From the first days of Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology, many enthusiasts found an analogy between RIA and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some of them talked about the benefits of a would-be-wonderful use of SOA in RIA; others saw RIA as a SOA face. Nonetheless, there are experts who see a discrepancy between RIA and SOA concepts. The major disagreement between RIA and SOA is in the fine-grained operations in RIA and the coarse-grained type of interfaces of SOA business services. Let's take a closer look at this problem. In a glance we can see that the RIA spectrum is wide. It includes applications with interfaces for information reporting, modifying predefined business data, collecting and inserting new data into the systems, fast and frequent exchange of information in social/community-oriented Internet applications, and setting commands in the pr... (more)

Adobe Announces A New Flex/AJAX Bridge

Adobe has announced a new Flex /JavaScript bridge; known as the Flex AJAX Bridge (FABridge), it is a small, unobtrusive library of code that you can insert into a Flex application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser, according to Adobe. Adobe says the bridge enables seamless integration of Flex applications with the browser’s JavaScript environment. The Flex DOM and ActionScript environment can be completely manipulated from the JavaScript environment and vice versa, and complex types can be marshalled across seamlessly. The FABridge library can be used to automatically expose  Flex application to Ajax-based HTML applications. Using the bridge,  rich Flex components can be embedded in  applications, integrating them tightly with the rest of the page content. Once a Flex application is enabled through the bridge, ... (more)

"Real-World AJAX" and "Flex 2.0 & Java" Books Announced by SYS-CON Books

SYS-CON Books (www.books.sys-con.com) has announced the forthcoming publication of two uniquely comprehensive and up-to-date books devoted to every aspect of AJAX technologies and Rich Internet Applications in the greater context of the overall "Web 2.0" spectrum: Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters Edited by: Dion Hinchcliffe - ISBN: 0-9777622-0-3 Written by: Dion Almaer, James Benson, Kurt Cagle, Ajit Jaokar, Kevin Hakman, Anil Sharma Book Website: www.RealWorldAjaxBook.com A process, not a technology, AJAX is changing the landscape of the Web. Armed with this book, you can become a part of that change. "Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters" not only showcases the history, the process, and the inspiration, it also helps you design actual AJAX applications using JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the Document Object Model (DOM), and XMLHttpRequestObject. ... (more)

How "Real-World AJAX" Faculty Has Disarmed Me

How "Real-World AJAX" Faculty Has Disarmed Me I was always skeptical about AJAX. This technology can be useful for Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, and the like. Because regular businesses can not afford it. They can not hire a team of experts to find workaround for dozens of serious problems browsers/JavaScript introduce. Browsers/JavaScript is not an application development environment. Jouk Pleiter of BackBase presenting to the "Real-World AJAX" audience of more than 400 on Monday, March 13, 2006 in New York City Have you ever been invited to an event, where every person has an assigned seat, and a perfect personalized goody bag is waiting for you on the table? No, I’m not talking about a wedding. This was SYS-CON’s "Real-World AJAX" Seminar in Manhattan. I’ve been to a couple of other events during the last year. This one was the best so far. At 7:50AM the... (more)

Top-Notch "Enterprise AJAX" Track September 23-26 at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West

Architect of Google Gadgets Adam Sah, Nexaweb Chief Architect Bob Buffone, Rearden Commerce Chief Architect Matt Mihic, Terracotta Founder & CTO Ari Zilka, jMaki Principal Architect Greg Murray, Sun Evangelist Arun Gupta, HP Director of PM Siva Darivemula, Teqlo PM Rod Boothby, WebEx VP David Knight, IndustryNext Lead Engineer Adam Breindel, and more. These are among the more than a dozen high-caliber speakers lined up by SYS-CON Events to speak in the Enterprise AJAX track at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West taking place next month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA – one of just ten simultaneous content-rich tracks at biggest version yet of the world's leading AJAX, Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event. The event is expected to attract more than 2,000 i-technology developers. The AJAXWorld Conference & Expo series grew from a si... (more)

