WebDevRadio

I got to chat with Matt Levine and Sean Schroeder from MuraCMS about, well, all sorts of stuff - a bit of CF historical stuff, the state of open source in the CF community, oh, and a bit of MuraCMS, the open source CMS built on ColdFusion.

I had a great chinwag with Nate Abele and Garrett Woodworth of the Lithium project - a new framework for PHP 5.3. Try as I might to inject Groovy and Grails in to the conversation, we kept coming back to PHP :) Curious about Lithium? Take a listen to see if their philosophy is for you.

Lots of small tidbits all cropped up around the same time. Palm (with its great webOS) looks to be trying to sell itself off. James Gosling, the father of Java, moves on to pastures greener (or just different). Opera Mini is now on the iPhone (and pretty fast too), and I rant a bit about my recent PHP experiences.

IE9 developer preview is out - are you testing with it yet? I recently found UserFly.com as a great tool to track and record your visitors' sessions, then found an older set of example code called MoveLogger if you're inclined to try to build the same thing from scratch. ClickHeat is a tool I've used to track where people are clicking on sites, giving you a pretty good idea of how visitors are engaging with your site. Some interesting conferences coming up over next few months - JSConf in DC, TXJS in Austin and NCDevCon in Raleigh. Know of any more?

Mostly a quick catch up letting you know what I've been up to, some new technologies I've found that might be of interest to you (Twilio and Titanium), where I'll be in the upcoming months, and an open invitation for your feedback. Also, a quick update on GroovyMag and JSMag - use coupon code "oneyearold" at http://jsmag.com to select a free issue. Email michael@webdevradio.com with your feedback, comments and questions.

I got a chance to catch up with some legendary names from the GR8 community while at CodeMash. Andres Almiray, Dave Klein, Chris Judd and Jim Shingler all gave me a few minutes of their time to talk about the Groovy year behind us and the GR8 year ahead of us.

We last left Frank back in 2006(!) with the publication of his (then) first book. I caught up with him to talk about his latest book (#6!) - Practical Palm Pre webOS Projects (we eventually get the title right!). Frank talks about the good, the bad and the ugly in the Palm Pre development world.

I got a chance to talk about web development stuff with Brian Hitney, Developer Evangelist with Microsoft. We talked about WebsiteSpark, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, touched on cloud computing and I kept forgetting the name of a podcast (it was the Startup Success podcast from Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley!).

I had a chance to sit down with Curtis Mitchell at the Raleigh Code Camp to talk about the Spark view engine for ASP.NET MVC.

I had a chance to catch up with local Jython hero and project lead (I get corrected early on!) Frank Wierzbicki. We cover some of the history, Jython players, web frameworks like Django, Pylons, TurboGears, future of Jython, and more. Frank takes *no* bait, despite my varied attempts at inciting a bit of friendly rivalry between the Jython/Python community and various frameworks.

I did another catch-up show, this time with Keith Murphy (last chatted with in August 2007). Keith talks a bit about his new book, the MySQL Administrator's Bible, his new Open Source Database Magazine (coming out soon) and some of the new developments in the MySQL camp.

I got a chance to chat with Robert Fischer, well known in the Groovy/Grails space for his work on Groovy plugins and recent GORM book. Robert and I chatted about dynamic languages on the JVM, his upcoming presentations on Agile and other NFJS talks, his GORM book and a new Polyglot Programming book he's working on for Manning.

This episode is solely a recording of Kyle Simpson's discussion of SWFObject - how it works, recent changes, common problems people have using it, and more.

I caught up with Jan and Chris at the JSConf in DC last weekend. We went over a bit of the couchdb background, what it's good for, what they're up with with couch.io, and some more goodies. Enjoy!

I had a chance to sit down for a few minutes with Satyen Desai from Yahoo to talk about YUI3. There's numerous architectural changes coming, and Satyen had presented a few of the major ones in his presentation at JSConf 2009.