Fiddler Customize Rules option

static function OnBeforeResponse(oSession: Session)
{
	oSession.oResponse.headers.Add("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
}

static function OnBeforeResponse(oSession: Session)
{
	if (oSession.HostNameIs("www.leggetter.co.uk"))
	{
		oSession.oResponse.headers.Add("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
	}
}

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:04:51 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:03:51 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Windows Mobile 7

At work the concensus amongst the developers at Caplin seems to be that they like Android as a platform and there’s quite a bit of excitement about the Google Nexus One which will contain the Android 2.1 operating system.

Nexus Google One Phone

Since I’ve been involved in most of the Microsoft product development here I’m interested to see if there is any chance of Windows Mobile doing anything. I’m excited about the inclusion of Silverlight in Windows Mobile 7, as I blogged about some time back, and have just read a small piece that indicates Microsoft are keen to take gaming mobile with XBox 360 integration.

A while back, just after we’d ported StreamLink.NET to the Silverlight runtime, I took an R&D day to try to port StreamLink.NET to Windows Mobile. I made good progress but left things in a non-compiling state. More recently I had another opportunity to take a day to try and finish the work off. The codebase had moved slightly so I had to do a little more work that I’d planned and now I’m left with a single compilation error based around the .NET Compact Framework not having the WaitHandle.WaitAny method. To resolve this I’m going to have to go native or we may have to consider purchasing the fantastic Smart Device Framework.

If Windows Mobile 7 supports Silverlight then maybe you could argue that my time spent porting StreamLink.NET to Windows Mobile has been wasted? Or, maybe you would argue that any time spent developing for the Windows Mobile platform is a waste of time? Personally, I like Windows Mobile as a platform, I have a Windows Mobile phone and I think the Windows Mobile development experience in Visual Studio is second to none. For these reasons, and because competition can lead to improved products, I hope Windows Mobile 7 makes a challenge in the final furlongs of the mobile platform race.

From a business point of view the conversation gets interesting when Kevin Bourne asks “do you not want to see a point where people want 100% of the choice but all out of the can with a library of applications that they can then tailor much more specifically to what they want to deliver to their clients?”

You can see the other highlight videos on the Caplin Systems You Tube Channel.

You can also download a full transcript of the event:
Buyers Market – Single Dealer Portals and Courting the Online Client

Last night, just over 12 hours ago, I attended the Gary Vaynerchuk Crush It event organised by Sprouter in London. I’ve already read Crush It and seen a lot of Gary online so I wondered if he would give out any information that I hadn’t already heard. On the way in I mentioned this to Ian Sanders who said:

It’s always different live. It’s like a gig.

This is a big statement considering the event is just a guy standing and speaking and taking some Q&A. However, Ian’s statement was spot-on. Gary oozes charisma and when he speaks it feels like he’s addressing you directly. This is clearly one of the reasons why he’s so popular and doing so well.

Gary Vaynerchuk at the Sprouter Crush It event

One of the things that Gary covered, and I’ve heard him mention a few times now, was small town rules. My take on what Gary means that social media has made a global community possible. He provided a couple of examples.

Example 1: Small Town

You can go out in New York, get drunk and get naked every night of the week and it most probably won’t impact your reputation. However, in a small town if you do this just once it will.

Example 2: Small Town effect through Social Media

The movie Bruno (I’m not giving it a link, I’ve heard it’s that bad) had one of the biggest attendances for an opening night in the states. However, the second night had the biggest drop off in attendances ever. This is because on the first night people left half way through and wrote on Twitter and Facebook how terrible the movie was. In 24 hours word had got out to avoid this movie at all costs.

What has this got to do with the Real-Time web I hear you ask? Well, in the first small town example it’s easy to see why and how news spreads so quickly. In a small town it doesn’t take long for news like this to spread. But in the second example the news spreads to a massive number of people because of the real-time web effect introduced by the immediate availability of information from networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

I managed to get a question in and asked Gary:

How real-time does real-time have to be? For example, the newly introduced Google real-time search checks every 20 seconds to see if any more relevant search results are available.

Whilst Gary said that 20 seconds was probably alright he did suggest that this would be fine until another site provided the results in 19 seconds, and ultimately 0 seconds. At which point expectation would be changed.

This has encouraged me to continue my push to encourage the uptake of technology to provide a truly real-time web experience. Data is available instantly so why not push it to users instantly. Is 20 seconds really good enough when technology is out there to allow that information to be pushed to us in closer to 0 seconds? My opinion is: C’mon Google, you can do better!

