I’ve just released a BlackBerry shortcut icon that launches Mobile Metro-North using the default browser on your device.

In the near future, I intend to launch a native BlackBerry application that offers more features over the simple Web interface. It will store station preferences, display the big board of all currently departing trains, and help locate the nearest stop using GPS functionality.

Watch this space for a release announcement, or send me a note if you’d be interested in beta testing.

Next Tuesday night we’re excited to have WebSphere guru Roland Barcia introduce the latest PHP and Web 2.0 capabilities in IBM’s WebSphere sMash environment (built on Project Zero) to the New York PHP community:

IBM WebSphere sMash is a platform for developing and running agile Web applications using scripting languages and Web 2.0 technologies such as RESTful Web services, JavaScript Object Notation, and Atom and RSS feeds.

It supports the Groovy language, familiar to Java programmers, and PHP for access to thousands of PHP applications and libraries,and the huge PHP developer community.

IBM WebSphere sMash is focused on significant improvement in time-to-value for Situational Applications and Mashups.

Partners and community have found that by combining PHP applications and libraries with new code written in PHP or Groovy for the IBM WebSphere sMash platform, they can achieve significant reduction in development time for Situational Applications and Mashups.

We cover an overview of the PHP support in IBM WebSphere sMash and the support for generating new PHP code before exploring more detailed scenarios demonstrating PHP applications being extended, integrated and mashed up.

The presentation comes on the heels of the latest WebSphere sMash v1.1.0.1 release that includes PHP performance improvements and the new PHP to Groovy bridge (call Groovy classes from PHP).

Here’s a little background on how sMash relates to Project Zero (you can find more info on the about page):

• Project Zero experimental builds (latest are named LeMans and Sebring). Includes the latest/greatest functional enhancements, tools, and bug fixes that haven’t yet made it into the generally available product. No-charge for development and limited deployments. Support via the Project Zero community.
• WebSphere sMash Developer Edition - includes tooling as well as the stable, production-ready runtime. No-charge for development and limited deployments. Support via the Project Zero community.
• WebSphere sMash - same stable, production-ready runtime as WebSphere sMash Developer Edition, but warranted & licensed for full production deployments. Available for purchase from IBM. Support available via the Project Zero community and 24×7x365 voice & electronic IBM support included with each new license purchase.

On a personal level, I’m excited to learn more about the PHP capabilities at this meeting first hand. I had a chance to work with sMash recently on an internal situational application that aggregated several Web services with differing APIs into one interface. It used Groovy however, not PHP.

Here’s the official write up for that project. I hope it gives you a good feel for how you can integrate all sorts of tools and services into a single app using sMash:

The application is built on WebSphere sMash with Groovy beans that are wired to Groovy scripts acting in response to RESTful events from the UI. Service and ServiceResult interfaces abstract the actual service transport, request and response format into a common API. The mashup stores configuration and user profile data in an Apache Derby database. The user interface is based on standard w3 XHTML templates. Asynchronous requests from the view to the controller are handled by the Dojo Toolkit. Pie charts are rendered by the Google Chart API. Normalization of HTML to XML is performed by NekoHTML and Xerces.

WebSphere sMash / Project Zero provides an ideal platform for this type of application, as its HTTP Connection API, XML processing capability, simplified dependency resolution for Apache Derby and the Dojo Toolkit, and simple ZIP file import / export mechanism (for the app code and database) make situational application development quick and easy to deploy.

There’s also a slew of articles on developerWorks to learn about writing apps for sMash. In particular, Introducing IBM WebSphere sMash, Part 1: Build RESTful services for your Web application is a good place to start.

Back to the NYPHP meeting, please make sure you RSVP at least 24 hours in advance, by 6pm ET on Monday, April 27th for the meeting Tuesday night.

Hope to see you there!

The network is the computer… finally? It seems that Sun’s motto comes full circle, and perhaps confirms their business plan all along.

I attended Sun’s CommunityOne East in Manhattan last Wednesday and cloud was the word of the day. It was also an apt term to describe IBM’s vague overture towards the hardware/software stalwart that morning.

I didn’t walk away from the conference with specifics about the new buzzword, but I do appreciate that it captures some of what IBM has been doing, and therefore reveals a rare bit of consensus among the major vendors:

• Software as a Service (SaaS). For example, Bluehouse.
• Middleware as a Service, for example DB2 on WebSphere available on the Amazon cloud.

Other notes from the sessions I attended:

• OpenESB: Connecting Enterprises: Sang Shin is an excellent instructor and firmly placed three technologies I’m evaluating for some current business needs… BPEL, WSDL, and SOAPui. Despite the compelling demo of NetBeans, I missed the actual server side / asynchronous implementation that is the promise of the ESB.
• GlassFish v3, OSGi, Java EE 6 Preview and Tools (Eclipse, NetBeans): JEE 6 was introduced in the context of GlassFish 3. There still seems to be some work to get the standards settled any time soon for implementation in WebSphere 8. I look forward to the annotation-based and modular approach of the new standard.
• Dynamic Languages: The Next Big Thing for the JVM or an Evolutionary Dead End? Chris Richardson reaffirmed some of my observations about Groovy… while cool, it may be the overly rebellious offspring of a middle-aged Java; Brilliant in flashes, but not quite predictable enough to bank on. Scala, however, seems to have lots of promise.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend Hans’ presentation on MySQL and PHP - State of the Union, but it appears to have been well received. In fact, you might expect a reprise at NYPHP’s June 23rd meeting.

I just took a few minutes to copy the photos from my time in Cuba over to Flickr.

I spent three weeks in and around Havana while studying abroad after my junior year in college during the summer of 1998.

The scans have long been available at PlayaGirón, but in the recent spirit of freer relationships between the two nations, I figured I’d follow suit and open them up to a broader audience and to tag them, making it easier for folks to find them.

I’ll probably also post the scans of the Cuban stamps that I collected sometime soon.

My sister Mona recently published her first book, “Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide,” just in time for International Women’s Day.

And it seems to be out of stock on Amazon already :)

Cat, my parents, and our family friend Mikey Ward took a trip to The Coop at Harvard for her book signing last week and posted a few of the pics on Flickr.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t record her entire talk on video which is a shame because Mona summarized the book concisely for a general audience.

While the book focuses on the various tactics and strategies that parties and legislatures have followed to achieve better representation for women, I think the end goal is what’s most important:

“A society that is without the voice and vision of a woman is not less feminine. It is less human.” - Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland

So, give it a read… it’s just over 200 pages and has great reviews. While you’re at it, buy a few copies for your friends and relatives too!

I hereby nominate Oktapodi the best short film of 2008, or any other year for that matter.

Great title, great characters, great colors, great animation, great plot. All in two measly minutes.

Excellent. See for yourself.

Well, the important thing is that I didn’t lose money by trading in my truck for a Prius, and that there are other incentives for developing alternative fuel sources.

Antonio Cangiano just posted that DB2 Express-C for 64-bit Intel Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is now available for download from IBM.

Stay tuned to his site for more details.