The Danish National IT and Telecom Agency has published some really useful data as a REST interface (although they haven’t committed themselves yet to make the service permanent). The published data is a complete dataset for Denmark which includes:

• 2.2 million adresses including geolocation data in 2 formats
• Roughly 106.000 roads
• Postal districts
• Municipalities
• Regions (similar to states in the US)
• Schools, election districts and more…

I really enjoyed the presentation, and I also enjoyed that external non-capgemini people showed up and made the discussion more nuanced and exact.

If you’re interested in the presentation (in Danish), we videotaped it and made it public available.
Part 1 – presentation + code example (27 minutes)
Part 2 – questions (12 minutes)
Part 3 – oiorest ruby plugin code walkthrough (13 minutes)

Below is Part 1 of the presentation:

More info (in English) from Kim Bach: OIO REST: RESTful web services developed by the Danish Public Sector

National IT and Telecom Agency: oiorest.dk

OIO Rest Ruby on Rails plugin by Christian Dalager and me. See the simple examples on the howto page
Dalager’s blog posts explaining more about the plugin and the public REST initiative: oiorest ruby news, Danmark exponeret som REST, OIOREST workshop writeup (all in Danish)

Technorati Tags: soa, rest, danish, oiorest, public, dalager, christian dalager, presentation, capgemini, smartlunch

So RailsConf Europe this year is over, and there are a few things i want to highlight from a conference that in general was a smash hit.

Usability and prototyping fits agile development style

Dave Thomas’ keynote had a great section about art and the work of great artists. Michaelangelo and DaVinci usually worked with prototypes — paper prototypes — that allowed them to iterate fast and wild. Thomas wanted the audience to work in that way too. What a coincidence that we have been using prototyping as a key methodology at work, and for the last year and half with Ruby on rails.

“Everytime you step away from your keyboard, you engage another part of your brain”, he said, refering to using whiteboards, papers, napkins, etc, to sketch ideas and think it over. At leas in Capgemini, the next year will be the year of the prototypes, and I still believe that Ruby on Rails is just fit for this purpose. (yes, I know we can and should do a lot more than just prototypes, but it really is a sweetspot where big enterprise organisations with a fixed architectural platform can still taste some of the advantages with Ruby on Rails).

David Heinemeier gave a good keynote the next morning, and one of the things he mentioned was just a little thing for Rails developers. But actually a brilliant example that software can always benefit from: Better defaults. David mentioned that the debugger in the upcoming Rails 2.0 is only working in development environment by default. Which means that your production application won’t break if you forget to remove a breakpoint. Ruby on Rails have a lot of good defaults.

As you may have noticed I’m kind of getting obsessed with “better defaults”.

it’s the defaults that matter — not what your application can be tweaked to do. Sooner or later your harddisk breaks, you need a new laptop, you start a new project, etc. When the defaults are right, you spend less brain capacity on setting up your computer or project and spend more brain capacity solving real problems.

It’s nice to see that there is a focus on better defaults.

Our own talk: Beyond Screenscraping

Mads and I has spent a lot of time preparing our talk “beyond screenscraping: toolbox for changing the legacy world”, and although 150 people left the room just before we started, it seemed as the remaining 50 (or so) people enjoyed the show.

One of the questions at the end was a guy that had downloaded the code and tried it out on his companys intranet, and wanted to know how our code would store the password.

That people were able to follow along and could try it out during the presentation was more than we expected. Also I afterwards talked to Rob McKinnon, that had some similar experience with using a Rails application ( www.theyworkforyou.co.nz ) for creating a political reason for changing a legacy application (in his case to expose data that formerly was very little accessible).

Presentation slides,and more project info can be found on the reform plugin homepage

Enterprise Readiness

Ruby on Rails have attracted more of the bigger players. This years sponsors included IBM, Sun and Thoughtworks who all seemed eager to tell about how well Ruby on Rails fit into enterprise environments. IBM and Thoughtworks, for instance, claim to employ 50 people working with Rails. David Heinemeier has more thoughts on the involvement from the big players in his blog.

