A full 6 months have passed since we started this module together during which although we only met a couple hours a week we managed to cover a great deal of topics and complete various workshops. This post is intended as a wrap up for this module which will go through most of the material we went through.
HTML/CSS - This was our first session together, all of us knew at lest the very basics of HTML and CSS and while the session was very informative it was more of a familiarization session where we introduced each-other and started getting used to the module. I still remember this first post we had to write and how many hours I spent re-writing same sentences over and over again.
JavaScript - Out first assignment in this module was the java script running man, experimenting with a language I never dared getting close to because of all the misconceptions surrounding it from compatibility issues any lack of standards proved to be very informative. Although there are real compatibility issues with JavaScript most can easily be overcome by following proper guidelines and design patterns available over the net.
PHP -This was out second task for this module, we were all asked to design and develop a web-space management system where users would be able to upload and download files securely through a browser. This was
SecondLife - I must admit this part of the module would be the one I disliked the most, spending time in a virtual environment with graphics like they're 5 years too late seemed way too daunting. The scripting sessions were interesting but again we were developing in an environment none of us were interested in. If I had to learn a scripting language I would have rather learnt something which might become useful later on in my carer. Virtual world will someday become the norm but I'm sure it will not be in form of the current second life implementation. One thing is fore sure you will not be finding my avatar roaming the second world any time soon
HTML5/Mobile Applications - During these sessions we explored various features that are already available though current production browser versions such as the geo-location feature on Chrome and mobile devices.
Online Social Networks - This was an informative session about social networks, we are also now all grouped up in Google+ circles as a result of that session.
Cloud Computing - This was the topic we covered during our final session, we discussed what the "cloud" actually means and the various advantages and disadvantages to distributed computing as well as the security issues relating to "the cloud".
Just writing this blog post makes me wonder how we actually managed to do all that in just a couple of months, but we did. I'm sure every one of us would agree that it was all interesting and informative.
Finally I would like to thank our tutor Jeremy who presented this module in an interesting fashion enriching each session with the knowledge gathered throughout his own career in the IT industry.
Monday 18 July 2011
Friday 8 July 2011
Online Social Networks
Online social networks have been around since the first time I logged into the internet, it is part of us humans that want to build social networks be it online or offline. On reading about the subject it was amazing to what lengths people would go through just to pass a simple message around.
For as long as I can remember I have been dragged from one online social network to another, I'm not a fan of any of them and quite frankly can do without any of them. The only reason I join as well as quit is because all my friends do.
The first social network I was ever a part of was IRC (Internet Relay Chat) based which at that time server the purpose just fine. It allowed us friends to identify each other, have mult-person conversations and speak as privately and publicly as we wanted. Next MSN Messenger started catching on, people where all shifting from IRC to MSN which allows you to identify yourself securely to your friends by your hotmail.com email account as well as accept/reject/block anyone you would want from your contact list. In my opinion the real reason people moved from IRC to MSN was because it looked "pretty". characters such as :) where being automatically transformed into smiling face emoticons and everyone was allowed to select their desired backgrounds and fonts.
Then came all the web-based social networks such as mySpace, hi5, facebook and now Google+, all trying to gain as much of the world's internet's population hostage to the multitude of features (mostly useless) to ultimately generate advertising revenue.
In my opinion the only reason why social networks have ultimately taken over most of the internet's traffic is because they're viral in nature. If you create an account at any of these sites you want your friends to be there too otherwise it's useless, on inviting your friends to join the network you have contributed to the viral nature of these networks and that is why the most successful ones grow exponentially and die off fast.
One could go on forever about the pros and cons on online social networks and would never end up with a definitive answer, yes we need social networks because they fulfill some inner human "feature"which makes us want to be a part of something but yet exposes some of our worst fears about privacy.
I have spend the majority of this post explaining my personal experience with online social networks yet not made any reference to anything relating to web technologies. I Believe that most of the latest web-technologies we have today are there because of social networks. The internet has been around for decades now but prior to the last 5 years all web-pages were simply that just HTML pages. Social networks have developed on the same technologies (HTTP, HTML, JavaScript) to come up with something as dynamic as a desktop application. AJAX has been technically possible since HTTP and JavaScript were available yet very little tried to implement it prior to the social network boom. That is one thing we should at least all be thankful for :)
For as long as I can remember I have been dragged from one online social network to another, I'm not a fan of any of them and quite frankly can do without any of them. The only reason I join as well as quit is because all my friends do.
The first social network I was ever a part of was IRC (Internet Relay Chat) based which at that time server the purpose just fine. It allowed us friends to identify each other, have mult-person conversations and speak as privately and publicly as we wanted. Next MSN Messenger started catching on, people where all shifting from IRC to MSN which allows you to identify yourself securely to your friends by your hotmail.com email account as well as accept/reject/block anyone you would want from your contact list. In my opinion the real reason people moved from IRC to MSN was because it looked "pretty". characters such as :) where being automatically transformed into smiling face emoticons and everyone was allowed to select their desired backgrounds and fonts.
