“Usability doesn’t have to be complicated and almost anyone can do it says” Steve Krug, Author and Web usability consultant at Advanced Common Sense.
“Anyone who’s ever watched a usability test knows that they work remarkably well. Sitting someone down and having them use what you’re building while you watch is the best way to ensure that it will actually be usable. And yet very few organizations do usability tests. And the ones that do don’t do them very often. Why? It’s simple: most people think usability tests are expensive, time consuming, and hard to do” says Krug.
"Usabilty doesn't have to be complicated" Interview with Steve KrugDownload
A special shout out to Steve for his support for the Web professional community and for being the great guy that he is.
More About Steve Krug
After a decade writing computer manuals, in 1989 Steve Krug (pronounced “kroog”) moved up the food chain to usability testing and interface design so he could fix the problems instead of explaining them.
Since then, he’s evaluated and improved interfaces for a wide variety of clients, primarily in online services and the Web, including Apple, AOL, Netscape, the late, lamented Excite@Home, BarnesandNoble.com, Lexus.com, and Circle.com (originally Interactive Bureau).
His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based in Chestnut Hill, MA.
He currently spends most of his time reviewing existing sites and designs for new sites, conducting usability workshops, and helping clients resolve thorny interface problems. Check out Steve’s website at http://www.sensible.com/
Steve’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug: Usability Demo YouTube.com
Chances are if you’ve been in the Web space for awhile, then you’re familiar with ColdFusion from the early 1990’s. With the goal of providing you with an overview of the various development options available to Web developers and to update you with the latest resources available, I reached out to Matt Gifford, aka coldfumonkeh, Lead Developer with Fuzzy Orange Ltd. Matt specializes in ColdFusion, Flex and AIR development.
In this five minute interview, Matt shares is views on the benefits of developing in Cold Fusion and the size and scope of the “800,000 developer” community.
“Cold Fusion is the best development language out there and the Cold Fusion community is the friendliest and the most helpful” says Matt.
A special shout out to Matt for his support for the Web professional community and for being the great guy that he is.
More about Matt
Matt is the author of “Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion”, published by PackT publishing. He presents regularly at national and international conferences, user groups and online meetings, and has written tutorials and articles for online resources and leading UK industry magazines.
As an Adobe Community Professional for ColdFusion, Matt is a keen proponent for community resources and sharing knowledge. He regularly writes and releases open source ColdFusion applications and code samples, and loves a fresh Starbucks latte.
According to Wikipedia, in computing, ColdFusion is used to refer to both a commercial rapid application development platform invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in 1995, and the programming language used with that platform. Originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database, by version 2 (1996) it had become a full platform that included an IDE in addition to a “full” scripting language. As of 2010, versions of ColdFusion (purchased by Adobe Systems in 2005) include advanced features for enterprise integration and development of rich Internet applications.
Overview
One of the distinguishing features of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), which compares to the scripting components of ASP, JSP, and PHP in purpose and features, but its tag syntax more closely resembles HTML while its script syntax resembles JavaScript. “ColdFusion” is often used synonymously with “CFML” or “CFM”, but there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as server-side Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScript-like language known as CFScript.
Originally a product of Allaire and released in July 1995, ColdFusion was developed by brothers Joseph J. “JJ” and Jeremy Allaire. In 2001 Allaire was acquired by Macromedia, who in turn were acquired by Adobe Systems Inc in 2005.
ColdFusion is most often used for data-driven websites or intranets, but can also be used to generate remote services such as SOAP web services or Flash remoting. It is especially well-suited as the server-side technology to the client-side Flex.
ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition.
Main features
ColdFusion provides a number of additional features out of the box. Among them:
Simplified database access
Client and server cache management
Client-side code generation, especially for form widgets and validation
Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper
Data retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP, SMTP, POP, HTTP, FTP, Microsoft Exchange Server and common data formats such as RSS and Atom
File indexing and searching service based on Verity K2
GUI administration
Server, application, client, session, and request scopes
XML parsing, querying (XPath), validation and transformation (XSLT)
Server clustering
Task scheduling
Graphing and reporting
Simplified file manipulation including raster graphics (and CAPTCHA) and zip archives (introduction of video manipulation is planned in a future release)
Simplified web service implementation (with automated WSDL generation / transparent SOAP handling for both creating and consuming services – as an example, ASP.NET[1] has no native equivalent for [2])
Other implementations of CFML offer similar or enhanced functionality, such as running in a .NET environment or image manipulation.
The engine was written in C and featured, among other things, a built-in scripting language (CFScript), plugin modules written in Java, and a syntax very similar to HTML. The equivalent to an HTML element, a ColdFusion tag begins with the letters “CF” followed by a name that is indicative of what the tag is interpreted to, in HTML. E.g. to begin the output of variables or other content.
In addition to CFScript and plugins (as described), CFStudio provided a design platform with a WYSIWYG display. In addition to ColdFusion, CFStudio also supports syntax in other languages popular for backend programming, such as Perl. In addition to making backend functionality easily available to the non-programmer, (version 4.0 and forward in particular) integrated easily with the Apache Web Server and with Internet Information Services.
[edit] Other features
The first version of ColdFusion (then called Cold Fusion) was released on July 10, 1995. This first version was written almost entirely by one person, Joseph JJ Allaire. Primitive by modern standards, early versions of ColdFusion did little more than database access.[1]
All versions of ColdFusion prior to 6.0 were written using Microsoft Visual C++. This meant that ColdFusion was largely limited to running on Microsoft Windows, although Allaire did successfully port ColdFusion to Sun Solaris starting with version 3.1.
The Allaire company was sold to Macromedia, then to Adobe. Earlier versions were not as robust as the versions available from version 4.0 forward.
With the release of ColdFusion MX 6.0, the engine had been re-written in Java and supported its own runtime environment, which was easily replaced through its configuration options with the runtime environment from Sun. Version 6.1 included the ability to code and debug Shockwave Flash.
[edit] Release history
1995: Allaire Cold Fusion version 1.0
1996: Allaire Cold Fusion version 1.5
1996: Allaire Cold Fusion version 2.0
1997-June: Allaire Cold Fusion version 3.0
1998-January: Allaire Cold Fusion version 3.1
1998-November: Allaire ColdFusion version 4.0 (space eliminated between Cold and Fusion to make it ColdFusion)
1999-November: Allaire ColdFusion version 4.5
2001-June: Macromedia ColdFusion version 5.0
2002-May: Macromedia ColdFusion MX version 6.0 (build 6,0,0,48097), Updater 1 (build 6,0,0,52311), Updater 2 (build 6,0,0,55693), Updater 3 (build 6,0,0,58500)
2003-July: Macromedia ColdFusion MX version 6.1 (build 6,1,0,63958), hot fix (6,1,0,xxxxx), Updater 1 (build 6,1,0,83762)
2005-February-07: Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 (build 7,0,0,91690)
2005-September-27: Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7.0.1 (build 7,0,1,116466)
2006-June-28: Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 (build 7,0,2,142559)
2007-July-30: Adobe ColdFusion 8 (build 8,0,0,176276)
2008-April-03: Adobe ColdFusion 8.0.1 (build 8,0,1,195765)
2009-October-05: Adobe ColdFusion 9 (build 9,0,0,251028)
2010-July-13: Adobe ColdFusion 9.0.1 (build 9,0,1,274733)
Versions
[edit] Cold Fusion 3.1
Version 3.1 brought about a port to the Sun Solaris operating system. Cold Fusion studio gained a live page preview and HTML syntax checker.
