AppFactory

Blocks And Lots - 48 Data Sets - 5,636,937 records

Here is the detail of the data available in the Blocks And Lots API.
Blocks And Lots DataSets Dec 8, 2009

What's different about Blank Slate?

Blank Slate is a "Platform as a Service" solution. PaaS solutions typically offer an integrated IDE, either on the desktop or in the browser, which you use to build your applications. Blank Slate happily offers no IDE. Instead, Blank Slate offers APIs. The Blank Slate APIs allow you to create the server side things you need -- including things to manage your data, users, and applications -- without touching a line of server side code. You just tell Blank Slate what to do thru the APIs. Blank Slate is very obedient.

Because there is no Blank Slate IDE, to use Blank Slate you need to know how to make web pages and connect to APIs. Why did we make Blank Slate this way? To give you the freedom to make the things you want and need, and to work with the languages and IDEs (Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, PDT, even Notepad) that you already know.

Ye Olde JavaScript - 1st NYC JavaScript Meetup

JavaScript is a programming language getting new attention here in NYC. Not because its new, it's not; not because a new version is coming out, there is; but because people are discovering what can be done with the JavaScript that has been around since 1995.

So, at the first NYC JavaScript Meetup, which took place last night at the BlankSlate office in lower Manhattan, there were two terrific speakers who shed some light on what's happening with ye olde JavaScript. For details take a look at Great Start for NYC JavaScript Meetup.

Hopefully getting people together -- and promoting people like Ning Zhou, Michael Girouard, and Geir Magnusson -- will cause even more developers to discover what Michael Girouard calls the "Beauty of JavaScript".

Picking A Name

Here's an online truism – your domain name matters.  

For our latest venture, we debated our naming approach -- "should we go with a literal name like 'IBM' or a conceptual name like 'Apple?'" -- then we made a shortlist from both categories and reached out to domain owners to see who was willing to sell at what price. This led us to choose BlankSlate.com.

The "blankslate" concept /metaphor has been around since Aristotle, which means over 2300 years.