- Curl Nitro offline RIA samples available
- Curl 6 outperforms Flex 3 on CPU-intensive benchmark
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1: To beta, or not to beta?
- Backbase meets AIR
- Will you like Curl?
- AIR is nice, but probably not the next big thing
- Cross-domain madness
- Silverlight 2 beta 1 design tools
- Getting started with the Silverlight 2 beta
- RIA at the LOC
June 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Curl Nitro offline RIA samples available
As our sister publication ComputerWorld reported in April, RIA vendor Curl has taken on Adobe AIR with an extension to its RIA environment called Nitro. Curl calls Nitro a "Fit Client"; I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean, but this is how they describe it:
Nitro provides the essential capabilities of the Fit Client such as support for rich user interfaces, complex application logic, and agile development. Curl has enhanced its desktop capabilities with the following new features:
- Applet installer and desktop controls - Curl applets can be installed on the desktop for online and offline operation in a secure sandbox. The installer creates shortcuts on the desktop and start menu with customizable icons and a skinnable user interface.
- Client-side database - Nitro enables developers to build applications with local databases using the popular open source SQLite database engine combined with standard Curl techniques for data presentation and manipulation.
- Demo applets - These Web-enabled applications run standalone on the desktop, update when connected and provide real business value to enterprises.
- Desktop security model - With Nitro, desktop applications use the same security model as Curl applets. They run in a secure sandbox with local data access but limited system privileges. Curl applications can also be fully privileged applications, which require a standard digital signature provided by an established certification authority -- self-signing is not allowed.
Recently, the Curl folks have released two sample applications for Nitro, a timeline viewer inspired by the SIMILE project at MIT, and a Facebook circle-of-friends visualizer.
Source code is available for both applications. Before trying to run either sample, download and install the Nitro runtime and/or the Nitro IDE.
Nitro isn't restricted to Curl: it "embraces and extends" Ajax, Flash, and Flex:
Curl Nitro will also enable HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and PDF documents to run in the Curl environment. Ajax and Adobe Flex applications will be able to execute with the same enterprise-level security and SQLite database access formally specific to the Curl platform. Curl Nitro is not just a desktop RIA solution -- it is a platform that supports Curl, Ajax, and Flex applications on-line or off-line, browser based or desktop based. Curl Nitro extends the Curl platform so that it is a RIA Desktop for the Enterprise.
Posted by Martin Heller on June 24, 2008 07:26 AM
May 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Curl 6 outperforms Flex 3 on CPU-intensive benchmark
As I've discussed in the past in my reviews of Curl 5 and Curl 6 and in this blog, the Curl RIA environment compiles its code to give it near-native performance. A year ago I thought that Adobe Flex 3 might be efficient enough to close the gap when it was released, but apparently it's not: Curl engineers just did a comparison of Curl 6 and Flex 3 as applied to a JPEG encoding algorithm.
Like all benchmark comparisons, this one's methodology is open to attack. In addition, the comparison didn't include Microsoft Silverlight. I expect Silverlight 1.0, which uses interpreted JavaScript, to be a tad slower than Flex 3; I expect Silverlight 2.0, which uses compiled .Net languages, to have speeds competitive with Curl.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting result, and a big enough difference to be significant. Here's the release:
RIA Technology Benchmark Test Finds Curl Outperforms Adobe Flex 3
Curl programming language is key factor in superior performance and developer productivity; outperforms Flex by factor of 8 to 10
Cambridge, Mass. – May 28, 2008 – Curl®, Inc. today announced the results from a recent performance benchmark test of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, Version 6.0, and Adobe Flex 3. The test aimed to compare the performance of these two RIA platforms and found the Curl language to outperform ActionScript 3, the programming language of the Adobe Flash Player runtime, by a factor of 8 to 10. This finding is particularly significant for developers seeking highly productive ways to build mission-critical, enterprise-class RIAs that require high performance capabilities.
The benchmark test, conducted by Curl engineers, comprised of implementing a JPEG encoding algorithm. This is an ideal test case for performance since JPEG encoding is a useful and common computational task. The engineers first translated an existing ActionScript program for JPEG encoding to Curl and compared the resulting performance for three images ranging from small to moderately large.
The results of the test showed that Curl retains a substantial advantage in raw execution speed, attributed mostly to the significant difference in the two platforms’ programming languages. While the Curl language was architected to support compiling to efficient code, Adobe’s ActionScript was not. The end result is Curl’s superior performance for building enterprise RIAs.
