WebGUI Going Into Debian Lenny

For the past several months I've been talking closely with a member of the WebGUI community Ernesto Hernandez-Novich (aka SquOnk). He's been maintaining Debian packages for WebGUI for years, but recently decided to up his efforts and try to get WebGUI into Debian's official apt repository.

Here is our most recent conversation on IRC:

This means that WebGUI will be an official part of the Debian Lenny distribution which is coming out later this year. And this is the reason that Ernesto is nominated for the WebGUI Contributor of the Year award.

You may be asking yourself, what's all the fuss about? Plenty really. First, if you're a Debian user it means you'll be able to install WebGUI just by typing:

apt-get webgui

Which is a pretty amazing feat in and of itself. Second, Debian is somewhere in the top 5 (depending upon the survey data you look at) most popular Linux distributions in the world. That means means there are potentially millions of additional people that might see WebGUI through Debian that otherwise would have never seen it. And third, Debian is the source of dozens of other Linux distributions, including current golden-boy Ubuntu. Many of those distributions pick up the packages from Debian and include them in their repositories. Which again means potentially millions more people see WebGUI that otherwise might not have.

It is a good day for WebGUI.

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Balmer Makes Me Sick

I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, and been involved in many takeover deals in my time. I don't claim to be an expert at it, but I certainly understand the fundamentals.

<Full Disclosure>

I've been watching Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo! very closely, both because the business of it interests me, and the outcome of it could affect WebGUI.

WebGUI uses the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library to do much of it's javascript functionality. So if Microsoft took over Yahoo!, they may change the licensing on YUI to make it incompatible with WebGUI, given their track record on open source licensing.

From the business side, I often watch or listen to podcasts of CEO's giving their annual address to shareholders, or doing interviews in prominent magazines. Watching CEO's of other companies for me is a little like watching your favorite player if you're a sports fanatic. 

But there's one CEO that makes me absolutely sick. His name is Steve Balmer. He may be the head honcho at the most powerful company on earth, but there's nothing I admire about him. While I didn't always agree with Bill Gates, I admired him immensely. Not so with Balmer. He has no redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned.

</Full Disclosure>

What I don't get is how the CEO of one of the richest companies around can be such a child. This weekend he pulled what amounts to a big 'neener neener boo boo' sour grapes move. Yahoo! decided it didn't want to get bought, and Balmer was so pissed off about it, that he decided do a total dick move to devalue Yahoo!'s stock price, either in the spirit of 'if I can't have it the nobody will' or 'maybe I can screw them over and pick them up for a song'.

Here's what he did: He sent an open letter to Yahoo!'s CEO Jerry Yang. 

• First, you don't send an open letter unless you're hoping to embarrass or peer pressure someone into doing something. 
• Second, in the letter he tries to tell Jerry that he knows how to run Yahoo! better than Jerry does, with *you shouldn't do this* sort of language. Keep in mind that Yahoo! is the #2 search company and Microsoft is a distant #3. Microsoft may dominate the desktop market, but that doesn't mean that they can run search better than Yahoo!. 
• Third, Balmer states that basically he thinks that what Yahoo! is doing poisons the well and makes them unbuyable by anyone. Keep in mind that Yahoo! never asked for a buyout bid from Microsoft, and Yahoo! hasn't done anything it can't undo. 
• Fourth, Balmer must be so enraged that he forgot how to do simple math. He states that in the final hours he raised the bid on Yahoo from $32/share to $33/share ($1/share raise) at a cost of $5 billion. He stated that Yahoo! would settle for nothing less than $37/share (an additional $4/share raise) and that would cost an additional "$5 billion or more". In what world does do both a $1/share raise and a $4/share raise both equal $5 billion?
  
• And then finishes his letter with the total sour grapes comment: "I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table. But clearly a deal is not to be."

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WebGUI 8: Asset Definitions

We're only about a year away from starting WebGUI 8 development. As such I thought it might be a good idea to start a new series on The Black Blog about it. None of this is set in stone mind you, it's just my thought on where things should be headed.

In this first installment, I'd like to talk about Asset definitions. For you code monkeys specifically the definition() method and everything that goes with it like getEditForm(), update(), etc. For the rest of you, I'm talking about automation. Through the definition of the asset, the asset knows what properties it has and how to use them. This allows us to be able to automatically generate edit forms, display certain data, import/export packages, create prototypes, override fields in shortcuts, and a whole host of other things.

The problem is that not all assets use definitions. Some assets manually generate forms and don't fully fill out their properties in the definition. That's because a long time ago, during 6.x we didn't do all the automation that we do today.

So in WebGUI 8 I think that we'll eliminate these vestigial elements of the asset system, and require all assets to fully fill out their definition. By doing this we'll be able to have an admin edit form for things like Wiki Pages and Collaboration System Posts, where we can adjust settings other than those exposed through the template.