[edit] ColdFusion 4
“Cold Fusion” moniker renamed simply as “ColdFusion” – possibly to distinguish it from Cold fusion theory.
[edit] ColdFusion 4.5
Version 4.5 brought the ability to natively invoke Java objects, execute system commands, and talk directly to a Java EE server.
[edit] ColdFusion 5
First release from Macromedia after the Allaire Corporation acquisition. The last to be legacy coded for a specific platform.
On January 16, 2001, Allaire announced a pending merger with Macromedia. Macromedia continued its development and released the product under the name ColdFusion 5.0. It retained the name “ColdFusion” through the remainder of version 5 releases.
[edit] ColdFusion MX 6
Prior to 2000, Allaire began a project codenamed “Neo”. This project was later revealed as a ColdFusion Server re-written completely using Java. This made portability easier and provided a layer of security on the server, because it ran inside a Java Runtime Environment. Senior software engineer Damon Cooper, still with Adobe on the LiveCycle team, was the major initiator of the Java move.
In June 2002 Macromedia released the version 6.0 product under a slightly different name, ColdFusion MX, allowing the product to be associated with both the Macromedia brand and its original branding. ColdFusion MX was completely rebuilt from the ground up and was based on the Java EE platform. ColdFusion MX was also designed to integrate well with Macromedia Flash using Flash Remoting.
With the release of ColdFusion MX, the CFML language API was released with an OOP interface.
[edit] ColdFusion MX 7
With the release of ColdFusion 7.0 on February 7, 2005, the naming convention was amended, rendering the product name “Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7″. CFMX 7 added Flash-based, and XForms-based, web forms and a report builder that output in Adobe PDF as well as FlashPaper, RTF and Excel. The Adobe PDF output is also available as a wrapper to any HTML page, converting that page to a quality printable document. The enterprise edition also added Gateways. These provide interaction with non-HTTP request services such as IM Services, SMS, Directory Watchers, and an asynchronous execution. XML support was boosted in this version to include native schema checking.
ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, codenamed “Mystic” includes advanced features for working with Adobe Flex 2.
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion 8
On July 30, 2007, Adobe Systems released ColdFusion 8, dropping “MX” from its name. During beta testing the codename used was “Scorpio” (the eighth sign of the zodiac and the eighth iteration of ColdFusion as a commercial product). More than 14,000 developers worldwide were active in the beta process – many more testers than the 5,000 Adobe Systems originally expected. The ColdFusion development team consisted of developers based in Newton/Boston, Massachusetts and offshore in Bangalore, India.
Some of the new features are the CFPDFFORM tag, which enables integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, some image manipulation functions, Microsoft .NET integration, and the CFPRESENTATION tag, which allows the creation of dynamic presentations using Adobe Acrobat Connect, the Web-based collaboration solution formerly known as Macromedia Breeze. In addition, the ColdFusion Administrator for the Enterprise version ships with built-in server monitoring. ColdFusion 8 is available on several operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003.
Other additions to ColdFusion 8 are built-in Ajax widgets, file archive manipulation (CFZIP), Microsoft Exchange server integration (CFEXCHANGE), image manipulation including automatic captcha generation (CFIMAGE), multi-threading, per-application settings, Atom and RSS feeds, reporting enhancements, stronger encryption libraries, array and structure improvements, improved database interaction, extensive performance improvements, PDF manipulation and merging capabilities (CFPDF), interactive debugging, embedded database support with Apache Derby, and a more ECMAScript compliant CFSCRIPT.
For development of ColdFusion applications, several tools are available: primarily Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, Macromedia HomeSite 5.x, CFEclipse, Eclipse and others. “Tag updaters” are available for these applications to update their support for the new ColdFusion 8 features.
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion 9
ColdFusion 9 (Codenamed: Centaur) was released on October 5, 2009. New features for CF9 include:
Ability to code ColdFusion Components (CFCs) entirely in CFScript.
An explicit “local” scope that does not require local variables to be declared at the top of the function.
Implicit getters/setters for CFC.
Implicit constructors via method called “init” or method with same name as CFC.
New CFFinally tag for Exception handling syntax and CFContinue tag for Control flow.
Object-relational mapping (ORM) Database integration through Hibernate (Java).
Server.cfc file with onServerStart and onServerEnd methods.
Tighter integration with Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.
Integration with key Microsoft products including Word, Excel, Sharepoint, Exchange and Powerpoint.
In Memory Management – or Virtual File System – an ability to treat content in memory as opposed to using the HDD.
Exposed as Services – an ability to access, securely, functions of the server externally.
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion 10
ColdFusion version 10 was confirmed to be in-work by Adobe at Adobe MAX 2010. The internal codename for the next release of ColdFusion is “Zeus”, but it is commonly referred to as ColdFusion X in blogs, on Twitter, etc.
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion Builder
Main article: Adobe ColdFusion Builder
Adobe ColdFusion Builder is the name for Adobe’s Eclipse based development IDE that can be used to build applications for ColdFusion. The product’s original codename, “Bolt,” is a reference to the original lightning icon for the product from the Allaire days.
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion Builder 1.0
ColdFusion Builder became available on 22 March 2010 along with Flash Builder 4.[2]
Features include:
Object Relational Mapping auto-configuration
Application Code Generation
Server management
Easily extensible through the Eclipse framework
CFML, HTML, Javascript, and CSS Syntax Highlighting
Code assist for tags, functions, variables, and components
Code folding
Snippet creation and management
Outline viewing
RDS Explorer for files and databases
Line-level Debugging
Refactoring
[edit] Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2.0
ColdFusion Builder 2.0 (codename “Storm”) was confirmed and previewed at Adobe MAX 2010 by Adobe. Major features include improved code navigation, searching improvements, code formatting and automatic method stub creation.
[edit] Features
[edit] Rich forms
ColdFusion Server includes a subset of its Macromedia Flex 1.5 technology. Its stated purpose is to allow for rich forms in HTML pages using CFML to generate Flash movies. These Flash forms can be used to implement rich internet applications, but with limited efficiency due to the ActionScript restrictions in place on Flash forms by Macromedia.
Flash forms also provide additional widgets for data input, such as date pickers and data grids.
In previous versions of ColdFusion, some form validation and additional widgets were available using a combination of Java applets and JavaScript. This option persists for those who do not wish to use Flash, however not all features are supported.
An example:
ColdFusion also includes some XForms capability, and the ability to “skin” forms using XSLT.
[edit] PDF and FlashPaper generation
ColdFusion can generate PDF or FlashPaper documents using standard HTML (i.e. no additional coding is needed to generate documents for print). CFML authors simply place HTML and CSS within a pair of cfdocument tags and specify the desired format (FlashPaper or PDF). The generated document can then either be saved to disk or sent to the client’s browser. ColdFusion 8 has now introduced the cfpdf tag which allows for unprecedented control over PDF documents including PDF forms, and merging of PDFs. These tags however do not use Adobe’s PDF engine but a combination of the commercial JPedal Java PDF library and the free and open source Java library iText.
