I liked, really liked, Jim’s Notes from the Aussie Architectural Astronaut Assembly but do have a small 409 Conflict with the assertion “REST isn’t simple”. It is true you have to be a protocol weenie or an unconscious idiot before you can comfortably use phrases such as “hypertext is the engine of application state”, but there are levels of understanding which are still useful: plumbing is complex, but you don’t need to understand it to flush a loo or make a cup of tea. As for 409, although I’ve encountered it in the wild using Subversion, I somehow doubt many would advocate WebDAV as the best pattern for REST and I know my mental model of how it “works” would break down under Jim’s detailed questioning. So I’d swerve using 409 in much the same way Jim swerves ETag, Sam’s REST litmus test. Jim’s asking “do you really need sub-second responses and correctness?” is my favorite approach because if things are getting tricksy, your best tactic is to simplify.

Such admissions obviously put me firmly in amongst the REST chattering classes, but I think that’s OK because the Web has survived and continues to grow like Topsy despite the ignorance of the gory details amongst most developers, and inspite of so much bad magic specified by vendors and baked into b0rked software. The Web not only suffers ignorant fools like me gladly, it continues to absorb us in every sense.

Processing is one of those things I keep on coming across, first through toy hackers such as krazydad, ni [video] and The Curiosity Collective and more recently in Maker articles and O’Reilly books such as Vizualizing Data and Making Things Talk. I’d even invested in the rather heavy Processing, Creative Coding and Computational Art, all totally inspiring, and yet I somehow hadn’t got around to actually doing anything with it. You see it’s the whole Java thing that puts me off; when it comes to playtime life’s far too short to wrangle a CLASSPATH or compile an applet.

So, it was great to see the amazing John Resig finally release his native Javascript implementation Processing.js. To allow easy experimention, I’ve wrapped John’s code into a TiddlyWiki Plugin, which took all of 10 minutes thanks to the prior art of Simon Baird’s cool clock. It took a little longer to knife and fork John’s basic examples into a TiddlyProcessing TiddlyWiki [subversion], mainly because his server was being hammered.

The result is a single HTML page you can double click on an example to view the Processing source, edit it, and see the results immediately without refreshing the page. Download and reopen it in Firefox and you’ll be able to save your changes locally. Not all the examples work, in particular those which use external images. You can save your changes in other browsers if you follow the generic TiddlyWiki instructions. .

All great fun, but it is just a hack, and I somehow doubt the purveyors of more complete bids for global vendor lock-in, such as Silverlight and AIR, are too worried as yet. But they should be. A combination of video as a first class citizen of the Web, Canvas in decent browsers and libraries and emulations using SVG elsewhere seems pretty close to being good enough. As much as I’d love to see more declarative approaches take off, I can’t help but think we’ve entered the age of the canvas!

Update: Simon has tweaked the plugin to avoid the need to escape single quotes and put his version up on TiddlySpot, a great place to store your TiddlyWikis.

Technorati Tags: Processing, Processingjs, TiddlyWiki

Another year, and another quiz sheet for our local school Spring Fair. The theme of this year’s fair is “The Beijing Olympic Games”. Sigh! So each picture represents a game. A board game. Hmm. And it’s not as cryptic as previous years. Double hmmm. As usual, I’ll post the answers after the prize draw. Have Fun!

Technorati Tags: Berkhamsted, quiz