Source code search engines

Krugle (good branding here) gets a $6 million IPO for a source code search engine:

"Finding Code: Finding, evaluating and downloading the right code is a common developer task that consumes massive amounts of developer time. 'This process has difficulties because of the way software projects and components are currently accessed on the Internet', notes Ken Krugler, Krugle’s co-founder and CTO. 'While current search engines are OK at finding Web pages, they don’t crawl source code repositories, archives or knowledge bases, and they don’t leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers need'" (Source).

When will there be an open source annotated code repository for, let's say, Blg Software written in PHP?

Web 2.0: Offline web apps

Gabor's blog observes that the problem of offline access to web apps will have to be solved before moving everything to browsers and web apps becomes feasible.

Larry Ellison and Sun's idea of a network computer was never realized because you don't always have a network. He hits the nail on the head:

"Display the UI in the browser, either by faking it or by actually running an application server locally."

Anyone who has fumbled around with dozens of complex GUIs like Java's Swing, Windows Forms, or the much easier Tcl/Tk which was the standard with Python for so long, has no doubt thought: Why not just use the browser as a GUI running off a local server (127.0.0.1) ? I do exactly that and it works.

Local servers are trivial easy to get going nowadays with EasyPHP, XAMP, or another version of WAMP or some other version of LAMP.

The idea of a collapsible network whereby offline you're using your local server and you connect to the internet via you local server as a proxy server seems viable. I'm just thinking economy of effort here. Assuming most people are lazy and have a lot of other things they coldbe doing with their time than mess around with the idiosyncracies of various GUIs.

I'd like to use DHTML plus Ajax and/or Flash as a GUI everywhere.

Ways that computer programming is like sex

The decline of western civilization is enumerated in this thought stimulating and long poetic conceit: programming is sex. Love this one:

"...there’s some odd people who pride themselves on their lack of experience."

This is called humility, a virtue that goes hand in hand with experience.

Multi column layout in CSS

Finally, support for multi-column layouts in CSS. Support for something that is completely standard in most weblogs.

It will be easy to make the blog into the main page of the website, easier to find a way to cram everything onto one page using CSS and not having to resort to tables and tag soup. The problems of multi-column are described in the article:

"The implications for web developers coding in CSS are tremendous. The only way to create multiple columns in CSS now is by jumping through hoops. A simple two column layout requires breaking a content-box into two child boxes and floating them. Try adding another column and you’ll find it almost a nightmare to code it with enough hacks so that every major browser renders it to a reasonable degree of similarity. I have yet to see a fluid four column layout using current CSS box model techniques."

The details:

"The W3C's CSS working group recently released a draft of a new multi column layout module--to be included (with possible modifications) into the CSS 3 specs. For those web developers that have been lamenting the lack of adequate multi column support in current supported versions of the CSS specs, this is an exiting addition."



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