I'm proud to say that Laszlo has shipped a preview of the calendar that Elastic Process has been developing for Laszlo's Webtop product. You can check it out yourself by registering for an account, but I also prepared this little demo to describe some of what's going on behind the scenes.

In typically cranky fashion, I've recently found myself straining against the dogma around today's development best practices. While I am somewhat drawn to the ideas of agile development and "getting real," I have been finding in my projects that agile techniques, like Ruby on Rails, are good for only certain kinds of projects, and, perhaps more importantly, that agile projects (like RoR projects) tend to yield similar results.

I'm happy to announce that Elastic Process has launched two websites in the past couple of months. The first is Netpop Research, which we built for the great folks over at media-screen.

I've been working on a lot of different stuff lately, but one of my bigger projects is a heavily customized Drupal implementation. I've been impressed with Drupal, despite its headache-inducing global function style. In the end, I've had to do a fair amount of custom development to make Drupal behave the way I want it to. Its search capabilities and customization options are pitiful. Its ACL features are coarse. Its callback APIs are confusing at best.

I recorded a screencast of the presentation I gave at AJAXWorld in March, and now it's posted on the OpenLaszlo blog. This demo shows an introduction to most of the basic features of OpenLaszlo, and it also uses the OpenLaszlo 4 DHTML output capability to integrate a Google Map.

So I've left Laszlo to pursue my fortunes as an independent software developer and consultant. When I tell people this, there's usually an understanding nod and then a conspiratorial "Why?"

I learned recently that the word "kung-fu" refers to "an art which requires practice for perfection" rather than any particular practice. So that means you can have kung-fu tea brewing. I'm awfully fond of the coding-as-martial-art metaphor, so you can imagine that this discovery pleased me greatly.

When is a software product ready for ship? The consensus these days appears to be: as soon as possible, but not too soon. That's a bit of a shift from the bad old days of packaged software, when the cost of release was high enough to justify both sign-off from marketing that the release meets at least of few customers' business needs, and sign-off from QA that the new release is of sufficiently high quality to prevent a support nightmare.

I went to OSCON this week and gave a little talk there. I try not to be cynical, but I have to say that I was disappointed in the level of discourse at the conference sessions, and it got me thinking that things in the valley and in our industry in general are starting to feel a lot like they did last time around.

When you start to think about it, it's pretty easy to see what's happening in software right now as absurd. I mean think about it: we're calling it Web 2.0 for crying out loud. Doesn't anyone remember what happened with Web 1.0? It's like Groundhog Day.