LobsterMonster.org

Last week I participated Devoxx 2009 conference in Antwerp. It was a great success!

The speaker list was very good. Just to pick some, I really enjoyed Antonio Goncalves' presentation about Java EE 6, Franck Greco's talk about HTML5 and Robert C. Martin's talk about development craftmanship.

I was delighted to see that XMPP was part of so many presentations at the conference. Patrick Chanezon's and Guillaume Laforge's demo of Google's Appengine and Groovy was based on XMPP. Ross Mason's presentation iBeans: dead-simple integration for the Web included examples implementing XMPP. And Ofcourse Frack Greco's presentation HTML 5 Communications - The New Network Framework for the Web was heavily XMPP related.

I think Devoxx 09 was a great success. I hope I have the opportunity to join it next year too!

Those who could not join, please check Devox 09 presentation from Parleys.com.

I had afternoon free, so I decided to do some more Superfeeder.com testing. I did some improvement for my "breaking news" service. It has now daughter service with a simple user interface to add and remove RSS feeds one wants to follow.

Couple of my friends are using this too, so I decided to create also a "RSS Mayhem" -page. On that page all RSS feeds followed are being published. When you log in to the page, your client will create anonymous, session based subscription to pubsub nodes. There are quite much Atom items published at the moment, about 15K a day.

If you want to have your own RSS view, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll create you a account for you to follow only the feeds you decide.

I had some free hours this nice Sunday afternoon so I did a simple comment page using Geode and XMPP to test how Geode and Google Maps works.

If you have Geode and Strophe compatible browser, you can drop a message to the "comment service" at http://www.lobstermonster.org/cheers . Your message is then displayed on the map at the page.

Since XMPP is used as transport protocol you can see comments by other users on the page at "real time". Buddycloud.org users can send messages to this service directly using their clients. You can see messages on the page of course even you do not have Geode compatible browser. Browser needs to be Strophe compatible then.

It's quite fun actually when zooming a bit and just to follow the messages send around the world.

As before, if anyone is interested about the source or how it's done in lower level, I'm happy to share the code and answer any questions.

I wanted to try some new stuff: XHTML-IM and smack. As a result you can now read BBC news in Lobstermonster Lounge and comment them in real time.

I created a simple bot using smack who has subscribed to the BBC News PubSub Service. As it gets new message he sends the messages directly to the chat channel.

The bot publishes the messages as XHTML-IM messages, so the output is directly nice and fit's the chat.

The news are displayed as XHTML messages only for web clients that supports "get elements using tagname and namespace" -JS function. Sorry, I'm lazy sometimes.

Come to follow and discuss what's happening in the world!

Since the depression is here, I decided to check my HTML skills and see if I can work on that field too or I should just give up and start begging like the guy on the left. Hmm, sadly even our CV's look the same.

I tried begging and I sucked at it. I was very good going the drinking part though... So I need to keep my programming skills up.

Well, the real reason why this site exists is that I needed to set up my own XMPP server for my personal use. Luckily my girlfriend's laptop was old enough so I bought her a new one and the old one has now new responsibilities.

After the XMPP server was up and running I wanted to try some jQuery stuff since I needed to do a small project with that at work. Finally I ended up doing this site too.