Platform (computing)

In computing, a platform describes some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer’s architecture,operating system, programming languages and related runtime libraries or graphical user interface.

This blog contains information on a variety of different topics, from approaches to technology solutions to UX considerations, and all these things come together to provide a solid base for development. To me, the word “platform” conveys an architecture and infrastructure of stability, on which you can integration your systems and build your applications.

Ability

The quality or state of being able; power to perform, whether physical, moral, intellectual, conventional, or legal; capacity; skill or competence in doing; sufficiency of strength, skill, resources, etc.; — in theplural, faculty, talent.

“Ability” straight away says to me that the Platform is an enabler, is of great quality, and can be relied upon. It enables users to integrate systems and build applications with ease. As this blog grows I hope we can share how we have developed, and will continue to develop, the components that come together to form such a platform.

Swimming in Technology

I love this tagline! For me, it says a lot about the people here at Caplin. We love technology. We don’t simply want to stand by and watch technology advance. We want to dive in and get involved, be innovative and contribute. We want to be the thought leaders and come up with new ways of solving problems and inventing new technologies.

And if that’s not got your creative juices flowing, how about a song to get you thinking (please remember I’m a Software Engineer)

Look for Platformability
The simple Platformability
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean Platformability
A set of great technologies
That brings Platformability to life

The goal of Silverlight is to provide a consistent experience across desktop and mobile phones. Developers will be able to easily optimize Silverlight applications for mobile form factors or run existing Silverlight applications on mobile phones.

The great thing about this release is that any existing Silverlight applications should work on any mobile device with Silverlight installed. The question about this is that if you design a user interface for a desktop browser how will it fit on a windows mobile browser? Well, Microsoft plan to give developers the ability to “optimize Silverlight applications for mobile form factors” which sounds like they will give us a way of dealing with the obvious UI differences between desktop and mobile platforms, as well as the underlying runtime issues.

We’ve already blogged about what impact Silverlight may have on single dealer portals. I’m really excited to see what developers can do using StreamLink for Silverlight to enable the real-time web on a windows mobile device. What opportunities might Streamlink for Silverlight Mobile enable?

Silverlight for Mobile

Read the Silverlight for Mobile FAQ for more information.

The phrase “real-time web” has been streaming its way around the Internet for a while now. It’s presently being used to describe information being available in search results as soon as it has been published by its author. Examples of this are Twitter or FriendFeed search.

As far as I’m aware it was Robert Scoble who made this phrase mainstream. Here’s an example from the start of February, but by this time Robert had been using the term for a while and a quick Google finds the term used as early as June 2008:

Let’s do a search for anyone who has written about the Canon 5D MK II but lets constrain that to posts that have at least one like and at least four comments. Here’s the search. Note that the post I wrote just one minute ago is already in the results page. This is the real-time web. – Robert Scoble (http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/09/is-the-real-time-web-a-threat-to-google-search/)

Whilst this is an example of something being almost instantly available from search does it really qualify as being “real-time”?

The first thing to do, as others have done, is understand what the term “real-time” means. Rather than going into this I recommend you have a read of the wikipedia definition of real-time and watch a Kaazing presentation on What is the Real-Time Web. There have been fewer attempts at defining “real-time web”. Even Wikipedia presently (19/04/2009) lacks a definition.

For me for something to be real-time web it should meet the following criteria:

1. Get up to the second information on a chosen subject.
2. Make an initial request for information to be delivered across the Internet. Subsequent updates to that information, or information stream, should be delivered as soon as possible without the need to make a additional requests.
3. Initial information and subsequent updates should be delivered in an acceptable amount of time.

The real-time web experience

If I go to my twitter homepage I don’t want to have to refresh the page, by clicking the refresh button, or hitting the F5 key, in order to see new messages from the people that I’m following. Twitter doesn’t really want users doing this either as it puts load on their server – but let’s leave this for another time.

Twitter

This lack of real-time updates on the Twitter site has lead to a surge in Twitter client applications such as TweetDeck and Thwirl. These clients simulate real-time by polling the Twitter API at intervals. I’d like to highlight the word “simulate” again and clarify what polling is. What the Twitter client applications are actually doing is making requests to Twitter at periodic intervals to see if the user has had any messages and if they have it displays them, if there are no new messages then it’s a wasted request.

