Web(2.0)Facing
Posted: April 21, 2008 Filed under: Abe Batthish, HATS, Web 2.0, WebFacing | Tags: Ajax, community, Content Assist, ENPTUI, feedback, HATS, RIA, Subfile, user experience, user interface, Web 2.0, WebFacing 5 Comments »When providing a UI Modernization solution, ultimately it’s all about the resulting UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience).
These are areas that have endless opportunities for improvements, and for WebFacing this is no exception. In fact, it’s been lower on the priority list for too long.
ENPTUI support? Better Subfile UI? Content Assist (e.g. Calendar widget for date fields)?
What UI enhancements are highest on your list to directly improve end user usability, enhance their experience, or enable the development of richer WebFacing applications?
I’m open to rants as well. Feedback is valuable in any form.
WebFacing Customization
Posted: October 20, 2007 Filed under: Al Rodriguez, Web 2.0, WebFacing | Tags: customization, Web 2.0, WebFacing Leave a comment »A previous post by one of this blog’s authors Al Rodriguez highlighted the potential power of WebFacing customization in a Web 2.0 world.
The popular post has since been formalized and highlighted in a recent IBM Systems Magazine eNewsletter.
TUG TEC ’007 – Abe’s Recap
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Conference, EGL, JSF, System i, TUG, WDSC, Web 2.0 Leave a comment »The TUG TEC ’007 conference is now over and done. Once again, the folks at TUG went all out to ensure both the attendees and the presenters were well taken care of. I had a couple of sessions this year:
- Web 2.0 for System i (mentioned earlier in this blog), and
- EGL and JSF
I have to thank George P. and Kushal, my co-presenters, for their help with those sessions.
Attendance at the sessions were relatively good. And for the first run of the Web 2.0 session, I think the reaction was positive. Although Web 2.0 seemed to be new to most of those who attended, we hope we gave a useful introduction to this popular yet misunderstood topic, along with its impact on both the technology and business worlds. It’s funny how there’s always a puzzled yet intrigued look on people’s faces when we describe Second Life. :)
The EGL and JSF session seemed a little more relevant to the attendees from my impression. Though next time I would delay going into the details of the JSF framework until after showing how simple it is to work with, given the tools available in WDSC. Kushal’s demo on creating a JSF front end to an EGL application was impressive. Sorry we ran short on time for the second demo. Maybe we’ll add a demo video on YouTube later.
We haven’t received feedback from TUG yet, but I’m interested to hear back from the attendees.
Thanks to TUG and those who attended. See you next year.
The Advent of Dualing Mice
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Brian Farn, IBM, Web 2.0 3 Comments »With the advancements of computing power, storage and memory capacity, we are now able to experience software applications that most of us have never even dreamed of. It isn’t until some remarkable forward thinking people demonstrate new user interface paradigms, such as this impressive one on Multi-touch devices that we begin to realize that our descendants will think that our current graphical user interfaces are antiquated.
Read the rest of this entry »
Quick Thought #1
Posted: April 13, 2007 Filed under: Abe Batthish, Quick Thoughts, Web 2.0 Leave a comment »With Web 2.0 and the advent of wikis, blogs, online games and apps… is it time we reconsider the term Web “Browser”?
IBM ShortCuts
Posted: April 13, 2007 Filed under: IBM, Web 2.0 2 Comments »I just came across a really nice series on ibm.com: IBM ShortCuts Podcasts. Each week industry experts answer technology-related questions submitted by users. Check out this great entry explaining Web 2.0.
Meet us in your Second Life
Posted: April 1, 2007 Filed under: Abe Batthish, Second Life, WDSC, Web 2.0 9 Comments »Second Life is “3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 5,148,016 people from around the globe”. Predictions estimate the number of users will grow to 25,000,000 by this time next year.
IBM sees a potential in the 3-D internet as “the next platform for global commerce and day-to-day business” and is looking at investing big $ as a result of last years third Innovation Jam, “the largest online brainstorm session ever”. Other big names like Circuit City and Sears have already joined forces with IBM to explore this new world from a business perspective by creating virtual stores and showrooms on IBM owned islands in Second Life.
Want to see what its all about?
Would folks be interested in attending a WDS/WDSC team social event in Second Life? The event would allow you to meet and converse with various members of the team, including authors from this blog, as well as others from the community in a 3-D virtual environment. Or just use this as an opportunity to explore Second Life with others like yourself.
If I see enough interest from this community, I’ll start looking into putting this event together for the near future.
del.icio.us
Posted: March 19, 2007 Filed under: Don Yantzi, ID, iSeries, RSE, System i, WDSC, Web 2.0 6 Comments »I was walking the dog Saturday night pondering the frequently asked question: “How do I start learning WDSC?” or “Where do I get started?”