Then came all the web-based social networks such as mySpace, hi5, facebook and now Google+, all trying to gain as much of the world's internet's population hostage to the multitude of features (mostly useless) to ultimately generate advertising revenue.
In my opinion the only reason why social networks have ultimately taken over most of the internet's traffic is because they're viral in nature. If you create an account at any of these sites you want your friends to be there too otherwise it's useless, on inviting your friends to join the network you have contributed to the viral nature of these networks and that is why the most successful ones grow exponentially and die off fast.
One could go on forever about the pros and cons on online social networks and would never end up with a definitive answer, yes we need social networks because they fulfill some inner human "feature"which makes us want to be a part of something but yet exposes some of our worst fears about privacy.
I have spend the majority of this post explaining my personal experience with online social networks yet not made any reference to anything relating to web technologies. I Believe that most of the latest web-technologies we have today are there because of social networks. The internet has been around for decades now but prior to the last 5 years all web-pages were simply that just HTML pages. Social networks have developed on the same technologies (HTTP, HTML, JavaScript) to come up with something as dynamic as a desktop application. AJAX has been technically possible since HTTP and JavaScript were available yet very little tried to implement it prior to the social network boom. That is one thing we should at least all be thankful for :)
Friday 1 July 2011
Mobile application development
This week's session was dedicated to mobile application development, since we only had a couple of hours to work with we decided to work using technologies we were all familiar with, web technologies. It would have been futile anyway if we had to decide which technology from which brands of smart phone manufacturers we should cover, everyone would have come up with their own personal preferences and it would have ended up being a long session with arguments as to why one technology is better. NOT the intention behind the session.
At this point I was thinking well we all know how to create websites so most probably we will be spending the session creating web-pages designed for smaller screen. I'm sure it would have been interesting but it wouldn't have done justice to the title "mobile application development", a web-page designed for a smaller screen is not a mobile phone app, it's just a tiny web page.
Fortunately enough I was wrong, we were actually going to be working on some additional features of HTML5 we had not yet covered, more specifically geo-location. I had no idea such functionality existed, for all I knew the only way to get a location from a visitor would be to look-up the user's IP in IP2Country database to figure out where the user might be located. From my experience with projects which had this implemented, it was not very accurate for one the IP2Country database (which is huge) would need to be updated frequently, you would also end up with a lot of inaccurate translations. People behind proxies would show up from the country where the proxy they used is located and not the actual location.
With HTML5 the browser will try and make use of the most accurate way of determining a user's location, on testing it out from my home PC, it didn't look too good, while it managed to figure out that i'm in Malta it flagged my location as somewhere in the center of Malta, some miles away from my actual location.
The browser will actually ask you before divulging your physical location, a privacy feature for all those who are worried that the entire world it out to get them.
Again the browser prompts for a confirmation on allowing the browser to provide your location and on pressing the Ok button, the API is available to that page.
At this point I was thinking well we all know how to create websites so most probably we will be spending the session creating web-pages designed for smaller screen. I'm sure it would have been interesting but it wouldn't have done justice to the title "mobile application development", a web-page designed for a smaller screen is not a mobile phone app, it's just a tiny web page.
Fortunately enough I was wrong, we were actually going to be working on some additional features of HTML5 we had not yet covered, more specifically geo-location. I had no idea such functionality existed, for all I knew the only way to get a location from a visitor would be to look-up the user's IP in IP2Country database to figure out where the user might be located. From my experience with projects which had this implemented, it was not very accurate for one the IP2Country database (which is huge) would need to be updated frequently, you would also end up with a lot of inaccurate translations. People behind proxies would show up from the country where the proxy they used is located and not the actual location.
With HTML5 the browser will try and make use of the most accurate way of determining a user's location, on testing it out from my home PC, it didn't look too good, while it managed to figure out that i'm in Malta it flagged my location as somewhere in the center of Malta, some miles away from my actual location.
The browser will actually ask you before divulging your physical location, a privacy feature for all those who are worried that the entire world it out to get them.
On allowing the geo-location API to work, I was flagged as being located at Birkirkara, a couple miles away from my actual location, most probably that's where my ISP's servers are located and after the browser exhausted all possible ways of determining my location through GPS, triangulation etc.. it reverted back to the old-school IP lookup, which although not that accurate is far more efficient then maintaining an IP2Location database. On a side note, the location is only available to the client for the server to actually get a hold of your location the client would need to forward the location to the server through an HTTP request such as an AJAX call.
The following test was carried out during this same session, this time using an iPhone, which comes equipped with GPS, etc... The accuracy here was mind boggling if reported my location to within meters away from our classroom at Pembroke.
Again the browser prompts for a confirmation on allowing the browser to provide your location and on pressing the Ok button, the API is available to that page.
As you can see from the above image here the location service is so accurate it would terrify anyone paranoid about the Internet, but for me the more APIs I as a developer have available the more functionality I can provide to the end user.
The source for the web page listed above can be found at http://drunktext.org/Daniel.html
PS: It has been recently reported that one of the largest smart phone manufacturers has been tracking the where-about of all it's customers for years, all of which had no idea on what was going on and never pressed any "allow" button anyway.