Massless

Hi, everyone. To U.S. readers, I hope your 7/4 was enjoyable. I spent all day creating software.

Don't look at me like that, it was fun. Really. Let me lay it out for you:

1. A UBB-like bulletin board using Active Server Pages.
2. An RSS aggregator in Java.
3. An Excel-like interface for tabular data using DHTML.

1. A UBB-like bulletin board using Active Server Pages.
I spent most of my time working on the back-end for Umamitsumani. Jane has been looking to get online for a while and asked me to help. So she designed a layout in Photoshop and then I found a few spare moments to write the HTML and VBScript and create an admin tool which allows her to manage her online comics and her weblog. But then she pointed to a message forum she saw online and said something like, "I want! Gimme, gimme, gimme! Mine! Mine!" So, on July 4th, specifically, I spent my time reverse-engineering the Ultimate Bulletin Board.

For those who don't know (I didn't), the UBB is a very popular codebase, written in Perl, that manages online forums, message boards, etc. You can see it in so many places, for example at Comicon (check out the Scott McCloud thread), or at the boards for Ninjai (flash movie serial). This was my first introduction to UBB and I'm quite impressed with the layout and the information provided with each post, topic, and forum.

I went to download the code and realized that after 50 posts from any particular person Jane was going to have to pay $200 USD to continue the boards. That seemed a bit steep. If they'd only charged, say $50 USD, maybe we would have used their software.

Jane agreed to let me spend some time trying to make my own UBB, and (whew!) I'm almost finished. Because Jane's site is being hosted on an server with Windows 2000 and IIS 5, I've written the code using Active Server Pages technology and a Microsoft Access database. However, I'm a little sad that it's not portable and so I want to fit in some time and make a version that will use mySQL and PHP.

I'm calling it BoardLess. (For those keeping score, yes, I adapted my weblog tool BlogLess for her site as well.)

After I'm finished, should I just publish the code? People would still have to do some tweaking of the code, but then they could expand its functions if they wanted. (For example, I didn't put in all of the UBB Code tag library) If you have an opinion, please let me hear it.

2. An RSS aggregator in Java.
A few months back, I wrote a little mini-portal which gathers RSS feeds from various places. It was written in Visual Basic using the Microsoft.XMLDOM object. But recent Microsoft marketing activities (see Smart Tags, for one) and a grossly unfair advantage over application development and presentation on their operating systems have partially eclipsed the technological advantages they offer to me as a developer. One point in particular hurts me professionally: If some friends and I create software that will do a better job at some task that a current piece of Microsoft software handles, they will make sure it is hard for you to install or use it. (see the Kodak story [ZDNet], or any other story in the past six years regarding the Redmond giant vs.Netscape, Real, Symantec, etc...)

So I decided to learn Java and use it for creating the back-end of web applications. It's a small start.

In the process, I ported my Visual Basic code for the mini-portal to Java. It's been running on the Java codebase since Memorial Day. In the process of porting it, I made some changes making it extensible and easier-to-use. Last week I had my first successful test of the code on Linux! Yay! Write once, run anywhere. Well, sort of...but close enough. The java.io package treats Unix filepath conventions differently from Windows filepath conventions. But it's a small matter.

I'm calling my new software JavaCollect. Here's my marketing spiel: JavaCollect is an RSS headline aggregator written in Java that takes any combination of URLs that point to RSS feeds and transforms them into HTML files. It comes with various out-of-the-box HTML templates or Themes or can be based on any XSL stylesheets you provide.

So now the question is: What do I do with this software? Do I publish the entire source code for free? Do I publish just the .jar file and license the source code for a fee? Do I create a demo .jar file for free, but charge for the full version? Do I just keep it to myself? Again, if you have an opinion, please let me hear it.

I'm stumped as what to do, frankly.

3. An Excel-like interface for tabular data using DHTML.
At my job, we call this idea The Holy Grail. In some of our web applications we have an incredibly large amount of data that need to be displayed and managed all at once. The best model for managing this kind of data, to date: Microsoft Excel (or any spreadsheet program, really).

It's fallen to me to make it happen with the following requirements: A cross-platform, bi-directional grid to be displayed in a browser and written with only CSS and Javascript on the front end.

A fun challenge, but it might be impossible. Neverthess, I've started and will publish my efforts here. So here's the first installment, Displaying Tabular Data using CSS and Javascript: Grid 1 and please note that the grid only currently works in IE-5.*(PC), Netscape 6.1 Preview Release 1, and Mozilla 0.9.1.

I need a graphical representation of my attitude towards (and fear of) this particular project. Hey, here's a good one: An iceberg. [via widepipe.org]