About
Human-readable metadata.
In which I name names.
People whose work I built upon
The people mentioned below wrote 99.5% of the code that Gradient is built on. They're included here as a way of saying "thanks". Bugs in code on this site are mine, not theirs.
The library that displays and updates the SVG markup is a product of the Batik project, a group within the Apache Software Foundation. Batik itself is a huge, mature and actively developed project centered around SVG. Batik committers and contributors are listed here.
The library that provides the ability to communicate with XMPP networks comes from Jive Software, who published the Smack API under an Apache-style license to (a) promote their XMPP server, and (b) be nice guys. Smack is a very nicely written collection of code, and is now maintained by small group of developers in and outside of Jive Software - thanks to Matt Tucker and Gaston Dombiak.
The library that provides ECMAScript functionality within Batik (and therefore within Gradient) is Rhino, a product of the Mozilla Foundation. Thanks go to Norris Boyd and Igor Bukanov for their help.
There are two libraries used in parsing XML. Firstly the XMLPull API, which is specified and implemented by Aleksander Slominski and Stefan Haustein. Second is the Xerces2J project, again from the Apache group.
The XPath library used in applying directives is Jaxen, and was written by The Codehaus, and released under a more liberal version of the Apache license.
Also used were two libraries from the Apache Commons project, which saved me a lot of time. Contributors for those libraries are listed here.
Thanks also to...
...the people that helped me stay sane enough (or insane enough, depending on your perspective) to keep at this for 3 1/2 months, listened sympathetically to incomprehensible rants on obscure protocol arcana, and provided encouragement and inspiration. In alphabetical order:
Carl, Colin, Derzou, Gael, Gabriel, Jean-Christophe, Lara, Paul, the "yp4sr" gang - you know who you are - and anyone I forgot to mention explicitly.
Development
Development was done in Eclipse and Textpad. Also used during development was Mozilla, Tomcat 5, Exodus, yEd, the Cavaj Java Decompiler, and SomaFM.
Website
The Gradient sub-site uses a 3-servlet IA/SEO-centric CMS that delegates UI complexity to normal office apps, that was originally written for a friend. This will be released when I've cleaned up the disfigured code it uses. Everything is (or should be) XHTML 1.0 strict, and layout is CSS based. The em-based box layout that resizes the left column based on text size comes from the HTML Dog CSS page layout tutorial. The colours used in highlighting examples are the same as the Google cache.
Web development was done using Mozilla & the DOM inspector, combined with the web development bookmarks, liveHTTPHeaders, and the totally future-fantastic, very, very cool Tabbrowser extensions by Piro (not the MT Piro, a different one). Once perfected in Mozilla, additional CSS hacks were put in to make IE6 SP1 behave. Also tested on Opera 7, but no changes were necessary. Batch-mode validation and spell-checking was done with HTMLTidy and Freespell/ASpell.
Please report layout bugs in other browsers.
Why
Towards the end of March '04 I started playing around with XMPP, with the intention of creating a personal agent that would allow me to transfer files to onto and email files from my home PC, check for urgent mail, text me alerts and reminders using Hotmail as an SMS gateway, and provide a centralised task-list and source code repository. (and, now that I think about it, play nice with iCal/Mozilla Calendar).
The week after that I realised that there's no real reason that SVG shouldn't be moved across XMPP, at which point I began spending far too much time in front of the computer. This website and the code available here is the result.
Me
I am Ian Sollars, a half-English half-German guy with a variety of interests, of which the most relevant ones are network & information architecture, disruptive technologies, Java, web & user interface design, security, and sci-fi. Contact info: mail is ian.sollars@gmx.net, Jabber is ian.s@jabber.org.
My brother can mix. A friend of a friend did these MP3s, which you'll like if you like TMBG.
© 2006. Some rights reserved. Author: Ian Sollars.
