Brennan’s Blog

The job market for software development is short on workers lately. When the Dot-com Bubble burst it had a chilling effect on the software development field. College students chose other majors and now there are not enough workers to fill the open positions. This situation has created a supply versus demand ratio that has boosted the salaries of those who are working as web developers. I had thought it was just a temporary phase and that college students would start to get back into the IT majors, but it has not happened yet. And despite offering very compelling starting salaries employers still cannot fill positions.

Last week I had three separate people ask me what they could do to get into web development. I am glad they asked because it is clearly a great time to get started while the job market is slanted heavily in the favor of new hires. I asked one of these people to send me a list of their questions so that I could respond here.

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I read several great blogs regularly and when I find something is really worthwhile, especially when it is long, I like to print it out and find a good chair to read it. It is just easier to read off paper than staring at a screen. But not many blogs are print-friendly. Now you could offer a print icon that sends your readers to a special page that just gives them the content that should be printed, but all of that work really is not necessary.

What you can do instead is add an additional stylesheet to your blog with the media attribute set to print instead of screen. For my blog I call this special stylesheet print.css and I have it hide the sections of my blog which are only useful when viewed on the computer, such as the header, footer and navigation.

For the blogs I read that do not have print-friendly pages I use jQuery and Firebug to trim the unwanted portions of the page that I do not want printed by setting the display property to none for each element I want hidden. It works some of the time but nearly as well as using a print stylesheet. By making this print stylesheet available on your blog you can do this extra work for your readers.

I have always wanted to know how some of the fancy layouts that Google uses actually work. The mail and reader applications both have sections within the page which I always assumed where just inline frames with the iframe tag which I personally avoid. But I recently discovered that you can achieve the same affect using div tags with the CSS value for overflow set to auto or scroll while the height is also set.

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I noticed that today CNN.com has been redesigned with a much cleaner look along with some design elements that remind me of Flickr.com, or perhaps just web 2.0 more generally. You can see how the photos stand out more now as well as the rounded corners and slick design elements that allow you to scroll through a series of photos in various parts of the home page and on an individual story page. The current top article on The New 7 Wonders has a tabbed interface for the story, video and photos. The videos are also inline in the page now instead of a popup window along with overlays for the next video much like is done on YouTube. I think it is a major improvement.

I am not a designer but I try to keep up with what is happening with modern website design. I am reading Don't Make Me Think which is a pretty good book so far. Many of the suggestions in the book seem to have been carried out on CNN.com.

It looks like a news website again. And it looks much easier to find something interesting at a glance.

I read HTTP compression in ASP.NET 2.0 by Mads Kristensen the other day and tried it out on a website that is using ASP.NET AJAX. I found that while the development web server run by Visual Studio handles it all just fine, IIS 6 on the server does not. Somehow the process is corrupting the page state. So while I want to use the compression to get what I can for bandwidth savings I had to work around this problem.

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You should have already heard the news. You can now get Safari for Windows. As a web developer I find this very exciting. And as much as I appreciated the improvements that came with IE7 I feel the browser is still lacking innovative features. For example, it has support for RSS but it does not really do a whole lot for you. Having Safari and Firefox as alternatives to the Microsoft browser will surely turn up the heat and compel Microsoft to give the IE development team more resources.

Improving Internet Explorer is important for every web developer because many companies, including my employer, only officially support the Microsoft browser. They still hold onto the premise that supporting rich functionality across browsers is too costly. While there is some necessary effort it is much less than it was just a few years ago because standards for HTML, CSS and Javascript have taken in hold in the major browsers. The competition that Safari will add will be just the right kind of pressure and contribute great ideas to the space. I just wonder if I will find enough reason to use Safari over Firefox, which leads to another important point.

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I have worked with tools like FreeTextBox and TinyMCE which are graphical HTML editors which run in multiple browsers. Developing these applications are difficult because of various browser incompatibilities and shortcomings. For a while the Apple made browser Safari did not have the necessary features for these graphical editors to work. If that were still true today and there was a Sliverlight editor it would automatically work in Safari using the Silverlight plugin which has been ported to the Mac for Firefox and Safari.

Since the Silverlight applications can be developed with C# it can conveniently avoid browser incompatibilities so the effort to produce a WYSIWYG editor would significantly be reduced. And with a Silverlight interface you may be able to add a few additional features that a browser cannot offer with an HTML/JS only solution.

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I seems that Apple has cracked open the door for third party applications on the iPhone. I hope this means that at least third party XHTML/AJAX applications will be possible. Many of the the mini applications (widgets, dashboard, gadgets) which have become popular over the past year are basically just mini web applications. They render their layout and graphics with standard XHTML, CSS and images with their behavior provided by an enhanced superset of Javascript.

While it may seem limited to networked applications, it will soon be possible to create web applications which work offline with local storage just like a "real" application. Such an application could locally store your preferences such as your zip code and weather data so that when you look at the weather forecast it does not always have to connect to the internet. Since the AJAX explosion there have been a greatly increasing number of tools to support development with Javascript so it is becoming easier every day to build these kind of applications.

But we can now consider using Java and .NET for these mobile applications which could eventually include the iPhone. It seems inevitable anyway. I think it is no accident that Silverlight was ported to work on MacOS X with a very small footprint. They clearly want to make it possible to deploy Silverlight applications to mobile platforms as well, and since the iPhone is running an OS which Apple claims is pretty much the same as MacOS X it may be trivial to extend Silverlight to the iPhone.

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Last week Microsoft announced Silverlight with cross-platform support for Windows and MacOS X. This was unexpected. And somehow they shrunk the runtime down to 4MB and met a goal of getting the installer to run in under 20 seconds. It is really an amazing feat and I am anxious to see what people build with it.

Today Sun announced JavaFX, a scripting friendly version of the Java platform which may compete on the same ground as Silverlight with a emphasis on the mobile market. Given Sun's track record I seriously do not expect much. I tend to believe that you will sooner see Silverlight applications on the new iPhone than JavaFX. I heard that at a recent Microsoft conference that Macs were everywhere. I think Microsoft may be warming up to Apple for some reason. Maybe they know that Apple will soon own a large portion of the mobile and home entertainment market and want to hedge their bets by having their hands in both cookie jars.

But what about SVG?

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I have updated LinkMindr.com with a few improvements. The big change is limiting the tag cloud to just 35 of the most recently modified tags. At the bottom I have a drop down list for all of the tags so users can still access all of their tagged items. This conserves real estate on the page and makes the most used tags more accessible.

As a part of this change I also converted the page to use PostBack events as triggers for the UpdatePanel which is a features of the new ASP.NET AJAX control suite. Previously I had a clever jQuery call handle all of my AJAX functionality but with the latest changes it became easier to handle this functionality with event triggering.

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