Useless Utilities #1

[Update 12/30/2006: Added Macworld Info and a Donation Button.]

[Update 12/20/2006: Added a small FaQ based on feedback.]

I created Keyboard Cleaner. It comes in handy when you want to clean your keyboard, but you are afraid you might trigger a command or change or delete some of your current work beyond repair and undo. Of course you could save and close everything. Sometimes however, it is just not what you want.

Enter Keyboard Cleaner. It shields your desktop and intercepts every keystroke you might accidentally make — except for Command-Q.

Needless to say that this was an educational project for me. While trying to create something like …

With the recent release of CouchDb 0.6.0, I sat down and updated CouchDbX, the MacOS X GUI for CouchDb. It comes with a brand-new and shiny user interface that is (hopefully) easy to understand. Thanks to Dominik Harijanto it has a set of nice buttons. The application icon is still my temporary icon, but Dom will update that as well.

What does it do? With the three buttons, you can start and stop CouchDb as well as launch the Peek admin utility. Thrilling. Since CouchDb is still alpha-quality software and is suited only for early adopters, this is all you need for now. Once CouchDb matures, CouchDbX will become a full fledged GUI to all of CouchDb's features.

It still looks like the teaser

Download CouchDbX.

The next version of CouchDbX comes with nice buttons and a cute interface. Enjoy the tease!

CouchDb PHP Demo Site

http://demos.couchdb.com/ now hosts two CouchDb Demos, BugShrink and Sofr (A Bugtracker and a discussion forum). Eventually, the site will revolve around all things CouchDb and PHP. Documentation, tutorials, HowTos, your demos and applications. But for now, and for the lack of material it only showcases the two CouchDb applications and links to the CouchDB PHP API documentation.

Please let us know, if you need anything else to get started with CouchDb!

Why PHP?

Currently, the CouchDb Project concentrates on the PHP community for its huge …

Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby are writing a book about web services and REST. They see superficial bloat in the way web services are built today. In short, they say to build a web page, you only need to know HTTP and HTML but to build Web Service a huge load of technologies has to be integrated:

XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, WS-Policy, WS-Security, WS-Eventing, WS-Reliability, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction, WS-Notification, WS-BaseNotification, WS-Topics, WS-Transfer

From a conceptual point of view, web pages appear to be the modest, hard-working older brother of the good-looking blabbermouth web services. How come?

REST defines web services with the tools of web pages—HTTP and URIs. Those who claim that this won't scale the book simply asks why the web scales when it is based on the same tools?—Touché.

With REST every resource has …