[edit] ColdFusion Components (Objects)
ColdFusion was originally not an object-oriented programming language similar to PHP prior to PHP 3. ColdFusion falls into the category of OO languages that do not support multiple inheritance (along with Java, Smalltalk, etc.).[3] With the MX release (6+), ColdFusion introduced basic oo functionality with the component language construct which resembles classes in OO languages. Each component may contain any number of properties and methods. One component may also extend another (Inheritance). Components only support single inheritance. Object handling feature set and performance enhancing has occurred with subsequent releases. With the release of ColdFusion 8, Java-style interfaces are supported. ColdFusion components use the file extension cfc to differentiate them from ColdFusion templates (.cfm).
[edit] Remoting
Component methods may be made available as web services with no additional coding and configuration. All that is required is for a method’s access to be declared ‘remote’. ColdFusion automatically generates a WSDL at the URL for the component in this manner: http://path/to/components/Component.cfc?wsdl. Aside from SOAP, the services are offered in Flash Remoting binary format.
Methods which are declared remote may also be invoked via an HTTP GET or POST request. Consider the GET request as shown.
This will invoke the component’s search function, passing “your query” and “strict” as arguments.
This type of invocation is well-suited for Ajax-enabled applications. ColdFusion 8 introduced the ability to serialize ColdFusion data structures to JSON for consumption on the client.
The ColdFusion server will automatically generate documentation for a component if you navigate to its URL and insert the appropriate code within the component’s declarations. This is an application of component introspection, available to developers of ColdFusion components. Access to a component’s documentation requires a password. A developer can view the documentation for all components known to the ColdFusion server by navigating to the ColdFusion URL. This interface resembles the Javadoc HTML documentation for Java classes.
[edit] Custom tags
ColdFusion provides several ways to implement custom markup language tags, i.e. those not included in the core ColdFusion language. These are especially useful for providing a familiar interface for web designers and content authors familiar with HTML but not imperative programming.
The traditional and most common way is using CFML. A standard CFML page can be interpreted as a tag, with the tag name corresponding to the file name prefixed with “cf_”. For example, the file IMAP.cfm can be used as the tag “cf_imap”. Attributes used within the tag are available in the ATTRIBUTES scope of the tag implementation page. CFML pages are accessible in the same directory as the calling page, via a special directory in the ColdFusion web application, or via a CFIMPORT tag in the calling page. The latter method does not necessarily require the “cf_” prefix for the tag name.
A second way is the development of CFX tags using Java or C++. CFX tags are prefixed with “cfx_”, for example “cfx_imap”. Tags are added to the ColdFusion runtime environment using the ColdFusion administrator, where JAR or DLL files are registered as custom tags.
Finally, ColdFusion supports JSP tag libraries from the JSP 2.0 language specification. JSP tags are included in CFML pages using the CFIMPORT tag.
Currently, alternative server platforms generally support ColdFusion 8 functionality, with minor changes or feature enhancements.
[edit] Interactions with other programming languages
[edit] ColdFusion and Java
The standard ColdFusion installation allows the deployment of ColdFusion as a WAR file or EAR file for deployment to standalone application servers, such as Macromedia JRun, and IBM WebSphere. ColdFusion can also be deployed to servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat and Mortbay Jetty but, because these platforms do not officially support ColdFusion, they leave many of its features inaccessible.
Because ColdFusion is a Java EE application, ColdFusion code can be mixed with Java classes to create a variety of applications and use existing Java libraries. ColdFusion has access to all underlying Java classes, supports JSP custom tag libraries, and can access JSP functions after retrieving the JSP page context (GetPageContext()).
Prior to ColdFusion 7.0.1, ColdFusion components could only be used by Java or .NET by declaring them as web services. However, beginning in ColdFusion MX 7.0.1, ColdFusion components can now be used directly within Java classes using the CFCProxy class.[4]
Recently, there has been much interest in Java development using alternate languages such as Jython, Groovy and JRuby. ColdFusion was one of the first scripting platforms to allow this style of Java development.
[edit] ColdFusion and .NET
ColdFusion 8 natively supports .NET within the CFML syntax. ColdFusion developers can simply call any .NET assembly without needing to recompile or alter the assemblies in any way. Data types are automatically translated between ColdFusion and .NET (example: .NET DataTable ? ColdFusion Query).
A unique feature for a Java EE vendor, ColdFusion 8 offers the ability to access .NET Assemblies remotely through proxy (without the use of .NET Remoting). This allows ColdFusion users to leverage .NET without having to be installed on a Windows operating system.
The move to include .NET support in addition to the existing support for Java, CORBA and COM is a continuation of Adobe ColdFusion’s agnostic approach to the technology stack. ColdFusion can not only bring together disparate technologies within the enterprise, but can make those technologies available to a number of clients beyond the web browser including, but not limited to, the Flash Player, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Mobile devices (SMS), Acrobat Reader (PDF) and IM gateways.
[edit] Acronyms
The acronym for the ColdFusion Markup Language is CFML. When ColdFusion templates are saved to disk, they are traditionally given the extension .cfm or .cfml. The .cfc extension is used for ColdFusion Components. The original extension was DBM or DBML, which stood for Database Markup Language. When talking about ColdFusion, most users use the acronym CF and this is used for numerous ColdFusion resources such as user groups (CFUGs) and sites.
CFMX is the common abbreviation for ColdFusion versions 6 and 7 (aka ColdFusion MX).
[edit] Alternative server environments
ColdFusion originated as proprietary technology based on Web technology industry standards. However, it is becoming a less closed technology through the availability of competing products. Products include Railo, BlueDragon, IgniteFusion, SmithProject and Coral Web Builder.
The argument can be made that ColdFusion is even less platform-bound than raw Java EE or .NET, simply because ColdFusion will run on top of a .NET app server (New Atlanta), or on top of any servlet container or Java EE application server (JRun, WebSphere, JBoss, Geronimo, Tomcat, Resin Server, Jetty (web server), etc.). In theory, a ColdFusion application could be moved unchanged from a Java EE application server to a .NET application server.
Rethinking User Research and Usability Testing for the Social Web – Interview with Dana Chisnell, usabiltyworks.net.
Whether it’s software, a cell phone, a website or a refrigerator, your customer wants no, expects your product to be easy to use.
“While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using the same user research and usability testing methods and techniques we were using in 1994″ says Dana Chisnell, author, speaker and Usabilty guru and usabiltyworks.net.
In this five minute interview with Dana, she talks about her upcoming session “Rethinking User Research and Usability Testing for the Social Web,” MIMA Summit, in October. She shares some real world examples and the risk of not getting this right. “We know that conducting usability tests can tell us where people get frustrated” says Dana.
In this four minute interview with Steve Fisher, User Experience Director at yellowpencil.com, Steve shares his thoughts on developing with Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. Steve also responds to questions about the need for designers to understand the development process and the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to education.
A shout out to Steve for his contribution to the Web professional community and for taking the time to chat with us.
Since 1996 Webprofessionals.org has been advocating on behalf of interdisciplinary education for Web professionals.
Why is this topic important?
Of all of the career industries, the Web profession requires perhaps the greatest cross-disciplinary interaction and development processes requiring the whole brain (left and right) connections. This is due to the combined skills most sought out by employers today because the work in Web profession requires an element of art and design, technology, business and communication, self management and project management skills. As a result, the organization will continue to support Web professional education by identifying the opportunities, barriers and challenges to interdisciplinary education.
What does Interdisciplinary mean and what are the barriers?
According to Wikipedia Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic fields into one single discipline. An interdisciplinary field crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged.
Originally the term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies – along with their specific perspectives – in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of AIDS or global warming require understanding of diverse disciplines to solve neglected problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women’s studies or ethnic area studies.
