Seth Ladd's Blog

Aloha Spring Framework fans! To celebrate the release of my (*) new book, Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow , I'm holding a little contest right here. Someone, maybe even you, will win a free copy of the book! I will send a copy to the person that can best express what it will take for the Spring Framework to continue to remain a strong force in web application development through the next 5 years. What's your vision for continued relevance for the Spring Framework, especially in web application development? What might be missing that would be required to continue to compete in a crowded and active market? The winner will be judged on most creative and practical vision for the future of web development with the Spring Framework. It's completely subjective, and I'm the only judge . Write your entries with this post's comments fields, and I'll close the contest one week from this posting. This is not a Spring love-in, as we all know it's a no-brainer for Ja...

OWL Rules in JESS includes Jess rulebase based on OWL Semantics. This implements a lot (how much?) of OWL inside JESS.

Add metadata about your tables to your models in Rails . >Rails model files contain no information on the tables they represent. This is a good thing in general, because it reduces duplication—add a column to a table, and there’s no configuration to update in the model. >However, when you’re writing code, it’s sometimes nice to be able to see just what attributes a model has. >Enter annotate models, a really trivial Rails plugin I hacked up in the plane back from the first No Fluff of the year. The plugin adds a comment block to the top of each model file, documenting the schema. If you update the schema, run it again and it updates the comment.

What (will be) new in Rails 1.1 > It's been just over two months since the Rails 1.0 milestone, and the long push of testing and refining that lead up to it. Surely, the contributors have been taking a much-deserved rest in the time since then. Surely? > In fact, the core team (and over 120 other contributors) haven't slowed down one bit, and the next major release of Rails is imminent. If you're running Edge Rails, you already have access to all the latest features, but perhaps a few have missed your radar. So I'd like to round-up what's new since 1.0 (or at least, everything that's interesting to me -- I've skipped a ton of bug fixes and smaller changes.) Let's start with the easier parts.

JTP: An Object Oriented Modular Reasoning System > JTP is an object-oriented modular reasoning system developed by Gleb Frank in Knowledge Systems Laboratory of Computer Science Department in Stanford University. JTP is based on a very simple and general reasoning architecture. The modular character of the architecture makes it easy to extend the system by adding new reasoning modules (reasoners), or by customizing or rearranging existing ones. > The system is implemented in Java. The reason for this choice is that Java is ideally suited for easy integration of object-oriented systems, which facilitates both extending JTP's functionality and embedding JTP in other systems. The abundance of supplementary software available in Java also helps.

SpringOne 2006 is the European Spring Framework conference. Just in time for Spring 2.0! > SpringOne is a brand new premium quality conference focusing on enterprise Java, which is brought to you by Interface21 and the Belgian JUG. The organization has only one objective; provide you with a first class environment in which over 40 of the industry's thought leaders, share their vision on current and future developments with you.

The Semantic Technology Conference looks really cool. It's the "Everything about the Semantic Web" conference. Wish I could go! Plane ticket + registration fee is a bit out of price range at the moment with the last minute notice. Now, if there was some sort of system or program that could inform me of upcoming conferences based on my availability and preferences... some sort of system that took into account data semantics. Now that would be nice! In the meantime, I'll stick to reading Dave Beckett's blog . > The SemTech conference is where customers, developers and researchers converge to discuss the commercialization of Semantic Technologies. It’s also your fast track to learning what Semantic Technologies are all about, and how to exploit them in your organization.

My book Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow is mentioned on springframework.org . Thanks, Thomas! And thanks to my co-authors, Darren, Steven, and Colin for their excellent work.

My friend Chris has a great question: > Did some reading on the issues in building the connection between items that have multiple definiations. Such as the word bug. Is it a software bug or a insect? Do you think it may be easier to take a clean slate approach and do it right versus trying to smash something into XML such as RDF? My response is as follows: Good question. If it's just the string "bug", then context is king. Through statistical analysis, you can determine to some relatively high degree that bug is a software problem or an insect. Now, on the web, "bug" can also be a Resource (see WWW Architecture for what a Resource is). If it's a Resource, it has a URI. Therefore, it's not "bug", but http://example.org/bug. Now, that's globally unique. Now that the name is unique, it's easy to all say things about it without being ambiguous. Of course, you can say that http://www.example.org/bug is a software problem and I can say it...

Pretty as a Picture offers very nice XHTML and CSS templates. > Pretty as a Picture is a web site born from the love of web/graphic design. Here you will find tutorials on how to create the visual and constructual elements of web pages that we really want, as well as free CSS & XHTML templates to download and use for your web site.

