I am already a fan of declarative programming. We've been using OpenLaszlo as our RIA platform and have had first hand experience with the power of this approach. So I was intrigued when I saw the "declarative living" term coined by I (think) James Governor. The idea may not be necessarily new, but provides means to describe the philosophy, sort of how the term Ajax was coined.
Declarative living makes it possible to share valuable information directly. This type of real world usage examples directly from people is priceless. What people are doing is a lot more informative than what they are saying.
So in the spirit of declarative living, I'd like to share couple of tools that make it possible for our small company (iFountain) to operate virtually. I have colleagues, customers, and partners in number of different countries in three continents.
The obvious one is Skype. I can't imagine how we'd function without it. I spend hours speaking to my colleagues daily on Skype. It's also worth mentioning that the Skype is the primary communications to between my daughter and grand parents!
We have also been using VNC routinely as we often need to work together on code, user interface, documentation, etc. One shortcoming of VNC has been the requirement to open up a firewall port let the traffic to through which is not always possible. Enter CrossLoop. It works without requiring holes in the firewall, installation and usage is quite simple, and it provides more security, hence I don't hesitate to ask someone to install it on their system when we need to connect to each others PCs.
On more common areas, we use OpenOffice and Google Docs (Writely rocks!) for documentation/collaboration, Eclipse as the development environment (Java), VMWare as the virtual platform for testing, etc. Firefox is the browser of choice, Thunderbird is the email client.
Groovy is our favorite dynamic language for JVM. Rife is our favorite web application framework.
Naturally there is more. I'll update when I can think of more...