“Curl was designed to be a very powerful, high-performing language and platform, and we have always been proud of this unmatched capability,” said Bert Halstead, vice president and chief architect, Curl. “However, in order to consistently demonstrate our dominance in this area, we understand the need to constantly test ourselves against other solutions on the market. The results of this test support our claims, and we will continue to expand on this study to further document Curl’s superiority for enterprise RIAs.”
Curl consistently outperformed Action Script in each of the three test cases. Specific results on the 2.26 GHz benchmark machine included:
- For the small image – 700 by 933, 0.65 megapixels and 72 kB in size – Curl performed in 0.16 seconds and Flex in 1.72 seconds.
- For the medium image – 1170 by 1560, 1.83 megapixels and 195 kB in size – Curl recorded 0.46 seconds with Flex at 4.43 seconds.
- For the large image – 2,560 by 1,920, 4.92 megapixels and 511 kB in size – Curl’s time was 1.36 seconds, and Flex’s was 11.69 seconds.
Multimedia: Curltech flickr page, Curltech photobucket page
Posted by Martin Heller on May 28, 2008 11:15 AM
May 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Visual Studio 2008 SP1: To beta, or not to beta?
As I mentioned in An old Visual Studio problem rears its ugly head back in February, I've been looking forward to SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and NET Framework 3.5. Why? These are supposed to fix most of the problems I've been having with Visual Studio, and restore most of the functionality that was cut from the initial 2008 release.
SP1 is out, but only as a first beta-test version. As is true with most beta-test products, there are risks to running it, ranging from a high likelihood of encountering new bugs to a low likelihood of trashing your system to the point where your most effective option is to reinstall Windows from scratch on a newly formatted partition, also known by the woodworking analogy of scraping your drive down to the bare bits.
The list of improvements in this version is impressive. Both Scott Guthrie and Brad Abrams have discussed these in their blogs. Brad does a great job of covering new features; Scott does too, in a slightly different way, and also highlights the known incompatibilities.
Here are the "gotchas", copied from Scott's blog:
1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.
2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.
3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.
I wouldn't install this version on my primary development system, but I might install it on a secondary development system after doing a full back-up.
To beta, or not to beta? Maybe both.
Posted by Martin Heller on May 13, 2008 11:37 AM
May 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Backbase, "The Ajax Company," announced today that it officially supports Adobe AIR in its development environment. This was implicit in last month's announcement of Version 4.2, but now it's explicit.
Here's the full release:
Backbase Enterprise Ajax Now Supports Adobe AIR
Allows deployment of Ajax based Web applications on the desktop
SAN MATEO, Calif., May 6th, 2008. Today, Backbase, The Ajax Company™, adds official support for Adobe® AIR™, a new runtime environment from Adobe Systems for deploying rich Internet applications (RIAs). This integration lets applications built on Backbase Enterprise Ajax run as applications on the desktop across various operating systems.
Applications created with Backbase Enterprise Ajax and deployed on Adobe AIR can access desktop file systems, clipboards, drag and drop events, and system tray/notifications. They can store information locally and operate offline. The combination of Backbase Enterprise Ajax and Adobe AIR opens up new opportunities for web application developers to extend their Ajax solutions to the desktop.
Developers will also benefit from the new integration because they can now use a single platform — Backbase Enterprise Ajax — to build both online and desktop applications. “Now developers can use both their Ajax skills and Web technologies like HTML and Ajax to develop desktop applications,” says Michel Gerin, Backbase VP of Marketing.
Backbase Enterprise Ajax delivers an end-to-end solution for designing, developing and deploying business critical Ajax based RIAs. With an intuitive interface, easy-to-use Ajax tags, and an extensive library of widgets, Backbase increases developer productivity, reduces lead-time for Ajax projects, and leverages existing IT investments.
Applications built and deployed with Backbase Enterprise Ajax and Adobe AIR deliver the best of both worlds. Backbase Enterprise Ajax delivers the features of browser-based RIAs plus speed of development and ease of use. Adobe AIR adds desktop functionality like reading and writing local files, integrating with other applications on an end-user’s computer, and maintaining local data storage on the desktop.
