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Facebook as a business platform

I recently attended the Thoughtworks Quarterly Briefing which was about their Tech Radar ā€“ a whats hot in upcoming and existing software dev technologies.  One thing that came up as surprising was the idea of Facebook as a Business Platform. 

My first thought, Facebook for business?, am I doing it wrong?  Winking smile But its actually a pretty neat idea.  The concept is simple, if so many people are using FB as a platform for games (Farmville) and other apps then why not business apps on there?  It can be used as a powerful marketing tool or a business information platform.  It is not much different to the way businesses have caught onto SMS to send info around and so if the infrastructure is there, being maintained by facebook, then why not use it?

Its funny when you hear an idea and then see it replicated elsewhere – moments of synchronicity perhaps?.  In my email this morning there was an article about Delta airlines allowing users to purchase tickets on FB. 

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Chuffed

I just deployed my first Grails app running with PostgreSQL on MorphExchange.

Following their Java Dev Cookbook was quite easy though I found I had to do the following:

  • Under log4j configuration add a property logs.home = ā€./logsā€ (here)
  • Don’t need to change the Grails DEFAULT_DEPS in War.Groovy to exclude jdbc2_0-stdext.jar per their doc.Ā  Perhaps the exception they warn about will be a problem if trying to use JNDI?

The real wide internets beta lookout, I now have a place to host some unsuspecting Java onto the world, <cold evil laugh>

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JSR 220: EJB 3.0

Sometimes the best resources are straight from the horses mouth.Ā  The excellent resources I found are located on the Java Community Process site.

The EJB 3 specifications for the core and persistence as well as a simplified spec can be found here.Ā  Download page.Ā  Click on the first download link to get access.