Archive for May 2011

5 entries

Platforms and Lock-in

Fri May 27 14:24:00 2011

At Gluecon on Wednesday, Mark Suster said that Force.com & AppExchange are mostly about lock-in. I think that's pretty much an exact quote. I tweeted it and expected to see someone react. No one did--at least on Twitter. But I did have a few people mention it to me with some questions about what Mark meant. The truth is, I don't know and I can't speak for Mark. Any platform provides some degree of lock-in. APIs lock a developer into a particular interaction mode. When I use Flickr's API, I make decisions that lock me into that platform. I
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Error Handling in KRL

Tue May 24 11:59:00 2011

If you've been following along, you know that KRL, the Kinetic Rule Language, is an event processing language for processing events on behalf of an individual entity (usually a person). Think of it as the People's Complex Event Processing language. For a long time, it's been difficult for KRL developers to handle errors. The language had no mechanism for exceptions and the only hope was to turn on debugging and fix them. Too often, however, we don't want to fix errors so much as handle them. Errors are not always problems in the code--bugs to be fixed--but exceptional conditions
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Install Kynetx for Google Chrome

Tue May 17 09:34:00 2011

The Kynetx Browser Extension (KBX) is now available for Google Chrome users in the Chrome Web Store. KBX is a universal browser extension that allows you to run Kynetx applications in any browser. There are dozens of Kynetx browser apps available right now and developers are creating more all the time. Because the apps run in the cloud, you get the same behavior from apps whether they're running in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (IE support is comming soon). What's more, even if you only use one browser, the apps behave uniformly across every computer you own and any app
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Dealing with JSONP in KRL: Using the Flickr API

Tue May 10 14:45:00 2011

When I blog I like to put pictures, like the one to the right of this sentence, in the article when I can. My usual method is to use Flickr because I can find good pictures that have creative commons rights that allow me to use them on my blog. The problem is that after I find the picture, I need to create an image tag with the right size source image that links back to the Flickr picture for attribution purposes. Creating the tags to do that by hand is a pain, so I've created a simple Kynetx
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Someone Clue Delta in About Transactional Integrity

Tue May 10 09:23:00 2011

Delta Airline's ticket kiosks apparently were designed and built by 1st year CS students using Visual Basic. I'm guessing that's the case based on the fact that they apparently have never heard that when you sell someone something, it's bad form to take their money and not deliver the product. They don't know that you should wrap such processes in transactions to ensure they're atomic. Someone needs to give them a clue. Last Friday on our way home from San Jose, Steve and I had the chance to get on an earlier flight for $50 each. I was checking
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