Given the fair number of web applications we have developed with some aspect of social networking involved, naturally we were pretty excited about Google's OpenSocial announcement.

Looking into the OpenSocial documentation you can see that it exposes 3 different types of resources: people, that person's friends, and their activities. This structure maps nicely onto Rail's concept of nested resources, where we could have a top-level users controller with friends and activities nested underneath it.

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Having worked on AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) a while back, I thought aspect-orientated programming (AOP) would be good topic for my Talk@2. I'm not going to go into too much depth but hopefully it'll highlight some of the possible uses of AOP.

A bit of history

AOP started out with AspectJ from Xerox PARC about 10 years ago, and is now an open source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation. AspectJ is an extension to Java that adds aspect-orientated capabilities, while not the only implementation of AOP it's practically the de facto in the Java camp.

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So we are back from FOWA, after our first (and hopefully not last) experience of running a stand at an expo. It was a really fantastic experience and we all had an amazing time there. Thank you everyone who came along and spoke to us, it was great to meet so many people and chat with you all. We will be trying to process all the contacts we made and responding to enquiries in the next couple of weeks.

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It looks like "FOWA":http://www.futureofwebapps.com/ is going to be a great event with an incredible line up of speakers. This time around there's going to be an expo and because we're one of the sponsors we'll also have a nice little booth where you can see all our shiny faces and chat about Ruby on Rails, cutting edge web development and where the web's going.

So if you're interested in meeting the whole team, maybe picking up some New Bamboo "goodies":http://www.flickr.com/photos/new_bamboo_london/1442939714/ come and say hello!

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This article was originally publish on my own "blog":http://www.jaikoo.com but some other people thought it was useful so I reproduced it here. Any bad language is representative of me and not New Bamboo who are all very polite chaps/chapettes

With Web 2.0 applications facing growing audiences with data hungry appetites "MOM":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_oriented_middleware has suddenly had a resurgence.

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I've been a huge fan of jQuery for over a year now. As JavaScript frameworks go it's light but still functional. As the 'newbie' I wanted to demonstrate this to the rest of New Bamboo. I know this information has been said before but below is my quick introduction to jQuery, what it's about and how to use it.

Find Things, Do Stuff

This is the methodology behind jQuery and it's very sensible. The whole API is geared towards selecting elements on the page and then performing actions on that collection of elements.

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In one of our current projects we have been experimenting with additional layers to the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. Namely the presenter and conductor; the presenter sitting between the controller and view, and the conductor sitting between the model and controller. Whilst, granted, they are overkill for most projects when used correctly in the right situations they can make your code much easier to read and comprehend.

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Caching and performance is something that always lingers at the back of my mind, and the Holy Grail is yet to be found as far as I am concerned. While looking around on various blogs recently, I came across "some fantastic articles on caching":http://revolutiononrails.blogspot.com/2007/08/advanced-rails-caching-on-edge.html that I found really exciting. In a nutshell the article introduces the concept of using ESI, or Edge side includes to create huge performance boosts in Rails applications. ESI is a standard that I had never heard of before, though it has been around since 2001. The "specification for ESI":http://www.w3.org/TR/esi-lang was written by some interesting people who have great pedigree in the field of advanced scalabilty, Akamai for example.

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I took some time out this week to finally tie up the loose ends such as hotels, flights etc and now can confirm that we'll be deploying a five person strong New Bamboo entourage. Max, Michelle, Pablo, Gwyn and I will be arriving in Berlin on the 17th of September.

I haven't been to Berlin in nearly 7 years when I worked at "Pixel Park":http://www.pixelpark.com so I'll be looking forward to seeing the sites and meeting fellow Railers! If you're going to be at Railsconf Europe or just in the vicinity it would be great to meet up and hang out.

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"Not long now!":http://blog.seedcamp.com/2007/08/seedcamp-act-two.html The application deadline was last Sunday and by the end of this week the 20 finalists will be announced. This is certainly the start of something which will change the startup landscape throughout Europe indefinitely. The beauty of Seedcamp is it's giving the passionate and committed engineers (but not forgetting entrepreneurs and designers) the chance to really get their idea produced and out there to the world. London is a wonderful place, and everyday I am amazed by the new people I meet here. If you're already in London, don't miss out on "OpenCoffee":http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/, this week it will be a great time to meet other Seedcamp applicants.

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