Web Info & Tutorials

Jason Hunter of MarkLogic has unveiled a new application that allows you to search and analyze email traffic. The service is called MarkMail, and you can check out the Apache instance to see it at work.

The application is written using MochiKit.

Jason gave us detailed information on the goals:

As you’ll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with the site has been to focus heavily on analytics. We have lots of graphs and counts, and you’re able to use them to watch Apache’s historical growth and each individual project’s growth. Every query you write gets its own histogram chart.

Another goal has been interactivity. Every search result screen gives you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment type, etc). Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts. You can hit “n” and “p” to move to the next and previous result and “j” and “k” to move up and down the thread view. There’s a lot of little things like this. Plus if your result message includes Office or PDF files they’re in-line interactive too.

http://apache.markmail.org/search/ext:ppt+axis

Another goal has been to focus on community. We could have launched MarkMail with 50,000,000 emails from many sources but I think it’s better to start with focus. In fact, I’ll be at ApacheCon and the Hackathon next week, along with my co-developer Ryan Grimm, looking for people’s suggestions and maybe on the spot adding in a few of them. There’s also potential to explore some fun one-off analytics, too.

As part of the focus on communities, we setup MarkMail so it recognizes that Apache itself consists of many communities. If you go to http://apache.markmail.org you search all Apache emails, but if you go to http://struts.markmail.org then you’re auto-limited to just Struts lists. Same for tomcat, spamassassin, httpd, and so on. You can always limit your search using “list:struts” in your query, but using the domain handles that a bit more elegantly.

Notes on using the site:

• Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and list: constraints
• The GUI doesn’t yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, like -subject:jira.
• You can sort results by date by adding order:date-forward or order:date-backward to your query
• Remember to use “n” and “p” keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search results

We have revamped Google Code, the site which is the home to developers, and open source hosting. A ton of work went into cleaning up the UI integrating and unifying content, and simplifying.

The site uses jQuery for a lot of its work, and also eats a lot of dogfood. The video below goes through some of the high lights, but DeWitt Clinton said it well:

One of the most exciting things about the redesign is that everything you see here was built using technology and APIs that are available to everyone. The pages we’re serving don’t rely on any secret back-end tricks; the site is built on plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS, each using our public APIs. In fact, all of the techniques used on Google Code can be duplicated on your own site.

For example, the search results pages use a combination of the AJAX Search API and Custom Search Engines. The homepage gadgets use the AJAX Feed API and Google Reader feeds. The videos are powered by the YouTube API, the blogs by the Blogger API, the events powered by the Google Calendar API, the metrics by Google Analytics, the forums by Google Groups, etc., etc..

Stay tuned — over the upcoming weeks we’ll offer detailed articles and tutorials about how we built the various parts of Google Code using open technologies.

This is just the beginning of a slew of updates that we are making to the site. I can’t wait to roll out some of the items that really match our vision of what a developer community can really be!

Dave Thomas (The AOP/Bedarra one, not the Ruby one) has a column titled Programming the World in a Browser: Real Men Don’t Do JavaScript Do They?! where he discusses how JavaScript won:

The mainstream professional developer community has never taken JavaScript seriously but soon they will have no choice. JavaScript is ready to move to center stage as the development and delivery technology for Web 2.x applications. In the past, most enterprise and product developers flocked to Java or C# while web developers moved to PHP, Perl, Python and more recently Ruby, with most ignoring the web based scripting language called JavaScript. At best it has been considered something to spiff up one’s HTML pages. To make matters worse, incompatible implementations of JS and the DOM have tormented developers and made JS very unpopular with many. Until Ajax and Web 2.0 Douglas Crockford seemed to be the only advocate for JavaScript as a reasonable programming language. He pointed out that JS was really a Scheme like language with a prototype-based object model layered on top of it. I’m sure that popular author David Flanagan never dreamed that he would be best known for his book Definitive JavaScript.

While many smaller companies had built quality widgets and applications in JS it is was the entry of Yahoo Widgets, and more importantly the that of Google Mail, Calendar, etc. that laid the commercial foundation for the Ajax revolution with a plethora of frameworks and tools. Rather than bulky and complex web standards, more and more of these toolkits support simpler Restful style services that use JSON rather than SOAP.

JavaScript’s ubiquitous browser availability makes it the frontrunner in that environment and this will no doubt ripple to servers and appliances. JavaScript is headed into the limelight once promised to Java, then later to Flash. It will be a must know language for everyone within 3 years. If JavaScript does cross over from the browser to other platforms it could inflict collateral damage on these languages down the road.

He goes on to discuss:

• The Push for a Faster, More Robust JS in the Browser
• Universal lightweight runtimes:
  • Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime
  • Scripting Language Execution on the JVM
  • The Sun Finally Shines on Dynamic Languages
  • Google Reviving Rhino?
  • IBM Project Zero?
• ECMAScript 4: Just say no
• JavaScript as a platform