Thus, only a programmer can access the data. Those same programmers whom likely don't fully understand the information collected and stored within the database. Programmers care about stuff like, structure, performance, security, servers and whatnot but data is just data. Later programmers will use an ORM to piece back together the data which was broken apart into a relational database only to re-structure the data into an object format. I could go on and on here, but my point is: SQL can be really stupid. Objects are easy. Resources are easy too. This got me to thinking... 

Not too long ago I was skimming a research paper about HTTP Database Connector (HDBC) because about two years ago I came up with an idea. The idea was simple. A lot of data is accessed via the web, thus why not just access your data via a RESTful web data source instead through a custom built application fetching off of back end SQL database(s)? At the time I thought the idea to be revolutionary, but I'm certainly not the first to come up with this idea though: JasonDB, CouchDB, Google RestDB.

I think most anyone can understand objects, especially subject matter experts (SME) on particular objects, e.g. a chemist understand the toxicology of lead and mercury but knows nothing about SQL. Let's use an example to illustrate. Both ways we just want to get the price of a wheel for a specific car. 

Accessing and manipulating data shouldn't be difficult. I think using REST as a gateway framework to our data sets, we keep things simple for the poor programmer (sucker) who has to design a web application around the data for the people that actually make use of the data.

Unfortunately, sleep mode did not work well with the media center (IR receiver, wake-up stuff) and furthermore could be confusing and frustrating. Following the Keep It Simple Stupid methodology, disabling sleep mode seemed the best option at the time. The thought occurred to me that if I could decommission this media PC then I would save electricity.   

It also just so happens that Kitty, my lovely wife, was in the market for a new computer, thus I formated the old media center computer instead of buying a brand new PC ($400+). Given all these conditions, in a mixed up kind of way I ended up saving money with a Boxee box - yes, I can be a real a tight-ass sometimes. 

Institutions already using Blackboard Learn or Vista/CE could leverage their existing system to popup an easily accessible content management system for the university. Think about how you share and backup files right now? Sending emails, sharing usb drives, mapping windows or mac network shares? (Try sticking a usb stick into your iPad). Using Blackboard Drive with the Content Collection could potentially simplify and standardize how users share files within the university. There are other hidden benefits too: backups and accessibility. Any flies you put in the Content Collection is backed up so you can worry more about making files than loosing them. Your files are accessible anywhere via the Internet by just logging into Blackboard normally and browsing to the files stored on the website.

Granted you don't get the benefit of the Blackboard CMS, but you could leverage other tools that support WebDAV, e.g HTTP Commander. This all boils down to a useful combination of tools to enhance education. The teacher spends less time on focused on technology (with questions like, how do I share my files?) and more time teaching.

Currently there are few options for mixing course evaluations and Blackboard (depending on your wallet size) and therefore other universities might have an interest in this extension. You can download the B2 from the open source project page. See video below for an eight minute introduction.

Researching the API actually took longer than the actual coding. I felt before writing this web application, I should know some Blackboard best practices first. The open source community was quite helpful and can be found on projects.oscelot.org. I did notice that Hibernate did not want to integrate due to classpath issues in tomcat and ActiveObjects did not work well with Oracle. The B2 should be database agnostic and is designed to work with both SQL Server and Oracle based Blackboard installs. The Spring framework was used for routing Controller actions. There is still a lot of room for improvement but it's a good start I believe.

The code to generate this list can be seen below. One special functionality of this list is to be able to re-order your list. This is done by sending an ajax call to your reorderingUrl anytime an item is moved. However, I noticed that my objects were not given the correct Id. Makes it difficult to reorder an item when your passing out incorrect Ids. 

Notice the itemIdAccessor="getId()" this means that item.getId() should be called to get the Id for the item. After some digging I found that getId() must return a String (it was an Integer in my case) to work correctly. This bugged me though since most Ids are typically not Strings. Oh well.

The documentation is lacking for ActiveObject but I was able to get it working quite easily. As soon as I saw the interface annotations for this library, I knew it would be a blast working with - assuming the pesticides had been spread around the source code e.g. no bugs. The website can be found here: http://java.net/projects/activeobjects/pages/Home

Below I have an example on how to use Active Objects. Let us assume our web application has the concept of "templates" which we want to persist in the database. Templates can have questions, instances and permissions (those are all just interfaces too). As you can see below we just define java interfaces with get and set methods. You don't implement the methods, just define them for reflection by AO. Also every interface will have a getID() method inherited from the parent Entity class. You can also add any annotations to describe any more specific mappings between your Java interface, other interfaces and also types for the database table. For example, below I use @OneToMany and @SQLType(Types.CLOB).

