Thursday, May 31, 2007

Morning Coffee 86

• Google announces Gears, a browser plugin for taking your web application offline. Developer docs are also available. TechMeme has lots more, but obviously this is yet another significant bow shot in the upcoming unified client platform war. By my count, there are four horses in this race: Microsoft with .NET and Silverlight, Adobe with Flash and Apollo, Google with AJAX and Gears and Sun with Java and JavaFX. Did I miss anyone? (via Dare Obasanjo and Scott Hanselman)
• Alex James writes that REST is about intent and shows a pseudo-code sample posting multiple changes to a single endpoint as a way of demonstrating your intent that they be applied atomically. Andres Aguiar left a comment saying that Astoria does something similar. Personally, I like that model for transactions better than the transaction factory approach Jon Udell describes. But either way, you've moved beyond simple CRUD style services and into the world of protocol. Surfacing intent via protocol aligns with what Tim described as making the protocol explicit
• Windows Live posted new beta versions of Writer, Mail and Messenger. I've been on an internal build of the new Writer for a while and I've really been impressed. There's also a new Provider Customization API, so I can't wait to see what the DasBlog folks do with that.
• Scott Guthrie's LINQ series continues, this time covering how to build the LINQ to SQL data model. Looks like they used the DSL toolkit to build the LINQ to SQL data model designer, cool! 
• Martin Fowler digs into racc, a yacc-esque compiler compiler for Ruby. Looks interesting as a internal DSL example (better than the now-canonical rake example). But why is the sexy new language on the block using old school CFG's instead of new hotness PEG's?
• Speaking of Martin, he writes about the opportunity Ruby presents to Microsoft, building on Scott Hanselman's concerns that Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. Sam Gentile also weighs in, suggesting that Microsoft is at the crossroads. Frankly, I don't work in evangelism anymore so I'm going pass these links along without comment except to say that Scott, Martin and Sam are all folks I have much much respect for.