“Applications on Adobe AIR combine the power of local resources with the reach of the Web,” said Robert Christensen, Adobe AIR senior product manager at Adobe. “The union of Backbase Enterprise Ajax with Adobe AIR empowers Ajax developers to use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications on the desktop.”
“The benefits are great” says Gerin. “Enterprise developers and ISVs can boost productivity, extend their market reach, enhance customer satisfaction, improve customer retention, lower costs, and increase profits.”
Best practices and a sample application using Enterprise Ajax with Adobe Air are available on the Backbase Developer Network at: http://www.backbase.com/adobe-air
About Backbase
Backbase, Inc, The Ajax CompanyTM, is the leading provider of enterprise software for creating Ajax-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Medium to large enterprises and independent software vendors use Backbase to enhance the usability of their Web applications, migrate fat client applications to the Web, deliver next-generation online self-service applications, and create enterprise mashups. Founded in 2003, Backbase is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA. Additional information is available at www.backbase.com .
Posted by Martin Heller on May 6, 2008 08:56 AM
April 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
As Doug Dineley and I were discussing my draft review of Curl last week, now posted here, he asked me a serious question:
You essentially recommend readers to give Curl a try. Is there a way to tell who is the best kind of match for this product? I mean, what sort of developer, in general, trying to meet what sort of need?
My answer about the need being addressed made into the final review. On the other issue, I responded:
The sticking point for a lot of developers is that the Curl language is different from what they already know.
In the early 1980s I ran a software development, publishing and sales business focused on engineering and scientific applications. One of the products we resold was Asyst, which was based on Forth. (There are still companies doing business under that name, but I doubt that any of them are related to the one that produced this product.)
After handling many returns of Asyst, I told the sales staff to ask the customer what kind of calculator he or she used, as a screening mechanism: if the answer was TI, then Asyst probably wasn’t for them, but if the answer was HP, then they’d probably be able to learn Asyst because they already knew Reverse Polish Notation.
I haven’t found a similar touchstone for Curl, but then again I’m not trying to sell it. I’m fairly sure that anyone who has learned Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk or Logo will pick up Curl very easily; most people who have learned OOD/OOP in any language will be able to pick up Curl without encountering any serious barriers.
Since it’s a free product for evaluation purposes, however, the simplest way to tell if you’re going to like Curl is to try it.
So there you have it.
Posted by Martin Heller on April 7, 2008 06:51 AM
April 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
AIR is nice, but probably not the next big thing
InfoWorld's Test Center chief technologist, Tom Yager, sometimes gets a little carried away in his enthusiasms, at least from where I sit. His deification of Adobe AIR in his recent posting AIR gets rich apps right is one of those cases: I'd go so far as to say it's a little over the top, even for Tom.
Right up front, let me say that I like AIR. It's a clever way to allow Flash and Flex developers to create desktop applications using their existing skills. I'd recommend it to those folks. But there I stop.
Tom's first assumption is that browsers of necessity fall short when used on the desktop. That needn't be the case. I have been shipping browser-based applications that look and act like Windows desktop applications for awhile now without any need for Flash or AIR. Start with a shell program written in C++, and let it host a Web browser control like MSHTML. Nobody really needs to know that you're using the IE engine under the covers. Write ordinary Web pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and use the scripting object model that Windows exposes to local applications. If that isn't enough, add an ActiveX control, expose whatever interfaces you need for scripting to an authorized client, and have full, safe, access to all Windows APIs.
Tom's second assumption is that browser plug-ins are dreadful. Yes, they can get out of hand, and they certainly aren't all wonderful, but well-written browser plug-ins in the right hands can make a Web page sing, not to mention dance. Of course an overloaded Web page can bog down, but you don't need to combine technologies to do that: one cheesy multimedia ad can do that all by itself.
Tom shudders to think what would happen were Silverlight added to the mix. Having played with Silverlight quite a bit, I can say that Silverlight will not end the world as we know it: in the right hands, Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, really dances and sings. Can a clumsy developer make a page bog down with Silverlight? Of course. But we're not talking about clumsy developers: we're talking about craftsmen teamed up with artists.
I like Silverlight. It's a clever way to allow .NET and WPF developers to create rich Web applications using their existing skills. I'd recommend it to those folks.
And there I stop.
Posted by Martin Heller on April 3, 2008 02:17 PM
March 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
One of the sites for which I consult recently licensed a Flash component from a third party. Of course, the vendor wanted to restrict the component licensing to avoid having the component re-used by others.
