Peter Elst

I just got back from the annual Feweb event, this year I was scheduled in the Rich Internet Applications track to do a Flash versus Javascript battle with none other than Peter-Paul Koch, moderated by Gijs Van Essche.

Despite our sincere efforts it was difficult to find fault with the two technologies since they complement eachother so well. I had a few opening slides listing some of the top reasons to use Flash and features that are now or soon will be available in the Flash Player.

The slides above are in Dutch but I’m pretty sure they won’t be too difficult to understand ;)

Further discussion points raised by the moderator included:

• Flex and AJAX are identical
• Flex is sexier
• Flex is cross browser
• AJAX is a team rather than a single company
• Flex = Ajax < Silverlight

 
In the end it came down to use cases for each of the technologies, with Javascript and AJAX you’ve got more fine-grained control over the browser DOM while Flash/Flex gives you the advantage of cross platform deployment and a whole stack of data and multimedia features.

Where both Peter-Paul and myself seemed to converge was the last question on Silverlight where we both had our concerns particularly about the way it is being marketed. I think we were pretty fair in our assessment though was pleased to have a little chat with Luc Van de Velde, Director Developer & Platform Group for Microsoft afterwards.

I would like to call for a RIA think tank to be set up to get a technology-agnostic look at the challenges we face and how to most effectively move forward. Nobody benefits from a “browser war” between rich client technologies. Anyone interested to help kick start this project feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly!
 

I’m really happy to finally be able to announce a project I’ve been working on for a little while now — www.riajobs.org.

A job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight.

Of course there are already great community resources available for those looking for Flash, Flex, AJAX developers but what I believe is often missing is the idea that Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 are about more than any single technology.

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I arrived about an hour late at JavaPolis thanks to some impressive traffic jam on the way to Antwerp but am glad I did manage to catch most of Sang Shin’s “Introduction to AJAX“.

He discussed several frameworks and did a demo for each — from Dojo through jMaki and DWR (Direct Web Remoting) to GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

Each of these has its own benefits and flaws I was thoroughly impressed with binding in Dojo and how you could very easily capture events for browser back and forward button navigation. jMaki was interesting in that allows you to leverage widgets from different toolkits and ‘normalizes’ the different API’s. DWR generates JavaScript front-end code from your Java classes and takes care of the remoting, essentially an RPC/RMI type situation. GWT goes one step further and actually translates Java classes to AJAX, interestingly it has both a web and hosted mode — the first just runs in the browser as traditional JavaScript/XML, the other in a Java client which is great for debugging as it supports breakpoints.

After lunch I attended Dick Wall’s “Google API’s” session which was another eye opener. Unfortunately he didn’t talk about OpenSocial as it said in the schedule but he did give a great overview of some insanely cool functionality in the Google Collections Library (BiMap, MultiMap, ReferenceMap, Constraints,…). I really need to read up on this and see how it applies to my Flex development and if there are any similar implementations out there.

The second part of his session covered the Google Data APIs, another great project and the demo’s gave us a good idea of how to connect up to Google Spreadsheet, Calendar etc. which was surprisingly easy. Also worth noting is that the client library is not just in Java but the community has it ported to Ruby, PHP, Lisp etc.

I called it a day after those sessions, will be heading out again tomorrow morning to catch the “Thinking in Flex” session and some other great presentations.

 
 www.javapolis.com

I unfortunately didn’t have the chance to do detailed reviews for each of the sessions I attended at MAX Barcelona (15 minute breaks between sessions just isn’t enough) but here is a list of the sessions I attended and a mini-review for each.

The Google Analytics Reporting Suite – Nico Lierman, Wim Vanhenden
Flash Lite 3 Development – Bill Perry
A Guide to Tamarin – Lee Thomason
Building AIR with AJAX and the Aptana IDE – Kevin Hoyt
The mobile ecosystem with FL3 on Nokia Platforms – Christian Buchbauer
Play with Pixels – Bitmap manipulation with Flash CS3 – Koen de Weggheleire
Working with Persistent Data in Adobe Integrated Runtime – Danny Dura
Creating new Flex Components – Marco Casario
Design Patterns in ActionScript 3.0 – Leo Schuman
Flash Player Internals – Lee Thomason

If you attended any of these sessions feel free to comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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James Ward, Flex evangelist at Adobe, did an interesting talk on Flash, Flex and Apollo for Rich Internet Applications at Google earlier this month.

Adobe has just released a prerelease of Spry, a set of JavaScript libraries that leverage XML and XPath for easily creating interactive web pages and applications.

What I particularly like about it is that it integrates nicely with your HTML content, no funky scripting is required. Just include the JavaScript libraries, specify an XML dataset and create a dynamic region. You can set up repeating regions, sort and filter data without much hassle.

Hope to find some time this weekend to look into it some more and build an actual application! ;)

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html

[update] You wonder if this release date is just a happy coincidence with Kevin Lynch delivering a keynote at the Ajax Experience conference later today.