We'll be able to automatically expose web services from all assets so that they can be updated and extracted from remotely. That sort of functionality will mean that templates can be directly edited in Dreamweaver and when you hit save they're published to the site, and photos can be uploaded directly from your hard drive without using a web form, among other things. 

It will allow us to do even cooler things with packages, like synchronizing assets across multiple web sites. So The Black Blog could, for example, be published here on plainblack.com, as well as webgui.nl (the Dutch language WebGUI site), and in your corporate intranet, and when someone makes a post to one of them, it gets published to all of them.

There is a downside to this however. It will mean that some custom built assets will break, and thusly there will be an API change. That's ok, in that we do break API's at major release points, but it will mean extra work for people who have built their own assets that don't fully use the definition. For the greater good of the community, I think this is an acceptable burden. And if the assets were written correctly in the first place, then those developers will have nothing to worry about.

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GAMA Trade Show (GTS)

I'll be at the GAMA Trade Show next week showing off WebGUI to those in attendance.  GTS is an annual show for businesses in the table top game industry to show off their new games to distributors and retailers around the US and Canada. 

You might then ask yourself, "Well then why is Plain Black exhibiting WebGUI there?" To which I'd say, "It's funny you should ask, a number of reasons actually!"

First and foremost, GAMA is one of our clients, and we love to support our clients in any way we can. Actually, GAMA runs both their national conventions using the WebGUI Event Manager. (Sidenote: I'm rewriting Event Manager from the ground up for the new WebGUI Shop that's coming out in WebGUI 7.5.)

Second, everyone that is there is representing a business of some kind. Plain Black and WebGUI service every sector of the business community, so it matters not to us what kind of businesses they are. 

Third, WebGUI has some really great advantages for the types of businesses that will be at GTS. Most game manufacturers have both forums and online stores along with their regular web site publishing needs. Obviously WebGUI serves all those needs quite well. Distributors need a flexible commerce system that can do all kinds of things, and WebGUI's new Shop will fit that bill nicely. In addition, there will be representatives of other trade shows and game fairs there that could really use something like the WebGUI Event Manager.

Fourth, many of you may not know this, but I actually own another business besides Plain Black. It's a small game company called The Game Crafter. Unfortunately in the past few years I haven't done much with it because I've been spending so much time with WebGUI, but table top games have a special place in my life, and so I'm always interested to see what the cool new games are that are coming out.

So if you're going to be in the Las Vegas area next week, you should come check us out. We'll be exhibiting on the 22nd and 23rd in the main exhibit hall, booth 409. I hope to see you there.

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WUC 2008 - Special Event

Those attending the 2008 WebGUI Users Conference will have an extra special treat if they stay in Madison after the conference this year. On Saturday and Sunday directly following the WUC, Madison is throwing it's annual food and music festival called Taste of Madison. 

At the Taste you can sample food and drink from almost 70 different local restaurants. Those of you that were here last year no doubt remember that in downtown Madison you can already find food of almost every ethnic variety imaginable, from Japanese to Moroccan, and Ethiopian to Russian, and Egyptian to Jamaican. Imagine all that great food plus almost 70 additional restaurants that aren't located downtown. Absolutely amazing! Add to that 35 bands playing Jazz, Rock, Rap, Country, and Dance music and you have one hell of a party!

So come hang out with over 100,000 of your closest friends. =) Eat, drink, listen to great music. Oh, did I mention it's free to attend? But do yourself a favor and book your hotel rooms early. The hotels downtown are likely to fill up fast for Taste.

Oh, and don't forget that the world renowned Dane County Farmers Market will, as usual, be in operation around the square in the hours before the Taste of Madison starts. Our Farmers Market is the largest producer-only Farmers Market in the country, and you can find not only fruits and vegetables, but meats, cheeses, honey, maple syrup, hand spun yarns, crafts, home made soaps, vinegars, and much more. Last year many WUCies attended the Farmers Market and promptly committed to bringing coolers and extra pieces of luggage to tote home some goodies! 

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WebGUI Contributor of the Year Nominations

It has been our tradition to recognize an outstanding contributor in the WebGUI community each year. In the previous two years Colin Kuskie and Martin Kamerbeek have won the award. However, in the past we have not announced who was up for the award until the WebGUI Users Conference. This year we'll still announce the winner at the WUC, but we thought we'd share in advance the nominees for 2008. This will give the nominees some much deserved attention, it may inspire even more people to step up to become nominees, an it makes the whole awards process more transparent to the community.

The nominees for this year are:

Colin Kuskie - Colin is constantly helping out in both the forums and IRC. He writes tests, updates help, and has been working on the new WebGUI Shop with the rest of the team.

