Code and Coffee

Recently BlueCrestStudios moved forward with utilizing /n software’s components in our products. We are in the process of implementing their IPWorks component into Gmail Studio.

Incase you are not familiar with /n software, they are a local company to the Raleigh North Carolina area. They are a steady, and diverse company in terms of components for development languages. They actually look like a great company to work for as well, I believe I sent my resume to them a while ago. But anyway, they make numerous libraries and components, for just about any language you develop in.

Third party components are great for small shops, and even large companies. They allow you to worry about your product and leave the protocol specific work up to the professionals. You get great quality code, and they manage the updates. Developing an IMAP library, or MIME parsing library to RFC specifications can be timely, costly, and frustrating. So why reinvent the wheel?

So this is the first post of many, that will account in detail my experience in working with IPWorks SSL from /n software.

So far, my experience has been well. The library is efficient, fast, and fairly easy to work with. /n software does allow you royalty free distribution when utilizing their components in your code. However, the components they distribute are obfuscated. Which makes them a little hard to deal with, mostly because they are not true object oriented. I understand the need to protect intellectual property, so I am not complaining, but its just a little frustrating.

The help files are fairly in depth, they provide a lot of information. They do offer several demos, but really just for the basic functionality of the libraries. I am actually working on several new demos, and will be submitting them back to the company incase they want to utilize them. Demos are great for developers, because we have the natural instinct to reverse engineer the way code works.

So far I am impressed. I plan on numerous follow up posts, even including some code snippets. But for now, I am getting my feet wet myself. Check out their components, just browsing their website gives me great ideas for new products.

Triangle Tweetup has organized a Deep Friend NC State Fair Tweetup on Thursday October 22nd. You can Register here, but hurry because space is limited. I will see you there!

We all know I am not a fan of saying that anything is dying and the sky is falling. But recently the activity around Facebook vs. Twitter has been exciting, and I believe that us, the users and developers, will be the ones to benefit.

Recently, this week, Facebook started supporting @ replies, or as they call it tagging. Also this week Twitter has changed their Terms of Service, which has all signs pointing to a business model finally coming out of their camp.

It’s not too far of a stretch to say that Twitter is a little worried, and that its no coincidence that Twitter changes their Terms of Service the same week that Facebook starts to implement one of the very features that made Twitter so popular.

So what does this mean? Well a lot of things. Do I see Facebook over taking Twitter? Very much so. Is it going to happen tomorrow? Probably not. But here is why. Facebook is bigger, and even though this scares some away at first, people eventually conform. Facebook is so much more robust, with their servers, and architecture, they are more table. Look at their API and SMS messages. They do not put tight restrictions on developers, with limits and ceilings.

On the other side of coin, Twitter is simple and a lot of people like that. But Twitter needs to grow, and expand their technology and allow developers to do whatever they want with the API. Twitter needs to realize that the more developers that create cool applications and services with their data and API. the more popular Twitter becomes. Twitter needs to cut down on the Spam, no easy task, but only recently with my project RTPeeps.com, have I realized how many spam accounts there are out there.

Either way, the future will be exciting. It is exciting to see the ‘battle’ begin.