So far, so good. But this site, being large and old, has many domains and subdomains. It would be bad enough if it were just sampledomain.com and www.sampledomain.com, but then there's staging.sampledomain.com for testing and www1.sampledomain.com for bypassing the load-balancing switch and weblog.sampledomain.com for blogs, plus a bunch of variants to protect against cybersquatters.
Would the vendor license the Flash component to *.sampledomain.com? No, that isn't the way they do things. Why don't we create a new subdomain special.sampledomain.com and use it to host the Flash component in the fixed directory they'd license?
That was fine with everyone, except that it didn't work: JavaScript running on www.sampledomain.com couldn't load a Flash control from special.domain.com. The vendor came up with a fix: add a crossdomain.xml file to the special.sampledomain.com root authorizing *.sampledomain.com.
That didn't work either. The next piece of the fix was to place the configuration XML file in the same directory as the Web page loading the Flash component instead of the same directory as the Flash component itself. Finally, the Flash component loaded, only it wouldn't return any information to the JavaScript of the calling page.
What was its problem? Our theory was that Flash thought it was being used for a cross-domain scripting attack. Thanks a bunch, Adobe.
The vendor provided a new license key that allowed www.sampledomain.com as well as special.sampledomain.com, which potentially fixed the problem for 90% of our users. The other 10%, however, would have gotten a message that said that that the component was unlicensed, and that they should report the problem to the webmaster.
That was too ugly to accept. As a temporary fix, I wrote some server-side code to check the SERVER_NAME variable and redirect the page to www.sampledomain.com if it didn't match. That worked, and although I considered it a hack we promoted the new pages to the production site.
Meanwhile, the vendor researched the problem and determined that there was no technical fix. Finally, they did what we had initially asked for: they created a new Flash component licensed to *.sampledomain.com.
It came in Friday after I'd gone home. I'll install it Monday, and change the server-side code to only redirect URLs that aren't in *.sampledomain.com.
Happy ending? I sure hope so.
Posted by Martin Heller on March 22, 2008 05:16 PM
March 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Silverlight 2 beta 1 design tools
Yesterday I explained how to get started with Microsoft Silverlight 2 beta 1 if you're a developer. If you're a designer rather than a developer, of if you're a developer who does some UI design and prefers to drag and drop controls rather than writing XAML, you'll need to download and install at least one more tool: the Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
Why is that? Given how good the WPF Designer is in Visual Studio 2008 (VS08), why should you need Expression Blend?
The answer is that the Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS08 really are in a Beta 1 state. Yes, the WPF Designer opens for a Silverlight 2 project in VS08; yes, the Silverlight 2 controls appear in the toolbox. But no, you can't drop them on the design surface, at least not yet: the mouse cursor turns into the universal "not allowed" symbol if you try, as shown in the figure below. On the other hand, you can type in XAML, see error messages when it's wrong, and see the UI displayed when it's correct.
You can drag and drop controls onto the Silverlight 2.0 design surface with Expression Blend 2.5, although the documentation warns that this part of the preview isn't up to the standards of the Expression Blend 2.0, of which it is a superset. As long as you're downloading Expression tools, you may also want the balance of the Expression Studio 2.0 beta: Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Media, and Expression Encoder.
I'm happy to report that the Expression 2.0 betas and the 2.5 preview do not overwrite or interfere with production copies of Expression 1.0. So far, what I have seen of the betas and preview is mostly good, but I like the safety of being able to use release-quality tools when necessary.
Posted by Martin Heller on March 7, 2008 01:00 PM
March 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Getting started with the Silverlight 2 beta
I'm up to my elbows in the Silverlight 2 beta, the release of which Paul Krill reported on here. I don't have much to say about it yet, but I thought I'd share the best way to get started developing with this version, since I wandered into and had to find my way out of several blind alleys myself.
Assuming that you already have Visual Studio 2008 installed, then start by downloading the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008. If you have any previous versions of the Silverlight tools or SDK installed, go to Add/Remove programs and remove them.
Then run the silverlight_chainer.exe you just downloaded. It'll either tell you that you have something else to remove, tell you that you're missing a prerequisite, or tell you what it's going to do. If you need to make adjustments and run it again, do so. Once it runs, expect it to grind away on its own through a coffee or tea break.
