jump to navigation

Best. CruiseControl build status indicator. EVAR! March 27, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 1 comment so far

I GIVE YOU… NABAZTAG!

Its going to be a tough battle between Nabaztag and the Bluetooth-equipped Lego Mindstorms NXT (which will be available for preorder on April 1st) to see which one wins the hearts and minds of continuous integration aficionados everywhere.

Hmmm… the temptation to have Nabaztag swear loudly and violently when the build breaks (hey the name sounds vaguely demonic), yet sing angelically when it succeeds, is far too strong.

So. Who’s up for writing a CruiseControl or CruiseControl.NET plugin then?

Where is the web service API for my bank account?

Posted by James Webster in : web, xml , 12 comments

I happened to come across Dimewise (here’s their blog), yet-another-Ruby-on-Rails web app, this time for managing your personal finances. The folks behind it have built it to scratch their own itch for a lightweight web-based financial management tool. Ultimately it is going up against desktop software such as Microsoft Money, Intuit Quicken and the open source GNUcash. Its a great idea, one I’ve had myself in fact, but it suffers from two problems:

  1. Are people happy trusting the current state of their finances to an intermediary such as Dimewise, which would be perceived by the general public as having less available resources to maintain security compared to their own bank?
  2. The data entry required is tedious and theoretically unnecessary.

The last point is the killer for me. I really want my balances and transaction history to be automatically updated into such a service. The online interfaces of most banks these days provide an export function into CSV or the proprietary formats of the aforementioned desktop apps but I have to explicitly log in and perform the export. Why can’t I schedule it to be sent to a nominated email address on a daily basis? Why can’t I have a simple SOAP/REST API for read-only access to my bank account details? I appreciate there is a potential security exposure here but is it really any worse than if someone breaks into my letter box and steals the bank account statements out of it?

I am also aware that some banks (my own included) do offer a sort of portfolio management tool that will aggregate your account details across multiple banks/fund managers/telcos/loyalty schemes, etc, etc. The tool that I have available to me is ActiveX-based. Unfortunately that requires Internet Explorer (although IE Tab might come to the rescue) and Windows. Now there’s a highly secure framework! And it doesn’t help me in my efforts to move away from Windows to OS X.

Is anyone aware of any banks or other financial intermediaries (fund managers, etc) that are providing this sort of access for their retail customers? If there’s one in Australia I will strongly consider signing up! Consider this my feature #1 for any agile development teams working on online banking portals.

Dynamic vs Static languages… FIGHT! March 16, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : software, development , 1 comment so far

Via Obie, Reginald Braithwaite argues that compile-time type checking doesn’t buy you much in today’s world. I agree, especially if you are doing test-driven development.

There is alot of activity getting dynamic languages to work on top of existing VM’s such as the JVM and the CLR. Over at Microsoft, IronPython’s pace of putting out betas is impressive, whilst over at Sun, James Gosling is warning of the dynamic language barbarians at the gates.

Interpreting the language (Ruby, Python, whatever) to native JVM/CLR bytecode is only half the battle however. When the standard libraries for those languages are implemented through the underlying capabilities of java.* or System.* things will really get cooking. In my opinion, whichever of the JVM or CLR can get Ruby (and Rails) to run seamlessly on their platforms first will win a lot of kudos in the enterprise space as they will gain the productivity of Ruby/Rails, plus the integration with alot of ‘native’ Java/.NET code. The JRuby project is already making progress in this direction (albeit without Sun’s help). Scoble asked late last year what MS could do to make ASP.NET development more appealing. Get Ruby & Rails to run on the CLR, that’s how!