I tried it myself to answer this : What are the all the currencies used in the French islands ? (héhé I am particularly interested in that one since I am from New-Caledonia)

First I could have all French islands on a map, and embed it here:

Then I could drill to the currencies of those islands and have their thumbnails:

This is almost the right result. I had to look for islands where French is spoken instead of French islands, which is a bit different. I had to do this because French islands set was reduced to New-Caledonia (what about La Réunion or Guadeloupe ?).

So on that little example I was able to answer my question very quickly and have the results presented in a very meaningful way (thumbnails of the notes and coins, islands placed on a map). The only drawback comes from the content itself. While it is very well structured, there are not as many french islands documented as in Wikipedia.

While Freebase claims to have 4,128,404 subjects documented versus Wikipedia’s 2,533,910, this has to be taken carefully. Freebase has a lot of articles coming directly from Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia articles are usually much richer than Freebase’s.

Anyway, thumbs up for all contributors of those bases ! It is really impressive and somewhat amazing to see those free contributions, particularly when opposed to other models (like Knol’s AdSense based model).

ECMAScript 4 standard rejected

ActionScript 3 - the language Adobe uses since Flex 2 - is based on ECMAScript 4. Adobe has been pushing it very hard in the previous years, proposing to make ES4 the next Javascript version. In that prospect Adobe has open-sourced its ES Virtual Machine (Tamarin), which was in its way to be adopted in the next Firefox versions.

But apparently it won’t: ES4 standardization has been rejected to pursue an older version (ES3.1). Fortunately for us Adobe will continue to support ES4 in next Flash player versions. But this is still bad news… Grant Skinner even suspects Microsoft to be somewhat responsible there… I really do not understand the logic behind this decision. Web applications become richer and richer. That gain in complexity requires a robust language to work with and ES4 was a good solution to it but no, Javascript will stay a “scripting” language for a few more years. Politics, politics…

But I am glad Adobe persists in its direction. Standardization is good but innovation is better.

Read more:

• Iconara
• Mike Chambers
• An eval()-fanatic

The future of the desktop

A very interesting article from ReadWriteWeb: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/1TSsquwuUlI/future_of_the_desktop.php

I encourage you to have a look at it, it exposes very interesting points. I tend to agree with most of what it says, even if I think it goes too much “in the cloud”…

Another User Interface language: Google XML Pages

I did not know that one. Google has its own UI markup language (they call it a templating language) and it was open sourced last month. So Google enters a world already over crowded, all the big technologists got one (what about Apple??):

• Adobe’s MXML: compiling to Actionscript/SWF ran by the flash runtime
• Microsoft’s XAML: ran by the Silverlight and the .NET3 runtime
• Mozilla’s XUL: ran by Gecko, Firefox’s layout engine
• Sun’s Java FX (not markup, more a scripting language): ran by Java runtime

With GXP you write your UI in XML, eventually adding scripts in either Java or C#. The XML is precompiled in Java bits which then generates HTML pages (or XML, or CSS, or Javascript…). So it is quite close to GWT, that let’s you write your HTML web applications directly in Java. I did not find any articulation between the 2 but GXP is used by Google Reader which I think also uses GWT… Not clear, but GXP is still in v0.2.

<gxp:template name=’com.google.sample.HelloWorld’
xmlns=’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’
xmlns:gxp=’http://google.com/2001/gxp’>

<b>Hello,<br/> World!</b>
</gxp:template>

While I find its syntax unintuitive at some points, GXP has some really great features. It leverages the Java beneath it to enable annotations and even generics in the templates! That’s very powerful.

I delayed this for months but now I am ready ! My intentions for this blog are summarized in the About this blog page. You will also find more information about me here.
I hope you will find this blog inspiring for all your projects!