Resilience

So I’m sitting on a train on the way home from London. It takes an hour or so to get from London Bridge to Brighton. I climb on the train on one of the carriages that has the t-mobile wifi stickers on the doors. But as happens at least half the time, there’s no wifi. Oh well. When there is wifi, it at least is free.

So I have the laptop out anyway, writing and replying to emails and you know what? I flip over to the browser and get a popup from my Google Calendar reminding me of an event in my Calendar coming up shortly.

There’s no net connection. But the browser javascript deployed from google doesn’t mind, the alert still pops up. So what if we are offline. And that is nicely resilient and is perhaps a design pattern for web apps:

Resilience: Keep working even when the network goes away for a short while.

Not for ages, though, but at least be resilient for a number of minutes of outage. The standard web page (GET/PUT) normally handles this pretty well, but with AJAX you have the ability to tie you application close to the server. Don’t if you can avoid it except where necessary.

I typed a bunch of appointments into my Google calendar here on the train with no network. I wonder if they’ll get committed to the server when I reconnect. There’s no reason why not, really, and if it works, I’ll always keep Google calendar in a browser window and use it even offline.

[Update: I got home and no, it didn't remember appointments entered while offline. I can sort of understand that from a transactional point of view -- what if the window closes or the PC shuts down.]

scouta blog launched

We’ve taken our web2thing and have re-launched it under a new name, Scouta.   And so the web2thing.com blog has migrated over to blog.scouta.com this weekend.  See the blog for a good idea of what we are doing getting our startup web application off the ground.

From here, things will speed up a bit getting scouta to market.  We are getting ever closer to a finished site then moving into a private, then a public beta program.  I’m not sure we’ll call it a beta.  Some kind of early access, anyway.

Nose to the grindstone

Where did this expression come from? :-)

Anyway, I’ve had the nose to the grindstone for some months now, holding down a London IT job while putting together our web startup (Web2Thing) and living life to the full in Brighton. It doesn’t leave that much time for blogging really…

However, things a re settling down a bit now, and the web startup is starting to look quite exciting on several fronts. There will be some announcements really soon on that score.

Yes, we have a name, and we’ll announce that soon. And about then, we’ll start talking about the product as well. It is exciting because it is still a very unique idea even though we’ve been stealthily working on it for about a year.

So.. more news soon!