Orbi Software is a Web solutions provider based in Berkeley, CA. We have over ten years experience building powerful, database-enabled Web applications for businesses and consumers in the San Francisco Bay Area. We also host our own suite of Web site building tools which allow our clients to easily bridge the gap between cookie-cutter template designs and expensive custom solutions. http://www.orbisoftware.com Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000 Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000 One of the more persistent challenges we've faced at my day job in recent years has been adapting our "plug-in" web apps to the design constraints of our resellers' web site products. Think, for example, of a camera store widget that can be added to an existing page on an existing web site. The user should be able to select from a library of different designs and color schemes to try to make the integration with the site as seamless as possible. When we first built the infrastructure for handling different internal designs, we also came up with some baseline widths (500px, 750px, 950px, etc) that we thought would be able to accommodate the needs of any website designer. Then we wrote separate CSS style sheets for each design, color, and width combination. This seemed like a reasonable approach at the time, but in practice it's become a real headache as we're constantly having to adapt to the specific width requirements of each new vendor. And our recent forays into WordPress themes and Facebook frames have only exacerbated the issue...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/orbisoftware/~4/QWmxvrnwmkE" height="1" width="1"/> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/orbisoftware/~3/QWmxvrnwmkE/2012-02-19-embracing-responsive-web-design.html http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2012-02-19-embracing-responsive-web-design.html Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000 http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2012-02-19-embracing-responsive-web-design.html A few months ago, we started researching new platforms, frameworks, and tools for the next generation of our flagship product at my day job. OSGi was one of several Java technologies that came up during our initial discussions. I had heard of OSGi in its context as the underlying runtime for the Eclipse IDE plugin architecture, but otherwise I knew very little about it. A quick Google search revealed that it's been rather ubiquitous in the embedded software world for quite some time now as a way to implement service gateways. More recently, forward-looking developers have also started to consider it as a platform for increased modularity in enterprise web applications. This idea piqued my interest, and I decided to do a little research. While we ultimately chose not to use OSGi for reasons which I'll outline below, I still had a lot of fun putting together a presentation for my colleagues and building a small prototype. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on progress in the OSGi world over the coming months in the hope that someday it will become a standard in the web world too...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/orbisoftware/~4/9qkCWFw5b4M" height="1" width="1"/> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/orbisoftware/~3/9qkCWFw5b4M/2011-09-18-fun-with-osgi-and-spring.html http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-09-18-fun-with-osgi-and-spring.html Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:11:00 +0000 http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-09-18-fun-with-osgi-and-spring.html Early last year when I decided that I just couldn't put off redesigning the very dated-looking Orbi Software site any longer, the first skill that I knew I needed to get up to speed on was CSS. Like many programmers, I had learned the basics of CSS in a very informal way, mostly by looking at a few online examples and then studying the stylesheets of designers that I collaborated with as a coder. This limited exposure gave me enough knowledge to get by, but I always felt like I was coding by coincidence when I had to write my own classes. And some of the CSS files that I was maintaining became rather large and unwieldy over time, with lots of unnecessary duplication of similar styles. As the promise of CSS3 slowly started to become a reality with the release of many cool new vendor-specific CSS3 extensions, I finally decided that I just didn't want to hack my way through creating stylesheets any longer...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/orbisoftware/~4/0FM7u_N_xdc" height="1" width="1"/> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/orbisoftware/~3/0FM7u_N_xdc/2011-07-23-handcrafted-CSS-book-review.html http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-07-23-handcrafted-CSS-book-review.html Sat, 23 Jul 2011 20:49:00 +0000 http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-07-23-handcrafted-CSS-book-review.html In this series of posts, I thought it might be useful to step back and take a look at my current development environments. Environments is plural here because I have more than one: the first on a PC running Windows 7 Professional at my day job, and the second on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard which I use for just about everything else. I had originally planned to write a brief overview of all of the major development tool categories -- Text Editors, IDEs, Command Line Interfaces, Version Control Systems, Database Tools, and Project Management / Build Tools -- in a single blog post, but I quickly realized this wasn't wise when I hit 3000 words and wasn't even close to half way through. :-) So following is the first part on text editors, and hopefully the rest will follow soon. Part I: Text Editors...<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/orbisoftware/~4/LCfYz0MS0KU" height="1" width="1"/> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/orbisoftware/~3/LCfYz0MS0KU/2011-06-09-a-look-at-my-current-development-environments-part-I-text-editors.html http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-06-09-a-look-at-my-current-development-environments-part-I-text-editors.html Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:24:00 +0000 http://www.orbisoftware.com/blog/2011-06-09-a-look-at-my-current-development-environments-part-I-text-editors.html