The beta doesn't register its help collection for use with Visual Studio. You can find the instructions by opening the Silverlight SDK 2.0 Welcome page and then opening the Readme file from there. The short version, however is to open Visual Studio 2008, pick Help|Index, make sure the index view is unfiltered, and look for Collection Manager. When you find it, double-click on the Help item below Collection Manager, and wait a minute or two while it grinds again. When it finally comes up, scroll down to the bottom of the page and check the box beside "Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Documentation" and click Update VSCC.
Then you'll have to OK some frustrating dialogs and let them close Visual Studio and Document Explorer. After they've closed, reopen them. When you bring up Help|Contents, it'll grind through yet another coffee or tea break, but eventually it'll open with Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK near the bottom of the contents.
You can also find the Silverlight documentation online on MSDN and additional tutorials, samples, and videos at Silverlight.net.
Posted by Martin Heller on March 6, 2008 02:14 PM
January 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
As I found out from a Microsoft press release, Microsoft and the Library of Congress (LOC) have recently started collaborating on interactive Web content, and have agreed to do more. The new site actually sounds useful. When I followed up on that at the existing LOC site, I discovered that some interactive content already exists there.
Some of it is Silverlight content (Reading Pre-Columbian Artifacts and the Waldseemüller Maps), and some is Flash content (The Buccaneers of America). Both kinds of RIA content also come in plain HTML versions.
Enjoy.
Posted by Martin Heller on January 10, 2008 07:39 AM
January 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Yet Another Silverlight Sports Video Site
What is it with Silverlight and sports video sites? First baseball, then basketball, and now the Olympics. This just in from Microsoft:
Tonight at CES in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced that NBC Universal has chosen to partner with Microsoft to make “NBCOlympics.com on MSN” the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. NBCOlympics.com on MSN will provide online users with exclusive access to an unprecedented offering of over 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video content built on Microsoft Silverlight 2.0.
The combination of the MSN audience reach and the Silverlight technology will allow NBC to deliver Olympics content to a broad U.S internet audience - all through an immersive and interactive video experience that will redefine how sports fans consume content online. The Silverlight showcase, which invites customers to showcase their applications, now features more than 100 Silverlight applications from 30+ countries/regions around the world.
Posted by Martin Heller on January 7, 2008 06:22 AM
December 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Silverlight for Designers: New Expression Blend Preview Available
Most designers would never use Visual Studio, or even consider using it. Microsoft has a partial solution for designers who want to create Silverlight-based RIAs: Expression Blend. There's a free December preview of Expression Blend 2.0 available for the downloading.
Why do I say it's a partial solution? Because at this point designers probably can't get everything they want from Silverlight by themselves. For many applications, the designer will have to collaborate with a programmer to get the project absolutely right. They may also have to use Visual Studio themselves, but only for a few simple, infrequent tasks.
Posted by Martin Heller on December 20, 2007 07:34 AM
December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Jason Snyder, quoting the Times, reported on Friday that Paramount Pictures will debut Jackass 2.5 online. This reporter has since learned that Blockbuster is using Microsoft Silverlight to "pioneer this movie experience."
According to Microsoft's press release,
The feature combines the rich media content delivery network from Limelight Networks and Microsoft Silverlight to provide first studio-backed feature streamed in its entirety. Anyone 17 or older can check out the movie for free at Blockbuster December 19th – December 31st.
For more information, please click here: http://www.limelightnetworks.com/press/2007/12_17_blockbuster.html
Comments?
Posted by Martin Heller on December 18, 2007 12:22 PM
December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Ephraim wonders about the necessity of having BI applications on your cellphone, and offers an alternative: One window.
"a single mobile environment, a single mobile window, if you will, lower case W please, in which information can be sent to or accessed from.
One window, one view, all critical information goes into that pot."
We already have One Window: it's called a Web browser. We also have ways to overcome the limitations of Web browsers, known collectively as RIAs, in which I include Ajax.
The whole idea struck me as funny, though, and brought to mind the inscription on Isildur's Bane (in The Lord of the Rings):
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
or, in Elvish:
Posted by Martin Heller on December 18, 2007 09:07 AM
November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with Dave Gruber of Adobe about Flex. The short summary is that Flex was designed to be Flash for programmers, and that Flex has been gaining traction for Web applications in a number of areas.
