robfig

In response to your 2nd and 4th points:

- We have had a fine experience not using Play's ORM support at all -- we have a Plugin that handles transactions for us, and we use non-Play-integrated persistence. It still works great.

- All of the Controller member variables are ThreadLocals, which is how Play handles concurrency. It seems like multi-threaded tests should work just as multi-threaded requests do. I'm curious what problem you're having with parallelizing tests?

My approach to #3 in gmail is to have filters that auto-archive, and then use multiple inboxes to show them under my main inbox email.

Why would someone use J2EE or Spring over the Play Framework (which we use at work for our "mission critical enterprise applications")?

Basically, what enterprise features am I missing out on by not using one of them?

I think that much rich world unhappiness stems from spending a lot of time watching TV or playing video games. If you spend your time playing (e.g. hanging out with friends, playing sports) or working (e.g. accomplishing something), then I think happiness is more likely.

The last sentence in particular resonated with me: “Happiness is not measured by the number of days you live but, rather, by the number of days you remember.” Every day I've spent consuming media is a day I can not remember.

Better ads are ads with higher click-through rates, which provides more dollars for the site whose content you are freely consuming.

Higher click through rates come from a better match between the user's interests and what the ad is offering. It is good for the advertiser (since they get more customers), and the site (since they get more ad revenue), and the user (since they see relevant ads instead of garbage).

So MVC frameworks are going away for thick-client apps because their routing is not convenient for defining resources? And that their templating abilities are too powerful (or not powerful enough?).

Not sure I get it.

(Current routing schemes do not seem overly difficult for this, and depending on your MVC framework, you can plug in your own routing.)

Jeff Dean uses emacs

I wonder how such cultural messages could be introduced, if they do not exist presently.

It doesn't seem like something that the government can do anything about, so it makes sense that the govt reaches for new laws and restrictions to address the problem (if unfortunate and ineffectual).

Very interesting read, thanks!

Disappointing that it didn't even touch on what I see as one of the central items of Khan Academy: the "watch lectures at home and do homework with teachers" methodology.

That seems like the most interesting bit -- one that could get a great teacher to expand their influence across many more students than they could otherwise. (ie, they have more time for 1-on-1 help since they do not have to put so much time into lectures)

It's required to maintain a linear history, no?

In violent agreement here.

Git and HG: 1. Require you to be sync'ed to tip before pushing. 2. Cannot selectively check out files.

The former means that in any reasonably sized team, you will be forced to sync 30 times a day, even if you are the only one editing your section of the source tree. The latter means that Joe who is checking in the libraries for (huge open source project) for some testing increases everyones repo by that much, forever, even if it's deleted later.

Needless to say, the universal response is that I'm doing it wrong. Perforce 4 life!

But seriously, it says that Google adopted Git for their repo --- does anyone know how they use it? I would expect them to want a linear history, but their teams are way too big to be able to have everyone sync'ed to tip to push...

Rarely use ifs?

What do you do if you want to see if, e.g. there are any results for the user's query?

I would do

if (results.length > 0)

or something

I'm curious -- how would the author's example look using greenlets?

You didn't have to take off your shoes or take anything out of your bags. And they wouldn't randomly force you through a scanner that takes nude pictures of you.

I'm interested to use Go, but probably couldn't justify introducing it at work until they hit version 1.0.

The built-in RPC is nice, but it seems like one would still want to use something like Thrift -- I assume that non-Go servers cannot talk Go RPC

Google doesn't "rewrite" things in the traditional sense.. they develop new versions of old systems when the old system has reached the limit (or is just grossly inefficient). The new systems generally are not at all architecturally similar. I don't think I've ever heard of a rewrite "because the code was messy" or anything other "it can't do X and we need X".

In two full days of effort, I couldn't get a simple set of pages done. I found Play! right after that, and finished the pages completely painlessly in roughly no time.

I would chalk it up to terrible terrible documentation, and being unable to read the example code that I did find due to the Scala practice of using random characters as method names. e.g. something = x % y %% z ||| a

The documentation was really the worst, though. Maybe it's improved in the last year.

This article is working ME too hard in order to read a dark grey font on a darker grey background

We use Play heavily at work (eg. 50k SLOC). I love it.

However, I'm pretty nervous about 2.0, due to the tight coupling with Scala. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from trying to use Lift, and I did not care for sbt at all.

While typesafe templates seem like a good thing, I can't recall ever having bugs that would have been caught by them, and it looks like it will eliminate the magical boilerplate-free parameter passing from the current version of Play.

Yep, you figured it out. JPA requires you to set it on both sides. (Well, really you only HAVE to set it on the owning side of the association, which is what Hibernate monitors, but you should do both. Otherwise, a future programmer may be surprised that the objects don't have a consistent view of the association later on.

Boy, I really have a different opinion of enterprise software. The number and complexity of all of the various cases is astounding! To make it worse, they frequently come with no underlying framework, so you have to extrapolate and hope that you don't bake in something that's going to change next week.

IMO, making that software to handle the business processes IS way more valuable to the business than a drag and drop widget framework. Especially if you execute it well, it can make the business hum.

""" Food:

I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up. """

Love it. Anyone know why?

Can someone explain why diplomatic cables should be free and open?

What is the distinction between struct and a class with all public members?

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/552/

I read an article in The Economist some time ago about speculative trading in oil markets. People were raising a ruckus about how it raised the costs of heating for the poor. Turned out that the evidence showing causation was extremely flimsy, and many other global trends were much better explanations.

I think burden of proof is on the article to make the case for causation, and I didn't see it (although I skimmed the second half).

One thing that seems to genuinely have changed is that the stock market no longer prints money for everyone. The average adult that saved and invested in the 80s and 90s had their wealth grow enormously. I've been saving and investing since graduation (6 years ago) and it's been a net loss -- and it looks likely to continue to be.

"More revenue solves all known problems", so presumably without a magical market that you can depend upon to increase your money faster than 1% a year, problems may be harder to solve.

"Now, I don't mean to imply that Wave did not have some very smart engineers working on the UI, we certainly did. But talent is different from experience. The latter is a guard against 3.5MB of compressed, minified, inlined Javascript. Against 6 minute compiles to see CSS changes in browser. Against giving up on IE support (at the time, over 60% of browser market share) because it was simply too difficult. Against Safari running out of memory as soon as Wave was opened on an iPad."

I wonder how much of the failure was this sort of thing vs just having a product that people didn't understand. (I definitely agree that if the UI had been simple and snappy it would have been better)

On the bright side, I feel pretty confident that some real startup will take the open sourced Wave technology and do something good...

"Your Silverlight plug-in has crashed."

gg

Where do you get that information? A large fraction of Google's frontends are written in Java.

The article's premise of Yahoo's value being "behavioral data of its users" seems pretty silly. It's all about the ads (search and display).

Maybe it was a roundabout reference to ad targeting?