Jeff Longland

Ruby on Rails has been the hot topic for nearly a year, but I haven’t really looked at it any detail… until today when I noticed that Roumen has recorded two demos of Ruby support in Netbeans 6.0. I’m very impressed, at both RoR *and* Netbeans. RoR is everything that I’ve heard it is… but bringing it in under the Netbeans umbrella is the really great thing. I’ve been using Netbeans for years - early 3.x versions if I recall correctly. The product has evolved extensively over the last two years and I implore anyone frustrated with Eclipse to give Netbeans a spin. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed (or I hope you won’t be).

• Ruby on Rails Netbeans Demo
• Advanced Ruby Editing in Netbeans

And… where else can you go to have a demo that sounds like it’s delivered by a CIA operative? Roumen is the best!

I’ve been absent from this blog for a couple of weeks - got a lot on the go and a lot on my mind… but I’ll save that for another post when there’s enough time for me to comprehend it to put it into words. Today I want to yammer a bit about another favourite tool.

I’ve been using Netbeans as my IDE of choice for a few years aside from a few exploratory tours of JCreator, JBuilder, Eclipse, etc. All in all, Netbeans suits me best. It may not suit you best, but for what I need to do - it’s great. And with some of the slick features coming up in Netbeans 5.5, I suspect the Netbeans userbase will continue to swell. Want to see why?

• Point-and-click Subversion support
  
• J2EE Wizards
• UML Modelling

Check out the rest of Roumen’s blog for more demos and other interesting tidbits. Geertjan’s blog also has some nifty pieces about Netbeans & Wicket.

I previously posted (briefly) about my adventures attempting to provide podcasts from WebCT. The larger issue this drives at is generating RSS feeds of WebCT Content. Andrew Gruhn commented today that he’d like to get RSS feeds of WebCT content as well. I drafted a post about this in November and have been kinda sitting on it ever since. So here it is with a whole lotta late night revisions. I’m working on implementing this but it’s currently more of a hobby than anything so don’t expect anything immediately. Hopefully someone finds this useful, let me know if you come up with anything or have suggestions for improvements.
So what type of content could we get out of WebCT? In particular, out of WebCT Vista 3/4 or CE 6. The PowerLinks SDK provides a few webservices that might be useful:

• Mail - new messages, etc
• Calendar - upcoming entries?
• File Manager - RSS w/ enclosures, ie. podcasting
• GradeBook - maybe grades?

I’m a little hokey on the GradeBook idea, but the other three sound decent. There’s also a beta Discussion webservice that’s available through the Vista Developers Network and that would likely be one of the most useful RSS feeds out of WebCT.

1. Instructor creates the RSS tool like they would any other tool. The tool is essentially an authentication module that can integrate with other systems or return a string - ie, HTML.
2. Student clicks on the proxy tool. The tool generates an HTML page with information about using an RSS reader along with a URL for the feed, perhaps a servlet on another server. ex. http://host/VistaRSS/feed?id=30303039 Velocity would be good for generating the HTML.
3. The user adds the RSS feed in their favourite reader. For me, BlogBridge or Thunderbird.
4. The reader makes the request and the servlet handles communication with the WebCT webservices. For example, goto the specified learning context (30303039) and get a list of all files in the /podcasts/ directory. Substitute any of the other content I mentioned earlier.
5. Using the list of all files, generate the XML for the feed. I’ve been using with Rome in my experiment with podcasting. Though Velocity would also make a good candidate.
6. Return the XML to the user.

Ideally in step 4 it would be nice to wrap some authentication around this whole thing. Authentication seems to be supported in a handful of RSS readers and podcast clients, mainly for standard HTTP authentication. Potion Factory walks through the steps of setting up a password protected podcast. Bottom line is that some form of restriction should be available should the instructor wish to restrict access to students only.

Well, time to mosey along. I should be working more on implementing this rather than writing about it, but I felt compelled to post today since I’ve been meaning to do this. So here it is.

As I start this entry, I’m sitting on a train looking at the shores of Lake Ontario as I make my exit from Toronto. I don’t make it to Toronto often nor am I particularly drawn here. You can take Jeff out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Or something to that effect. I’m headed home to a less urban locale.

So what brought me to the big smoke? A conference hosted by Apple and McGraw-Hill Ryerson on podcasting in higher education. I haven’t written much here about podcasting, but don’t take this as an indicator of my interest – in fact, I’m borderline fanatical about podcasting… this from someone who doesn’t own an iPod! As with most of my obsessions, I’m more excited about the technology that makes all of this possible. So here’s my big anti-climatic announcement: I’ve been experimenting with the ROME RSS utility and the WebCT PowerLinks SDK to add podcasting support to WebCT. It’s nothing pretty yet, but I’m confident it can work – albeit in a manner that may or may not be inline with how Apple would like to see podcasting in WebCT. At the moment, my concern is to simply generate the RSS feed and the means to retrieve the enclosures. I have both of these pieces working, but as I said – it’s not pretty, nor ready for release. From the instructor perspective, the podcast is uploaded to a ‘podcasts’ directory in the WebCT section – it is from this directory that the RSS feed is generated. One item with enclosure in the RSS feed for each audio file in the podcasts directory.

Getting back to the conference, I was pretty happy with the speaker line-up. In particular, it was a great opportunity to meet Brian Lamb who came in from UBC. On our way into the city, a few of my colleagues asked me if I was familiar with any of the speakers – so I gave them my two cents and a strong recommendation for Brian. At the end of the day, they came back to me and commented about his energetic / humorous / passionate performance. And? They want to learn more! Sadly, they were unaware of my interest in this area. I think this tells me that I should probably be putting more of myself into this blog and generally promoting emerging technology more. Brian made a similar suggestion to post more regularly. I admit that I need to knock it up a notch.

The other presenters that impressed me were Robert Lyons and Bob Burke from Carleton. Having years of experience recording and processing lectures for television delivery has given them an opportunity to implement vodcasting with minimal effort. Copyright issues were briefly touched upon during the Q & A and it appears that due to the current state of Canadian copyright laws, Carleton can only vodcast original content. As a few audience members commented, Bob’s vodcasts are probably just as popular as his in-class demos because of his sense of humour.

Above and beyond everything else that was discussed today, I was most impressed with the depth of knowledge and passion displayed by the aforementioned presenters. A great day for reflection on the way home.

Edit: If you want to know more about the event, here’s a blog that will fill in the detals.

The passing of time has always intrigued me. How we mark the passing of time and our progress. I have a directory where I keep all of my Java development projects. I regularly take snapshots, usually when I hit a milestone of some sort. Looking back over the last year, I realized the memories that I’ve associated with these snapshots. Bits and pieces of my life marked in Java. Early evening snapshots in late June, walking through the campus after a late day thunderstorm… Small snapshots, debugging in early winter when it’s dark before the work day is done… It’s nice to look back and feel movement, progress. I knocked down a domino today and I’m hoping there will be some more to come!