Capgemini where I work also have a dedicated involvement in Ruby on Rails, and here from Denmark we try also to be active in the local Rails community (copenhagen.rb) to give something back.

At Tuesday evening, Jørgen from Lenio and Codegirl arranged for a Danes meetup and dinner. Great event, especially because we were more than 30 people. Compare that to last year where we were five or six danes (including David, of course). To continue the trend, each Dane must bring an additional 4 or 5 people each year. So if you make that assumption, we will be 166 next year and 915 Danes at RailsConf 2009 :)

Thanks to Jørgen’s boss for paying the dinner. They really deserve the mention.

Photos from the evening below. It was really a lovely evening and the discussions continued fueled with beer, as you can probably see on the photos.

More info:

• Casper Fabricius notes: Dave Thomas keynote, DHH keynote
• DHH: Good times at RailsConf Europe
• DHH: Sun surprises at RailsConf Europe 2007
• Justaddwater.dk: Busy Preparing RailsConf Presentation
• Justaddwater.dk: Ruby on Rails for the enterprise: Business perspective (May 2006)
• Justaddwater.dk: Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool (Apr 2006)
• Justaddwater.dk All articles about prototyping
• Flickr: All my photos from RailsConf Europe 2007 (and from 2006)
• Reform plugin homepage

Technorati Tags: dhh, dave thomas, ruby on rails, railsconfeurope, railsconf, railsconf europe 2007, berlin, copenhagenrb, copenhagen.rb, casper fabricius, speaking, event

At the presentation we will introduce a Ruby on Rails plugin that can create the foundation for a local Rails app based on forms scraped from a remote application. In our case, an internal application used for timereporting in Capgemini.

My head is too ful of all the details in the presentation but fact is, that we’re running two trials on the presentation this Thursday the 13th in our Capgemini office in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Let me know if you are interested in hearing the presentation. Readers of this blog are welcome, but make sure to contact me or call me in advance if you like to participate.

More info

Public test presentations Thursday Sept. 13th at 12.15 and 16.00 at the Capgemini office in Gentofte, Copenhagen Denmark. Call me in advance (+45 2373 6220) or via the contact form if you like to attend.

Justaddwater.dk: RailsConf Talk Accepted: Prototyping, Hacking Enterprise Legacy Applications

Railsconf Europe session info: Screenscraping as a Tool for Changing the (Legacy) World

Reform plugin website (where you can download presentation, submit bugs, checkout code, add documentation).

UPDATE 2007-09-18 with new URL to Reform plugin: reform.quickanddirty.dk (we moved to our Capgemini server for prototype projects: quickanddirty.dk )

Technorati Tags: railsconf, berlin, europe, capgemini, presentation, ruby on rails, ruby, rails, madsbuus, speaking

The new innovative improvements to Google Maps… View the demo video (it’s just a few minutes):Via Jacob Hage’s blog.

My favorite is the drag-and-drop replanning of routes. Danish competitors are lightyears behind here…

If you have not seen it: Check out Douglas Merril (CIO at Google) talk about innovation at Google. I have embedded video here below.

He is a very entertaining speaker. Seems like he has given this talk many times…
What are your favorite quotes?

Bonus article: Thomas Baekdal discussing the ever present issue security vs usability: The usability of passwords.

Technorati Tags: google, cio, innovation, maps, route planning, baekdal, security, usability, passwords

Here is the talk proposal:

Title: Screenscraping as a tool for changing the (legacy) world

Conference: RailsConf Europe 2007
Type/Duration: 45 Minute Conference Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Audience Type: web developers, programmers

Description Short:

Tired of your existing corporate legacy application? Show them you can do better! Learn how to make your own Rails version of a website with ugly UI, bad user feedback, no API.

Use these tools and techniques to build your own, better, user interface on top of an old legacy backend.

