|
Top Stories
I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by
the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.
Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old
enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain
cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up
and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal
because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on
water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly
already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can
already no longer be with us?
The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last
time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his
language was named. It was in the context ... (more)
2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will
'08 be the year of "Unified Communications" or the year when CMS comes to
stand for "Community Management System" - or even "Collaboration Management
System"? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat the mere
mega-mergers of 2007?
As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling its
globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives,
commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always, the range and depth
of their answers is fascinating, throwing light not just on where the
industry is going but also how it's going to get there, why, because of who,
within what kind of time-scale.
Enjoy!
RIAs versus AJAX . Ruby on Rails . PHP . Facebook Competitors
TIM BRAY
Director of Web Technologies, Sun
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary projec... (more)
From AIR to ZK, this is an alphabetical round-up of the fast moving-world of
application development tools and frameworks spawned ever since the
appearance of Google Maps, the canonical early RIA. The list includes AIR,
Appcelerator, ATF, Curl, Dojo, Echo, Eclipse RCP, Ext JS, Flex, Grails, GWT,
JavaFX, Kabuki, Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 platform, Novulu, OpenLaszlo,
Prototype, Rico, Ruby on Rails, Seam, Silverlight, ThinWire, TIBCO GI, ULC,
WaveMaker, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Zend Framework, and ZK.
Editorial note: The words used to describe the various solutions are in every
case taken from the sites cited, so as ever we encourage developers in every
case to "suck it and see" by downloading or otherwise sampling the tool in
question for themselves.
Omissions should be sent to ria (at) sys-con.com, and we will endeavor to
include them in a future revision of t... (more)
Rich Internet Applications offer the potential to fundamentally change the
user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. The
theme of this October's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West is 'Beyond AJAX
to the RIA Era' and the Call for Papers, which is still open, specifically
encourages submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases
of the fast-emerging RIA alternatives.
Call for Papers Now Open - Submit Your Speaking Proposal Here !
The business value of RIAs is very clear: aesthetics do matter and users
would like a pleasant experience.
Most enterprise applications are based on old client-server technology with
high cost of ownership and lack of flexibility. Switching to the Web as a
platform for mission-critical applications is very appealing as it lowers the
TCO significantly.
Industry experts are arguing that enterprises ... (more)
Submit Your Speaking Proposal
It is a great time to be a front-end engineer! But is it easy yet to
make Rich Internet Applications that easily go offline? Are developers
better off using an RIA framework, a toolkit or just coding their own
AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can RIA
apps be made secure? When will AJAX and RIA development finally be easy?
Submissions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming
in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on
March 18-20, 2008.
The Call for Papers is as always a 100% online process, found here. You will
find details of tracks at that link too.
iPhone Developer Summit will debut this year, colocated with AJAXWorld and
it will be chaired by Kevin Hoffman editor-in-chief of iPhone Developer's
Journal. (Remember to select iPhone Track in the pull-d... (more)
A study of the iPhone UI and rebuilding it in AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)
using Adobe Flex 3. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-operating
system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development
skills to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications to the desktop. With
the WebControl component in AIR which is powered by WebKit it will allow you
to build and test iPhone Applications. Also, I will be showing a component
that will give the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive
voicemail, as well as add and manage contacts.
Speaker Bio: Flex developer, information architect, roller hockey goaltender.
Joe Johnston has worked with Flash and other interactive tools for over ten
years, starting his career at Crowe/Horwath.
AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West will take place on September 23-26,
2007, at the Santa Clara Con... (more)
Kevin Whinnery's 2.0 A Go-Go Blog
The defining characteristic of any RIA is that it has a stateful client that
is (or should be) platform and browser independent. With the advent of new
RIA platforms like Flex, GWT, and OpenLaszlo, developers now have all the
reach of a traditional thin-client web application with many of the useful
characteristics of thick-client applications, such as the ability to maintain
state on the client. Is there a clear winner of the three, one toolkit that
developers should focus on at the expense of the others? I don’t really
think so. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.
Here I thought I would dedicate a little web space to throwing in my two
cents about what I think those strengths and weaknesses are. Is there a clear
winner of the three, one toolkit that developers should focus on at the
expense of the others? I don&rsq...; (more)
[For an A-Z of RIA Frameworks, from Adobe AIR to Zimbra, click here]
Is AJAX fit to serve as spear carrier for next-generation Web technology?
That question, asked by the San Diego Business Journal in March 2007, was
answered by the sheer scale of the last two AJAXWorld Conference & Expos, in
March (New York) and September (Santa Clara). The undisputed answer is "Yes!"
So many companies have jumped aboard the AJAX train that when we wanted to do
an informal survey the other day on upcoming Web and Internet technology
trends, I was able to quickly compile a list of 800 different companies that
are leaving the station.
AJAX is moving toward the enterprise. Google, the company that helped light
the AJAX wildfire in the first place by using it in Google Maps and Gmail,
has since then released a paid version of its Web-based applications for
small businesses, Google Apps Pr... (more)
While AJAX, as XML co-inventor Tim Bray puts it, "tries to do everything in
the browser using just what the browser ships with," RIA frameworks like
Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX aim to take developers beyond
the limitations of the browser. "I'm not brave enough to predict who wins,"
Bray noted in a SYS-CON.com feature earlier in the year, "but I do predict
that 2008 will be a crucial year; either RIAs enter the mainstream, or they
start to smell like a red herring left in the sun."
Bray's predictions came in the feature "Where's AJAX, SOA and Virtualization
Headed in 2008?" - which also included predictions from: Joshua Allen,
Microsoft; Dr Adam Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill
Roth, BEA Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's
Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.
Bray is Director of ... (more)
AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa
Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new
dedicated "iPhone Track."
Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for
conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on
OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's
JavaFX.
Click Here - Discounted Registration
Click Here - Sponsor AJAXWorld
The world’s leading Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event is
expected to attract more than 2,000 i-technology developers. AJAXWorld grew
from a single track, one-day seminar, less than a year ago, into a four-day
international conference & expo with more than 150 sessions delivered in ten
simultaneous tracks, by more than 150 faculty members.
Track 01: Rich Internet Applications
Track 02: ... (more)
Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also
comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to
back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk
to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the
Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either
in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed
to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects
it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of
external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot
of unmanageable, buggy code.
The approach discussed here provides a more intuitive solution to generate
ActionScript classes on the Flex side that are direct counterparts of the
enterprise object ... (more)
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to Adobe AIR on Ulitzer Email News Alerts
Subscribe via RSS
