http://bit.ly/cbX0Pv #
  • CaplinTech's prettiest post yet: Narrative Journey Maps: http://bit.ly/cHm0bP by @detyro #yam #
  • CaplinTech blog post by @martintyler – Build vs Buy, Open vs Proprietary – http://bit.ly/bhw2iJ #
  • Happy Friday from CaplinTech. A gr8 post from @ian_alderson: Imprecise Accuracy is better than Precise Inaccuracy: http://bit.ly/9qO6gz #yam #

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  Imprecise Accuracy is better than Precise Inaccuracy

  Ian Alderson 2:53 pm on 5th March, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Agile (8), Software Engineering (16)

  Last week I blogged about how an estimate is not a guarantee. A small, but important, omission from that post was the distinction between an accurate estimate and a precise estimate.

  Frequently accuracy and precision seem to be considered the same thing. The critical difference was highlighted when I went on an agile course run by Mike Cohn. He demonstrated the difference by asking the question of when your birthday was?

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  Build vs Buy, Open vs Proprietary

  Martin Tyler 11:58 am on 5th March, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  I just blogged about the build vs buy choice with regards to Single-Dealer Platforms on the SerenDiPity blog.

  It’s a bit of a new take on the build vs buy debate and how that relates to open source vs proprietary in different software categories.

   
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  Narrative Journey Maps

  Duncan 4:49 pm on 4th March, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Design (3), User Experience (6), UX (8)

  Introducing Narrative Journey Maps

  The UX team at Caplin are always looking for ways to enhance our Usage Centered Design (UCD) process and tools because we realise the importance of UCD in helping us to uncover the pain points of our users.

  When designing/refining application ‘flow’ one of the tools we use is a Narrative Journey Map (NJM).

  This is a mashup inspired by other UCD techniques combined into something we find very useful. In this post I’m going to outline the NJM process we currently use – (we are always experimenting and evolving this technique). We will also be exploring the NJM process in detail as part of our upcoming Persona Driven Development workshop at SPA2010.

  

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  The banking exodus from IE6 begins?

  Patrick Myles 5:22 pm on 2nd March, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ajax (10), Browsers (2), IE6 (2), JavaScript (7), Microsoft (3)

  We’ve all seen the retail and consumer space push to ditch IE6 gathering pace over the last 6 months, including a petition to the UK government and Google’s announcement that their online productivity suite stopped supporting IE6 yesterday. But the corporates (and specifically banking)  have been a lot more reluctant to follow suit. But is this about to change?

  Rumour on the street has it that, finally, the investment banks are going to start abandoning IE6. Barclays are allegedly going to do an enterprise-wide rollout of IE8 in Q2 of this year (put back from Q3 last year). Even more surprising (and impressive) is a rumour that Standard Bank of South Africa are going to ditch Microsoft browsers completely and move to Chrome for their corporate standard!

   
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    Phil Bitis 7:20 pm on 2nd March, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    Can’t come soon enough.

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  Why we don't need HTML5 WebSocket

  Martin Tyler 4:28 pm on 2nd March, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ajax (10), Comet (12), real-time web (13), WebSocket (2)

  I was going to blog about HTML5 WebSocket last week, but got side tracked. In the meantime Greg Wilkins wrote an excellent piece covering some of what I wanted to say – http://blogs.webtide.com/gregw/entry/websocket_chat

  The idea of WebSocket is sound – it should get past some of the limitations of the various Comet techniques used today on various real time websites. It gives you full duplex communication between a browser and a server – Comet fakes this somewhat, but in most cases it is sufficient.

  Some people seem to think that WebSocket is going to mean no more Comet servers and no more frameworks for real time data. But as Greg points out, WebSocket just doesn’t give you enough.
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  Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-28

  CaplinTech 12:55 pm on 28th February, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: tech (4), Twitter (4)

  • RT @patrickmyles: Google's newly proposed SPDY protocol could be interesting 4 realtime finance webapps, if adopted – http://bit.ly/AAR95 #
  • RT @jurgenappelo: Scaling Lean & Agile Development, by Craig Larman and @basvodde, is great! http://bit.ly/bCMoQK #yam #
  • RT @elijahmanor: "Intro Reactive Extensions for JavaScript: Creating Observables" by @mattpodwysocki #tech #javascript http://j.mp/aI8twY #
  • RT @detyro: RT @ianmacfarlane: Google killing off Google Gears, moving to equivalent HTML 5 support http://tr.im/gooh5 #
  • What does your 'website code' sound like? try the codeorgan to find out: http://www.codeorgan.com/ #
  • When were you when Tendulkar scored 200? New blog post http://bit.ly/ah3rLB #cricket #
  • Check out our new paintjob: http://twitter.com/CaplinTech ~ to sync with our blog: http://blog.caplin.com/ #
  • sometimes Twitter feels like a game of Tag #tag #
  • AHHHH I knew the two accounts would confuse me – sorry… #
  • @ld6772 Our UX designer got crafty & now our Twitter profile graphic matches our Platformability blog! http://bit.ly/OgvD5 in reply to ld6772 #
  • @ld6772 Thanks. Us too. The killer fish are also awesome. in reply to ld6772 #
  • Excellent summary on detecting which HTML 5 features are available in a browser http://bit.ly/11Fw13 via @elijahmanor #
  • CaplinTech blog update: @ian_alderson on An Estimate is not a Guarantee http://bit.ly/9S7zJh #agile #dev #yam #

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  An Estimate is not a Guarantee

  Ian Alderson 12:57 pm on 26th February, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Agile (8), kanban (4), scrum (4), Software Engineering (16)

  The statement that an estimate is not a guarantee might sound obvious but it often feels anything but. Over the years I have frequently heard managers complain that something has taken longer than was anticipated and have been told to improve the estimates.

  Of course at times the estimates have been inaccurate, with features taking far more time to implement than was initially predicted. The question is how to learn from these experiences to help improve your estimates. This is especially pertinent for software engineers within financial services because this same conundrum is at the heart of pricing financial instruments.

  This article looks at how the Rational Expectations Theory can help you improve your estimates in software development. It starts by looking at estimating something much easier than a software enhancement, your journey time into work, and demonstrates when that estimate should be considered good or bad. It then looks how this can be applied to software development.

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  When were you when Tendulkar scored 200?

  Martin Tyler 2:59 pm on 24th February, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ajax (10), Comet (12), real-time web (13)

  No, that title isn’t a typo. Today, the little master, Sachin Tendulkar scored 200 runs in an ODI, the first time that has happened. That’s cricket in case you were wondering.

  Cricket is played all round the world most of the year round, which means there are often games happening while you are sitting at your desk at work – or maybe you don’t have Sky Sports and have to follow the scores online even when at home.

  So what do most people do? You sit there working while one of your browser tabs is open on http://www.cricinfo.com updating you with the scores. There are other sites too, but from my experience CricInfo’s ball by ball approach gives me the most information.

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    Ashish 1:06 pm on 27th February, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    

    “We’ve just ordered some Tendulkar servers” said the editor in his blog..

    http://blogs.cricinfo.com/fromeditor/archives/2010/02/tendulkar_breaks_cricinfo_reco.php

    Not that I care that they’ve gone down the expensive route to solve the problem but I just hope I am not stuck refreshing frozen scoreboard next time Sachin goes for a few tons