Description:

You sometimes come across web applications that are really bad: Ugly UI, bad user feedback, minimal usability, no API.

To improve such an app, a rails hacker may have to prove him/herself by prototyping improvements first.

Rails makes it possible actually “taking over” parts of a legacy app, by presenting the user with a rails UI that submits back to the original app. A prototype that works against the legacy app and is usable and testable by real users.

This session will present you with the techniques and tools you need to do this:

* Advanced two-way screen/form scraping from “bad” legacy applications
* Guessing the data model.
* Screenscraping tools and their strengths and weaknesses.
* Helper tools and how to use them (http sniffing, browser submittal, DOM, CSS selector tools, etc)

Along with this, we will discuss how we used this technique on a particular internal timetracking application, and in particular the lessons learned on how to navigate a Rails prototype into the political game in a world of legacy systems.

Screenscraping as a prototyping strategy could be just what you need in a political environment where it’s hard to convince management to build an existing legacy application in Rails.

Mads is the ideal co-presenter for this talk. He is a highly skilled programmer, very opinionated about software development, and also entertaining to listen to. We have quite some work to do, as we have plans to take this talk a step further. And Christian Dalager has promised to help us out, which makes me look very much forward to this. Not only the presentation itself. But also the process of creating our code. (For now, I can say only that we will be coding a tool to make it even easier to API-ify a legacy app.)

See you at RailsConf, Berlin, September 17-19!

Technorati Tags: rails, rubyonrails, event, railsconf, conference, oreilly, berlin, copenhagenrb, madsbuus, dalager, legacy

This inspired me to have a conversation about “the humane interface“… In the light of Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface to discuss the past, present and future of interaction design, human computer interaction and related stuff.

It was a great, lively debate and good to meet a lot of people interested in this subject. I think around 20 showed up. I hope people will add comments and photos from the session — which actually took place in a dressing room… Very rough, but fun to try :).

Technorati Tags: interaction design, user experience, uxp, human, humane, reboot, reboot9, jef raskin, allpeers

Below some notable quotes on AJAX. I really like his style a lot. Also, I can recommend his talk from 2005 on high performance systems (via IT conversations), where he mentions that one Google blog has experienced up to 120,000 hits per second.

A good tool should be transparent, should execute actions in less than half a second and should involve interactive bottom-up learning, “because you change your mind as you go,” he said.

Natural language was billed as a replacement for the GUI, but it failed to achieve that. It also failed as a query language for databases, as a calculation language for spreadsheets and as a document creation language, Bosworth said. “Humans expect a human level of comprehension,” he said, noting that database queries and spreadsheet formulas have to be exact.

But natural language got a second life, too, triggered in part by Microsoft Help, and the next step turned out to be Google, Bosworth said. The trick to being successful with natural language is to “start with a fuzzy problem, one no human can resolve anyway…orient it around search, and the magic is just in the ranking,” he said.

Drawing on the lessons he learned from the initial failure of AJAX, Bosworth admonished developers to think about user activity. “Ask what the frequency is,” he said. “Unless an app is used over and over each day, make it simple, even if more clicks [or] pages are required.”

Also, “Ask how long it takes to execute a requested task,” he said. “If it takes more than 2 seconds, consider not providing the task or splitting it up into small, user-controlled tasks.”

Moreover, “sites where people don’t go a lot don’t need AJAX-style UIs [user interfaces],” Bosworth said. “If we started building AJAX for AJAX’s sake we wouldn’t be doing our customers any favors.”

Technorati Tags: google, ajax, adam bosworth, microsoft, ie4

Copenhagenrb.dk: Railsconf Europe Session overview

Technorati Tags: railsconf, notes, presentations

The presentation is in Danish. More info on previous blog post “Speaking on Corporate Weblogging event“.

Powerpoint version: Capgemini og Justaddwater.dk (2.1MB)

PDF version: Capgemini og Justaddwater.dk (1.4MB)

We’d love to hear your comments on our presentation (especially if you were there).

