Adam Crossland's Blog

July 12, 2010

The first real application that I developed under my own direction was largely in JavaScript. There was a significant portion in SQL and Tcl, but the bulk of it was in the very first release of JavaScript that the world had ever seen, in Netscape Navigator 2.0. I was trying to help my employer recover from a horribly-botched job by a breathtakingly expensive consultant. His solution of Excel with enormous Visual Basic extensions and broken ODBC middleware not only failed to meet our customer’s requirements but also utterly overloaded their Mac IIs, and nobody was happy.

I had been playing around with using JavaScript to make dynamic web applications, and it occurred to me that the most of the work being done by Excel could be shifted off to the over-powered and under-utilized database server and the user interface could be provided by Navigator with JavaScript and lots of document.writes to render the data coming from the server.

Given that this all happened before the DOM and XmlHttpRequest were part of the browser, it was somewhat remarkable that I was able to make it all work. The client loved it, and it looked like a smooth recovery ...

May 10, 2009

I have been working with Google's AppEngine since its first day of release. Their vision was instantly compelling, and the birth of Microsoft's Azure platform only increased my feeling that even in its infancy, cloud computing is the best way for web entrepreneurs to create their businesses. These platforms give us a way to develop and deploy applications with two compelling advantages over alternative hosting options: low cost of entry and effortless scaling to accommodate success.

Over the past week, I completed some work for a client that showed me another important facet of the cloud computing revolution: services in the cloud. These are web services that can provide absolutely critical infrastructure points to enable the success of small, incipient web-based businesses.

In particular, I was working with Amazon Flexible Payment Service, creating a Python library to enable its use from within an AppEngine application. It is a beautiful, wonderfully-designed product, and working with it was a joy. It was readily apparent to me that any business could use it to quickly and almost effortlessly take care of their billing needs with very little middle-man overhead.

While I was investigating FPS, I took a look at the other ...

December 31, 2008

Go ahead and check out the amazing new thing before every one else does:

Oslo

Of all of the things to pour forth from the Microsoft Technology Firehose, it is the one that has completely captivated me. It is going to be huge. It smells like one of the things that comes around every decade or so that can completely change the IT industry and the way the software engineers work.

That could be scary, but Oslo is just so cool...it's hard to imagine even the most clench-jawed, steaming-mad Slashdotter disliking it. I'm sure, however, that they will rise to the occasion.

And more important than any technology nonsense, my best, most sincere wishes to you and yours for a happy, prosperous and fun New Year.