Posted by Charlie
Tue, 08 Aug 2006 08:59:00 GMT
Over the weekend we pushed another update. This update continued the rollout of the new user interface, with changes to the search page and communities page. The friends page and ratings pages are slated for updates later this week.
We also spent a lot of time fixing bugs that occur in Internet Explorer 6 sp2 (including the g bug)- that's what you are probably using if you have Windows XP.
Internet Explorer 6 sp1 though still has issues - thats the version you are likely running if you have an older version of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows ME, etc.). We're in the process of setting up our test lab to include IE SP1.
One of the difficulties in testing IE is that it is tied to the operating system. That means you cannot run two different versions of IE on the same machine.
However, there is an very clever way around this. You can install software from VMWare that creates "virtual" machines. Using VMWare, on our Linux box, we can create any number of "virtual" machines running Windows XP, Windows 2000, etc. You can also create virtual machines for other Linux Operating Sytems, Solaris, FreeBSD, and if rumour is correct, soon Mac OS X. Its really an amazing program.
Posted in Development | 1 comment
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:20:00 GMT
We just rolled out another update to the server that includes an improved user interface for the comments and map editor pages.
As part of the update, we also made some significant changes to the way comments are implemented. As a result, we had to delete all the existing comments. Sorry if this causes any problems.
Next up on the todo list is improving the search page, adding a home page and adding full text search of comments.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:55:00 GMT
After the the latest upgrade to Google Maps yesterday, we've seen lots of these errors:
- TypeError: g has no propertie
- Unspecified error
Right now are tracking them down.
On the bright side, our new automatic error reporting is catching these errors and logging them to our bug database.
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:00:00 GMT
Over the last few weeks we've spent a lot time improving MapBuzz's user interface. We've hired a graphics designer, who has been busy creating mockups for the site. In parallel, we've been updating the site to match the new mockups.
Last weekend we rolled out the first set of updated pages. The new pages include the main map page, the map sidebar on the right, and parts of the editor page.
In the next week we'll finish the editor page, the discussion page and the search page. After that, we'll update the community page, friends page and account information pages. We will also add a new home page that will hopefully make it simpler for new users to get started with MapBuzz.
Posted in Features | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sun, 16 Jul 2006 23:47:00 GMT
We pushed another release on Friday that adds:
- Deleting maps
- Tagging maps
- Lots of bug fixes
This week will focus on implementing a new user interface, adding the ability to comments tags, and mapping search results.
On the admin side, we've now automated the deployment of database updates. For the last couple of months we've been able to automatically deploy new code and run tests - but updating the database took manual effort.
This was an unsatisfactory because it was easy to make mistakes, difficult to synchronize changes from multiple developers and hard to rollback failed updates. Happily all these issues are now fixed.
Posted in Features | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:45:00 GMT
After updating to Apache over the weekend, we then pushed a new release.
This release includes a number of new features:
Much improved editing functionality. You can now create new points, lines and polygons.
Upload of GPS data. If you have a handheld GPS, you can now upload the data you collect and show in on a map.
Improved search. We've added searching for tags and fixed a number of usability annoyances.
We've also fixed lots and lots of bugs.
At this point, we've almost completed all our planned features. The main things left are map styles (so you can pick the color of geometries drawn on map), deleting maps and features, and improving the user interface.
The most important of these features is improving the MapBuzz user interface. We've been working with a user interface designer for the last few weeks, and will start to roll out updates next week.
Posted in Releases | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sun, 09 Jul 2006 07:34:00 GMT
Most people don't realize that over 70% of all web sites are hosted by the Apache web server program. Apache was born at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. It grew through hundreds of patches contributed by users to the original code base. Thus, it was one of the first successful open source projects and laid the ground work for many projects to come. Today the Apache Foundation has grown into the premier incubator for open source projects as you can quickly tell by perusing its web site.
Having said all that, it turns out that many of the newer web application frameworks such as Rails don't run very well on Apache. Traditionally, each request to a web site starts a new program that performs the request. However, newer frameworks tend to use dynamic languages which means they have slow startup times. On the web that is untenable.
