Author Archives: Ben

UX and App Design at Google – Takeaways

By Ben | Published: February 3, 2010
Yesterday I was at an interesting UX knowledgeshare event where Simon Raess spoke about user experience and application design at Google. Google being an engineering company at heart they arguably only put in the recent years more weight on Ux and Design. Also nowadays Google employs only 200 designers. Being an engineer myself, I expected [...]
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A Programmer’s New Year’s Resolution for 2010: Learning Scala

By Ben | Published: January 9, 2010
In a world of constant change and ever increasing speed of innovation as a programmer, you might sit back and think about how to prepare for those changes and increase your career options. You might also look forward to a mental distraction from the daily Java/Ruby/PHP routine, or your inner geek is just looking for [...]
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The old-school Objective C is approaching top 10

By Ben | Published: December 9, 2009
From time to time I check the index of the most popular programming languages by tiobe, check out how popular the old-school Objective-C is becoming! Given that this language is very old school, it makes me wonder what would have happended to the Appshop and Apple if they opened the Shop for Java, PHP or Python? Permanent [...]
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MegaTrend #9: Cross-platform Mobile Development

By Ben | Published: November 30, 2009
In a recent article by InfoWorld Cross Platform mobile development was mentioned as one of the top 10 emerging enterprise technologies. Until about 1 years ago the options for cross-platform mobile development were doing platform specific native builds for Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry, UIQ, etc. or Java development with specific twists per handset / handset group or WAP/XHTML Mobile Web [...]
Posted in mobile development | Tagged | 5 Comments

Obfuscation Bugs in J2ME Apps

By Ben | Published: November 21, 2009
Does this sound familiar to you? It really did drive me crazy. Bug only appeared in a certain phone model with a certain version of the app. Not in emulator, not in other phones, not with other version of the app and just 2 weeks ago – without major change in the app – all was [...]
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FB Series: Difference between IFrame and Connect Apps

By Ben | Published: November 16, 2009
Writing about specifics on iFrame apps in Facebook development was on my list for quite some time. So now despite a lack of time, let’s just get out with the essential message: When writing iFrame Apps, think of it like a Connect App. It is essentially the same. I made the long way round trying to [...]
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Lessons learned trusting Code Generators

By Ben | Published: October 30, 2009
To give you a short answer beforehand: Do not do it! But let me tell you my experience: I started using Jersey back in 2007 when it was at version 0.4. Netbeans however already had a plugin to get you started on the fast track by generating REST Webservices out of Entity Classes, which you can [...]
Posted in java | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Website deployments: Plain old Ant

By Ben | Published: October 21, 2009
In the last entry I was mentioning several solutions for managing web site deployments and packaging for php webapps. Since with PHP there is usually no build process already at development time this has often to be established especially for test & production – and yes there needs to be a build process if you [...]
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Initialise External Javascript in Page Fragments

By Ben | Published: October 1, 2009
In the last couple of hours I was contemplating around maintainable, performant and non-obstrusive Javascript on a project I am working on. Following situation: - Much Inline Javascript - Many JS and CSS files referenced - No Frontend Deployment/Build Process in place - Some Javascript values are set at page generation time by Server Side code - Webserver is not configured [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, javascript | Tagged | 1 Comment