JaCIL, 24, Online Food Ordering
JaCIL
This looks interesting. JaCIL (pronounced “jackal”) is a project that aims to be able to provide the capability of running CLI code on the JVM and visa-versa. Underneath, it leverages Mono’s Cecil to help tackel some of the hurdles.
You can read the anoucment from the author here: http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2006-May/018573.html
24
I don’t watch 24 but there is a lot of press because it’s the finial episode or something. The most interesting story is the dude that noticed that the clock on the show isn’t a real clock.
Online Food Ordering
Ordering online right now and I just had to talk about this.
This drives me nuts. Pizza Hut uses this company that provides this software called QuickOrder on their site for online ordering. It breaks so many rules of good design. The most anoying “feature”, is that the back button will corupt the entire order (their little javascripts to detect the back button don’t really work). Oh and anyone like DHTML layered popups? The new version is now “AJAX” powered, just for the sake of being AJAX powered and not because it solves any problems. This site is completely useless if you don’t support Javascript. Konqueror just about melted when I used it tested it out just for kicks.
QuickOrder is used on some other sites such as Dominos and a bunch of smaller resturants. I don’t know how. Do people even demo their stuff before buying in?
In contrast Papa John’s online ordering system is awesome. They used to use Food.com (years ago in the pre .COM boom era when Food.com had an online ordering system), but decided to write one on their own. Nothing special. It’s a traditional web app. Its clean, it provides everything it should (user registration, profiles, password recovery etc), and it works even under the worst conditions. Praise the Papa for good design.
Another really good one I found is Jason’s Deli ordering system. This one is written in ASP.net and it’s very new on the block. I’m sure it doesn’t see the traffic as the other two, but yet it works quite well and has a cute little charm to it.
Oh well. Slow day of code.
Tags: Mono & .NET, Personal, Tech Notes