The first thing we talked about is the designer orientation of Flash. I freely admitted that I never really grokked Flash, while my sister the RISD BFA/Cornell MFA had no trouble at all with it. Gruber told me that I was not alone, and that the tools for Flash were intended for designers and built around paradigms that designers understand. The difficulty that many programmers have with Flash is the principal reason that Adobe developed Flex in the first place: it's their programmer-oriented RIA tool.
You may recall that I reviewed Silverlight a couple of months ago, and said it competes with "Adobe Flash and Flex, with OpenLaszlo and Curl, and with a variety of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) frameworks." A few days later the irrepressible Tom Yager wrote a rebuttal in the Test Center Daily that said "Looked at in a vacuum, Silverlight is nice, and it demos smashingly well, but Microsoft is bringing a plug-in and unfamiliar tools to developers and content creators, while Adobe is expanding its Flash ecosystem with its own Internet run-time framework, AIR."
I think Tom got that both right and wrong: different audiences have different expectations. Silverlight is immediately familiar to .NET developers, and the Silverlight tools are mostly the same tools that .NET developers already use.
While I never took to Flash, I'll probably be able to learn Flex; nevertheless, FlexBuilder is a new tool for me with its own learning curve. I have downloaded the FlexBuilder 3 beta, but haven't yet gotten far with it. Designers and what they are used to is another story entirely.
Gruber and I discussed AIR and other new parts of the Flash/Flex ecosystem. AIR can be used to deploy Flex, AJAX, and Flash applications to the desktop. The motivation for AIR is that developers who use FlexBuilder for Rich Internet Applications want to use the same tools for desktop applications.
"Thermo" is an "upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs." Thermo applications "are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers." In other words, Thermo is a Flex tool for designers who have outgrown Flash.
The Flex 3 SDK and engine will be open source when they are released in February of 2008. FlexBuilder, however, will remain proprietary.
Gruber mentioned that Adobe was in the process of acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, the creators of a Flex-based word-processing application called Buzzword. I have been playing with Buzzword online recently, and it is getting better and better. I'm impressed: in some ways it's already better than Zoho Writer, although it's not far enough along to replace Microsoft Word, at least not for me.
Stay tuned: the whole RIA language and tool area is emerging rapidly. I don't think it will be a matter of anyone "winning" so much as a matter of several players staking out separate but overlapping territories in the RIA market.
Posted by Martin Heller on November 29, 2007 08:35 AM
October 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Red Sox Win ALCS Game 7 Against Indians
Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but last night I was not only glued to the TV in the living room, I had my laptop on the coffee table with the game day display (which is apparently a Flash or Flex RIA application) open for quick reference, since the Fox announcers in TV always seemed to be jabbering about something irrelevant to the actual play. You wouldn't know it from the final score (11-2), but it felt like a close game until Papelbon pitched out of the potentially disastrous situation in the 8th inning.
I have choir rehearsal Wednesday night during the first game of the World Series. I'm sure there will be an alto in the back row reporting the game score every 10 or 15 minutes.
Posted by Martin Heller on October 22, 2007 07:26 AM
October 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I spent most of the day Monday at ReMIX07 in Cambridge, MA. I got there a little late, just in time for Miguel de Icaza's Linux/Moonlight demos near the end of Brad Abrams' keynote. Fortunately, Brad has already blogged a summary of his whole talk: ReMix Boston Keynote thoughts. I can verify firsthand that he got a good reception.
I heard a good talk by Rocky Lhotka (a developer) and Tony Handley (a designer), both of Magenic, about how they collaborated on a WPF project. It was originally supposed to be a Silverlight project, but Silverlight 1.0 doesn't have a Text Box control, and the application requires a lot of text input.
After lunch, I had a good discussion with Ed Blankenship and Grant Hinkson of Infragistics about their collaboration on a WPF reference project, Tangerine. I also had some very interesting discussions during and after lunch with several designers about how they felt about what Microsoft had been showing them.
I want to digest all this before I draw any conclusions. More soon.
Posted by Martin Heller on October 8, 2007 02:55 PM
September 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Installing Silverlight 1.0 Templates on Visual Studio
On August 9th I discussed Microsoft's recommendations for setting up a Silverlight development environment. As I noted on August 25th, this process hasn't been without its troubles for me.
With the release of a shipping, supported Silverlight 1.0, I decided to get serious about testing the two Silverlight SDKs. I already had the Silverlight 1.1 alpha SDK set up properly with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 in a Virtual PC. I set up the Silverlight 1.0 SDK with Visual Studio 2005 on my production development environment... and found no Silverlight template when I went to create a project.
