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Showing posts from January, 2014

Why attend LinuxFest at IBM Connect 2014

Thanks to Bill Malchisky, LinuxFest V is back at IBM Connect 2014. It will be held on Thursday, January 30, 2014 at 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM at the Dolphin - Oceanic 2.  Though it is not an official session, this is one of the sessions that I have always attended at Lotusphere/IBM Connect in the past. There is no marketing BS, all technical knowledge from some of the best Linux experts in the IBM Community.  And they tell you like it is. As a software architect, designer, and developer, it is very important that you understand the operating system that your application is running on from the perspective of resources and security. This determines how you approach the design and architecture of your application.  Linux has become a significant part of the IBM Collaboration environment and its importance has been growing especially if you are looking at cloud-based solutions.  As a company, almost all our servers are on Linux and with a few desktops.  Even if you are running a Windows shop,

The End of an Era

As some know we are celebrating our 23th anniversary as entrepreneurs this year.  It has been full of highs and lows.  One of most fun achievement that we had was in the first couple of years as ReCor.  Now it is most standard corporate training with ReCor and social collaboration and BPM technology with Phora Group and our iPhora solutions. As one starts out, you try to determine your bearings.  Usually reality hits and you throw out all the business plans and marketing stuff.  So early on we did some stuff for free hoping that something might come out of it in the future.  And that is what happened.  About a year later, the person we helped out came back to us to develop a kiosk for an exhibit.  We did not know much about kiosks at that time, but we knew technology.  You have to remember that we are talking about the early 90s and there is no Internet, Windows, Macs, fancy computers.  The latest and greatest was Intel 486 processor and VGA graphics card with a whole 64 Mbytes of me

Optimizing Dojo Loading for Bootstrap Widgets

Over the past year, one of our major efforts for our iPhora products was to switch from using Dojo Dijit widgets to only Bootstrap widgets.  One of the problems that we have seen with Dijit widgets is that they take a long time to load and are very heavy compared with JQuery based Bootstrap widgets. The advantage of JQuery-based Bootstrap widgets is that they are loaded all at once as a single file. This is great to minimize the loading speed.  However, it does not lend itself to easy maintenance by multiple developers. With Dojo you load the individual widgets are needed using dojo.require. Unfortunately, this results in multiple HTTP request in order to load the individual widgets and support files. Even if we are not using Dijit widgets but you want to use dijit._Widget to creating your own widgets, Dojo loads a whole brunch of additional files like dijit._LayoutWidget.js and doubles the loading process.  That is because you need to load dijit.js in order to use dijits. So without