The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.
Development
Although interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy. Julie Thompson Klein attests that “the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge” while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy) to further understand their own material.
Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology paid little attention to the social analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined science and technology studies programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as nanotechnology, which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include quantum information processing, an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science, and bioinformatics, combining molecular biology with computer science. Sustainable Development as a research area deals with problems requiring analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres; often an integration of multiple social and natural science disciplines. Some institutions of higher education offer accredited degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies. Norfolk State University, a historically black institution located in Norfolk, VA, is one such example of this.
At another level interdisciplinarity is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization. On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another. JaCorey Royal was an excellent academic adventurer in the field of interdisciplinarity.
Barriers
Because most participants in interdisciplinary ventures were trained in traditional disciplines, they must learn to appreciate differing of perspectives and methods. For example, a discipline that places more emphasis on quantitative “rigor” may produce practitioners who think of themselves (and their discipline) as “more scientific” than others; in turn, colleagues in “softer” disciplines may associate quantitative approaches with an inability to grasp the broader dimensions of a problem. An interdisciplinary program may not succeed if its members remain stuck in their disciplines (and in disciplinary attitudes). On the other hand, and from the disciplinary perspective, much interdisciplinary work may be seen as “soft,” lacking in rigor, or ideologically motivated; these beliefs place barriers in the career paths of those who choose interdisciplinary work. For example, interdisciplinary grant applications are often refereed by peer reviewers drawn from established disciplines; not surprisingly, interdisciplinary researchers may experience difficulty getting funding for their research. In addition, untenured researchers know that, when they seek promotion and tenure, it is likely that some of the evaluators will lack commitment to interdisciplinarity. They may fear that making a commitment to interdisciplinary research will increase the risk of being denied tenure.
Interdisciplinary programs may fail if they are not given sufficient autonomy. For example, interdisciplinary faculty are usually recruited to a joint appointment, with responsibilities in both an interdisciplinary program (such as women’s studies) and a traditional discipline (such as history). If the traditional discipline makes the tenure decisions, new interdisciplinary faculty will be hesitant to commit themselves fully to interdisciplinary work. Other barriers include the generally disciplinary orientation of most scholarly journals, leading to the perception, if not the fact, that interdisciplinary research is hard to publish. In addition, since traditional budgetary practices at most universities channel resources through the disciplines, it becomes difficult to account for a given scholar or teacher’s salary and time. During periods of budgetary retraction, the natural tendency to serve the primary constituency (i.e., students majoring in the traditional discipline) makes resources scarce for teaching and research comparatively far from the center of the discipline as traditionally understood. For these same reasons, the introduction of new interdisciplinary programs is often perceived as a competition for diminishing funds, and may for this reason meet resistance.
Due to these and other barriers, interdisciplinary research areas are strongly motivated to become disciplines themselves. If they succeed, they can establish their own research funding programs and make their own tenure and promotion decisions. In so doing, they lower the risk of entry. Examples of former interdisciplinary research areas that have become disciplines include neuroscience, cybernetics, biochemistry and biomedical engineering. These new fields are occasionally referred to as “interdisciplines.” on the other hand, even though interdisciplinary activities are now a focus of attention for institutions promoting learning and teaching, as well as organizational and social entities concerned with education, they are practically facing complex barriers, serious challenges and criticism. The most important obstacles and challenges faced by interdisciplinary activities in the past two decades can be divided into “professional”, “organizational,” and “cultural” obstacles[4].
[edit] Interdisciplinary studies
Interdisciplinary studies is an academic program or process seeking to synthesize broad perspectives, knowledge, skills, interconnections, and epistemology in an educational setting. Interdisciplinary programs may be founded in order to facilitate the study of subjects which have some coherence, but which cannot be adequately understood from a single disciplinary perspective (for example, women’s studies or medieval studies). More rarely, and at a more advanced level, interdisciplinarity may itself become the focus of study, in a critique of institutionalized disciplines’ ways of segmenting knowledge.
Perhaps the most common complaint regarding interdisciplinary programs, by supporters and detractors alike, is the lack of synthesis—that is, students are provided with multiple disciplinary perspectives, but are not given effective guidance in resolving the conflicts and achieving a coherent view of the subject. Critics of interdisciplinary programs feel that the ambition is simply unrealistic, given the knowledge and intellectual maturity of all but the exceptional undergraduate; some defenders concede the difficulty, but insist that cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind, even at that level, is both possible and essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions.
The Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies
Since 1998 there has been an ascendancy in the value of the concept and practice of interdisciplinary research and teaching and a growth in the number of bachelors degrees awarded at U.S. universities classified as multi- or interdisciplinary studies. The number of interdisciplinary bachelors degrees awarded annually rose from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 a year by 2005 according to data from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NECS). In addition, educational leaders from the Boyer Commission to Carnegie’s President Vartan Gregorian to Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have advocated for interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary approaches to problem solving in the 21st Century. This has been echoed by federal funding agencies, particularly the NIH under the Direction of Elias Zerhouni, who have advocated that grant proposals be framed more as interdisciplinary collaborative projects than single researcher, single discipline ones. At the same time, longstanding bachelors in interdisciplinary studies programs many existing and thriving for 30 or more years, have been closed down, in spite of healthy enrollment. Examples include Arizona International (formerly part of the University of Arizona), The School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University, and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University; others such as the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, and George Mason University’s New Century College, have been cut back. Stuart Henry has seen this trend as part of the hegemony of the disciplines in their attempt to recolonize the experimental knowledge production of otherwise marginalized fields of inquiry. This is due to threat perceptions seemingly based on the ascendancy of interdisciplinary studies against traditional academia.
[edit] Historical examples
There are many examples of when a particular idea, almost on the same period, arises in different disciplines. One case is the shift from the approach of focusing on “specialized segments of attention” (adopting one particular perspective), to the idea of “instant sensory awareness of the whole”, an attention to the “total field”, a “sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity”, an “integral idea of structure and configuration”. This has happened in painting (with cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. According to Marshall McLuhan, this paradigm shift was due to the passage from an era shaped by mechanization, which brought sequentiality, to the era shaped by the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.[5]
In this thirteen minute interview with Chad Windnagle, Senior Web Developer at s-go Consulting, Chad shares his thoughts on previous post regarding the advantages and disadvantages of developing with Joomla and WordPress.
A shout out to Chad for his contribution to the Web professional community and for being the professional that he is.
Chad Windnagle in “his own” words:
After reading much of the misinformation that was posted by Alec, a creative director of the company Foliovision, on a previous Webprofessionals.org blog post,, I felt the need to respond to the factual references regarding Joomla. I intend to do this without addressing Alec’s opinion. Opinions and preferences aren’t something to be contested, but factual information should always be set straight in the record, that’s what I intend to do.
Alec starts his post by addressing “Joomla” as “Joomla/Mambo” – and that’s just the beginning.
To be fair, Alec is right about Joomla and Mambo being related. That relationship ceased to be when Joomla 1.5 was released. The history of the Joomla project is really interesting, and those of us developers using the product who have ‘been around’ know most of it by heart. I’ll quote Wikipedia’s information on it:
“Joomla was the result of a fork of Mambo on August 17, 2005.” 1
Joomla version 1.0 was essentially a renamed version of Mambo. The code base was the same. However with the release of Joomla 1.5, the code core was a total rewrite, with some legacy code in place to help with migration. Joomla 1.5 Beta was released in September 2006, a little more than a year after the Mambo split. 2
So at this point, a post written in 2011, nearly 6 years after the split and 5 years after a total code rewrite, putting Mambo and Joomla in the same sentence is quite insulting to everyone in both projects. They aren’t related, they are different products.