I had attempted to use Active Objects with a Blackboard Building Block (also called a B2), but the Blackboard API didn't seem to want to give me a proper information on how to connect to the database (Bb v 9.1.7). Therefore I never actually got around to using this code, but I'll share it with you since you're already here. And I wanna give a big shout out to Peter Fokkinga's since I'm using his DbUtils class which can be found here.

So how would we use this Database class? Assuming the virtual installation worked consistently, below is an example using Spring with controller request mappings of how to do an edit and update.

If I come onto any projects that need a standalone website I would like to combine the Grails or Play! framework and use ActiveObjects for the Model part of the MVC framework - resulting in sheer Java bad-ass-ery. I know Java is a huge language and web frameworks only covers a small part of it's ability; however, I really like the idea of Java becoming a competitor for simple turnkey web apps, the same ones that can be made in a short time using the conventions of CakePHP, Zend, Django and Rails. Developing in Play! and ActiveObjects is just plain easier. I don't imagine that JEE, ContextFactories and extensive xml configurations are just going to magically disappear (you know job security and all that), but this is the age of designing RESTful web services and shunning away the complexities of CORBA and even SOAP. 

I'm sure in ten years, something new will be along to lay rest to REST (sorry I couldn't resist) but for now, the general consensus seems to be that web applications should be very simple to develop and maintain, i.e. wham, bam, thank you mam.

In minutes I had configured a profile: https://ktdockins.coursesites.com/

There is a lot of potential here, even for those who are not instructors at universities. For example, someone who just wanted to offer an online course could use this - imagine this site http://www.aslpro.com/ was merged into CourseSites, forging an online class with a large repository of ASL videos. A lot of websites exist which aim at educating people, why pay for website hosting, website design, website up keep (for those that don't know css, html, jquery, php, etc)?

Don't forgot Blackboard collaborate. A powerful tool which is essentially a live virtual classroom. I prefer Collaborate over Webex, Livemeeting, Dimdim and Adobe Connect; while Collaborate isn't flawless, it is very slick and being heavily developed on at this time.

CourseSites is also used for collaborating with other Blackboard users; currently I am a member of the ASR user group and several cohorts. These aren't really used to teach a structured course but rather to learn through a community-like process. I may setup a course (if I can think of a good idea) to illustrate some Blackboard tools and advantages to distance learning.

If you don't know about Picasa go check it out. It allows you to organize your photos and even has facial detection software so you can detect people in your album. It's sort of like tagging your friends in Facebook except that Picasa does it for you automatically. I can imagine this same algorithm would make Google+ very popular in the realm of photography (at least where people you know are actually in the photos).

Why tell Facebook where you are, your phone knows that already. There are so many benefits here I can't list them. Given that Google rules the Android world, and many of the applications that make smart phones great... they can't go wrong.

After I signed up for Google+, I noticed a whole new experience with in my Chrome browser (also another Google product). It seems that Google+ has this +1 button everywhere, and it will let me know about all the cool stuff Google+ can offer. It's everywhere. In reality, it is going to be impossible to ignore Google+.

Obviously, I sound like a big Google Fanboy so I'm going to talk about something else besides how wonderful Google is. I'm not a stock guy and over $500 per share seems very, very steep. I have no clue what will happen to Google's stock but I can guess that apart from a government take over (to prevent googolopoloy), there is great promise in Google Corp. 

I know their apps are amazing, and developers (including myself) love to work with the api. It is simple. It is built by creative minds and crafted with simplicity in mind - not to mention the documentation. Google Apps provides clean documentation, tutorials to get started and plenty of client library support.

My biggest beef with Google Apps is that if there is a bug with the products, it's difficult to get in touch with a "real person." Also, why have they not opened the developer api for Google+ yet? I may have to put some of my Google experience to use and develop a Google+ application - which will hopefully rival Facebook's Graph API which happens to be pretty sleek.

Which brings me to my next beef. The APIs change quite frequently and depreciate rapidly (for example, see the Google Spreadsheet API). And Facebook is notorious for changing it's API constantly. What's FBML again? Now, granted I am a web developer and not a business hat, I have really been looking at this from the developer perspective and, I can tell you from this view... Google+ has no where to go but up. It's still not ready to compete with Facebook, but it's getting closer every day.