Orlin Monad's Bookmarks tagged RIA →  View Popular

Power with Flexibility

OpenLaszlo LZX is a declarative XML markup language with embedded JavaScript designed expressly for advanced Web applications. Its syntax is familiar to developers experienced with JavaScript, HTML and XML, and it provides advanced language features such as animation, layout, drawing, data binding, and server communication (persistent connections, SOAP, XML-RPC and XMLHttpRequest) to create an extraordinarily rich user experience. OpenLaszlo comes with a robust set of components and is supported by extensive documentation.

Not only is the ActionScript language becoming like Java – the whole damn thing is becoming like Java. Granted, Flash tends to be faster and a little bit better looking than most Java Applets, but it’s all starting to look quite heavy.

The Java Applet story never really panned out like it was hyped; and the Flex hype is starting to sound exactly the same.

Oh yeah, and the ActiveX story sounded pretty similar too.

The big corporations stagnate until there’s sufficient competition. C#’s rapid progression into new features has probably done more to propel Java forward than anything in recent years.

For Flex, the competition is AJAX. If this new wave of browser development using DHTML, Javascript, JSON, and XMLHTTPRequest didn’t come along, Flash wouldn’t have been threatened and I highly doubt Flex or any other free tools would have shown up at all.

As such, I think it’s up to the AJAX community to continue to provide an alternative. Work with Flex, sure, but once there’s no competition it could very well stagnate just like IE did once it achieved 90+ percent browser share. Microsoft went from their party line of “HTML Experience Everywhere – we are going to be the absolute best web experience company!” to “IE6 ought to be just about enough for anybody for the remainder of time.” That is, until Firefox finally became a plausible alternative and started to threaten that dominance.

I just have a hard time trusting Adobe in this arena. Nothing against the company (I continue to use PhotoShop and still occasionally use GoLive for some personal site work), but I just don’t trust them to be good gatekeepers of client side web application technology. And I can’t help but think I’m in a time warp back to 1996/97 whenever I hear about all of the great “rich application” crap Flex/Flash can bring.

“The interface to JavaScript has been improved too with the Flash/Ajax bridge”

Don’t forget about the externalInterface in Flash 8 either :)
I used it quite heavily when creating flashBug to allow me to interact with the Firebug console.

Unlike previous communication methods like getURL which was pretty much a one way street _ the externalInterface allows seamless communication. Once you have added your callbacks within Flash you can then access them like any other objects methods….._myFlash.method();

Regarding the first problem (back button), that’s what I’ve found yesterday on delicious IIRC:

http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

I lost interest with Flash mainly for these reasons:







• Monolithic applications: Flash apps tend to exist at one URL, fail to respond to the back button well and generally work within their own environment in the browser rather than working with the browser.


• Bad programming environment: Working on a Flash app with more than one person was always a pain in the arse. Because a lot of the app was contained inside one or more FLA files which could only be opened by one person at a time and it was a binary file version control was a pain.


• Controls didn’t work enough like browser controls: The in-built components helped a bit but Flash select boxes, scroll bars and other widgets just didn’t look or act the same. Bad for usability.


• Accessibility no-no: Previously SWFs where essentially a black box to assistive technologies and event MX components seemed to have trouble with keyboard focus and tabbing.
  * Limited and tedious interface with JavaScript: Getting data in and out of the SWF was possible but never easy.


• ActionScript is heading toward Java: Oh man, don’t get me started. As ActionScript develop it becomes less and less dynamic. `You get native classes and packages but type annotations? I suppose you get a performance boost but really. Static types are for stupid people…we don’t need em


• It’s not open source

"at some point integration will be required for business systems",

I really think we should factor in the kind of web app we're talking about in this debate, the two main categories being business apps or personal/productivity apps.

There's an instantly identifiable flaw in John's reasoning. There is a big difference between desktop apps with online capabilities and online apps with offline capabilities.

And it is this: desktop apps are OS-dependant. Online applications are cross-platform. Furthermore, as Tim O'Reilly often points out, online applications use web as the platform. This approach gives them a number of features/capabilities which desktop apps cannot emulate. More on this can be found if you dig through my site and read a recent post on Web 2.0.

