Popstats is a just-released open-source set of PHP 5 classes that allow you to easily query one of several popularity APIs with a given URL. This code originally lived in the Power 150 (now hosted at AdAge.)

These tools can help you programmatically grab ranking and popularity information for your (or anybody else’s) website.

The initial classes offered are as follows:

The intended audience for these tools are PHP programmers and integrators; these are not intended for use by an end-user or non-programmer.

You are highly encouraged to contribute to popstats by submitting improvements or bugfixes that have general benefit to the tools. The code will probably also need a wiki page per class to discuss usage and that sort of thing – we would be happy to see that kind of documentation spring up.

This past March, TechBrew partnered with Todd And to automate his popular Power 150 rank list of marketing blogs. The automation helped Todd expand his list to the international market, with nearly 350 blogs ranked on a semi-daily basis.

The Power 150 has taken off and attracted the attention of Ad Age, who has just made a deal with Todd to host the list and vastly increase its daily exposure.

First, big congrats to Todd. Well done!

Second, as part of the deal, TechBrew will release modest portions of the Power 150 code as open source, specifically the pieces which interface with 3rd-party web services. The code will all be PHP 5, and ran in production for a couple of months.

Update:   See our Popstats announcement for an overview and links to the code.

The June 11, 2007 edition of eWeek magazine has an interesting article called “Google keeps an eye on open source.” Chris DiBona responds to a series of questions about Google’s use of open-source software, but this comment stands above the rest:

Every time you use Google, you’re using a Linux machine.

If that isn’t doesn’t convince a corporate CIO to consider Linux, I can’t imagine what will. Another interesting tidbit: Until Java was recently open-sourced, Google had a source code agreement with Sun to provide patches/bug fixes. Said DiBona,

We have a lot of fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks like Joshua Bloch working for us, and he’s a very prominent Java developer and he’s involved in the Java Community Process very heavily. So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features developed … But with it being open source, it’s actually better for us … we can offer those fixes up without as much ceremony.

If anything, statements like this are a good indicator of whether Java still has “legs” in the high-end commercial market. It sounds like Google had a pretty heavy commitment to using the language.

It has been interesting to watch how the early adopters of JavaFX are catching on (or not) to the declarative approach of JFX scripting. The discussion of how the platform fits into a larger vision of Rich Internet Apps will have to wait, but in the meantime there are some interesting bits to take a look at:

The Planet JFX Wiki has had a nice start, with over 24 articles currently in place. Sun employees are contributing to the wiki, which brings it some tacit validation as well.

Some tutorials are now appearing on the wiki, including these good ones:

• Step by Step: How to build your first JavaFX application
• Developing a File Browser in JavaFX

Numerous JFX code examples are also popping up, some of which are even aimed at producing a logo for the wiki.

Hopefully the wiki will continue as a home to this kind of materials, since the information going on the user mailing lists is typically too fragmented for people to learn the language in a comprehensive manner.  Time will tell.

Sun’s recent introduction of JavaFX has created quite a stir in the Java community. There has been a flurry of activity on the new mailing lists and forums, but the wiki for the project on java.net is strangely static.

As it turns out, even though the source code for JavaFX is open, the official documentation is still closely guarded. The JavaFX wiki on java.net has been disabled for the public.

There are good reasons for doing this when a project has just begun, but it hampers the efforts of early adopters to share information with each other. Mailing lists and forums are good, but “point in time” information is rarely as accurate and as complete as wiki information, which can have ongoing review and revision.

This chafes me. Open source projects should have open documentation at some level.

I have proposed that the JavaFX community use a off-site public wiki called “Planet JFX” that wouldn’t be subject to official Sun Microsystems documentation control. This would ideally become a fast-growing repository of early adopter knowledge

The tips, tricks, and gotchas flowing through the mailing lists could be captured into a really good knowledge base that would benefit everybody. It would also be an important resource for people who are using JavaFX but aren’t on the mailing lists.

Planet JFX would be a free instance of Wikimedia provided by wikia.com. (Wikia will provide the hosting if enough people lobby for it.) If you agree that open documentation is an important resource for open source platforms like JavaFX , drop by and add your support.

Update:  http://jfx.wikia.com is now live!

The Rich Media Wars has a new contestant in the arena. Joining Adobe’s Apollo/Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight is Sun Microsystem’s newly-unveiled JavaFX.

JavaFX (code-named F3) is targeted for rich desktop/browser applications, and especially the mobile market. They are also open-sourcing the language from the beginning as openjfx, which is quite encouraging.

Demos of JFX are available along with several tutorials, including a tool called JavaFX Script JavaFXPad Demo. This app runs via JavaWebStart and lets you create and modify a JFX GUI while seeing the results in real time. This alone is a fantastic way to promote the language.

As you can see in the screenshot, JFX uses declarative constructs as an alternative to procedural ones. The irony of JFX is that it looks a lot like JavaScript, but compiles to “real Java”. So you go from something like this in standard Java with Swing:

var win = new Frame();
win.title = "Hello World F3";
win.width = 200;
var label = new Label();
label.text = "Hello World";
win.content = label;
win.visible = true;

To this in JavaFX:

Frame {
title: "Hello World F3"
width: 200
content: Label {
text: "Hello World"
}
visible: true
}

If you’re more comfortable with the procedural approach, you can still use it, since JavaFX supports both. Sun is also providing scripting-support plugins for both NetBeans IDE and Eclipse.

There is a lot more to uncover with this language, so expect more content on TechBrew.net about JavaFX in the weeks and months to come.

JetStream is one of the projects currently in our labs. It monitors the CNET 100 Top Blogs OPML file (but it could be any OPML), indexing all of the RSS or Atom feeds. These feeds are checked on a regular basis, whereby we index blog posts and articles by their tags and categories. From there we update a daily tag cloud, tag calendar, tag constellation, and multiple tag profiles that show you the hot topics across the A-List

More on how it works, after the jump…

Normal tag clouds show you what’s popular for all time, which don’t account for “relevance decay.” JetStream looks at posts from a daily perspective so you can see what is important today. (Or what was important yesterday.) We even have a Google Widget for putting today’s tag cloud on your Google homepage.