John C. Bland II

I’m at the airport squeaking out this post before group A finishes and group B (my group) starts loading. I wanted to get here earlier and write this eloquent post about how my life is about to transcend…{insert scratched record noise}…WHATEVER…I’M GOING TO CHICAGO! lol

See you there! Keep an eye out for a lot of posts this week. I blog a lot when I’m at conferences and they usually include “WOW…THIS IS SWEET!” type posts. I’ll try to keep’em a bit to the point this time around.

Uh oh…group A is moving fast…gotta run! {insert Speedy Gonzalez running noise} lol

I’m contemplating an approach to this IM/Chat application I’m about to build and the “Command Pattern”:http://www.johncblandii.com/2007/09/desert-code-camp-day-1.html came into mind. Here are my thoughts…please respond and let me know what you think of the approach.

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The “WebORB Preso by Mark Piller”:http://www.johncblandii.com/2007/09/azfpug-september-meeting-webor.html was given tonight for “azFPUG”:http://www.gotoandstop.org. I knew the majority of the info Mark talked about having toyed with the product before but there were a few things I didn’t know. On the “WebORB Mailing List”:http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flashorb/ I have made numerous comments about licensing (has been months but you should be able to find it in the archives). Well, now I see why it has the price tag(s) it does and definitely see the benefits of using it.

First, I didn’t know you could stream videos from it. That gives you Flash Media Server capabilities…very nice.

Secondly, I didn’t know you could use Remote Shared Objects (for sharing data between connected clients). [another feature of FMS]

Thirdly (is that a word? lol), I didn’t realize WebORB generated messaging code. So, you can go from 0 to 59 with the last 1 being your own custom UI. That’s great and for those not familiar with messaging, it is a way to allow data to be pushed to clients vs the client apps constantly polling the backend for data.

All of this is possible through .NET, PHP, Ruby, Ajax, and Java. Very nice!

The guys at “Midnight Coders”:http://www.themidnightcoders are doing some great work. I highly suggest looking into WebORB. Their admin console truly kicks butt!

UPDATE:
I forgot to add Silverlight to the technologies you can use WebORB with. They haven’t released it yet but they are working on it.

I’ve had a few clients email or call wondering if they were a part of the “I’m on the market…”:http://www.johncblandii.com/2007/09/im-on-the-market.html post. Well, I won’t post a list of who is on or off but I do want to clarify a few things.

# That was purely a vent based on events from the whole year and based on a collection of projects running concurrently.
# Katapult has way more good clients than bad. We seriously enjoy some great relationships with local dev’ companies, Fortune 500′s (and lower), and other dev’ companies throughout the country.
# As stated in the post, it isn’t the people but how the business runs or how my clients client requires things.
# I’m not anti-NDA but it would be nice to take credit for some of the award winning things we’ve done. Yep, others taking credit, receiving awards, and not throwing us a bone at all.

As for Katapult, a few people (not just clients) have been confused here too.

# I’m not shutting down Katapult.
# Katapult will still do a light amount of client work (very, very light).
# Katapult’s focus will be on “our products”:http://www.katapultmedia.com/products.cfm (only a couple listed there). We have 6 products, logos and all ready to roll, and all of them have been on hold for client work. Finalizing these products is a top priority.

Hopefully that clears up a few things. If you are a client and you are reading this/the last post, feel free to ask if I was talking about you. I will definitely be open and answer honestly.

Thanks.

I didn’t expect the books today but I got’em. One of the perks of writing in the series is 5 free copies of each volume. The covers look even better in person than they do on Amazon. This is cool but I can’t wait until Volume 2 is in my hands.