A Mix of Thoughts and News

Time for a mix of thoughts and news.

• I have to/need to learn French. There are many reasons for it, but no doubt that this paragraph in this Wikitravel article joins that list of reasons in one of the first positions :-D

  It has long been the language of international diplomacy and communication, and although largely supplanted by English since World War II, it remains de rigueur (of obligatory requirement) for educated people in many societies around the world to have some level of basic French ability. It is also an official language of the UN and the EU.

• This article about the Lava Layer Anti-Pattern is one of the best things published in InfoQ in a long while. It immediately came to my mind a different scenario for this Anti-Pattern. A Web Application started around 15 years ago with classic ASP. Around 2003/2004 it was extended with some ASP.NET WebForms. In 2007 some Ajax panels where added to these WebForms. In 2009 some clever guy tried to do some real Ajax development by hacking these WebForms to return clean html pages and pieces of html and JSON requested via jQuery Ajax. Then in 2011 some ASP.NET MVC came to the rescue, and then in 2013 some Web API magic was added. All of it living together in a huge IIS Site. Seems unrealistic? Well, think that still 3 or 4 years ago the EasyJet site contained some classic ASP pages...
• Talking about Asp.Net, much has been said in the last months about .NET going partially OpenSouce, about .NET Core and so on... the most interesting of all this (bearing in mind that the multiplatform thing is nothing new, as Mono has been around since the early beginnings) is ASP.NET 5 (aka ASP vnext). First and foremost we get a unified programming model for MVC and Web API (for example no more similar but different classes in charge of routing for each subsystem), as a consequence, you'll be able to self-host MVC! As you'll be able to run it the Core CLR, you can deploy your complete self-hosted application in just a few MBs, without depending on any installed component, and you'll be able to do it on Windows or Linux (and yes, Mac, but I don't give a shit about rotten apples). On the other side, as OWIN continues to gain momentum, hosting on a separate web Server will be much easier.
• Well, this is quite old news, but I hadn't found it until recently. Gimp has since v2.8 a Single-Window Mode! This is for me the more needed feature in this nice software, those fucking multiple windows floating around have been a pain for many users (me included of course) and kept many of them away, so this is definitely a great step forward.