Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

…or in other words, how to rent an army of slaves on demand.
Quoting from Amazon Web Services (emphasis mine):
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human [...]

Trac, SVN quick howto on a linux Debian

In the following, I will present a mini guide to setup Trac 0.10.3 and SVN services on a Linux Debian stable.
I needed a per project authentication both in trac and in svn.
I just finished it, seems to be working, will check it out in a few days, hope it does not burn your PC [...]

Remote Procedure Calls in GWT

From google
GWT RPC makes it easy for the client and server to pass Java objects back and forth over HTTP.
When used properly, RPCs give you the opportunity to move all of your UI logic to the client, resulting in greatly improved performance, reduced bandwidth, reduced web server load, and a pleasantly fluid [...]

Open-source scripting environment Komodo Edit 4.3

 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080316-hands-on-open-source-scripting-environment-komodo-edit-4-3.html
http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml
The free and open source editor,  supports

Browser-side technologies: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XML
Server-side languages: Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl
Web template languages: RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django

The OpenKomodo project has the potential to become for scripting what Eclipse is for Java.

Prism for the Desktop

Mozilla Labs last week released a new version of Prism, a single-site browser system that brings web applications to the desktop. The latest version is designed to work as a Firefox extension rather than as a separate XUL application.
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/03/major-update-to-prism-first-prototype-of-browser-integration/
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism/Scripting
Roughly, you can run server side code offline. The interesting part is the lightweight browser. It does [...]

Vortex: An offline abstraction on top of Google Gears

from ajaxian.com

Google just released Google Gears for pocket pcs

Off-line web applications are a big deal for many companies/projects such as Adobe/AIR, Mozilla/Prism, Google/Google Gears and possibly Microsoft/Silverlight.
From gearsblog.blogspot.com:
Gears for mobile devices is initially available for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6.
An interesting point is that they “plan to keep the Gears API consistent across all platforms”.
So Steve Jobs new something and [...]

Creating rich Internet applications on Linux with WebKit

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080303-creating-rich-internet-applications-on-linux-with-webkit.html
The title says it all. It mostly talks about WebKit integration on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkit. Is it just my idea, or that Internet applications has waaaaaaay too much material to read….

Amazon for developers

Amazon Web Services and Amazon Business Solutions. They offer the following infrastructure services for developers:

EC2=Elastic Compute Cloud (Computing/processing in a cloud)
S3 = Storage in a cloud
SQS=Simple Queue Service (Messaging between different parts of applications)
SDB=Simple Database (Database in a cloud)
Flexible Payment Service (Money processing. They don’t call it FPS for some reason )

Above those [...]

The server side of Ajax

From ajaxian.com
In this podcast interview, Justin discusses all that has to happen on the server side in order to render Ajax and its related technologies on the client side, what the shift toward RESTful-style apps means for developers, why there’s an increased focus on security as it pertains to what ends up in the browser [...]