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Google Notebook finally got a feature I’ve been asking for since the beginning: The ability to remember whether I want my notebooks sorted alphabetically or by date of last update. When the service launched, notebooks were always sorted by last update. When they finally added the option of alphabetical sorting, they left out the ability to make your choice sticky across sessions. This little wrinkle annoyed me almost as much as the Google Calendar search box’s default action of searching public calendars rather than my own. I can’t believe what a difference it makes in your relationship with a webapp when you don’t curse out loud every time you use it.

Many users have the tendency to get bent out of shape about deficiencies in a tiny, tertiary portions of an application – or, for that matter, an operating system. Mac users devote entire forums to complaining about changes to, or lack of changes to, the Dock. PC users are still cursing those stupid Windows XP “You have unused icons on your desktop” messages. When we spend increasingly endless stretches of our lives in front of a terminal, tiny annoyances add up.

I call this the Disproportionately Annoying Detail Syndrome, or DADS. It has a tendency to flare up worst when you’re working late on a short deadline and your computing environment fails to read your mind.

A couple of years ago, when I first started abandoning desktop software for cloud computing, I gave Ta-Da List a shot. I couldn’t get over the placement of the “Add another item” command. Instead of putting it at the top of the list, they stuck it at the bottom. Every time I wanted to add a task, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page before I could start typing. I worked with this system for about a week before jumping ship to Remember the Milk, where I can hit the “t” key to add a task without ever picking up my mouse.

I’ve spent a bunch of time testing two nascent Mozilla Labs projects recently and thought I’d share my experiences, one awful and one awesome.

Failure: Mozilla Weave

After casting aspersions on Mozilla’s progress in the mobile space yesterday, I thought I should probably back up my comments with a real-world example: my utter failure, after five attempts, to get Mozilla Weave up and running.

For those not yet acquainted with it, Mozilla Weave is an initiative to bind the Mozilla experience more tightly with web services. To date, that initiative has taken the form of a Firefox plug-in that syncs bookmarks, browser history and cookies between multiple machines through the power of the cloud. Eventually, Weave will provide a set of APIs for individual application and plug-in developers to provide similar syncing mechanisms. But at this early stage, Weave is more demoware than anything else. The folks at Ars Technica took Weave for a spin several months ago, but despite subsequent updates, the plug-in still offers a complicated, error-prone and just plain broken user experience.

I spent a lot of time at Web 2.0 Expo session-hopping – and a lot more time hanging in the speaker’s lounge fine-tuning my own talk. That’s the curse of going on the last day. You can’t fully enjoy the rest of the conference. That said, I had pretty strong reactions to some of the keynotes. The big platform announcements from Microsoft (Live Mesh) and Yahoo (SearchMonkey plus), were OK, but I was most struck by author Jonathan Zittrain and Mozilla exec Mitchell Baker.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Web 2.0 Expo is closing up shop. I think my talk went pretty well. Despite being the last session of the last day, I had about 100 people, most of whom stayed till the bitter end. Not a lot of questions, but quite a few folks stopped by to chat afterwards – including Mark Meeker, a friend and former colleague from Orbitz who’s no stranger himself to the conference circuit.

I made a conscious decision not to focus on code, but rather to provide tools and advice to developers who want to be a part of the conversation between standards bodies, browser vendors and library authors about the future of the web. I’m not sure how much of it makes sense without my narration, but I’ve posted my slides to Slideshare.

Now, out for Afghani food with old friends. More about Web 2.0 Expo next week!

• My slides (embedded)
• My slides (slideshare)
• My abstract
• My Crowdvine page

Given my previously professed obsession with sci-fi blog io9, I had to check out the Web 2.0 Expo session hosted by its editrix, Annalee Newitz. User Generated Censorship tackled the ways in which community policing and content flagging can damage the value of social networks.

Using case studies from Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Wikipedia, Newitz explored the various ways in which user-generated content can be flagged by community members and summarily banished to the void. She harshed on services – Blogger, Flickr, Digg – with poor transparency into their processes and insufficient recourse for those flagged. She also showed the love to services – Wikipedia, YouTube – with more complex, detailed and “byzantine” rules for flagging content.

Her logic? Such complex rules force would-be community censors to get specific about why they’re flagging particular items. Wikipedia, for instance, offers seven different directives for its content. To flag content for removal, users must cite the specific directives that have been violated. Lots of discussion ensues.

At today’s Web 2.0 Expo, Greg Pollack of Rails Envy introduced me and a few hundred of my latest acquaintances to Behavior-Driven Development. Basically a mash-up of Test-Driven Development and Domain-Specific Langauges, BDD empowers developers to turn English-language spec documents into working test suites with a minimum of fuss.

Pollack’s talk was titled The Art of Testing Web Applications, but his copious code examples skewed, unsurprisingly, toward Rails. Easily mixing high-level concepts with nitty-gritty code, Pollack showed how to turn existing Rails unit and integration tests into BDD tests using the RSpec framework. Although the translation from one testing framework to the other seemed almost 1:1, the difference in readability was striking. I can actually see clients and product managers/business owners using these test suites in the real world.