To add to this, Joomla 1.7 is now the latest short term release of Joomla, and it’s a far cry from Mambo, Joomla 1.0, and Joomla 1.5! I notice that while Alec didn’t seem to do his research on Joomla & Mambo, he acknowledged that WordPress is no longer going by the project name ‘b2/cafelog’ either. (WordPress started as b2/cafelog before being forked in 2003) 9
Moving on to the next point of Alec’s post, he addresses some advantages and disadvantages of Joomla. This is something that can get pretty opinionated, an advantage for one person is another developer’s disadvantage. But there’s some serious problems with both of his lists:
Alec’s Advantages:
Good menu system.
Strong static page structure (cf. weblog).
Built-in membership/community features.
Long time on the market.
I’m searching here.
Joomla’s static page structure might be good, but a majority of the time developers use Joomla’s categorical structure for sites. Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 both featured a Section / Category / Content (or article) hierarchy content structure, not much unlike WordPress’s category structure. Joomla 1.6 introduced the category and unlimited subcategory concept as well.
Moving on, Alec talks about built in membership / community features. To this I have to say “what the hell?!”. Joomla does not have built in membership or community features. It has a user manager with some built in user access settings. But it is certainly not a membership system or a community system by any means. To quote Joomla co-founder Brian Teeman:
“Please can you show me Joomla’s built in membership/community features as I’ve been using Joomla for 6 years and 16 days and I’m still to find them.” 3
Now without knowing what Alec’s exact situation was I can’t say that his distribution of Joomla didn’t have some community features that came with it when he installed it, but I can promise anyone who installs Joomla’s core package will not find anything resembling a membership system or a community-centric application.
Alec ends his list of advantages by saying he’s still searching for more advantages. While I could certainly help him out with that, I just want to point out a few of the advantages he boasts about WordPress that he apparently failed to recognize in Joomla:
Huge community.
Easy to theme in a unique way. A WordPress site does not have to look like a WordPress site.
Great plugin architecture.
Plugins for everything.
Lots of great professional developers.
Fast development cycle. Improvements every year.
Huge community. Joomla has a decent sized community. Forum.joomla.org has these statistics: Total posts 2,447,339 | Total topics 575,025 | Total members 512,054 4
I’m not here to compare Joomla’s community to WordPress, they’ve got some great people and I’m happy for them, but to recognize WordPress for it’s community, and not Joomla for it’s community is a clear and rude bias. Joomla has a huge multinational community in many different places, whether it be official channels like Joomla.org, or on some other sites like ataaw.org, nooku.org, mailing lists, twitter, facebook – the community of Joomla is enormous.
Whether or not Joomla is or isn’t easy to theme is subjective, but, does a Joomla site have to look like a Joomla site? Certainly not! To expound on that further, anyone experienced with different web applications can spot ‘tell tail’ signs of applications. One thing I always notice with Joomla is the signup / login module. With wordpress it’s that ever-present Month / Date category filter on the right side of nearly every wordpress site in existence.
Now with all that said, who really cares if you can spot a Joomla site or a wordpress site. Are you ashamed of it or something? Does a site have to be ‘untraceable’ for some reason? Is there an unspoken rule I’m not aware of here?
Plugins for everything – That’s awesome for wordpress. I’m glad that they’re able to meet a lot of different application scenarios. Joomla has plugins (we call them exensions) for ‘everything’ too. Why didn’t that make it onto Alec’s post I’m not sure. But, if there’s something in particular he was looking for from a plugin he couldn’t find, what was it? (And was it available for WordPress?)
“Lots of great professional developers” is again, a pretty subjective advantage, but again, good for wordpress! Joomla also has what I would define as great professional developers too. If Alec is able, he has my personal invite to any Joomla day he’s able to make time to attend. I’m sure after a few beers with some of the very open and welcoming Joomla community he’ll agree that we have great and professional developers also.
A fast development cycle is something that Joomla is pretty behind on, but we are making progress in this area. The project has moved to a Long Term / Short Term release system. The project has planned for short term releases being put out every 6 months and long term releases approximately every 18 months. 5
Alright so now it’s time to look at the disadvantages that Alec has brought up about Joomla. Again, it’s important to remember, opinions are just that, opinions. But there are a few factual items to look at:
Built-in performance pretty sluggish/clunky.
Weak weblog section
Hard to theme. A Mambo/Joomla site looks like Mambo/Joomla, like it or not.
Crappy built-in SEO. Leading SEO plugin belongs to a very peculiar developer and is encrypted (have fun repairing the SEO plugin, we reverse engineered and decrypted it for our site to make our changes even after paying for it).
Nasty, nasty core code. Very difficult to fix broken items
Most good plugins are pay.
Rather mediocre developers. Anyone who likes to code in Joomla/Mambo in 2011 ought to see a psychiatrist.
Developer pricing is all over the map as there are many old-school Mambo/Joomla developers still ought there churning out convoluted future-resistant code quite affordably.
Performance is a never-dying discussion in any circle. But let’s be honest, we don’t know what kind of environment that Alec had installed Joomla in, and it could’ve been a top of the line server with all the perfect settings, or it could have been an overloaded GoDaddy account on a day when Alec’s internet connection was being hit pretty hard. Only Alec can answer this of course, but to cite something as subjective as performance as a disadvantage without saying what environment it’s in is pretty weak.
Weblogging, blogging, is something that WordPress is designed to do, and it does it extremely well. Joomla is designed to manage content (hence why WordPress is a blogging platform and Joomla a CMS platform), it can be used (like WordPress) to do many different things, and blogging is one of them. But Alec is right here, blogging in core Joomla isn’t as plug-and-play as WordPress. However with certain extensions it can be a great blogging platform. Just like WordPress being a great ecommerce platform with the right extensions as Alec talks about in his interview. Fair is fair, here.
I already talked about the appearance of Joomla site’s, and there’s a lot of great Joomla developers building sites that look like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Changing the appearence of any site is a matter of modifying HTML, CSS, and images. If a Joomla site looks like another Joomla site it’s not because Joomla makes it hard to change, it’s because a developer didn’t bother to change it.
SEO was a huge complaint in Joomla 1.0 (or Mambo) from the (“nonexistant”) Joomla community, and the core developers worked hard to improve this in Joomla 1.5, and even more to improve it in Joomla 1.6. Not many expert Joomla developers use the core SEO functions, and Alec admits that he and his team paid for an extension, the ‘leading’ one. I don’t know which one it was, but a quick look at the extensions Joomla directory for the Editor’s pick and the most popular extensions shows that sh404sef is the current ‘leading’ extension. 6, 7
A quick look at sh404sef’s Terms of Service shows one thing: GNU GPL license. (8). What that means is if Alec was using the ‘leading’ extension, and that leading extension was sh404sef, he should have received a GNU GPL extension, freely modifiable under the license’s terms. Reverse engineering doesn’t exist by definition with GPL licensed software because the nature of the license is to encourage exploration in the code, to help to contribute, and I’d like to thank Alec for helping to fix any issues and contributing back to the Joomla project. I hope he let the developers know what he did so they could see what he and his team fixed!