Technorati Tags: event, speaking, presentation, blogging, corporate weblogs, capgemini, justaddwater.dk

My presentation on rapid prototyping

For weeks I had been looking forward to presenting my talk on rapid prototyping and do a demo of an application we did in Capgemini. It went fairly well. No technical flaws, I also got a little extra time so there was time for questions.

Here is some of the feedback I got. I decided to shamelessly to put the kind comments here, so if I have a bad day, I can get back to this post and read all your kind comments :-)

Thanks a lot, I really enjoyed the demo! This should be required reading for any web development team.
Source: Jeppe Kruse

Good to see clueful work in a big consulting firm…nice presentation.
Source: Guy Dickinson

If I had the money I would hire you.
Eric Reiss told me after the presentation

After my first attendance last year I knew what to expect somehow and what this will be all about. So this year I did have expectations – the biggest one to be motivated and inspired. This really did happen. The talks from Bill Laio, Ben Hammersley and Jesper Rønn-Jensen were really good and did inspire me again.
Source: Michael Hartmann (designitsimple.de)

Prototyping is way important, not only in software engineering, also with organisations. You definitely should understand why, read here [link to justaddwater.dk].
Source: Benjamin J. J. Voigt

Jeppe Kruse also posted a comment in Danish on his weblog:

Capgemini lavede en funktionsdygtig prototype af en web-applikation i Ruby on Rails på 20 timer.

Normalt når man laver prototyper af web-projekter er det for at få en fælles forståelse af, hvad det er for en dims man har mellem hænderne, hvordan den ser ud og hvad den skal kunne.

De fleste bruger Photoshop-mockups eller statiske HTML-sider der ‘mimer’ funktionaliteten. Begge dele tager som regel betydeligt længere tid end 20 timer, og efterlader desuden en hel del arbejde når de er blevet godkendt: “Så er den i hus, nu skal det bare produceres.”

Med en funktionsdygtig prototype er det meget nemmere at se, hvordan dimsen virker; man kan få lov at bruge den i stedet for at kigge på et billede af den. Og så er alt arbejdet gjort næsten inden man kommer i gang.

Source: Jeppe Kruse weblog

My own impression: I Started out a little too tense, but fund the natural flow afterwards. I was glad for my cuecards, helped me some at the beginning. Thomas took some more photos that are available at Flickr.com.

I saw Doc Searls in the audience just before my presentation, and got this thought that the moment I started, he’d probably get up and leave the room! I think he stayed, however. He took this photo of Thomas Watson:

Thomas Watson Steen (photo by Doc Searls)

Ruby on Rails meeting

Thursday evening had a geeky meetup about Ruby on Rails. Even though it was after dinner lots of people showed up. Jarkko Laine had arranged for the meetup and Chris McGrath put up his notes from the meeting.

Just as everybody else were partying downstairs, we had a good discussion and exchange of experiences.

You probably think: What a geeky way to spend the evening when people are partying downstairs. But when you look closely at the photos, you see that we have beer. All photos available on Flickr.com/photos/jesper.

Networking

Above all, Reboot was a good opportunity to network. The most important asset of the conference is the participants. We were really networking at the Rails evening session, and I definetely hope to see some of the Rails-heads again June 29 in Copenhagen.

In particular, it was a pleasant to meet Lynn, Line, Jens-Christian, Marston, Reno, Olle, Jan, Geoff, Eric, Marklund, Pelle (and wife), Jakob, Tobias, Michael, Trine-Maria and husband, Maja, Thomas, Pollas, Keith, Jeremy, Jesse, Dalager, Jarkko, Björn, Casper, Claus, Trine, John, Michael, Lars and everybody else I got a chance to talk to.

It’s the audience that makes reboot a special event

Technorati Tags: reboot, reboot8, presentation, talk, ruby on rails, networking