The semantic web, being many things to many people, promises to enable cross domain knowledge exchange in such a way that is compatible with current World Wide Web architecture and assumptions. The enterprise computing environment, defined here as inter-departmental or even inter-organizational information and service integration, can certainly benefit from some of the semantic web’s visions and goals. For example, most of the work done at the enterprise level is integration between disparate data sources and services. This integration is performed at two levels; the first is characterized by building data warehouses, extract/transform/load (ETL) procedures, and generally combining data repositories to create more complete data sets. The second level of enterprise integration is concerned with defining and mapping the semantics of the information sources in order to integrate knowledge across the enterprise more efficiently. It is this second level of integration that the semantic...

Native to a Web of Data is a great presentation on what makes a good Web 2.0. This is Web 2.0 without the marketing hype, this is the Aggregate Web. A web of services and data, available for mashups and remixing. As Dave Beckett points out , the goals of the Aggregate Web are very similar to the Semantic Web's goals.

Web Systems Invited Article: Semantic Web Technology -- Bringing Meaning to Distributed Systems > With the increasing size of the web and the availability of new technologies such as mobile applications or smart devices, there is a strong need for making the information on the World Wide Web accessible to computer programs which search, filter, convert, interpret, and summarize the information for the benefit of the user. The Semantic Web is a synonym for a World Wide Web whose accessibility is similar to a deductive database where programs can perform well-defined operations on well-defined data or even derive new information from existing data.

Towards Semantic Middleware for Web Application Development > In this paper we try to remedy the problems by applying semantic technology, i.e. ontologies and inference engines, in the middleware itself. After providing a short introduction to Web-based middleware and detailing some of its problems in sections 2 and 3, we propose an ontology as harmonizing conceptual model covering aspects from the heterogeneous areas of component and service descriptions (section 4). The ontology is leveraged to support developers and administrators in their complex tasks during development-, deployment-, and runtime in our prototypical Application Server (section 5). We discuss related work in section 5 and conclude in section 6. Finally, we provide a useful compilation of references and links.

Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web: From Scenario to Technology > In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila wrote a seminal article in which they envisioned the Semantic Web.1 The article's general tenor, and particularly their scenario demonstrating how the Semantic Web might be used, was directed toward identifying and using services on the Web. The pursuit of this vision continues.This article describes a complementary vision—a vision of the Semantic Web as a knowledge management environment.

Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow is my first book, soon to be published by APress . The official book page has been updated with the correct book description and cover thumbnail. If I were you, I wouldn't wait for the movie version, so go buy a copy! The contract negotiations with Natalie Portman are still in the works. > Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow provides in-depth coverage of Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow, two highly customizable and powerful web frameworks brought to you by the developers and community of the Spring Framework . Spring MVC is a modern web application framework built upon the Spring Framework, and Spring Web Flow is a new project that compliments Spring MVC for building reusable web controller modules that encapsulate rich page navigation rules. Along with detailed analysis of the code and functionality, plus the first-published coverage of Spring Web Flow, this book includes numerous tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Spring MVC, Spring We...

Flickr Filesystem > Flickrfs is a virtual filesystem based upon FUSE for Linux. It can be mounted on your computer and then can be accessed using the standard commands. But, here are the twists. The filesystem uses threads, and hence, improves usability and speed. When you mount the filesystem, it will create 2 directories automatically: 'tags' and 'sets'. 'sets' will automatically retrieve your sets and will show you all the photos available in your sets. You can then easily copy images on your hdd. If you want to add some more photos to these sets, just copy them to the folder, and they will be uploaded to the respective set.

Programmable Web: The Web As Platform has a great listing of APIs , Mashups , and even a Make Your Own Mashup Guide . Mashups, in this case, are web applications that combine the functionality, or simply change it up, of one or more existing web applications.

Rails Best Practices, Tips and Tricks > Because Rails is a young framework, I thought it would be helpful to write up what I consider best practices when coding with it both for my new coworkers and the web at large. Here’s my current draft. Feel free to critique and comment. I’m very open to suggestions.

Super Mario Brothers Sounds is a sound board (flash app with icons that play short sounds) for all those wonderful Super Mario Brothers sounds and music you know and love.

SwitchTower progress has a very nice tip for SwitchTower and a different username for subversion than the currently logged in user. Normally, SwitchTower will use the username of whoever is running the script. However, this may not always be what you want. In our environment, we have a single account used for all deployment tasks. >Another hack to allow different user/pass for SVN access than for SSH access: > > set :repository ”—username user ––password pass http://svn.example.com“