Kaleb Murphy - Like Colin, Kaleb is always there to lend a helping hand. But this year Kaleb has taken on the heroic task of doing a ground up rewrite of the WebGUI Survey system. Even more amazing is that he was unfamiliar with both the WebGUI API and the YUI API before this project, and learned them both in order to complete it.

Ernesto Hernandez-Novich - Ernesto has been working diligently for the past year to get WebGUI into the official distribution repository of Debian Sid. He has not only built official Debian packages and gone through the submission process (which can be quite lengthy and tedious), but has also created all of the prerequisite packages that Debian also didn't have in order to run WebGUI.

This year we're also going to add a new contributor award. In addition to the individual contributor award we've decided to do a corporate contributor award as well to recognize organizations that are putting their resources to work for the good of the WebGUI community. The nominees for the 2008 WebGUI Corporate Contributor of the Year Award are:

United Knowledge has been involved in the WebGUI Friends system, and is building a new slide show player for the new WebGUI Gallery.

El Motaheda has been working on the Arabic translation of WebGUI. And given that WebGUI is a huge system, it's amazing that El Motaheda has completed 90% of the translation work.

ProcoliX has kept the Dutch translation of WebGUI to 100% completion nearly the entire year, which is the only translation kept so up to date. In addition, they've spend a lot of time working to make the WRE even better than it already is.

Knowmad Technologies are constantly participating in IRC and on the forums. They've created and updated dozens of wiki pages, and they've contributed a number of packages to the WebGUI plugins. In addition, they've worked to make the Windows WRE work better, faster, and more reliably. 

Oqapi is the largest contributor to the commerce team writing the new WebGUI Shop outside of Plain Black. They've written the payment subsystems, and two payment plugins already, and they've volunteered to write more payment plugins before the release of the new WebGUI Shop in WebGUI 7.5.

One thing to keep in mind, there are still about 4.5 months until the awards are announced. Therefore some new nominees may appear on this list between now and the WUC if they pop up with some massive contributions. 

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Perl Myths

A while ago I wrote a blog entry called Perl is dead. Long Live Perl! It got quite a bit of attention in the Perl world and was even translated and cross published on in various languages on various sites. That article talked about the fact that not only is Perl not a dead language, but that it's not even dying.  

Recently Tim Bunce has created a presentation called "Perl: Baseless Myths and Startling Realities" and he's put it up on slide share so we can all take a look. If you're interested in the reality of Perl, I suggest giving it a look.

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WUC: Birds of a Feather

We've had such an influx of speakers wanting to talk at the WUC this year, that we've decided to open up three more special sessions. These will be more of a birds of a feather kind of sessions, rather than the traditional lecture sessions.

One has already been taken, which will be sort of a round table discussion on gauging server hardware and bandwidth needs for your WebGUI site or sites. This discussion will be lead by Koen de Jonge, the owner of ProcoliX, a hosting company in the Netherlands that has been providing WebGUI hosting solutions for nearly as long as WebGUI has existed.

But I said we opened three sessions. We created the two additional sessions so to provide room for people that may want to discuss something WebGUI related, but don't really want to be a speaker. Maybe you're a fan of OpenID and want to talk about getting that into WebGUI. Maybe you want to speak on something for 5 or 10 minutes (a lightening talk), but not for a whole hour. Maybe you've got an idea for a web-based business model that you want to talk with people about. Maybe you want to do a round table for Schools, Government, Non-profit, Manufacturing, or other sectors so you can converse with other people that do what you do and share ideas. Whatever the case, no idea is a bad idea. Just reply to this post, or drop me an email (jt at plainblack dot com) and we'll get you hooked up with a room, a projector, and tables and chairs.

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TBB is Quiet

Sorry that the Black Blog has been so quiet the past few weeks. To be honest, I haven't been thinking about much beyond the commerce system. And if you want to keep up with what's going on there, you should check out the developer's mailing list.

The new commerce system is coming along great. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it will be complete by the May 31st feature freeze deadline of WebGUI 7.5. I'll provide a full featured list of all the new commerce functionality to expect in 7.5 as we get closer to completion. For now, just know that my silence means that the commerce team and I are working hard to bring you a substantial upgrade to the commerce system. 

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Web Standards

If you've ever designed a web site you have probably said "f*** you Internet Explorer" or "I hate Firefox" or "Opera is a steaming pile of s***". It's all a matter of your perspective, but it comes down to the fact that despite all the so called web standards, there really is no standard. If there were, when you designed your page in one browser, it would look the same in all the other browsers every single time.

Today Joel on Software laid out the problem more directly, and succinctly than I've ever read or heard described before. It was such an interesting read, that I thought I should share it with you.  

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