This reminded me of an installation bug with an early LINK preview. I checked my C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Silverlight\ directory, and there was the SilverlightJSApplication archive. I copied that Silverlight directory to C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\Visual Studio\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#, restarted Visual Studio 2005, and was able to create a Silverlight 1.0 JavaScript application.
That wasn't what Microsoft recommended, however. They suggested developing with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the Expression Blend 2 preview. There wasn't a Silverlight 1.0 JavaScript application template installed there, however, and the Silverlight 1.0 SDK installer refused to work in the absence of Visual Studio 2005.
Searching the Silverlight forums eventually got me to this posting by Shawn Wildermuth: Installing Silverlight 1.0 Templates on Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (Orcas). Reading over what Shawn did, I realized that I could skip a few steps since I already had the template extracted. I copied the SilverlightJSApplication archive into the Virtual PC, placed it in a new Silverlight directory under c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#, ran "devenv /setup" from a Visual Studio command prompt, and I was in business.
Posted by Martin Heller on September 11, 2007 11:37 AM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Silverlight Talk in Second Life
OK, I've hit my buzzword quota for the day.
Seriously, Brad Abrams gave a talk about Silverlight in Second Life at the end of last month. As it happens, I missed it: it was at 3 PM SLT/PDT, which is 6 PM EDT for me, and my wife expected me home for dinner. Real life always wins.
Fortunately, Brad has posted the slides, Silverlight media demo and Silverlight RIA demos on his blog. I suspect that going through the media on your own PC will be a better experience than sitting through a demo in Second Life, especially given what Tim Heuer had to say about his own experience.
I understand exactly the problems Tim had. The problem with media starting out fuzzy and then getting clearer is an artifact of the way Second Life does incremental scene rendering. There's a bandwidth throttling preference setting in the Second Life client that you can adjust to make this better, but I don't know of a way to make it go away.
The problem Tim had seeing the speaker from his seat could have been solved if Tim had more experience in Second Life instead of being a newbie. Instead of flying his avatar around and annoying everyone else, Tim could have adjusted his camera position (using the Alt key on the Windows client) or used Mouse Look (started with the M key). There's also a Disable Camera Constraints option (Ctrl-Alt-C). Without going through some training, there was no way Tim could have figured that out.
(I can't believe I'm giving advice about using Second Life. I'm barely past the newbie stage myself.)
By the way: Silverlight 1.0 has shipped. Silverlight 1.1 remains in Alpha. Get them here.
Posted by Martin Heller on September 6, 2007 02:10 PM
August 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Earlier this week, I started delving into Silverlight in earnest. Browsing Silverlight samples to understand what was possible with the two versions of Silverlight was great, but I very quickly became frustrated when I tried to work with the development tools.
My first problem was that I couldn't compile any of the samples: I got errors about missing references, and another that said "The Silverlight framework is not installed". I assumed that I had missed an installation step, but after lengthy checks I determined that I hadn't.
Eventually, I found a long series of postings on the Silverlight forums; after weeding through complaints from many others in the same boat and quite a bit of well-intentioned but ill-informed advice, I finally got to the crux of the problem: the Alpha tools for Visual Studio needed to be updated. The Expression Blend 2 preview also needed to be updated.
I did this, solved most of the problems, and was able to compile and debug simple samples. I still had some trouble running more complicated samples from my Visual Studio 2008 Virtual PC, even though the same samples ran fine from computers that didn't have the development tools installed.
I uninstalled the Alpha refresh runtime and tools in the Virtual PC, started over with the 1.0 RC runtime, and verified that I could browse the MLB site. Then I added the 1.1 alpha runtime, and verified that I could browse the Zero Gravity game. I retested the MLB site, and it was still OK.
Then I added the VS alpha tools, and all my samples and all the demo sites showed me "Download Silverlight" icons. When I tried to download and install Silverlight again, either 1.0 RC or 1.1 alpha refresh, I would get Error 1502, "A newer version of Silverlight is already installed on this machine."
I let the Silverlight PR team know that I was having problems, and also posted about it on the Silverlight forums. As I was about to leave the office on Friday, I got a call from Jamie Cool at Microsoft offering to help me track the problem down.
