Yay or Nay: URL Shortening

Coincidence or not, it seems in this new and brave Twitter-powered world (which deserves its own yay or nay blog but I'll save it for later), the prevalence of minimalist ... well, everything, have become popular. Half-size soda cans and water bottles, miniature laptops, and these tinyurl, bit.ly (and ju.mp) URLs. Of course, the question is...

Yay or nay?

You may have already sniffed out which way I'm leaning, but I'll start with an objective look at the positives. A number of services (including Google Groups) don't take too kindly to very long URLs. With websites becoming more powerful by the day with amazing technologies backing them, more and more information is being handled by web services, and ultimately passed via URL. Additionally, shorter URLs are "cute" and they can also be more easily read aloud. Finally, some of the more advanced shortening services offer cool tracking features, which are nice when you are into those sort of stats.

So, negatives. Aside from the fact that the last time I typed in a URL or read a URL to someone to type in was April 1997 (as an April Fool's joke), I find myself incredibly suspicious and uncomfortable with clicking a link with an obfuscated mystery destination. And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), I (like so many others) am not on a Mac, so viruses are a concern. To me, URL shortening is essentially a rod and bait for phishing techniques. Yahoo and Myspace apparently agree, as they have banned URL shortening from some of their services.

So, the verdict...

Despite the features and "cute" factor that URL shortening provide, they also open doors to spam, phishing, and other dimly lit alleys that I don't want to venture down. Outside of services like Twitter that just don't allow enough characters to have a full URL and descriptive text, I find URL shortening to be useless. 98% of websites I visit are via a search or a clicked hyperlink ... and if I'm clicking a link, who cares if it's 20 characters or 200 characters?

Mind you, I have a clear bias as I am working with professional services most of the time and am used to seeing complete URLs (and do not click otherwise); however, in general, I think it's undesirable to be magically transported from one URL domain to another, just for the sake of cuteness.

Now, if there was a means of shortening a URL from something like mydomain.com/anextremelylongurlthathasmanymanycharacters to mydomain.com/short, that is more acceptable. Having a shortened URL within a domain is fine and useful given the same positives that you find with URL shortening, but without the obvious negatives as listed.

All in all, though, I like to know where I'm going before I get there. So, URL shortening get the Nay.

Thoughts are welcome, as always.

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Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

The Google Takeover?

First came Chrome, Google's web browser built from the bottom-up based on some well-thought out and fresh ideas (which I happen to be using now as I type this!).

But that just wasn't enough. Now, they want the whole operating system:

http://www.digitalmediabuzz.com/2009/07/os-wars-google-vs-goliath/

Good luck. We at Solertium are excited.

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Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

Does Open Source Software Suck?

Hi All,

Just came across an interesting blog that I thought I'd share. It discusses the pitfalls of Open-Source Software.

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/06/30/one-which-i-say-open-source-software-sucks/

My thoughts? Well, first, I think the article makes a number of valid points. However, many of them do not only apply to open-source. There's a lot of "sucky" software out there! But the fact that any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a machine can create open-source software means you have to be wary about where you get software from.

The article was directed at the higher-level OSS, so to focus on that, again, I agree with a lot of what was said. The main mistake this article makes, in my eyes, is limiting the remarks to the world of open-source. That said, as a happy Windows user, the value of well-polished financially-backed software is undeniable.

However, the draw to open-source is the gain received from using the latest trends and tools available. Much "industrial" software fails to stay current and shys away from new ideas, clutching ever-so-tightly to that which worked. By and large, open-source projects tend to feel much fresher, breeding ideas that 5-10 years later could likely wind up in a big-ticket, closed-source product.

Again, I won't deny the facts presented in the article. But there's always two sides to a coin. :)

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Carl Scott
Open-Source Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

Google Charts Via Charts4J 1.2!

Progress is a great thing...

