Opa

A one-size-fits-all environment for Web application writing. It apparently subsumes the database, server, and both server-side and client-side programming into one big programming language. I'm pretty sure I've linked it before, but just in case: Opa.

It might be instructive to work out their examples in Decl.

Opa's central thesis is that polyglot programming suffers from impedance mismatches that slow down any programming effort. I guess my own Decl-based WWW::Publisher's answer to that isn't to eliminate the polyglossia, but to provide some kind of macro-based assistance to make sure your polyglossia has a solid framework to work in.

YUI

OK, so Yahoo! has a UI library, YUI, for writing AJAX applications. Which I kind of knew, but ... really it would be nice to come up with a Rosetta stone for all the myriad ways of cooking a UI.

The Strong API

Some kind of ... thing for determining degrees of relatedness between terms using ... the semantic Web? Maybe? But it does look interesting!

Karma proposal

This is an interesting proposal for karma measurement using the Sharpe ratio.

More on Twilio

Some new company/applications written on Twilio.

Usability blog

Interesting.

Checkers playing in 1966 and today

Peter Norvig gets scary in analyzing an article about a checkers playing program. To evaluate the program, he writes a compiler for the language used to write the program. And then debugs both the language spec and the published program.

Odd that I've never started a compilers topic before now. I guess I've just trusted other people to do it better.

Interactive diagrams

Another from the same Amit: an interactive diagram of a car's blind spots.

Game programming

• Nice list of links from Amit ... P.
• Scirra, some kind of drag-and-drop HTML5 game maker thingy.

Target application: Listry.com

Neat! This is from an HNN announcement. As always, I'd find it instructive to try to clone it in as few steps as possible.

Microformats

Here's a Wiki of "microformats" - semantic markup for various categories of things. Interesting effort. Filed under semantic Web, I guess?

deck.js - beautiful online presentations made easy

I really like this. [here][hnn]

What would be even cooler, though, is an authoring system based on Decl that could output either deck.js or PDF. That would even be easy, really. Maybe a nice get-your-feet-wet kind of application.

PHP best practices

I should just look up PHP best practices on a regular basis, shouldn't I? Read this. Now look at #6.

#6 is advocating a manually operated macro system, which is really all that snippets are. Not that it's bad advice! But imagine tracking your snippet usage across projects, and being able to refine their usage across all projects as you (or more accurately your programming system) learned more. I want to go there.

JavaScript::Writer - quasi-declarative Javascript output

[CPAN]. An interesting approach.

Binary parsing in Javascript

Cool! Very cool!

Seriously: a binary parser domain would really be useful. Gotta do some thinking on this.

Gamification as cargo cult

But a lucrative one! [article]

Seriously: larger strategies like "Web 2.0" or "social" and now "gamification" are quite reasonable collections of patterns - but pattern without content, in this case motivational content, is an empty thing.

I need a term for "site strategy patterns" or something like that.

Your Code is my Hell: Musings on Ruby project maintenance

Interesting article looking at maintenance of Ruby-on-Rails projects and how they are likely to recapitulate their phylogeny. Which tells me really (since I like software maintenance) I should be learning Ruby on Rails as the cool kids move on to whatever the hell they rabbit off to next.

Twitter Bootstrap

A ... what? CSS boilerplate distro from Twitter to make the assembly of Webapps easier. Neat - and should be pulled in wholesale. And studied, really, because a higher-level Webapp (or app) domain should be built on top of the HTML and CSS domains I finished last month.

Spamularity

Language Log post from last year on spambots (or actually lack thereof). Siren song to my ears.

Deployment configuration: static site on e.g. S3

There's been a little run on the notion of publishing static sites to high-availability cloud servers that's kind of cool. Definitely a nice tool for the toolbox.

• "High Scalability" blog (follow up!) has a strategy post to this effect with good analysis.
• Jekyll is one such option for blogging.