The reasoning behind Lumberjack

So why, in 2009, in a world of RIA frameworks, web-based applications, and a wide variety of blogging engines to choose from, would I write a desktop application in Java targeted exclusively for one company's proprietary blog platform?

First of all, it was tempting to write this as an Adobe AIR application. It would have fit my requirement that it be cross-platform and run as a desktop application, but I've never written anything with Adobe development tools before. Given the limited time I had on weekends to work on it, I wanted to get something written as quickly as possible rather than spending all my time learning a new platform. With Java, I could just hit the ground running, and it was just a matter of referencing the Swing-specific documentation. It boiled down to what was expedient and familiar because it would allow me to build something quickly.

With respect to the issue of making this application web-based, the main point is that I didn't want to start up a browser just to create new posts on Blogger. There's the Blogger Dashboard for that. Now, it's true that one could write a slimmer, lighter, faster-loading web-based client for Blogger without all the heavy clutter of the Blogger Dashboard, but it would still require that I start up a web browser; in the end, I wouldn't end up using it much. I wanted to build something that I would use and keep on using. (I have also been writing web applications for the past five years, and thought it would be fun to write something that ran on the desktop for once.)

Finally, there's the issue of this program being a client specifically for one company's proprietary blogging engine. Why not make it work for WordPress, TypePad, Posterous, and all the other major and popular blogging platforms? For that matter, why am I still using Blogger when there are so many newer, slicker platforms to choose from? I have to admit that I was tempted to switch out from Blogger — WordPress and Posterous in particular have impressed me the most — but when it comes down to it I'd rather have my blog on Google infrastructure than anywhere else. With that said, not everyone feels this way, so they choose newer, snazzier blogging software — which is how Blogger ended up neglected by hobbyist software developers. To this day, I still can't even log in to my Blogger account using Drivel, a desktop client with support for all sorts of blogging engines.

Popular posts from this blog

Arrays in Visual Basic and classic ASP

For the programmer who is used to C-like syntax, working with arrays in Visual Basic or classic ASP can be aggravating. In this post, I will briefly go over declaring single- and multi-dimensional arrays, then iterating through them — the basic operations that make arrays useful. One-dimensional arrays Let's declare an array with six elements. Dim OneDimArray(5) Yes, that says "5", but it has six elements. When we're going through the elements of this array, we'll start counting from zero and end at five. Iterating through one-dimensional arrays For i = 0 to UBound(OneDimArray) Response.Write(i) Next There will be six elements iterated through. General notes about arrays in Visual Basic So far, we're left with the impression that Visual Basic is a strange language. When we declare arrays in VB, the real size is the declared array size plus 1. If you're used to programming in a C-like programming language such as C++ or Java, it's the declared array...
Read more

JavaScript syntax highlighters

I'm really into writing documentation, and very often, this documentation must include code samples. I wanted a JavaScript syntax highlighter that: involved very little hassle in setting up, worked like a real parser using parse trees to ensure accurate highlighting, and provided decent coverage of the most common programming languages in use today. Obviously, by opting to go with a JavaScript syntax highlighter, I chose to forgo the option of doing my syntax highlighting on the server side. Doing it on the server side still interests me, but for immediate and practical reasons, the quickest way to get syntax highlighting in my documentation would be to do it on the client side. I went searching around for JavaScript syntax highlighters, and these are the top three that met my criteria. Javascript code prettifier . This was the first decent one that I found. It's pretty basic but I got up and running very quickly. The documentation is sparse and the tone of the README quite ter...
Read more

The costs of configurable settings in your web application

By and large, the received wisdom when it comes to configurability and flexible settings for web applications is that more is better. Making something configurable frees up the engineer from having to make mundane (but necessary) changes that can be left to other people. It's desirable to change the state of software without having to rebuild or redeploy the code. There are a lot of obvious benefits to making software configurable, and these benefits are plain to all. What I'm going to focus on here are the costs of configurability, based on my experience and observations over five years of writing web applications full-time. These costs apply to other kinds of software beyond the realm of web applications. I just choose to limit the scope of discussion to web apps because these costs manifest themselves the most when there's a fast development cycle and rapid iteration. The following is intended to be a comprehensive, itemized breakdown of the costs of making an applicati...
Read more