When I began my personal blog last year, I was investigating new technologies beyond the IBM Collaboration Solutions stack. This last week I've been attending and presenting at the conference, including covering one of those new technologies. The experience for me has changed drastically the direction I was heading. But this is not about a vendor's products, this is about the open source technologies I intend to pursue over the next year.
Last year I blogged about an initiative to take TitanDb to the Apache Foundation as an incubation project. Yesterday, the next step for TitanDb was announced, when the Linux Foundation welcomed JanusGraph, a project which uses TitanDb as its starting point. The current documentation will look familiar to anyone who has investigated TitanDb, but the news will be welcomed by the TitanDb community. So it's worth keeping an eye on the JanusGraph website.
A few weeks ago, IBM announced Watson Workspace, the final name for Project Toscana, and its API Watson Work Services. The product itself has similarities to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but this post is not about discussing a comparison of the products. It's about the API backing it.
Watson Work Services is a REST API that uses GraphQL, a method of querying and posting via REST that focuses on configurability. Whereas traditional REST services have fixed endpoints that take fixed parameters and return fixed data objects, GraphQL is a sort of "API-as-a-service". You call an endpoint, pass a JSON object determining what elements of which data you want to return, include any dynamic variable values. The queries are passed to an engine at a REST service endpoint which parses the JSON passed, replaces any variables with the dynamically passed values, and returns just what the application or user asks for. This may include data from what, in a traditional REST API application, would be from different REST endpoints. For example, to get members and messages from a space, you might need to make a REST call to get the space ID, then another REST call to get its members, and a third to get the messages.
Over the last few months a lot of what I've had to do has come from combining frameworks. Usually one of those frameworks is Vaadin. But whenever you're combining frameworks of any kind, it usually means some content is pre-configured, which may conflict with settings in another framework. If you're not familiar with the framework and the technologies in use, it's a lot like looking at hieroglyphics without a Rosetta Stone! The result is a lot of learning on the job.
Earlier this week I had problems with high CPU utilisation and had to restart my PC. I took the opportunity to bite the bullet and install some Windows Updates. What I saw brought my mind back to UX and coding of applications. For at least five minutes, the progress displayed as "100% Complete". It prompted me to issue the following tweets:
Developers, progress bar should never show 100% complete. It should be 0% of next process or gone. Windows updates 100% complete for minutes