Archive for Apr 2011

9 entries

On Strict Constitutionalism

Sat Apr 30 10:36:00 2011

Yesterday I had an interaction on Twitter with a few folks about strict constitutionalism. The context was the Utah County Republican Organizing Convention happening today. In response to a tweet I made about being leery of strict constitutionalists, Connor Boyack said: You oppose strictly adhering to the party's constitution? Seems odd. :) The point isn't that I oppose strictly adhering to the constitution. The point is that I distrust the motives of people who make strict constitutionalism a point of their platform for office (in the party or otherwise). I don't doubt that there are many sincere people who
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The Value of Browser Add Ons

Tue Apr 26 16:04:00 2011

Today a question about the size of the browser add-on market came up and more specifically, what kinds of things people used browser addons for. I spent a little time at AMO to try and find some answers--at least for Firefox. First the AMO statistics site shows that there are almost 200 million addons in use and that number continues to show healthy growth for the last few months. AMO lists over 5000 add ons. The most popular is Adblock Plus with almost a million weekly downloads. I classified the top 100 addons on AMO according to the following
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The Trends Driving KRL and Kynetx

Mon Apr 25 17:57:00 2011

In my last post, I outlined a few benefits that developers could gain from using KRL. Well and good, but so what? Are those benefits that matter? How do they relate to the other reasons programmers learn new languages like money and opportunity? In this post, I will talk about some of the big trends driving my thinking and informing the decisions around what KRL is and why it enables the abstractions that it does. There are three trends I'd like to examine: The rise of real-time data and the evented Web The rise of personal data and user-centricity
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Why KRL?

Mon Apr 25 07:58:00 2011

A lot of people ask me why I invented Kinetic Rule Language (KRL) instead of just using an existing language. There are a lot of answers to that question, but I want to get to some specifics. Tools shape how we think and work. I learned long ago that the best way to think differently about a problem is to create a nomenclature that describes and illuminates the new domain. KRL is a rule-based language that is custom built for the domain of event-based applications that operate on real-time data in the cloud. KRL was designed from the ground
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Building a Personal Commenting System Using Twitter and Kynetx

Wed Apr 13 20:29:00 2011

Earlier today I was talking to Britt Blaser about making the Web friendlier for people who want to organize around political issues. Of course, I immediately imagined a Kynetx application for doing. Doing this as a browser application would have a few advantages: A browser application operates anywhere people wanted to comment and yet still bring the comments together in various, meaningful ways. A browser application can pull information from various contexts and make it available where people are. A browser application would be easily updated as new features were added. What I envision is something that combines the
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Tweeting from KBlog: An Experiment in Loose Coupling

Fri Apr 8 16:48:00 2011

Last week I posted about creating a blog using KRL as an example of an application that used multiple rulesets and has a more complicated event hierarchy than typical KRL applications. I followed that up with a post about making the back button work in the resulting blog as an example of using external JavaScript libraries and emitting raw JavaScript from rules. We even added a new event type (web:hash_change) using JavaScript. You can see the resulting blog here. Another idea I've wanted to explore is how event-driven applications can be extended in a loosely coupled way. The argument
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The Cost of Saving Money

Wed Apr 6 21:49:00 2011

This morning I had an interesting experience. I want to get a new bike from REI using rebate money I earned from me REI Visa card. REI also does a thing where you get 20% off one full priced item during "rebate season." I stopped at REI on the way to the airport to look at the bike and give it a test drive. I liked it. But I wasn't really ready to buy yet. But the thought of the 20% discount ending on Saturday was pushing me to buy today. Then I found out that the 20% discount
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KBlog: Making the Back Button Work

Wed Apr 6 09:01:00 2011

Friday, I posted a long blog article that discussed using KRL to create a simple blogging application. the application writes multiple pages, manages a navigation bar, and allows new posts. (Try it here.) One problem with the implementation is that because it paints the entire app in a single page (sometimes called a single page interface or SPI), the back and forward buttons don't work. The problem is that the browser doesn't know there's a new page and put it on the history unless the URL changes. The back and forward buttons are just indexes on the browser history.
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Event Hierarchies: A Blog Written in KRL

Fri Apr 1 14:06:00 2011

I've mentioned several times that I'm writing a book called The Live Web that discusses how events and strong user identity combine to produce new ways of creating Web applications that are significantly different than those in use today. Chapter 12 is about creating event-driven applications that are based on multiple rulesets. At the recent Kynetx Impact developers conference, Ed Orcutt built a blog application using KRL. Actually, he did it twice: once with one ruleset and another time with three. If you're like to read the book in draft form, contact me and I'll invite you to the
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