Rich Waters

Busy Times

Rich Waters — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:42:44 +0000

Well, it seems when things get busy this place is one of the first to get left behind. Unfortunately I don\\\’t foresee things slowing down a whole lot until perhaps later this year. The Ext team has been working on some really exiting stuff though, and I can\\\’t wait until we\\\’re able to announce everything that is going on.\\r\\n\\r\\nLotusphere is coming up really quick, and I\\\’m not sure if I will make it this year yet. Hopefully will have that figured out soon :P. Jack R will certainly be in attendance and has been working hard on getting Ext.nd ready to show off against Dojomino in BP103. Definitely check it out if you\\\’re attending this year.

The Switch

Rich Waters — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:36:41 +0000

Times are definitely changing. I have been anti-mac for as long as I can remember… I never liked the idea that you couldn’t pick/choose your hardware and that you were really stuck with everything they gave you. I even avoided iPod’s and went for other non-proprietary mp3 players. Also, for years I built all of my own machines so that I could pick out decent graphics cards and such and not have to spend a fortune for a decent setup. As things have progressed my views have definitely changed and I’m certainly not a hardcore gamer like I used to be. My first step was picking up the new iPhone, with my massive travel schedule lately I wanted to have a way to access things easily and this seemed like a good way to do it. I was totally floored, the interface all worked just as I had expected, almost every website works perfectly fine… I couldn’t ask for more at this point. Then I found myself needing a new laptop as I needed a bit more power since I wind up working while traveling a great deal, and decided to give the Macbook Pro a shot. I most certainly do not regret my decision, and have now adjusted quite well to the mac after just over a month. I picked up a copy of parallels and threw windows xp on there so I could test (and still access domino designer). After dealing with a newer laptop running Vista I’m very glad to be away from it…

Who knows, maybe my next desktop purchase will even be a mac…

Woah, an update?

Rich Waters — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:20:51 +0000

Things got sorta crazy for me (and Jack) over the past few months, as you can see one of the first things to go when I don’t have time tends to be this blog… Hopefully things settle down here some and I can keep things going.

The View has published an article that Jack and I wrote, it is available online for subscribers here. The article does a good job walking through an overview of Ext.nd and shows off a sample implementation with the new example tasks database Jack whipped up.

Also the latest version of Ext.nd has been released and is available at the normal download location in the Ext forums. This release has actually been ready to go for quite some time, and I think Jack sent out almost 50 preview copies to those that requested it. There were issues with licensing on top of lack of time to get it out the door. For now the Ext.nd project has shifted over to a pure GPL 3.0 license to line up with the change in Ext’s license. This allows us to still include the full Ext library within the notes database and not have to attempt to fuss with special extension licensing clauses that haven’t been finalized on the Ext side just yet. Check out the forum post for a listing of all the bug fixes and enhancements included in the release.

I’ve gotten access to a url we registered a couple years ago (http://www.extnd.net/) and hope to have some time to get an actual site built for the Ext.nd project. Stay tuned for updates on that site.

On a final note, I wanted to mention that even though we’ve had a large delay on the current release that certainly hasn’t prevented work on what will become the next release. I expect you’ll see a much faster turn around this time as much of what we wanted to accomplish is already complete. Beta 2 will likely be the largest architecture change of Ext.nd to date and really focuses on making the code better fit into the Ext 2.x way of doing things. Biggest changes off the top of my head include full categorized view support, full support for including Ext.nd components in any layout via xtype, much more control over configuration options, and a bunch more.

Ext & Google Maps

Rich Waters — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:53:25 +0000

A colleague of mine, Shea Frederick, whipped up a really nice example integration of the Google Maps API and Ext JS. I had the chance to look at the demo a while back when there were some minor rendering issues, it appears that they’ve all been resolved and the result is really slick.

Check out the blog post for full details and code, or jump straight to the live example to play with it (don’t forget to pop up the extra windows by clicking on the buttons in the toolbar).

The best thing in my eyes is the GMapPanel component, which means that you can now include these Google maps anywhere in your layouts via the ‘gmappanel’ xtype.

Accepted into Aptana Cloud beta

Rich Waters — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:20:08 +0000

So after my recent article playing around with Ext on the server side with Jaxer, I figured I would check out Aptana’s cloud platform so that I had a decent place to host and test my Jaxer apps.

They sent over the credentials and information to install the cloud eclipse plugin, every thing was dead simple and within a few minutes I had partitioned off a section of the cloud and deployed a simple Jaxer app that I had been playing around with. They did a nice job integrating the cloud infrastructure, syncing is a breeze and I’m looking forward to having some more time to play around with it.

When I get a chance this week I’ll toss up the Jaxer code from the examples I wrote for the Ext article and post the url.

Ext and Aptana Jaxer

Rich Waters — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:08:51 +0000

I’m not one to normally do frivolous things like blog about blogging, but I spent a good deal of time playing around with Jaxer and wrote up an article on the Ext Blog. The article covers integrating an Ext Data Store with Jaxer, and a nice example of using Ext.XTemplate on the server. Check out the post for a lot more detail and a bunch of code.

Ext.nd Progress

Rich Waters — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:39:51 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve said anything about the progress of Ext.nd, Jack and I have been quite busy since Lotusphere. We’ve been on the verge of a new release for a while hope to have it tested and available soon.

As for the framework itself we’ve made some great progress lately. Jack has implemented a first pass at rendering categorized views and has done a lot of work to make them play nicely with a PagingToolbar. I’ve recently finished a large rewrite of the outline and view code to directly extend TreePanel and GridPanel. This change has allowed for much greater flexibility as we can now include domino components directly into an Ext layout via XType. The changes have allowed for some nice refactoring, leading to much cleaner code and increased performance.

Keep your eyes peeled, I’ll announce the release here and in the forums when it is available.

Trying out Twitter

Rich Waters — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:53:08 +0000

Twitter has actually been around for quite some time now. I even signed up for an account a long time ago and just never did anything with it. Now, with the rush of Twitter adoption through the Notes blogging community (TwitNotes, Ed Brill, Planet Lotus) I figured I may as well give it a try.

I’m not sure what I do and where I go is all that interesting, but you never know

Wordpress Upgrade

Rich Waters — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:59:13 +0000

In an effort to stay on top of upgrades and security updates in a more timely fashion, I just upgraded to the recently released Wordpress 2.5. If you are running a Wordpress blog I would definitely recommend heading over to the download site and upgrading. As with all my past upgrades, everything went very smoothly. They have definitely done a good job keeping upgrades simple.

The first noticeable change is the major overhaul to the Admin interface. They actually worked with the Happy Cog team to put together a very nice and much cleaner interface. Happy Cog are the folks behind ‘A List Apart’ and ‘An Event Apart’ which I’ve been to a couple of times now. I was previously using a plugin to replace the Admin interface but I may stick with the default now

Wordpress Security Issues

Rich Waters — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 05:14:13 +0000

A friend recently brought to my attention that some of my recent posts contained some odd links to casino sites and other such random spam. After further investigation I found a total of 5 posts affected and I’m confident it was due to the recently patched security issue found in Wordpress. More info can be found over on their blog. I suppose that will teach me for letting the version slide for a little while without upgrade. I’m also glad that I only had 80 some posts to look through, it certainly could have been much worse…

Anyway, if you run a Wordpress blog, make sure to upgrade ASAP.