Alec complains about the core code of Joomla / Mambo being ‘nasty’ and ‘difficult to fix’. Since I’m still not totally sure what Alec was using (there’s a big difference, as we already discussed, between Mambo and Joomla) this could be true, or false. All software has bugs, though. There’s many people in the Joomla community who would agree with Alec, and many others who wouldn’t. That said, whether or not the code is nasty will always have to remain a personal opinion.
The Joomla community is really quite unique, but Alec states that the community is fractured due to the fork. People in the Joomla community are passionate. They love what they’re doing, they are opinionated and they want to see the best for the community. The Joomla community is community lead, there is no single company or owner to tell people what to do or direct the project. When highly opinionated, skilled, and passionate people get together amazing things happen (like the three world renowned, and also free content management systems!), unfortunately sometimes disagreements cannot be resolved. However, its important to appreciate the fact that differences of opinion has lead to some really cool Joomla-centric projects being created. But again, now we’re getting into perspective. The truth is that yes, not everyone in the Joomla community is willing to forgive and forget, but it certainly isn’t the majority of us!
Now here’s something that Alec states as a disadvantage that I’m not at all sure why he thought it was: “Most good extensions are pay”. First of all let’s take a look at the most popular Joomla extensions according to the JED10:
There’s 20 of the most popular extensions on the JED. There’s two that are paid. That’s 10% of what is arguably the good extensions being paid extensions. Most of the ‘good extensions’ on the first page of the JED’s are actually free – 90% of them, to be precise. To top it off I did a quick check on the Joomla extensions directory and found that 5434 extensions of the 8166+ 10 of all the extensions in the JED non-commercial. That’s about 67% of the entire JED being listed as free, non-commercial licensed extensions. A little more arithmetic shows that 2732 actually are commercial (33%).
The point is, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is that Alec is dead wrong when he says that most of the good Joomla extensions are commercial. They most of the extensions, and most of the good ones, are free!
Now Alec starts to say some things that I’d call fighting words: “Rather mediocre developers. Anyone who likes to code in Joomla/Mambo in 2011 ought to see a psychiatrist.” Now, I understand that Alec was just trying to be jovial and good humored, but this sort of comment is really quite offensive to the people who’ve contributed to the project. There’s lots of people who enjoy ‘coding in Joomla’ (not sure about Mambo!). And, a lot of them are senior developers who have either given up jobs or positions at companies to work in Joomla, or have been hired out of the Joomla community to become senior level developers for other companies.
The final point that Alec makes about Joomla is a rather curious one. He states that ‘developer pricing is all over the map’. I didn’t see any sources or research that he provided to back up this point (or any of his other ones, actually) but I suppose this sort of thing might be true. But I highly doubt it’s true for Joomla alone. Developer pricing can vary by experience level, location, economic market standards etc… For any CMS platform, WordPress and Drupal included.
WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla/Mambo: An Experienced Web Professsional Perspective
In this fourteen minute interview with Alec Kinnear, Creative Director Foliovision, Alec shares his thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of developing with the three commonly used Content Management (CMS) systems.
A special shout out to Alec for his contribution to the Web professional community and for being the really nice guy that he is.
Alec was kind enough to share the following detail in “his own” words:
Drupal Advantages
Very clean core code.
Good project leadership from Acquia.
Some very good developers available for hire.
Fewer clowns available for hire (you can either code Drupal or you can’t, it’s harder to fake it).
Can be made very server efficient in the right hands (scaleable).
Disadvantages
Less ready made drop-in plugins. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty almost every time.
More imposing default user interface.
Fewer developers.
More expensive developers.
Joomla/Mambo
Advantages
Good menu system.
Strong static page structure (cf. weblog).
Built-in membership/community features.
Long time on the market.
I’m searching here.
Disadvantages
Built-in performance pretty sluggish/clunky.
Horrid built-in URLs.
Weak weblog section.
Hard to theme. A Mambo/Joomla site looks like Mambo/Joomla, like it or not.
Crappy built-in SEO. Leading SEO plugin belongs to a very peculiar developer and is encrypted (have fun repairing the SEO plugin, we reverse engineered and decrypted it for our site to make our changes even after paying for it).
Nasty, nasty core code. Very difficult to fix broken items.
Fractured community (never healed after Joomla/Mambo split back in 2006).
Most good plugins are pay.
Rather mediocre developers. Anyone who likes to code in Joomla/Mambo in 2011 ought to see a psychiatrist.
Developer pricing is all over the map as there are many old-school Mambo/Joomla developers still ought there churning out convoluted future-resistant code quite affordably.
WordPress
Advantages
Huge community.
Easy to optimise for performance thanks to Donncha O Caoimh and Frederick Townes. Great work guys.
Easy to theme in a unique way. A WordPress site does not have to look like a WordPress site.
Great plugin architecture.
Plugins for everything.
Lots of great professional developers.
Fast development cycle. Improvements every year.
Active leadership from Automattic and founding team. Particular thanks to Mark Jaquith for keeping the community running with less nepotism and more fairness than most collective human endeavour.
Disadvantages
Fairly weak core code (in comparison to Drupal, but not Joomla!) but core getting better every year.
Lots of really crap faker developers in the pool who couldn’t build a working website to save their mother’s life.
Lots of popular but seriously broken plugins which will cripple your website performance forever and make it nearly impossible for you to cleanly upgrade (NextGen Gallery, I’m looking at you but not just you).
Really crappy commercial themes which are heavily marketed but compromise your ability to either upgrade or switch themes and compromise performance for the life of your site.
Weak static page management without adding plugins. Easily fixed with said plugins.
Too fast an upgrade cycle. You have to keep upgrading your site, whether you like it or not, for security reasons. There are no security releases only new versions. Feel the pain for a commercial site with running a full complement of plugins. Corollary: choose your plugins and plugin developers very, very carefully for cleanliness of code and frequency of update.
Conclusion
For a very large commercial project, I can see a justification for choosing Drupal. On a big project, most of your expense will be custom development anyway – everything has to be optimised and integrated – so you don’t much care one way or another about a myriad of plugins which you will probably not use. I still wouldn’t make that trade-off: slightly better core code for a vast pool of community contributed code. But it’s a defensible position.
Joomla/Mambo should die a violent death. We did our first CMS project in Mambo and last year redeveloped a couple of existing sites in Joomla. Our best developers – very platform agnostic – threatened to quit if I accepted anymore Joomla work. Such crappy, convoluted spaghetti code they’d never seen. And these developers have had ample chance to see the worst side of WordPress.
The only justification for a site in Joomla/Mambo is that it’s legacy (i.e. you already did a lot of custom development on it six years ago and don’t have the budget to migrate) or that you are part of an international network standardised on Joomla/Mambo and the mothership discourages anyone from leaving the central platform (our client’s situation). For everyone else, just migrate out and count your blessing that you got your site out alive. Enjoy the fresh air and clean code of WordPress (or Drupal).
WordPress is the platform of choice in my opinion for the small, medium or large business. Whatever holes you can find in WordPress (editorial management process, page management, ecommerce, membership site) are easily solved with high quality plugins.
The cool part about WordPress is that the core is kept clean so that you aren’t forced to load code you don’t need if you want a simple weblog. Thus WordPress can be a weblog, a corporate information site, a membership site, a store or an international news network.