People learn in different ways such as: external courses, in-house courses, self study courses, tutorials, reading a book, articles, or documentation, conference presentations and labs, and by just starting to use the it.
Other factors that affect this are: access to the learning resource (especially for external courses and conferences), time required and cost / budget. Also new users have different learning requirements than an intermediate or advanced user that just wants to learn more details about a specific function.
The good news is that all of the above resources exist for learning WDSC. The bad news is that no single place documents them all and finding them can be a nightmare. So how do we do a better job organizing these resources so that they are easy to find from WDSC? What is that magical starting point?
A solution to this problem already exists on the Web: social bookmarking. Here is the general idea: there is a website del.icio.us where you can install a browser plug-in that lets specify “tags” for any Web page you visit. Anyone can go to del.icio.us and query Web pages based on a tag or set of tags. Give it a try, go to del.icio.us and search for RSE. You can also query based on who did the tagging.
A few people have already started tagging things for WDSC, RSE, and Systemi (tags can’t have spaces). I have been using an IBM internal system social bookmarking service called dogear which allows me to tag both external and internal sites, but I’ll start using del.icio.us for external content.
How does this all relate to WDSC? The embedded help view (Help > Search) in WDSC already searches Google, infocenters, eclipse.org, and IBM developerWorks in addition to the product documentation. We could extend this to also search del.icio.us tags for the search keywords. Or provide quick links that go to some predefined del.icio.us tag searches such as WDSC Conferences (tags WDSC and conferences). Edit: I’ve updated the link to conferences from conference (conferences seems to be used more frequently on del.icio.us than conference).
This allows both IBM and WDSC users to define what resources what would show up. Anyone could add a page to the result by tagging a Web page with keywords WDSC and conference.
I’ve started and will continue to do so. I’ve been using tags WDSC, RSE, Systemi, iSeries, WebFacing, conferences, education, LPEX, and RPG. I’d be interested to hear from others in the System i community who have started tagging.
IT Revenge: System i on YouTube
Posted: March 19, 2007 Filed under: George P., IBM, iSeries, System i, Web 2.0 Leave a comment »I just came across an article from ITJungle, about a IBM sponsored marketing campaign called IT Revenge on YouTube. The videos are funny and really get their point across in a creative, almost Office Space sorta-way. Here they are below:
IT Revenge v1.1: Kernel Ape Panic
IT Revenge v1.2: System Crash
IT Revenge v1.3: Fizzy Exception
IT Revenge v1.4: Hard Boot Pinata
Web V2R0
Posted: March 15, 2007 Filed under: Abe Batthish, System i, Web 2.0 17 Comments »(Updated Mar. 20/2007): Added tentative overview of session below.
George P. and I are working on a new session called “Web 2.0 for System i” … though after coming up with this post’s title I’m reconsidering the name. :)
The session will make its debut at the Toronto User Group (TUG) TEC 2007 conference, April 17-19. And if all goes well, it may work its way to a conference near you.
I feel the proper marriage of these two entities is long due. The system is well known for its reliability, security and flexibility, but can gain from a “cool factor” in cetain aspects that Web 2.0 related technologies and concepts can provide. It may be just what System i needs to ignite a new interest in the system. Is “coolness” that important? Well, let’s just say I’ll be watching sales of Vista to see if coolness is more important to people than reliability or security. ;)
Back to the session…
The content will be divided into two parts: the first attempts to answer the ever popular question “What is Web 2.0?” by going through various examples of related applications and concepts, the latter then describes various ways as to how Web 2.0 related solutions and technologies can be consumed (hosted) and produced (developed) on System i.
Usually a session needs to wait for its first set of feedback forms after its debut before the authors of that session are provided with useful suggestions of what they would’ve liked to see added in future revisions. But in this modern Web 2.0 world… why wait till then!
Here is a tentative list of the topics covered:
- Concepts: Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Mashups
- Technologies at play: (P)AMP, Ajax, Syndication Feeds, JSF, Dojo
- What is Web 2.0? Why is it important?
- Consuming: Blog, Wiki, Lotus Connections
- Producing: JSF Web Tools, Ajax Toolkits, PHP IDE
Is there a particular Web 2.0 technology or concept you are curious about and want to see covered by this session? Feel free to give suggestions here via comments.
Call it “feedforward”.
Please keep in mind this instance of the session is a 45min intro.
As a precursor, here is a YouTube video with an interesting way of explaning what Web 2.0 is all about…
Did I hear you say, “cool!” ? :)
