Eoin Prout

The Coming of Gmail

When Google released GMail they eroded the two primary advantages of the desktop email client, Storage capacity and POP access.

Before GMail, web based email restricted users storage capacity to a couple of megabytes, users could access their POP accounts but only if they paid a premium for this service, Gmail allocates a couple of gigabytes and are continually increasing it, and Gmail allows users to access a number of POP accounts free of charge.
How long will it be before GMail uses GEARS to enable it’s use off line?
Add this to all the other advantages inherent in web based email clients, why would anyone still want to use a desktop email client?

Not everyone has broadband

Not everyone has a fast internet connection and using web based email on a slow connection is painful.
What they need is the solution which requires the lowest possible bandwidth.
Enter the desktop email client.

An email client such as Thunder Bird can be configured to only download the headers while leaving the rest of the message on the server, the user can then decided what important enough to download in full. This is an extremely efficient use of bandwidth.

The Future

I don’t think desktop email clients have much of a future, as high speed internet connections become even more common the need for desktop email clients will decrease and they will become a niche product.

Maybe this is an indication of what will happen to other types of desktop applications in future, Just look at Google Apps for a hint of what is possible.

REST reminds me of a quote, “Simplicity is a Function of Insight”.

When I first heard about REST way back in 2004 , I was stunned by its simplicity, particularly in comparison to how SOAP is abused (remind to tell you that story one day).
For so many applications REST is the simply the best way to implement them.

One of the common complaints about REST is that it tries to make things simple when they really aren’t, in answer to that I include this link The Complicator’s Gloves.

When developing software we should always keep in mind Ockham’s razor, when given the choice choose the simpler path.

I hadn’t intended this blog to focus on REST web-services, I thought Delphi would come up more often and maybe some general software development posts.
I suppose its just that I find REST to darn interesting. Why fight it.
So for the moment this blog is going to focus on REST.

Conclusive proof of my theory that the Google search engine is intelligent, as defined by the Turing test
The results of the query just need to be re-formatted.

What is the answer to life the universe and everything ?

Look at the top result.

This looks like a good idea for a mashup, some kind of service that can use Google results to generate a conversation with a person.

Yes! Regular Expressions are simple once you learn the grammar, and thats also the biggest problem with them, unless you learn the grammar, Regular Expressions look like the gibberish of some dark art, And unless you actually sit down and study you’ll not make much progress with them.

There are some good books on Regular Expressions.
Regular Expression Pocket Reference

Mastering Regular Expressions

Once you have Regular Expressions in your tool box you’ll quickly see many uses they can be put to such as page scraping or data validation, I’ve even seen them used them for updating Delphi code bases to the latest version of Delphi.

In the train timetable service I used 3 Regular expressions to extract the information need to output optimized version of the time table.

The first two

/<input type=”hidden” name=”DepTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

/<nput type=”hidden” name=”ArrTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

Are used to strip out the table elements which contain the departure and arrival times,
The strings which match the patterns are stored in two arrays, one for arrival and one of departures.

Then iterating through the two arrays a third regular expression is used

[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

This Regular Expression returns the times from the strings contained in the two arrays and it is this information which is used to produce the timetables you see when using the service.

I’d be interested to hear an if there is an even easier way to do this.

There is an excellent tool available for working with Regular Expression, Regex Buddy It is a fantastic piece of software.

Most languages and platforms support Regular Expressions, For Delphi you can use the TRegex component which is free, for Delphi .NET it’s not needed as .NET supports Regular Expressions.

REST has been gaining more and more traction lately but there are still a lot misconceptions about it, So that we’re all on the same page I’ve included a list of the articles which I think explain REST.

“How I explained REST to my wife” : An excellent discussion on what makes REST REST.

Common REST mistakes : Sometimes it helps to understand something by understanding what is not.

The RESTful Web at XML.COM : Good articles about REST on O’Reilly.

The Beauty of REST : A nice article on an actual REST implementation by Jon Udell, who is now working for Microsoft as an evangalist. Jon has written a number of articles on the benefits of REST

The REST communities Wiki

And Finally the dissertation which coined the terms

Tag Clouds are a useful way of visualizing information.

When I saw the tag cloud generated by del.icio.us using my bookmarks, I was surprised how clearly I could see myself in it.

It presents a interesting picture of my interests although it is a skewed towards computing related subjects, but being an internet based tool it is only to be expected (or maybe it’s me who is skewed ;)).

It’s interesting or worrying, I haven’t decided yet which, how much can be deduced about someone just from their social bookmarks.