TweetDeck

Twhirl

A much better model would be for Twitter to notify the client that new messages are available by passing the additional messages straight to the Twitter client.

Real-time web delivery time

What determines the amount of time that is acceptable between a message being published and it being received by the consumer (user) depends on the context of its use. For something such as instant messaging or a Twitter conversation the time between publication and consumption can be reasonably large, maybe 10 seconds. However, if the publisher is a trading system sending a price and the consumer is a trader 10 seconds is far too long. By the time the price reaches the trader it may be out of date.

Real-time technology

XMPP and SUP have been touted as the technology to deliver the real-time web but they appear to be server side solutions or require clients with knowledge of the specific technologies. For a web solution people start to turn to Comet server solutions. Caplin Systems – the real-time web company – have had the technology available to deliver real-time data for many years now so I wanted to understand why, only now, has the idea of a “real-time web” really taken off.

Caplin Systems

Caplin Systems have a high performance scalable real-time comet server called Liberator that can push updates to subscribing clients as soon as it receives information. The clients are:

• Java clients: standalone application or applet
• .NET clients such a windows desktop application or web page embedded SilverLight widget
• JavaScript clients: any website such as http://twitter.com or http://friendfeed.com

Twitter and FriendFeed don’t use Liberator but they could easily do so. All that needs to be done to integrate Real-time Rich Internet Application (RTRIA ?) functionality to an existing web site is include a JavaScript library called SL4B (StreamLink for Browsers). The RTRIA functionality can then be added to an existing site in the same way that RIA functionality can be introduced to a website using other JavaScript libraries such as JQuery. However, in this case the RIA functionality that can be added is a true real-time web experience of data being pushed to the client as soon as it becomes available, without any need for the user to check to see if any new information is available.

Conclusion

My opinion is that the instant availability of information via search straight after it’s published doesn’t really justify the term “real-time web”. To be truely real-time the information needs to be pushed to the user. The true real-time web experience and the technology to achieve this is already here but at the moment few people are aware of it and therefore it’s not in mainstream use. The ideas behind Comet, the Liberator server and Liberator clients provide technology and infrastructure to push data to clients without the need for polling or a user driven information request. Scalability and side by side integration with existing systems are already possible which means there’s no reason why existing clients such as websites can’t start taking advantage of it.

Some relevant links:

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sorry_google_you_missed_the_real_time_web.php
• http://www.gnipcentral.com/
• http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/09/is-the-real-time-web-a-threat-to-google-search/
• http://scobleizer.com/2008/12/21/rss-shows-its-age-in-real-time-web-sup-and-xmpp-to-the-rescue/
• Kaazing presentation on “What is real-time web“

What do I mean by not being able to “create an instance of yourself using new Class()“?

MyClassDefinition = function()
{
};

MyClassDefintion.prototype.myFunction = function()
{
    // do some stuff
};
MyClassDefinition = new MyClassDefinition();

Here we lose the ability to do new MyClassDefinition();

What do I mean by “objects that are dynamically created”?

// create an object using the object literal notation
var oObj = {};

// dynamically append a function
oObj.myFunction = function()
{
    // do some stuff
};

Code written in both these ways make it more difficult to create a mock using Mock4JS because it expects a function reference to be passed to the mock method call.

A way around this is to dynamically create a definition from the object. This is done using the following piece of code:

function createMockDefinition(oObject)
{
    var oMockedDefinition = new Function();
    for( var x in oObject )
    {
        // Only add functions to the dynamically created prototype
        if( typeof oObject[ x ] == "function" )
        {
            oMockedDefinition.prototype[x] = function(){};
        }
    }
    return oMockedDefinition;
};

With the above code we have now created a class definition that we can pass to the Mock4JS mock() function.

function myTest()
{
    var oObjectIWantToTest = {};
    oObjectIWantToTest.functionIWantToTest = function(){};

    var oMyMockDefinition = createMockDefinition( oObjectIWantToTest );
    var oMyMock = mock( oMyMockDefinition );
    var oMyMockProxy = oMyMock.proxy();

    // setup expectations
    oMyMock.expects(once()).functionIWantToTest("myArgument");

    // call function and execute mock method.
    oMyMockProxy.functionIWantToTest("myArgument");

    // Finally, verify the expected mock methods have been called.
    // If not, an exception will be thrown.
    Mock4JS.verifyAllMocks();
};