This is the answer to John's question: "Or are there still intrinsic differences between web and desktop, regardless of how well they work offline or on?". Yes, there are.

ReadWriteWeb is currently running
a poll asking which web apps should also work offline. Shouldn't we be
asking the equally valid corollary as well: which desktop applications
would you like to see work online?

Fundamentally, what is the difference between a web app that works offline
and a desktop app that works online? Could it be that the web and desktop
application communities have accidentally merged and are violently agreeing
what the next version of productivity applications will look like? Or are
there still intrinsic differences between web and desktop, regardless of how
well they work offline or on?

#4. Yes, Dekoh can connect to any database including SQL server and MySQL using appropriate JDBC driver. JDBC drivers are available for most databases. This is unlike writing your own driver — which is required in Apollo.

Dekoh Desktop also bundles a database (Apache Derby), which can be used by applications to store data and metadata.

#3. Yes, developers can and will write lot of widgets. However some widgets like the tag cloud (link) can be reused across applications.
>

The widgets they can be used outside of Dekoh runtime. Such as an enterprise application that is being built for similar runtime. Widgets mostly

require Javascript, CSS, AJAX and, in some cases, Java. Dekoh will provide the code to developers, so that they can custom enhance it to suit their needs, as opposed to a published widgets/gadgets where they are meant for use as is.

#1. What it means is there is ATOM-based RSS reader bundled in the platform. Application and content shares can be subscribed by your buddies to see them on your desktop. Certainly, you can build a RSS reader on any platform. It is just that in Dekoh it comes bundled default.

Dekoh Desktop comes with a RSS widget that consumes RSS feeds and can be configured to display the feeds in the browsers inside any app you build on Dekoh. For example, you can have a “What’s New’ page on your personal Photo

application that gives you a news update when a friend comments on your collection.

Dekoh Desktop also has a easy-to-use feed generation API that feeds out on ATOM RSS formats. The API works is tested and works across all versions and variations of ATOM and RSS.

Adobe's Flex 2 - With the second version of the platform released a couple of months ago, Adobe seems to have a very strategic, long-term plan for Flex.  Flex uses a combination of declarative markup and procedural code to specify how applications should look and work.  Flex applications look extremely professional right from the start and there is a clear emphasis on providing a platform that enterprises could love, including lots of support for back-end infrastructure including Web services, messaging, portals, server-side event push, and more.  Adobe also has a world-class GUI builder environment for Flex called Flex Builder that can run as an Eclipse Plug-in.

Flex 2 requires the very latest Flash 9 player so if your applications are facing the Web, this could be an issue for some uses since this player is brand-new and deployment is still limited on the Web.  While developer and community support is still growing, and some count the number of Flex developers in the low thousands, it's clear that this platform is one of the most sophisticated and mature RIA products currently available.  Check here for my favorite Flex 2 demo app; click on the pie chart wedges and see how the graphs repopulate. The Flex language and SDK are completely free, but very expensive server-side run-time licenses can apply for the enterprise features.

A host of powerful new methods for rapidly creating compelling browser-based software (aka Rich Internet Applications) have recently come to market, or are rapidly heading there.  While the technique getting the most press by far these days is still Ajax, there are a number of new approaches that are intent on dislocating this often finicky and hard to work with — though very powerful — browser software model. The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.

The motivation for all this is simple; most of the world of software is moving to the browser and SaaS — and therefore the Web and your local Intranet — despite the browser lacking an innate capability for hosting sophisticated applications.  This lack notably includes support for rich media such a video, audio, and 3D graphics.  The fact is, Ajax is a solution that makes the most of fairly severe constraints in the browser, particularly not having the full support of an operating system, no access to powerful programming languages, and very few good development and debugging tools.  Yet it does quite well enough because the best Ajax applications build on top of the model of the Web and favor granulated data and software widgets all usable, discoverable, and "assemblable" by the vital hyperlink structure of the Web.