I have arrived in San Francisco for Web 2.0 Expo. Over the next couple of days, I’ll post about my favorite sessions and all that jazz. But here’s the obligatory plug for my session, which takes place at 3.50 p.m. Friday in room 2003. I posted about my talk when I was first accepted, and I’m really pleased with the way it’s come together. I did a dry run of it with my peers at Pathfinder on Monday and got a lot of excellent feedback.

As previously reported, my session is called Do Try This at Home: Ajax Bookmarking, Cross-site Scripting, and Other Web 2.0 Browser Hacks. In it, I’ll examine the various draft WC3 specs that are already coming alive in the latest crop of browsers – and how you, the everyday developer, can help road-test the future of the web by employing the new tools sooner rather than later.

I’m part of the development track, but given that I’m speaking in the last session on the last day, I’m going to mix the technical details with a lot of strategy and DIY cheerleading. The best thing about my R&D job here at Pathfinder is the chance it affords me to play with all the latest toys. I want to encourage other developers to do the same, even if they can’t find a way to work such forays into their day-to-day projects.

Hope to see you there!

One thing I overlooked with the release of Ext JS 2.1 is that it is now GPL rather than LGPL. That means that if you build Ext JS 2.1 into your app, it would have to be GPL’s if you planned to distribute it. (See this flame thread on the extjs forum).

Not a problem if you are providing a service, but if you are distributing the application, then you are GPL infected.

If we look at part of the GPL v2:

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Now IANAL, but if you distribute a stub application with at least 2 UI implementations that can be downloaded and installed separately, you might be OK. Another argument for designing your applications as service providers that can be accessed by multiple different clients. That way you can change UI frameworks as necessary, such as when your current framework changes open source licenses.

Some noteworthy Ajax Framework releases have come out in the last few weeks, along with some other news of interest:

• Ext JS 2.1 and Ext GWT 1.0 Beta – Better performance, new Slider, StatusBar components. REST support (support for other HTTP methods beyond POST and GET). The Ext GWT 1.0 Beta consummates the love affair between GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and Ext that was started by gwt-ext and MyGWT, but provides the comfort of knowing that it is supported by the Ext JS folks. Note: Ext GWT is pure GWT, not an Ext JS wrapper.
• Dojo 1.1 – First off, API compatibility between 1.0 and 1.1. Unified timing loop (ala Scriptaculous) for animation effects, with increased performance. Syntactic improvements to dojo.query. Unification of XHR functionality into dojo.xhr() function.
• Backbase Enterprise Ajax 4.2 – Backbase has been in the commercial framework game longer than almost anyone. Among the new features: hierarchical data bindings and improved performance. If you’ve wanted data binding for tree widgets, have a look.
• Google Search, Feed and Translation API – I opined a while back that Google discontinued their SOAP search API because they didn’t want people reordering or otherwise manipulating their search results. Looking at the terms of use of the new REST service, you can see that this continues to be a concern:  You agree that you will not, and you will not permit your users or other third parties to: (a) modify or replace the text, images, or other content of the Google Search Results, including by (i) changing the order in which the Google Search Results appear…
• Google App Engine – it only runs Python apps right now, and it’s a preview release available to a select few, but you can already see that this is Google’s challenge to Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud. In at most a year, unless you are security sensitive — health care, financial services — or running on Windows, you won’t be building and maintaining data centers. The capital requirements for launching sophisticated and scalable online services is about to change.
• Echo3 (beta) – it’s getting close. Superior performance to Echo2. Easier development of new components. Automatic serialization of objects between client and server. All HTML rendering now done on client. Overall the JavaScript client code is now of a design quality on par with the server code.

Lots of exciting developments for Ajax developers and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. I, for one, can’t wait to see how the Google App Engine compares to EC2 for deploying and scaling Facebook applications.

Technorati Tags: ajax, dojo, google app engine, gwt, ext js, backbase, echo3, google search

Facebook is a unique platform for application development — Facebook applications have a powerful API, a large user base, and low barrier to entry. With the Rails Facebooker plugin, a Rails programmer can treat the Facebook user data as an extension of existing Rails session features. It’s all very nice, and I’m not going to talk about any of that this time around.

I’m going to talk about the logistics of doing Facebook apps. When a user sends a request to a Facebook app, Facebook intercepts it and forwards the request to the third-party app server, along with some specific Facebook data, like the ID of the user making the request. Applications have to be registered with Facebook, and have a unique URL prefix at apps.facebook.com. You also provide the URL for your third-party server.

This sets up some challenges for a development team. First off, your application probably relies on Facebook services, meaning it can only be fully tested from within Facebook. This implies that the external Facebook server needs to be connected to your development server. Since many Rails developers run off their own development machine behind a firewall, this is potentially awkward. Similarly, the fact that the Facebook application has a single URL mapping makes it difficult for multiple developers to work on the same application without tripping over each others’ work.

How can a development team make this work?