After announcing my work on Google Charts for GWT, I was able to work with the Charts4J team, who'd also implemented a Google Charts Java API that worked server-side, and made a branch that was compatible with GWT.

charts4j 1.1 was released as an initial port of existing behavior of the original charts4j. Today, 1.2 was released containing loads of fun features as well as integration of some features I was using in Google Charts for GWT:

http://code.google.com/p/charts4j/wiki/Change_Log

If you're looking for a means of providing lightweight charts in your GWT application, give it a whirl. If you need lightweight charts in a non-GWT client application, you should try it out as well!

http://charts4j.googlecode.com/

Here's hoping you find this as useful as I have!

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Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

Google Charts for GWT

For anyone interested, I have begun developing a GWT implementation of the latest Google Charts API.

While there are a number of useful GWT-based chart implementations, many of them are based in Flash or are otherwise a bit heavyweight. Although there are some that work really well and are very nice (there's a really cool-looking one for Ext GWT), sometimes you just want a simple chart without any external dependencies.

The Google Charts API allows you to create charts on the fly via a URL-based API. It returns a static generated image of your chart. This makes for a powerful, yet extremely lightweight tool. While this API is clearly exposed on their site, there does not seem to exist, essentially, a standardized wrapper for this that caters to GWT.

My implementation of Google Charts for GWT simply provides that wrapper. Certainly, if you want something flashy and dynamic, this tool is not for you, you want the heavier tools I alluded to earlier.  But for a quick, lightweight tool with a number of customizable features, give this a whirl.

It is currently in the alpha stages, meaning that it is functional but is not completely documented and may contain some weird behavior. I would like to test the implementation more aggressively and finish off the full API feature set. Right now, though, you can create Bar, Line, Pie, and Scatter Charts, complete with features for Chart Legends, Shape Markers, custom colors and chart axes, multiple data sets, and more.

Check out my Google Charts for GWT samples here (with example source code):
http://www.solertium.com/samples/charts/index.html

Download the source code and samples from:
http://code.google.com/p/gogoego/source/checkout
https://github.com/GoGoCarl/google-charts-gwt

The project you're looking for is located in trunk/modules/com.solertium.util.gwt.charts

Hopefully this is useful. I'm very open to criticism and suggestions going into further development of this project.

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Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation

OSGi and Eclipse Make Me Smile

So, I finally did it.  After some preliminary research and a bit of procrastinating, I went all in and began to adopt the newfangled OSGi approach.  Er, maybe not so new, but new to me.

Surprisingly, everything now seems to just ... work.  After months of toiling with Eclipse trying to ensure that my classpath settings were right, and dreading every completely updating as I knew my classpath would be shredded to bits by a co-worker, the combination of some built-in plug-in development tools from Eclipse and some knowledge of OSGi have brought me to tears ... of joy.  

Anyway, a while back, somewhere between the research and procrastination, I came across a very helpful presentation that got my feet wet, and I'd recommend as a nice starting point for newcomers:

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/j1sessn.jsp?sessn=TS-1419&yr=2007&track=3

The conversion of my projects from the traditional monolithic project to the multiple modules approach was not initially fun.  I'd actually compare it to the transition from creating verb-based Web Services to RESTful Web Services, to a degree.  The presenation below goes into more detail on things related to that.

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/j1sessn.jsp?sessn=TS-5122&yr=2008&track=javaee

So, tying this all into Eclipse: if you've got a fresh version, a lot of the work is done for you via the Plug-in Development Tools!  Simply take the time to appropriately fill out your Manifest information for your bundles (er, plug-in projects), create an Application using said bundles (again, it's built-in), and you're off to the races!  And one thing you've got to appreciate is work already done for you!

:)

Anyway, you can of course find Eclipse-related resources on their site, which has treated me pretty well in regard to finding information I'm looking for.  But the links above were particularly helpful for me to start from scratch and sink my teeth into OSGi.  Hope you find them useful, and feel free to submit your own references!

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Carl Scott
Software Developer, Solertium Corporation