Does it annoy anyone else that Web 2.0 apps like Basecamp no longer have login forms? I understand that you need to login at a specific URL http://nitobi.myapp.com but would it be so difficult to actually just have a login form that transfers you to your server rather than making people remember the server name?
Get it while it’s hot! It looks like the Enterprise Ajax Live Lessons are now available on either Safari or Amazon.
if you want to learn about Ajax in a format that is bit more easily digestible than reading a boring book then be sure to pick up the Live Lessons where we step you through all the pitfalls of building an Enterprise Ajax application. Topics covered include a framework review, testing, security and usability.
Way back in May of this year (I have been thinking about this post for a while now!) Andre and I were down at JavaOne to give a presentation and also had the chance to take part in the always interesting (at least two years in a row now) RedMonk CommunityOne session. It was good to take part in the cloud computing, twitter and open source discussions - one great take away was “don’t drink and tweet”. I digress.
Of most interest to me was the round table discussion about “what is an RIA?“. There were various opinions on this that I will not repeat here and let you read over on RedMonk.
What didn’t come through on the RedMonk review was what I thought, arrived at through the great discussion, was really the defining characteristic of Rich Internet Applications. In the end it was not about flashy graphics or animations. The one defining characteristic of an RIA is that there is no page refresh.
That’s it. That is all there is to RIA. If you have an application running over the network that does not have a page refresh then that is an RIA - be it using Flash, Ajax or a Java Applet. The discussion went back and forth until Jeremiah Stone from SAP finally talked some sense (afterwards we had a very interesting discussion and I really need to follow up with him) saying that good design is dependent on the context of the problem being solved. Now this is a really important idea since if you are used to working with a keyboard accessible green screen application, a visual mouse driven GUI will probably be far less usable. It is all context dependent. I may take longer to learn the green screen application but it will likely pay dividends in productivity down the road.
At any rate, long story short, the one common theme that people presented was that an RIA is defined by an application that has no page refresh, whether it is made for a user of a terminal or a new web 2.0 application.
I had my epiphany at the very end of the session and was pretty much lost on deaf ears of people who were about ready for a cold one (aside from Duane who was thoroughly liquored already ;)) . However, I felt somewhat vindicated when I was reading James’post about the session when I noticed that there was a comment from David Mendels of Adobe, who was possibly responsible for defining the term while at Macromedia in the early 2000’s. Indeed David suggested that the original definition of an RIA was an application with no page refresh.
Based on that I think that the case of the meaning of RIA can be considered closed.
We are almost ready to start building for our planned July 1 release of Complete UI Q3 - it is looking like we will be on schedule even! It is too bad we didn’t get everything in that we wanted but there are still a few nice new features.
The most notable updates aside from various bug fixes are Firefox 3 support, a new and improved Calendar and Datepicker component, and JSF versions of all the components!
I am really excited to see what sort of adoption we get for the JSF versions of our components and I think that people will be pretty happy with the new and Calendar functionality.
Time to get back to work as it will probably be a pretty tireless last week and a half.
Despite it occurring on one of the nicest days of the year so far in Vancity, sixteen people came over to the Nitobi offices and hacked the day away. The beer arrived early so those of us who’s projects made a turn for the worse were getting sauced already by two or three - just after the pizza lunch.
When everything was said and done, Yohei came out on top with a Papervision3D version of the Nitobi office! It was pretty damn cool and you can play with it below.
Alexei also showed his NitobiBug tool that is a cross-browser Ajax debugging tool similar to FireBug.
Thanks to everyone for coming out despite the amazing weather (which you can see out the windows of the model of the office below) and the opening of the new Vancouver Apple store
We will be having the next one some time in the fall I think.
This morning I remembered why I never use the Vancouver Ontario Street cycle route - it is littered with death traps. No not the type that you may have seen in the recent Jones movie, I am talking about the invasive species introduced from the UK called the North American roundabout. It can generally by discerned by the motorists driving through it at break neck speeds; one may also identify it by the pieces of broken bicycles and / or cyclists strewn about in various states of disrepair.
If you use the Ontario Street bike route you must have a death wish. I think that Main Street - though you do have to be wary of door prizes in certain areas - is actually far safer for cyclists. I for one feel that rather than being segregated to the back of the bus, in the name of safety cyclists should be using the proper road ways, pissing of the car driving, climate changing commuters.
At any rate, one can see in the lovely animated gif, care of the Wikipedia article, that vehicles entering the roundabout yield to those already in the roundabout - be them cars, bikes or hover boards. What that means here in North America is that when entering the roundabout you give the right of way to those on the left unlike a regular stop sign.
In case you have not heard of our upcoming Nitobi events - Ajax and Scotch as well as Hack Day - then where the hell have you been???
Come out on Thursday night (May 22) at the Shebeen Room for some lovely scotch - my current favourite is Auchentoshan - and of course Ajax discussions, which as we all know means pretty much anything these days.
My talk at CommunityOne went off without a hitch and was possibly even well received. After which Andre and I went on to check out the RedMonk track at CommunityOne, which was inciteful as one would expect. We participated in a few discussions around cloud computing, twitter and, of course, RIA. I think from the discussion about RIAs I pretty much decided the only thing that makes an RIA is when an online application does not use page refreshes (too much). Flash, Silverlight and Ajax all share this one common thread. It was a good time and got even better at the house of shields after (between which was dinner with Dion, Ben, Chet, James and Andre).
At any rate, there have been lots of good conversations with all sorts of differentpeople and the creative juices are flowing. Can’t wait to find time to get some code written
Tomorrow is the Anchor Steam tour that Mike Chambers has organized - needless to say I can’t wait!
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