Java Champions Discuss JavaFX with Sun Microsystems

This morning, Sun Microsystems has arranged a conference call with about twenty five Java Champions from around the world. We talked about JavaFX, a new language for development of the GUI for rich Internet and desktop applications. Java Champions were not shy to ask direct questions, and these are some of the interesting questions and answers about JavaFX: Q. What are the plans about the painless installation of JRE? A. Sun started running compatibility tests of the upcoming small-footprint  Consumer JRE all the way back to Java 1.1. Tests against Java 5 are  very stable. Old applets will be also tested to ensure that they can run on Consumer JRE without problems. Q. Why Java Swing components are selected for use with JavaFX? Why not come up with a nice looking components that could compete with, say, Flash components? A. The time is the problem, that’s why the... (more)

Event-Driven Web Application Design

Yahoo! User Interface Blog Frontend engineering rocks right now. The era of boring web sites is over and we’re all into pushing the envelope, erasing boundaries and getting beyond whatever prevents us from building the next killer web application. New companies building quick-turnaround web products spring up like mushrooms and many an old convention of web design is cast aside to make way for quick prototyping and agile development. The real confusing part of it — at least to me — is that we don’t try out new ways to approach web application development. Instead, there seem to be two separate schools of development approach: You either use a framework (like Ruby on Rails, Spring or Microsoft .NET) to build your web-app or You build your web app with best-practices ideas coming from more traditional web design and/or application design. The fra... (more)

Exclusive Q&A with Coach Wei - Chairman, Founder & CTO of Nexaweb

'Ten years ago,' Nexaweb Chairman, Founder & CTO Coach Wei tells Jeremy Geelan in this exclusive interview with AJAXWorld Magazine, 'I was as a poor graduate student naive enough to start a company at the bottom of the 'dot-bomb' burst. I learned so much coping with the 'nuclear winter,' raising $18M in financing, working through all the challenges associated with the market, dealing with investors and everything else. I only wish that I had known all this before I got started.' View Coach Wei on SYS-CON.TV Read Coach Wei's Articles AJAXWorld Magazine: As the technology commentator who coined the phrase “the AJAX wildfire” fifteen months ago, less than a year after Jesse James Garrett’s seminal essay, what was it precisely that made you so certain that AJAX was going to spread Web- and world-wide? How did you know it was no mere fad? Coach Wei: Since 1996, the drea... (more)

RIA Development on the Microsoft Stack Using Flex

ASP.NET AJAX is a natural candidate for RIA development under the .NET framework. However, there are other complementary or even alternative technologies that are worth your consideration. This session will start with a brief market overview and outline the pros and cons of some of the emerging and established frameworks, particularly JavaFX, Silverlight, and Flex. We will then dive into hands-on labs for delivering applications using Flex and .NET. You'll see specific implementations utilizing web services, FlourineFX (open source Flash remoting) and WebORB (commercial Flash remoting). We will also discuss delivering desktop applications using Adobe AIR, streaming video over the web, and engaging your audience with audio/video chat. Basically all the must-have features of today's Rich Internet Applications. Speaker Bio: Mike Grushin is the CTO of SharpStyle Labs, In... (more)

Tracking RIAs with Google Analytics and Unica NetInsight

Judah Phillips' "Web Analytics Demystified" Blog All this talk about 'the death of the page view,' 'AJAX,' 'rich media,' 'engagement,' and 'events" is enough to make even the most savvy Web analyst think twice about what we're measuring these days.  When you use Google Maps, the name of the page doesn't change. (So now you see where all that page view death conversation comes from.) 'Traditional' web analytics care about when the page name changes - they see that as an important event. Suddenly, that's changed. It is true that with new client-side technologies, the page view is no longer the holiest of holy metrics anymore (personally I’ve always liked to see increases sessions and in “page views per unique visitor”). But the page view is far from dead. Rather the page view is evolving to become a type of “major” event in the Web 2.0 experience. Now before I go on, l... (more)

AJAX and Enterprise RIA Tools - JSF, Flex, and JavaFX

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.  To make this task manageable, I'm going to narrow things down to three different technologies for delivering enterprise-level Rich Internet Applications. While the first two (JSF and Flex) are proven technologies that have been used for a numbers of years, JavaFX is a new declarative language for building rich user interfaces using Java. It's essential for IT managers to consider and be aware that more than one delivery platform exists today for Rich Internet Applications. Tab... (more)