The usual workaround is to start a number of applications to serve requests ahead of time and leave them running. Each request is then sent to one of the application depending on how busy they are. This is often done using a technology called fast cgi. Since Apache doesn't have good fast cgi support, it tends not to be used for web sites that use Ruby on Rails or other similar frameworks.
It turns out though that fast cgi isn't a very good technology. It tends to be unreliable and hard to manage. Over the years, each web development community (the java community, the python community, now the rails community) comes to this realization and looks for a different approach. History has shown the best one is to embed a mini web server into each application. That way the main web server (like Apache) can simply act as a load balancer and forward requests to idle applications using standard web protocols (i.e., HTTP).
However, until the last few months you couldn't easily do this for Ruby on Rails. Thus MapBuzz has been using an alternative web server called lighttpd. Lighttpd is fast and has good fast cgi support, but lacks some of the features provided by Apache. This has resulted in some surprising bugs that we don't see in development (where we use yet another web server) and that we have to workaround.
In the couple of months though, Apache has surpisingly reemerged as good web server for MapBuzz. Two key things happened. First, Apache 2.2 released this spring added a new load balancer that is quite good. And second, a new project called Mongrel makes it easy to add a fast mini-web server to a Ruby application.
Thus we spent a day this weekend changing MapBuzz's infrastructure to use Apache, fixing a number of issues in the process. The new setup will be easier to manage, and should provide equivalent performance.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:43:00 GMT
One of the things on our todo list for the last couple of months is implementing automated client testing. Client testing is used to test the code that runs in your browser. There are so many combinations of browsers and operating systems that without automated testing it becomes very difficult to ensure a high quality release.
Over the last week we have integrated the selenium test framework into our testing framework. Selenium is an open source project that originated from ThoughtWorks .
Selenium is quite clever - it works by installing a test runner into the browser. The test runner then runs your code and reports the results back to the server.
Our client code coverage is still fairly low, but is improving quickly. We now have tests running for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera on Windows. We have also tested Firefox, Opera, Camino and Safari (not supported) on the Mac as well as Firefox on Linux.
We're quite happy with selenium and think it will help us to continue to improve each MapBuzz release.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:37:00 GMT
Opera 9 was released last week. Although Opera has less than 5% market share, I've always tried to support as many browsers as possible to give users a choice. Back at GE, we spent significant effort making sure our browser clients worked both in IE and Mozilla/Firefox. Most people thought we were silly, but I think the intervening years show we were correct. Un unexpected benefit was that it was much easier developing in Mozilla/Firefox since its tools were so much better.
Over the last year the media has fallen in love with Firefox and its success in grabbing market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Under the radar screen, Safari (the brower built into the Mac) and Opera have also been gaining market share. The three now control roughly 15% of the market (and growing) - enough to make web sites pay attention to them. A large portion of that 15% are developers - a constituency vital to every software organization. Microsoft' success to a large degree resulted from its effectiveness at wooing developers to its tools and platforms.
In the past I've tried supporting Opera, but have never succeed because it lacked some key functionality. Opera 9 finally solves these issues. After a bit of hacking over the weekend, I'm happy to say the next release of MapBuzz will support Opera.
That leaves one major browser unsupported - Safari. The current version doesn't work with MapBuzz because it lacks support for a standard called SVG which we use to draw shapes on maps. However, Safari's nightly builds now include SVG so its just a matter of waiting for the next release (Apple hasn't announced a release date).
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 19:31:00 GMT
Over the last year or two tagging has become an extremely popular way of categorizing content. The idea is that users can type one or two words to describe something - be it a picture (Flickr) or map (MapBuzz).
It turns out that on the Web this is a much more successful approach to categorizing content than traditional top-down approaches that rely on rigid hierarchies. There's been a lot of debate about why this is - but one of the key reasons is that users are happy to add a one or two word description to something since its easy. But if they have to wade through a hierarchy of choices they don't bother.
Once content has been tagged it becomes searchable. There's even a successful web site, technorati that is a tag search engine for the web.
Right now we're in the process of finishing off our tagging support for MapBuzz. For the last few months you've been able to create maps that let you display features that have been tagged. For example, show me a map of all features tagged with 'bar'. We're also enabling maps themselves to be tagged as well as comments.
Once that is done, you can then search for those tags using MapBuzz's search functionality.
Posted in Features | no comments
