Coming from the Open Source world I had never really worked with .NET – except for some minor Sharepoint 2007 stuff – until last September. That’s when I joined a project maintaining a .NET application written in C#.

Since I had previously worked with Java, becoming a (visiting) C# developer wasn’t that much of a leap. After all, C# was partly influenced by Java (learning new frameworks did of course impose some learning curve, but that’s of course independent of language).

C# has some nifty features that Java lacks, though. In many ways, it feels like a more modern language — pardon me for saying so!

What follows are some of the things that I’ve started to like about C#.
Read more »

Shoot me an e-mail at trondpet[curly-thingy]hotmail.com if you’re a US based employer in need of a sr. web developer with a proven track record. I’m a US citizen with no need of sponsorship.

My strengths are web development and -programming — from architecture and back-end programming to front end coding:

• PHP
• Java
• RDBMS, SQL (MySQL, SQL Server)
• XSLT
• XHTML
• CSS
• JavaScript / Ajax (love jQuery)
• Topic Maps

…and a lot of other stuff related to web development.

I’ve currently got a few opportunities in sight, but am still open for exciting offers.

Feel free to contact me at trondpet[curly-thingy]hotmail.com, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Happy New Year 2010

After a busy December month, the Christmas vacation finally gave me some room to concentrate on what really matters.

Here’s my third blog post on building web apps with Ontopia. A bit late – I had hoped to have it out before Christmas – but at least I made it within January 01 2010 … have a good one!

Getting to the Point

This blog post is part of a series on Web Application Development with Ontopia.

1. Part 1: Installation & Requirements
2. Part 2: Creating the Database
3. Part 3: Creating the JSPs

In Part 2 of this series on building web applications with Ontopia we had a look at how to set up an application’s domain model using Ontopoly.

This post discusses how to go about building a custom web interface to present the data.
Read more »

Intro

This blog post is part of a series on Web Application Development with Ontopia.

1. Part 1: Installation & Requirements
2. Part 2: Creating the Database
3. Part 3: Creating the JSPs

In part 1, we looked at how to set up Ontopia. We also described the application that we intend to build (a blog) and what we need to develop in order to achieve our goal.

This time we’ll look at how to set up the “database schema” and create new blog posts by using Ontopia’s web interface. The resulting topic map can be browsed here.

Read more »

Introduction

Ontopia is an Open Source application that lets you create, manipulate and navigate information represented in topic maps. It’s also a toolbox for building all sorts of applications. Among the advantages of topic maps driven applications are enhanced navigation and search capabilities.

Ever since Ontopia went Open Source earlier this year, I’ve wanted to give an example of how easy it is to build a web application on top of it.

Through the next couple of blog posts, I’ll try to show exactly how easy this is – and I promise to leave out the unnecessary talk (wont discuss Topic Maps, for instance).

First I’ll “reveal” how to set up and start Ontopia. As this requires very little typing on my part, I’ll quickly move on to discuss what our goal is. Then we’ll have a look at the required data model, before pointing out the kinds of views that our application needs to support — and how to lay this out. Afterwards, we create the limited amount of code needed to get everything up and running. Last, we deploy.

All code will be available for download
Read more »

Personally I’ve never used the YUI library (yet), but the new event delegation functionality of YUI 3.0 has a very nice look to it:

// Defining simple listeners on each element:
Y.on(“click”, handleClick,
“#container ul li a.profile”);

// Defining listener on a container using the delegate() method:
Y.delegate(‘click’, handleClick,
‘#container’, ‘ul li a.profile’);

[...]

Event delegation in YUI 3 moves the overhead of walking the DOM tree from the loading process to the point of user interaction, and decreases complexity by removing the need to match target elements within the callback. Instead, delegate() tests the event target (e.target) against the selector (‘ul li a.profile’) after the event is fired but before the callback is executed…

More at the YUI Blog.