We fixed my installation in ten minutes by doing exactly the same things that I had already tried, only this time they worked. It turns out that the two builds of Silverlight, the 1.0 RC and the 1.1 Alpha, had gotten out of synch for about two days: the RC version had been bumped to fix some bugs, but the Alpha version hadn't been updated. Once I downloaded and installed the very latest 1.1 Alpha runtime and tools versions, my installation started working properly.
I like being on the leading edge. When it turns into the bleeding edge, it isn't quite as much fun.
Posted by Martin Heller on August 25, 2007 07:55 AM
August 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Silverlight: How to Set Up for Development
After downloading all the new Microsoft tools I told you about on August 1st, I was a bit confused about how best to set up for Silverlight development. It was clear to me that Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, the Silverlight Alpha add-ins for Visual Studio 2008, and the Expression Blend v2 August Preview were the right tools for developing Silverlight 1.1 applications with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha refresh SDK.
But what about Silverlight 1.0? Do the two SDKs install side by side? What are the best tools for Silverlight 1.0 development? So I asked Microsoft, through the PR person assigned to the Silverlight account.
The advice I got back was simple: use the Silverlight 1.1 development tools to target either 1.1 or 1.0. The two SDKs do not install side by side, although you can certainly install them on separate machines or in separate Virtual PCs on the same machine. However, Silverlight 1.0 is a proper subset of Silverlight 1.1, and the tools let you target either one.
There is one small disadvantage of doing this: the Silverlight 1.0 RC client updates itself automatically, but the Silverlight 1.1 client does not. Technical Evangelist Tim Sneath explains:
If you're running the 1.1 builds (as I'm sure most developers are), we don't auto-update your machine. Since you're on the "development" fork, we require you to manually update your machine (simply run the install from the link here and your machine will get the latest bits). The current 1.1 bits are v1.1.20806.0 (the build number matches, just the major and minor version numbers are different).
Posted by Martin Heller on August 9, 2007 07:15 AM
August 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Why would I, a known Red Sox fan, be interested in the screen shot at left grabbed from a video of Yankee A-Rod's 500'th homer? Because it's the first instance, or at least the first I know about, of a major league (not to mention Major League) site using Silverlight.
The press release that told me about this follows:
Microsoft is happy to share that MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, has deployed a new online media player using Microsoft Silverlight 1.0. MLB.com first announced support for Silverlight at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference earlier this year and previewed the new player during the keynote at the Microsoft MIX’07 conference.
MLB.com has been looking for a way to bring a more interactive and enticing media experience to baseball fans around the world. With Silverlight, MLB.com will reach an even broader audience while pursuing new media experiences for its viewers. The new player provides fans with a richer, more interactive experience on MLB.com by engaging users to share baseball video with the capability to email directly from the media player. To take a look at the new player, please go here and to see how the new video player will be integrated into existing MLB.com content, please go here.
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for delivering media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Silverlight helps media companies deliver interactive web experiences with higher quality, broader reach, and greater control while reducing delivery costs. In addition, Silverlight is compatible with the millions of hours of existing Windows Media content. A feature complete release candidate (RC) of Silverlight was released on July 27th.
Posted by Martin Heller on August 7, 2007 11:56 AM
August 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
In my review of Curl 5.0, which posted today, I called out a generic page for Curl demos, but I didn't go into the details.
First, before you run any Curl demos, download and install the Curl RTE.
There are three demo areas:
- Enterprise software demos: prototypes of various enterprise-related applications, highlighting Curl capabilities that can help build better business applications.
- Fun and games: Have some fun. Kick back and relax a bit, while getting a different perspective on the capabilities that Curl has to offer.
- Code Samples: See how to use various capabilities of the Curl platform, particularly in the areas of dynamic 2D and 3D graphics.
The Enterprise area has 7 demos: Stock Performance Calculator, On-Line Map Exploration, Order Entry, Live Tax Form, Mailing Label, RSS Reader, and Web-Based Training.
The Fun and Games area has 4 demos: Chess, Chinese Checkers, Maki, and Match-it.
The Code Samples area has 9 demos, all with source code. Three samples cover 2D graphics, 4 cover 3D graphics, and the two miscellaneous samples implement a Whack-A-Mole game and a PDF viewer.
In my screencast, I spent a lot of time on the Ray Tracing demo, which personally I found impressive. On the other hand, the Enterprise software demos might shed more light on whether Curl could help your company.
Posted by Martin Heller on August 6, 2007 01:56 PM
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