Even though we are halfway through the first month of the new year, I thought it would still be a good time to bring up my programming-related New Year’s resolutions.  With the way the landscape in programming changes every few years it seems only appropriate to encourage personal growth.  I have found previously when I do this it also strengthens the languages that I already know.  Learning Rails re-inforced the idea not only of testing, which is stongly built-in to the framework, but also concepts like MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) concepts.  Here’s what I have set as personal goals for 2009:

• Learn a new language.  I’ve previously worked in mostly Java and Perl, with a bit of Ruby on Rails thrown in.  So I could claim Ruby on Rails and still learn a lot (for that matter, Perl as well…) but I want to challenge myself and try to learn Python.  Initially, there seems to be a good deal of overlap between Python, Ruby and Perl, so I think that should help me.  I will start with Dive into Python as that has a complete textbook online.
• Learn 2 new frameworks.  I have not completely decided on what to do here.  Looking at our biblios project makes  me want to learn Google Gears.  If I learn Python, Django, a web framework similar to Rails, would blend nicely.  Catalyst might be a great fit that could directly impact Koha.
• Contribute to one other open-source project or consistently attend a code group.  These will probably go together.  Here in Atlanta, where I live, there are groups for all the languages and most of the frameworks that I’ve mentioned above.  They tend to meet once a month and often have side meetings to work through learning aspects or book clubs related to the topic at hand.  It’s a great way to meet people and learn what others are doing in the same field of interest. Meetup.com is where I found the Rails group I (very) infrequently attend and actually heard about the Perl Mongers group in the area that I’m hoping to attend this year. Often, you can find people in need of help for various projects, or who are looking to help if you have a project of your own that needs help.  Meetup is international and it’s very easy to start your own group if one isn’t already meeting. Maybe I’ll even start a Koha group??

So feel free to share your goals or resolutions in the coming year in the comments below, or even the methods you use to improve yourself.

Among the tougher proprietary platforms for Open Source to gain ground in, consumer mobile devices is arguably the toughest. Google is hoping to challenge that with the release of their Android mobile computing platform and the first phone to use it, T-Mobile’s G1. Maybe now is the time to replace that chunky Nokia 3650 I’ve been hauling around for 7+ years…

Google spiced up things in the browser world recently by releasing their own (beta) standalone web browser called Chrome.  Interestingly enough, the name seems to derive from the Mozilla Firefox term for the user interface layer.  The code is based on WebKit and V8, as part of Google’s Chromium project, operating under a permissive BSD license.  There may be some confusion here, since Chromium is BSD-licensed, but Chrome itself seems not to be.

So does it mean that we’re seeing the return of the browser wars?  Maybe a bit.

IE is still going to be on more systems, by virtue of inclusion on the most common pre-installed OS’s.  But some analysts have noted that Google doesn’t need to “beat IE” in market share in order for Chrome to be effective.  Rather, Google intends to influence the direction and feature-set of future browsers by providing their own freely-available, freely-applicable version.  Core features are going to include powerful, reliable javascript interpretation and XML parsing, of the kind you might need for, say, Google Docs or Google Gears web applications.  That is to say, this is the browser that intends from the beginning to be an application base, not just a page viewer with additional features strapped on.

In the long term, one might expect Google to use Chrome to make it easier for them to place ads more intelligently and reliably.  Eventually, it is conceivable they might go whole hog and mint their own linux distro, thereby cutting directly at Microsoft’s main advantage in establishing IE’s userbase.  It is quite interesting how the competitive strategies tie into each other at various levels.

The main downside for web developers now is having another level of cross-browserness to test against… and the potential privacy implications when relying on Google for so many aspects of business.  Note also, the current beta is Win32/64 only.  MacOS and Linux versions pending.

So it looks like this will be the week of the new browsers for me, talking my XP virtual machine to IE7, FF3 and now Chrome.