Remus Stratulat - On the Stre@m

Las Vegas - get us your money

We arrived here in Las Vegas Friday and for somebody that have never been here it is breathtaking. At first. After you stay a day you can just see that is as a friend of mine putted, “The Plastic City”, a giant money making machine. Of course that unless you are a gambling freak you will have some fun for that money.

However the Venetian Hotel we are staying here is a very impressive one, lavish decorations and great rooms.

MAX

Today was the registration process and the exhibit section was open. I’ve get the chance to see old friends from previous conferences and reconnect with them.

As the day 0 this is quite a slow one, no sessions today, just a welcome reception at the Venetian Pool later this evening.

Straight from the oven: Andrei presented just half an our ago in front of more then 2000 people, a sample on how Ajax can be integrated with Flex, both benefiting from the power of FDS - Flex Data Service.

A finance demo application had a chart embedded into the same page along with 4 Ajax components: stock ticker, news accordion, competitors stock ticker table and article details, everything updated in real time using server push technology.

And that is not all, the components can interact with each other through JavaScript. So if you click in the chart on one article indicator, the article summary from the accordion will be opened along with the detailed article under the chart.

And by the way, its Dragomir with an r

MAX has started early today and the general session in the morning was full of exciting things.

Sho Kuwamoto presented Flex Builder and he created with ease a small but working mp3 player in just 5 minutes.

Apollo was a true hit in my opinion. The way that it will bring the power of Flesh, Flex and Ajax into the desktop world is great. Apollo is a cross platform runtime for building desktop RIA’s. But check more about this at http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo/.

In the end the organizers presented the largest mobile device that runs Flesh:

First of all, great news, Flash 9 has been released for Linux. That has many implications, one of them is that we can develop Flex now also on Linux :D.

Next week I will be at MAX and I just wait to be there. As it is hold in Las Vegas the conference it will be great.

There are some things that are happening and should be checked out:

• a presentation of Flex and Ajax working together on top of Java to create very powerful applications by combining the best features from the two worlds
• Apollo - a cross-platform runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, AJAX, PDF) to create and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.
• Acrobat 3D

See you there.

myFeedz opened up it’s API for the public use. I have already used this API to include the tags from my profile and the top articles for my profile (check out to the right).

But the possibilities does not end here. The tag cloud can display the tag associated with your blog if the blog is submitted to myFeedz. And you can transform the tags in links that perform searches on your blog using those tags.

The top articles are also interesting. You can choose to show:

• myFeedz top articles
• articles relevant for your myFeedz profile
• articles from a specific feed
• articles that you saved and thought they are very important and worth to be read.

A nice thing about the articles list is that the links does not point to myFeedz (so no tracking, no redirect, no marketing involved here) but instead directly to the source of the article.

This year I will be present at MAX 2006 that it will be held in Las Vegas :D.

Last time I was at MAX it was amazing and I’m looking forward to reconnect with people I know. So, see you there.

There is already on my site a JavaScript regular expression tester. I’ve been using it for a long time to help me with the regular expressions that I have written.

As I am becoming more and more familiar with Flex I have decided to write also one in it. It was a very simple job and the Flex Builder helped me a lot in drawing the interface. As in any other visual editor, one only has to drag some components onto the canvas and that is all. Attach a method to a button and..

Have fun with it. Right now is just a translated version of the JavaScript one but as Flex allow for a more interesting interface I will try to improve it.

It is nice to see that your fiends are involved in great projects. Cristi Balan ( evilchelu for us ) is a highly skilled programmer and it’s passion for Ruby on Rails may be outpassed only by his knowledge of CSS. And that is not mentioning JavaScript (I hope you are using JSEclipse ).

I wish him well in his enterprise and all you outthere keep an eye on his work, you will not get disappointed.

Developing an Ajax application can be a little bit difficult. Creating an Ajax web application that is both useful and degradable IS difficult. However this two goals can be achieved quite easily if you are using the right tools.

Right now there is only one tool that I know of that offer both these desired features: MX Ajax Toolbox. You can look at this very impressive demo
and you can try to disable JavaScript from your browser to see how it works.

Quoting from the website: MX Ajax Toolbox consists in a set of tools that allows you to solve two main use-cases:

1. Build AJAX sites from scratch (Rich Internet Applications) - with or without using a database connection.
2. Update legacy websites with interactive AJAX controls and widgets.

The Ajax image gallery from my site is one of the widgets provided by this toolbox.

I am a SF fun and one thing has puzzled me over the time: time traveling. I am sure that time traveling is either impossible to be done or we as the human race will never discover it.

Aside from various moral discussions or paradoxes involved with this concept, there is one thing that is obvious. Nobody have come from the future to visit us.

Why?

Because:

1. it is impossible to travel through time.
2. the travelers are very careful not to leave any marks in the past.
3. the human race will gone extinct before the technology will enable us to travel through time.

As option (2) is highly unlikely I am hoping for (1) as (3) is not quite pleasant even if this is the most probable one.