We regularly develop advanced real estate sites in WordPress, maintain a very sophisticated insurance site, have developed elaborate furniture rental systems and develop the most delicious cooking sites as well as gorgeous online literary reviews. Not to mention political, news and law sites. All in WordPress.
The danger with WordPress include the overhyped commercial themes which don’t solve your problems but pretend to (I’m looking at you DIYthemes.com and Thesis, WooThemes and ElegantThemes). A related danger are the weak developers and hangers on who have infested the huge WordPress community and enthusiastically give bad advice, whether about SEO or gallery plugins. These clowns will happily break your website for pay or into a defective by design commercial theme. Forewarned is forearmed.
Just like any other serious professional endeavour you need steady hands on deck when you want to take your site to the next level if you want to maintain performance, appearance and compatibility. Once you have substantial traffic or need ecommerce, WordPress is no longer a DIY venture for the non-programmer.
According to Alec, “We personally recommend people start a new site on WordPress.com unless they are developing for an established business. Once you have an audience or a functioning business, self-hosted WordPress is the way to go. Even the sky is not a limit. There are few sites we could not develop better and faster in WordPress.”
Adobe Max 2011 LA – Interview with Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems
Sponsored by the Adobe Systems, Inc. the Adobe MAX conference is one event and perhaps the only event that I know of that successfully combines a strong element of design, technology and business for its attendees. To explore what Adobe has is in store for this years Adobe Max LA conference scheduled for October, 2011, I reached out to interview Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist.
In this six minute interview, I asked Ben if he had any buzz that he could share surrounding this years event. I also asked him to share his thoughts regarding just how effective the mixing of the content ranging from creative, development and business is for the event and its diverse group of attendees.
“The days of being a silo with a single product or single technology are over. If you are building websites and using instruments HTML, CSS such as JavaScript, and backend, may be is not enough. You are going to be talking everything from Ajax to Flash to Flex to all technologies as well. If you are a designer, then you will more be faced on the coding also, you know that’s the reason we put scripting in your Flash with that’s the reason there is so much buzz around, around products like you know the preview of Edge right now, which lets designers to do, to start doing some animation, before it wasn’t really possible. And yeah the necessity for developers, designers for all players in this space to broaden their skills sets, understand to other source work, understand the work flow integration, process has become very, very compelling, really critical, really important and so you know, we actually don’t see that if people come to Max anymore who sign up for all the ColdFusion sessions, or all the Flex sessions and that’s it.” Ben Forta, Adobe Systems.
Attn: WebProfessionals.org Members: Use the Adobe MAX discount coupon code WOW011 on the Adobe Max registration page and save BIG bucks.
Transcript:
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: I am on the phone with Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems with a great history, ColdFusion and Flex, good afternoon Ben and thanks for being to the interview.
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Hi Bill, good to talk to you, thanks for having me.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: I appreciate that Ben, you obviously have been around this space for number of years going back to Macromedia and Allerier days with ColdFusion, great pleasure to talk to you today and I have a couple of questions for you about Adobe Max.
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Ah, Max my favorite topic, go for it.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, I appreciate that, so any buzz that you can share with us regarding to this year’s Max?
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Well, a little, well I can’t tell you, just, I think it will be a lot of you know really interesting product announcements, some don’t knows that will well completely roll people, if you think of a scene of, I suppose Adobe Max before, there are interesting real surprises this year. So now I can’t tell you any specifics about any of those but I think it is probably worth noting that if you look at Max for the last few years, we have a history of showing very compelling stuff, going back several years ago, when we first showed this sneaker feature that got a standing ovation from the audience, then Adobe is coming with the new [indiscernible] [00:01:15] in Photoshop probably released to couple years ago when we first showed that its own features, started working with flash and plug, so then we ended up on an iPad and then last year with that of TV. So every year we’re showing very compelling things that’s of unexpected and help revolutionize the space really push the platform forward.
I think you will be very, very excited about what we have installed this year. So, you know I think previous years, we had two very compelling key notes, we are working them right now, we have our sneaks’ session that we do Tuesday evening every year and I am looking for the summer sneaks content right now as well. It was very, very cool content.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: With that in mind, I have a question for you so, because this event has an element of technology force, it has an element of creative, because it is creative medium and it has a heavy development conference, in other words it’s one of the events that I know of, one of the only events that I know of kind of combines the element of art, technology and business and so with that in mind, curious to know as a technology evangelist, how do you think that mix the overall development community and how does that work for the overall creative community?
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : That’s a good question, and you’ve obviously been attending Max for a long time, if you ask that question because that’s probably the metamorphosis that Max went through amidst [indiscernible] [00:02:33] over a decade ago when it was a very much of single product above all the conference and it’s a lot along the way. It is, it isn’t very much those mixes, in fact you know when you look at the content, we divide them into, into three very high level tracks for the developers, designers, and then the vision track which is more the, the higher level of the case studying history, business opportunities, kind of a less technical law, industry trends and things. So we do try to console those, I think it’s really important because the days are being a silo with a single product or so with technology over. If you are building websites and using instruments such as JavaScript, and backend, backend may be is not enough. You are going to be talking everything from Ajax to Flash to Flex to all technologies as well. If you are a designer, then you will more be faced on the coding also, you know that’s the reason we put scripting in your Flash with [indiscernible] [00:03:22] that’s the reason there is so much buzz around, around products like you know the preview of Edge right now, which lets designers to do, to start doing some animation, before it wasn’t really possible.
And yeah the necessity for developers, designers for all players in this space to broaden their skills sets, understand to other source work, understand the work flow integration, process has become very, very compelling, really critical, really important and so you know, we actually don’t see that if people come to Max anymore who sign up for all the ColdFusion sessions, or all the Flex sessions and that’s it. They will do cross knit, do mix and there is a lot of crossovers below that and that’s good, it’s important, we try to solve and complete into one story. We want people to read our story you know they should come to learn for, it’s people who will come to Max for one particular thing but always we want to expose them to a broader variety of expanded options, so we can realize just what they can be doing and what we want them to built.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, actually that’s a great summary of that, I appreciate that and thanks, I think that’s what is so valuable about Adobe Max is that it brings all of those elements together with a strong emphasis on business right at the end of the day, you know that’s great to be a savvy developer, terrific, creative, artistic designer, but at the end of the day there is a strong business element to all of the great stuff that we do right?
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yeah, and we actually see that in, even our content as well in Max, so if you go back years ago, the keynotes were, let’s talk about what to improve, let’s talk about what to do in ColdFusion, every product by product centric and look at about what we’ve done on the last few things that quite a bit and the keynotes and the big messaging is very much driven about what problem you are trying to solve hence with the recognition that, you know your business need, hence the problem you are addressing is going to likely necessitate a variety of products, a variety of technologies all working nicely together, and so you have the, we have done a big shift away from the very product silo centric thing to, to business problems and business solutions and helping developers and designers actually address real problems and become a very successful in doing so. So yeah that is entirely inline with how we position Max now a days.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: That’s what important one, right at the end of the day we want not only you know developers to think like designers and designers to think like developers but at the end of the day, we also want them to start working better together right, it’s all whole work flow environment?
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yep, absolutely.
Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah, excellent, well I think that’s a terrific summary on that, I appreciate, so we look forward to seeing you when in October, what date, Ben?
