Topic: Software Development
As consumers continue to adopt using media on demand, developers are working to come up with tools that allow computer users to access material. Deeje Cooley, product manager for Adobe, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the Adobe Media Player (AMP), which allows a user to watch their favorite shows, anytime, anywhere. It also allows content businesses new waysto create, deliver, and monetize high-quality content and advertising through a customizable cross-platform player that supports both downloaded and streamed media.
In mid 2006, YouTube served approximately 100 million videos in a single day. To maintain a website of that scale, one would imagine YouTube has hundreds of DBAs. But in fact, there are just three people that make it all work. Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at YouTube shares horror stories about scalability at YouTube and how he coped with them to keep the show going everyday, while learning important lessons along the way.
Information processing is integrated into everyday objects, and the metaphor 'desktop' is obsolete. This post-desktop model of computing is known as 'Ubiquitous Computing', or UbiComp, in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) jargon. Mike Kuniavsky, the co-founder and Principal of ThingM, a design and research firm, and the author of 'Observing the User Experience', alludes to 'magic' as being the new metaphor for ubiquitous computing in his novel perspective.
Zope is a high-performance application/Web server, content management system. It is a complete, robust, scalable solution. Rob Page, CEO and President of Zope Corporation, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the status of Zope, as well as the company. He reviews the background of the system, including what led them to use Python as part of it. He also gives some examples of successful implementations. He talks about why the company made Zope open source and discusses the challenges of making money in open source.
Matt MacLaurin, who works for Microsoft's Creative Systems Group, is developing a game -- and game-development platform -- called Boku. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Matt about his own early experiences writing software for systems that invited hacking.
Avi Bryant is a Smalltalk developer who joined the Ruby community in its earliest days. He is the author of Seaside, a web-application development framework for Smalltalk, and of Dabble DB, a user-friendly web-based database developed with Smalltalk. In this address, he weighs Ruby against Smalltalk, pleading similarities between the languages and arguing that Smalltalk provides lessons that the Ruby community can learn.
Greg Whisenant, founder of CrimeReports.com, wants every city to make its crime data usefully available to citizens in the same kinds of ways that ChicagoCrime.org famously does. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Greg Whisenant describes a software product that can enable police departments to easily deliver online crime mapping and analysis. The future of law enforcement, he believes, will be a citizen/government collaboration enabled by this kind of social application.
The next evolution of Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.
As described on its website, Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. It is designed to help young people As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Phil and Scott discuss Scratch, along with a number of other current technology topics.
Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Phil and Scott talk to Bruce Johnson, one if its co-creators. In addition to discussing its development, Bruce gives a number of examples of projects that took advantage of GWT.
