While society must do things the right way, its people must find ways to do the right thing

Nuff said.

CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination

Ars Technica has an article by Kris Kowal about the CommonJS effort and the general state of Javascript outside the web browser... Indeed, jsconf.eu turned out to be quite a ServerJS party, much more so than I had expected.

"This has been a big year for JavaScript. New, fast engines have tested their legs. Libraries have matured. With the ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the language is growing. However, the language remains largely in exile, to only be used in Web browsers. This year has marked a resurgence of efforts to make JavaScript useful outside the browser. This was patently obvious at this year's first European JavaScript conference, jsconf.eu."

ServerJS - putting Javascript to work on the *other* side

Slides from my recent presentation at the JavascriptDay at WebTech 09 in Karlsruhe :

"JavaScript on the server-side has been around a while but is seeing a recent increase of freshly sprouting open source projects. As an ad-hoc grassroots effort, the CommonJS working group is attempting to standardize an API of server-side JavaScript environments and build a standard library, enabling far more code sharing between projects. Why is the CommonJS effort a major step forward for ServerJS and what are the unique contributions ServerJS can make to the future of web development? How can you leverage this spirit when using JavaScript on the server-side in your projects today?"

Eating healthier would safe the planet

For the the World Watch Institute , two environmental scientists of the World Bank have rechecked the numbers of that 2006 UN report, which you might remember me mentioning not to long ago .

That report of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said that global meat production is causing over 18% of men made green house gas emissions, more than the entire CO2 emissions of all forms of transportation combined.

While rerunning the numbers, the World Bank scientists noticed some major omissions, drastically underestimating the true impact of livestock production on the global climate .

The UN FAO report counted 7'516 million tons of CO2 equivalents. The report did not count 8'769 million tons of CO2 equivalents caused by the respiration of the livestock. Nor did the report account for the at least 2'672 million tons of CO2 equivalents that would be absorbed by the improved CO2 balance of reduced land usage for food production, allowing forests to regenerate, absorbing more CO2.

The report also undercounted methane gas emissions by an additional 5'047 million tons of CO2 equivalents. That's because the report counted the global warming potential of the methane emissions using a 100-year timeframe, while methane, with its 90% lower half-life in the atmosphere than CO2, should more accurately be counted using a 20-year timeframe.

Also, the UN's "Livestock’s Long Shadow" report used partially outdated and undercounting numbers. For example, it uses citations dating back to such years as 1964, 1982, 1993, 1999, and 2001, where emissions today would be much higher. While the report based its calculations on 33.0 million tons of poultry production in 2002, even the UN FAO’s own Food Outlook of April 2003 reports that 72.9 million tons of poultry were produced worldwide in 2002.Taking several additional categories of overlooked, undercounted and misallocated emissions into account, would add at the very least another 8'560 million tons of CO2 equivalents.

The corrected numbers increase the CO2 emissions that need to be attributed to livestock production from 7'516 million tons to a whooping 32'564 million tons of CO2 emissions, which means that livestock production is responsible for more than 50% of man made global green house gas emissions .

Even if we would switch the entire planet completely to renewable energies, suppress all industrial CO2 emissions worldwide and ban all cars, truck, airplanes and boats, new and old, everywhere, the effect for the climate would be smaller than switching to a vegan diet.

Be part of the solution, not part of the problem .

JVM Web Framework Smackdown

Linux Magazine's JVM Web Framework Smackdown article... "compares three of the most promising modern Java frameworks: JRuby on Rails (JRoR) ; Grails, powered by Groovy ; and Helma, with Rhino JavaScript "...

The article covers the fundamentals...

Helma... "uses Rhino JavaScript, the oldest language on the JVM besides Java itself. Rhino was created by Netscape and later inherited by the Mozilla Foundation. It is backed by Google, and it is the default scripting language implementation available in Java 6. It offers strong performance and a rich set of utilities, all of which Helma leverages beautifully."

"Helma was the easiest to get up and running. Once you download the package, run ./start.sh [...] and navigate to http://localhost:8080/ to find a page with links to various tools, documentation, and the Helma website."

...attempts to explain Helma concepts...

"The biggest challenge learning Helma is shifting your mode of thinking—not entirely different from first learning JavaScript’s prototype-based object system. Most frameworks are written in object-oriented languages; Helma is an object-oriented framework. It is a subtle, but critical distinction. With Helma, you build one massive object that is the web application. While confusing at first, the final organization seems very intuitive."

...finds some things to reasonably gripe about...

"Helma’s organization does lead to some weird cases. For instance, consider registering a new user. This should obviously be an action placed under the User prototype. Right? Wrong. Every User action must match up to an existing user. Therefore the registerUser action must be stored in Root. As a result, this directory can feel like a random grab-bag.

In theory, you could avoid this issue by creating a default object and cloning it. This would fit nicely with the cloning-based approach of prototype-based object systems, but it does not seem to be the standard for Helma."

...and concludes...

"[...] developing an application in Helma was a pleasure. The organization, while unusual, was also very powerful and will challenge your assumptions about how web development should be done. [...] While its libraries are decent, they pale compared to Rails and Grails. Still, it was the most fun to develop in."

Before implementing a solution to a problem, always search for a workaround, because the workaround is often better than the original solution

Nuff said.

If they are not ready for what they need, give them the backbone for their future baby steps

Nuff said.

>>> Been there, but haven't done that