Ben Forta, Adobe Systems Inc. : Yeah, I will tell you, it’s going to be Los Angeles, registration is still open, and it’s really fun, it’s going to be, hopefully we expect this to be our biggest Max hits. We have lot’s of very surprises in store, some of the pre-conference sessions are actually already sold out, but there is still [indiscernible] [00:06:05] Max itself you haven’t attended go to max.adobe.com and you can register right away. You know there is two days, we have two days of keynotes, we have the big special party that would be, even more special this year I can promise you. On the second night we have the sneaks, we have the Max awards, sessions, this year we have greatly expanded the “Bring Your Own Device” sessions that became popular over the last couple of years where [indiscernible] [00:06:31] bring their own devices, so you are up, and books and pretty complex scenarios and so yeah it’s everything Max has always been just bigger, more of its, more people and more products, more technologies and whole of more fun as well, so if you haven’t signed up yet, I’d love to see you there. Go to max.
Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt
Mobile JavaScript – Interview with Christopher Schmitt, Heatvision.com
The Mobile web is growing eight times faster than the desktops and Smartphone sales will surpass PC sales in 2012 says Christopher Schmitt at Heatvision.com
In this eighteen minute interview with Christopher Schmitt, author, Web standards advocate, designer and principle at Heatvision.com, a small new media publishing and design firm from Austin, TX, Christopher shares his thoughts and perspectives on the mobile JavaScript frameworks, mobile design and mobile best practices.
We also discuss his thoughts on why Markup and Scripting is important for Web Designers, some of the takeaways from a upcoming HTML5 Cookbook he is collaborating on and a totally online Mobile JS Summit that he has planned complete with discounts for WOW members as well as a number of other events that he has planned.
I continue to be amazed and impressed with just how incredibly intelligent and down to earth Web professionals like Christopher Schmitt are and I’d like to give him, his co-authors and his collaborators on the following events for Web professionals. It’s a great time to be a Web pro and I’d highly recommend that you learn more about Christopher and his support for the Web professional community.
Demystifying HTML5 – Interview with Bruce Lawson, Author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera
Suddenly, everyone’s talking about HTML5, and ready or not, you need to get acquainted with this powerful new development in web and application design says Bruce. Some of its new features are already being implemented by existing browsers, and much more is around the corner.
In this seven minute interview with Bruce Lawson, author, Web standards advocate and evangelist at Opera, Bruce shares his thoughts and perspectives on HTML5 as well as some takeaways from his HTML5 book for Web professionals.
A special shout out to Bruce Lawson for the interview and his time. Bruce is a down to earth guy and we would like to thank him publicly for all that he does to support Web professionals and the Web professional community at large.
Here’s an intro to his book as well as a few links to check out.
Written by developers who have been using the new language for the past year in their work, this book shows you how to start adapting the language now to realize its benefits on today’s browsers. Rather than being just an academic investigation, it concentrates on the practical—the problems HTML5 can solve for you right away.
By following the book’s hands-on HTML5 code examples you’ll learn:
•new semantics and structures to help your site become richer and more accessible
•how to apply the most important JavaScript APIs that are already implemented
•the uses of native multimedia for video and audio
•techniques for drawing lines, fills, gradients, images and text with canvas
•how to build more intelligent web forms
•implementation of new storage options and web databases
•how geolocation works with HTML5 in both web and mobile applications
All the code from this book (and more) is available at www.introducinghtml5.com
Beyond Usability: Emotion as the New User Experience with Kelly Goto, principal of gotomedia, LLC San Francisco, CA
Today’s connected experiences are no longer limited to a single laptop or mobile device. High expectations and dwindling patience have pushed customer demands to a new level.
In this fourteen minute interview with Kelly Goto, author, blogger and principal at GotoMedia based in San Francisco, CA, Kelly shares insights about “design ethnography” and tips to rethink your design and research approach and gain insight into the needs and desires of your customer in a truly contextual manner.
We also talk about the importance of understanding “Markup and Scripting” for Web designers and how members of her team are most effective as “left brain and right brain” Web professionals.
According to Wikipedia, Ethnography (from Greek ethnos = folk/people and grapho = to write) is “the science of contextualization” often used in the field of social sciences—particularly in anthropology, in some branches of sociology,[2] and in historical science—that studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture. It is often employed for gathering empirical data on human societies and cultures. Data collection is often done through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Ethnography aims to describe the nature of those who are studied (i.e. to describe a people, an ethnos) through writing. In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a “field study” or a “case report,” both of which are used as common synonyms for “ethnography”.
Data collection methods
One of the most common methods for collecting data in an ethnographic study is direct, first-hand observation of daily participation. This can include participant observation. Another common method is interviewing, which may include conversation with different levels of form and can involve small talk to long interviews. A particular approach to transcribing interview data might be genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols. Questionnaires can be used to aid the discovery of local beliefs and perceptions and in the case of longitudinal research, where there is continuous long-term study of an area or site, they can act as valid instrument for measuring changes in the individuals or groups studied. Traditionally, the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable informants who know well the activities of the community. These informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the community, often using chain sampling. This process is often effective in revealing common cultural common denominators connected to the topic being studied. Ethnography relies greatly on up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is one of the keys to this process. Ethnography is very useful in social research.
Differences across disciplines
The ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily by anthropologists but also frequently by sociologists. Cultural studies, economics, social work, education, ethnomusicology, folklore, geography, history, linguistics, communication studies, performance studies, advertising, psychology, usability and criminology are other fields which have made use of ethnography.
Cultural and social anthropology
Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronis?aw Malinowski, Ethnologische Excursion in Johore by famous Russian ethnographer and naturalist ( “The moon man”) (1875) Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson or “The Lele of the Kasai” (1963) by Mary Douglas. Cultural and social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career.[citation needed] The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common.[8] Ethnographies are also sometimes called “case studies.”[9] Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities and its variations through ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought. Classic examples are Carol Stack’s All Our Kin, Jean Briggs’ “Never in Anger”, Richard Lee’s “Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers,” Victor Turner’s “Forest of Symbols,” David Maybry-Lewis’ “Akew-Shavante Society,” E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nuer” and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Tristes Tropiques”. Iterations of ethnographic representations in the classic, modernist camp include Bartholomew Dean’s recent (2009) contribution, Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia.
Bronis?aw Malinowski among Trobriand tribe
A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate, and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat. Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from the formal sciences. Material culture, technology and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects and the history of language change are another group of standard topics.Practices of childrearing, acculturation and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure. Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them.[15]
As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed the “ethos” of the culture. Clifford Geertz’s own fieldwork used elements of a phenomenological approach to fieldwork, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about a region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about “webs” instead of “outlines”[16] of culture.
Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing “bio-confessional” ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan). Later “reflexive” ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. “Experimental” ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.
[edit] Sociology
Sociology is another field which prominently features ethnographies. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, with some well-known early examples being Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr.. Some of the influence for this can be traced to the anthropologist Lloyd Warner who was on the Chicago sociology faculty, and to Robert Park’s experience as a journalist. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. Other important ethnographies in the discipline of sociology include Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Algeria and France, Paul Willis’s Learning To Labour on working class youth, and the work of Elijah Anderson, Mitchell Duneier, Loic Wacquant on black America and Glimpses of Madrasa From Africa, 2010 Lai Olurode. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
[edit] Communication studies
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely employed by communication scholars. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen’s analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking ‘Like a Man’ in Teamsterville, paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.
Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communication behaviors, seeking to answer the “why” and “how come” questions of human communication. Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally or the way firemen communicate during “down time” at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, participate in and/or directly observe the particular social group being studied.
