Posts

Fantastic, something else to learn 😉 Sun bloggers have been dropping hints to look toward the JavaOne conference in and around all of the Silverlight posts that have clogged up the aggregators the last week or so, and it appears the announcement for their new AJAX/RIA alternative comes in the form of “JavaFX”. JavaFX makes use of a new scripting language and utilises the Swing APIs for UI. This probably comes as no suprise, I have drummed on to my poor colleagues the last year how AJAX’s days are numbered in terms of the popularity it currently enjoys, it simply cannot keep up because HTML and JS were never intended to build this “new” breed of online app, too much reliance on the browser itself naturally brings with it serious yet fully justified limitations. We’re reaching the top of that particular bell-curve now. For an example of this you just need to compare Google Docs (Google being the absolute cream of the crop in AJAX scene, yes I know they use GWT), with early pre-alpha screens of Buzzword. The potential benefits of using the Flash Player are limitless in terms of real-time document editing (binary data transfer over XML refreshes, bitmap editing, video embedding, animation creation etc). Microsoft, Sun and Adobe of course are all providing better tools to craft future of the web. ...

Just watched the video of the BBC Silverlight app we created being presented at the day 2 keynote for MIX 07. There’s been a lot of traffic in the last couple of days with regards to Flash/Silverlight etc, and I’m not going to get into any of that here. The feature-sets and SDKs/players for the two products are out there for you to decide yourself as a professional whether it suits your needs. I just enjoy working at a place that throws so many new challenges my way, keeps things exciting! ...

I just got sent a very interesting link to a Flex app from James Ward that runs tests on a variety of different data exchange formats. The tests include results for: 1. Server processing time 2. Data transmission time 3. Parsing time and… 4. Rendering time Of course no real suprises that Flex/Flash Remoting performs the best in all cases (the Dojo example appears to transfer quicker, but it is actually only dealing with 500 rows instead of 5000 in the Flex tests, maybe because it is sadly let down by the incredibly long render time), “classic” AJAX performs fairly badly, with JSON and Dojo falling somewhere in between. ...

I know there are a lot of Amiga fans out there with you Flashers (that includes you Ralph), so imagine the suprise when I read today that Amiga are releasing a budget and a high-end computer using the PowerPC architecture and running AmigaOS4. I’d like to say I’m going to get one, but let’s just have a little play first and see how it feels. 🙂 Read the press release.

Just got sent this by a colleague, great fun and well executed, reminds me somewhat of LocoRoco…. http://www.acrobots.net/

I’m a huge fan of TED talks. If you read New Scientist or Scientific American and you’ve never seen a TED talk you may be missing out as the topics covered are generally very similar. And if you don’t, you’re still missing out! You may have seen the now famous multi-touch display, first demo’d (I do believe) at TED. TED talks are on a variety of topics ranging from “Is there a God?” and “What makes us happy?”, and their new website reflects on these themes with a nice new Flash theme-based visualisation of the (now over) 100 talks, along with some other great new features. ...

Just got sent this by Rick Williams… Security researchers have found what they say is an entirely new kind of web-based attack, and it only targets the Ajax applications so beloved of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement. Vulnerable frameworks include: Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (aka. Atlas), XAJAX and Google Web Toolkit, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, Moo.fx, jQuery, Yahoo! UI, Rico, and MochiKit. Read the full story here.

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Bedale group, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank James for organising it, and for the wine, there were a great deal of top quality bottles had over the course of the night along with some excellent cheese. I’d recommend anyone using Adobe products in an organisation to come along, many topics were discussed. From LiveCycle to Apollo to Flex, we covered a lot of ground regarding the products in terms of positioning, functionality, and in particular relationships with Adobe and the ISV outreach and support programme. It was interesting for me personally to talk to the guys from Arch Consulting who specialise in SAP R/3 and LiveCycle. In particular it was great to get a better picture on how Adobe fits in with the enterprise, I feel fortunate that I can pick up a beta and pretty much start using it in production, however at the other end of the spectrum there is a huge amount of proof needed before making leaps into new technologies. ...

Tuesday the 20th of March sees the first meeting of the Bedale Group set up by James Governor of RedMonk: The Bedale Group is… “An unassociation for the UK Adobe ecosystem. If you’re a software or services company that specialises in Adobe platforms I would be very interested to hear from you. The idea is to create an occasional forum to drink wine and discuss what Adobe needs to do to sustain and improve its engagement with the local corporate developer community.” ...

So I’m on day 2 of a project I’m un-imaginatively calling “PaperTron”, my first foray into making a game with PV3D, and I thought I’d post up a little screenshot of what we have so far: I hope this shouldn’t take too long, but considering it’s taken well over 2 weeks to make myself spend the time I have, it could take a while ultimately ;). Either way, it’s a lot of fun, and PaperVision 3D makes it pretty easy, let’s face it, if you’ve ever done any 3D in Flash before, it’s not easy, so anything that helps you do just the fun stuff is great in my books. ...