Yesterday I bought a License of Enso Launcher and I realized that it's the first license that I've ever bought voluntarily.

First of all I want to clarify that doesn't mean that all of the other software I'm using doesn't have a license, it's just that it came with the computer or it does not require a license. In fact I usually use only open source software with very few exceptions.

So what is Enso Launcher and why did I buy a license? It is a product meant to make the computer easier to use inspired by the ideas of Jeff Raskin in The Humane Interface. I really enjoyed reading that book so it was great to see that someone had made it real. Accidentally I've been using Windows for a while and really missed the command line, so Enso was a perfect fit for me. They are really showing how good a command interface can be (emacs users already knew, enso has a lot of the concepts of emacs commands but with an improved UI).

Today I wanted to start a prototype portlet and thought that instead of wasting time creating my environment with ant I could use that same time learning maven2 and creating the environment with it.

I used maven for EasyConf and some projects in Germinus so I wasn't expecting it to be hard. Overall I was very pleased with the great improvements of Maven2 over Maven1. In particular I think that idea of defining a lifecycle is just brilliant.

But unfortunately I've also found some annoying problems. First of all the documentation has improved a lot since I first used maven, but it still feels very short. Being used to ant I often found myself with questions to which I couldn't find an answer. After reading some articles I finally found a book about maven written by Vincent Massol et al and sponsored by Mergere. If you want to learn about Maven I strongly recommend starting with it:

A post in Yahoo's blogs dated June 21st 2006 says We Now Support Microformats where thay state:

Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.

I think that wide adoption by widely use portals was the next step for the success of microformats. In the near future we'll likely see more and more tools that make use of them. I would bet some money that Firefox extensions will come very quickl

Probably the most important change in the next version of Ruby on Rails, 1.2, will be its embracing of the REST style of developing web applications. I started learning about Rails and REST at the same time and quickly got excited about both of them so in my opinion is a great thing that we can now get the benefits of both at the same time.

Just as a quick summary:

• REST is about using the full power of HTTP, which is a lot more that most of us thought. URLs should point to resources and the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) should be used with a meaning.
• Ruby on Rails is a web development framework developed with the Ruby language. It comes with its own development environment and provides libraries for the whole stack from the frontend to the database backend. It's motto is to use convention over configuration and I can tell you that it really pays of.