After getting most of Send Me a Pic completed, I needed to figure out a way to handle the image scaling widget. The reason for needed this widget was that displaying images on cell phones causes a couple problems:

• Screen sizes are really small, even the large screen sizes are still only 320 x 240. Most are around 128px on their longest side.

• Aspect Ratios for cell phones are different for each model. Aspect Ratio is the ratio of the width of the screen divided by the height. aspect-ratio = width / height.

Both of these problems means that with out a way to scale and offset the image the photos would not show up correctly on the users phones.

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Programmableweb

www.programmableweb.com is a great web site for seeing what’s going on in the Mashup World. The site has over a thousand mashups and serveral number APIs; its the place to go to get inspiration on creating your first or next Mashup.

In October, I created the Ajax Map Comparison Mashup that allows users to see the difference between the big three Ajax Map widgets, posted programmableweb.com. The thing with Mashups if no one uses it, does it really matter? I guess that’s the same for any application, but Mashups are really more about inspirations, creativity and sharing than they are hardcore engineering.

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JavaOne call for papers is now open.

Your boss may have asked you if you want to submit a paper for JavaOne or maybe you have a good idea for a paper. Let this be both a warning and inspiration to those who dare to follow .

11/14/2003

My CTO sends me an email with the subject “JavaOne Paper for 2004″. I am not really sure what he wants so I continue reading. From what I can tell, he wants me to come up with an idea for a paper to present at the next JavaOne conference. Having given numerous demos and product talks both to internal and external people in the past; I think this should be easy enough. As I finish reading the email, I realize there is only one week left to complete my abstract.

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Keeping the Web simple and easy has driven Internet usage to more than a billion people worldwide. Anyone with a connection, a browser and the ability to enter a URL can use the Internet today. This simplicity is great for those looking to browse their favorite blog or search for a recipe for dinner, but it has many problems as an application development platform — usability being the primary issue. Of course, tools and HTML compatibility also pose problems, but these are development issues and are dealt with by a few well–paid, trained individuals. Usability affects a greater number of people over a longer period of time.

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When trying to include 10s of thousands of row in a table the performance degrade. There are several tricks one can do to increase the performance of tables in Nexaweb.

1.) Explicitly specify the height for row – This can be done by adding a “rowHeight” attribute to the “table” tag.

Example: <table rowHeight=”20″> …

2.) Provide a width of all table column – To do this add a “width” attribute to the “column” tag

Example: <column width=”200″> …

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