MAX 2006 presents Ajax & Flex

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 2006 day 1

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:

FLEX is free.

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 .

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 API – social web"> myFeedz API – social web

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.

MAX 2006"> MAX 2006

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

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

Flex Regular Expression Tester"> Flex Regular Expression Tester

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.

New Bamboo"> New Bamboo

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.

Degradable Ajax?"> Degradable Ajax?

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.

Time travel

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.

Biggest AJAX problem

Or, how I found myself in front of a 700 MB memory footprint Firefox.

AJAX is becoming the new “de facto” standard in the web application industry. Every where you look on the web there are changes and on almost all sites to approach the AJAX world. Gmail and Yahoo Mail are some of the biggest web applications implementing AJAX and the results on both are amazing.

Browser world

If you ask a JavaScript developer about what is the biggest problem of JavaScript programming it will probably tell you it’s browsers’ incompatibilities. This is a very big issue and as long as the major players will not come to an understanding (and unfortunately they won’t) and provide a common ground it will remain a big issue.

I will not mention here other problems from the CSS world for example.

Fortunately along with AJAX came a lot of frameworks and libraries that address this problem and hide the ugly details from the programmer.

The PROBLEM

In my opinion there is a worse problem then hacking your way around bugs and differences. That problem is represented by memory leaks.

JavaScript VM comes with a garbage collector and aside from some edge cases you might encounter, it does a pretty good job. Once you close a page a lot of work is done behind the scene to clear unreferenced objects. A lean, mean cleaning machine.

Well… AJAX can mess this up. The page is not closed any more.

The problem is not AJAX in itself as a programming paradigm but in what it can do for the application. With AJAX you can retrieve data from the server without closing the page and rebuilding it. And that data is placed inside the same page and manipulated by JavaScript programs. New DOM objects are created over and over, new JavaScript objects are created based on those data, new events are attached to all this objects. Few programmers destroy those object and unattache the events.

AJAX is still young and most of the people that have done some AJAX implementation for their site are just pulling some HTML parts from the server and using innerHTML to replace the content of a div element. No harm done. As the applications are becoming more and more complex the use case changes. XML or JSON is pulled from the server and DOM objects are created based on them. It is very easy to forget something.

Unfortunately most JavaScript programmers are sloppy. They were taught to be that way by the old browsing habits. There was no need to clean after you. When the page needed some more information, it was regenerated on the server and rendered again by the browser. A clean sheet to work on. Everything that was persistent were the cookies on the browser.

Taking care of your things in JavaScript is harder than you think. Very good programmers missed this. I was using an AJAX application from a well known company (not here to throw the stone) and after heavy usage for about two days without closing my browser, it reached the respected 700 MB footprint in my laptop’s memory.