Fooling around with AJAX has been on my web programming to-do list for quite some time — like years.  I’ve read bits and pieces on it, but I never had the right project come along at the right time.  Finally the planets aligned. With a series of 15 google calendars, and my task is to make one web page that will allow users to easily navigate between them.  You can see the first working prototype here.  I created a table in MySQL that holds the information on each of the calendars, and a PHP script that delivers the proper Google embed code based which calendar is selected.

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I have been working my way through Vladimir Prelovac’s new book WordPress Plugin Development.  Mr Prelovac is an active contributor of quality WordPress plug-ins.  If you’re an active user of plugins take a look and you’ll probably find a couple of his in your mix.  So in his latest book you can rest assured you’re hearing from a writer with extensive experience in this area.

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So it has been a couple of weeks now that I’ve been playing around with the OpenSolaris operating system on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop.  And I really like it.  I’ve installed it three times — once on a spare hard disk, once in a Sun Virtual Box running inside Windows XP, and this final time as a multi-boot partition on my regular hard drive.  Each time I’ve gotten a little better and faster at getting the install done.  So what’s so good about this that I’ve spent so much time messing around with it?

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Already a couple of days into my OpenSolaris installation and I am loving it.  There have been continuing challenges — for instance I needed to do some under-the-hood configuration changes to get the suspend feature to work.  The open source music player Songbird is a great alternative to iTunes — but you need to download extra codecs to play mp3 files (it defaults to the open source oga format.)  And connecting a USB drive formatted with NTFS is touch — in fact I just gave up and reformatted it in FAT32.  But these are just little tests, and make it all a fun puzzle.  And my first introduction to the development tools is very positive.

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Sun is sort of like the much geekier cousin of Apple.  Founder Scott McNealy has always had a very network-centric focus.  In the early days of the internet it was true that most of the server architecture ran on Sun equipment.  Java is a Sun program, and they recently acquired MySQL.  The company has had its ups and downs in recent years, trying to move to more of a software/services basis.  Part of this move has brought a more open source focus, and there is now an open source version of the Solaris operating system, OpenSolaris.  I got a copy recently from a rep at the Nercomp Annual Conference, and decided to give it a try.

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Facebook, Wikipedia, the photo sharing site Flickr and others are household names, crucial resources in people’s daily lives.  These web applications have vibrant development communities extending their core functionalities, building greater value and encouraging even wider adoption.  Application development in much of higher education has been slow to adopt the successful technologies and strategies used by these leading web companies.  But with the maturing of key technologies, rise in user expectations, and cost sensitivity brought on by the current economic crisis the time is now.  Corporate, or in the higher-ed world central IT units need to start learning from, and adopting these practices.

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