Blogs

It’s been a looooooong beta period for our ASP.NET Ajax Grid and today we released Beta 2. Well it hasn’t actually been THAT long since we weren’t actualy working on it for a month or so while we focused on making the JavaScript better and adding some of the features our customers were demanding.

The new Grid beta supports ASP.NET 1.1, 2.0 and Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 design times. You can bind to datatables or datasets easily, and even handle editing and saving.

Design time support includes easy drag and drop from the toolbox to your webpage, and you can configure databinding, and many other attributes from the properties editor.

For all you ASP.NET developers who aren’t already familiar with our Grid, Nitobi Grid is a multi-mode enterprise datagrid component supporting a variety of Ajax and static databinding techniques, copy and paste between Excel and Grid (or between grids), livescrolling, and rich editing capabilities.

We’re really looking forward to any feedback people may have, feature requests, and other such things. When the ASP.NET version is released it will be a free upgrade for all our Grid customers.

To grab the download, log into your customer center account or get it off our trial download page here: http://www.nitobi.com/download/

For a demo go here: http://www.nitobi.com/products/grid/demos/

So Ektron and SitePoint recently published the results of a survey indicating that PHP developers report they are far more likely to switch to Rails than any other framework (ASP.NET, Java, Perl, Coldfusion, Classic ASP, and Python included). I’m not all that surprised. PHP is part of LAMP, and Rails also quite complementary to that technology stack.

(taken from http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/10/09/php-developers-most-likely-to-switch-to-rails/)

I think too that there are cultural (if you will..) reasons why this might happen. I have found the PHP community to be quite aligned with open source and free software, and generally interested in new and bleeding-edge technology. Also, Rails guys and PHP guys dress the same and use Pechule Oil (ok jokes!). Rails still suffers from some of the same issues that PHP has.. eg: Unicode support (actually rails is worse).. and one thing that PHP developers will lose when moving to rails is access to the Windows API (should they want to port ASP.NET apps or something).

PHP Developers willing to stay the course will be treated to some exciting improvements and cleanup in PHP 6.. including full Unicode support (already mentioned), and an improved SOAP interface.

I’ve been a Coldfusion fan for years - ever since it was owned by Allaire. Although I hadn’t done a lot of work with Coldfusion in recent years (apart from the occasional troubleshooting of a customer’s code) I am still impressed with the way Adobe can produce an enterprise-class declarative web-app platform that is both easy to use and install. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re about too – products that are powerful, but so straightforward they literally fly into production. I guess that’s why people like Ruby so much too.

So we’re glad to annouce the release of Coldfusion MX editions of Grid and ComboBox. This adds to our already expansive support for J2EE, PHP, Classic ASP, and .NET (ok Grid is coming). Coldfusion will be supported by all future products too, as long as people are asking for it.

Why is this significant? Well a lot of people use Coldfusion, but there has been a poor showing of Ajax components and frameworks for CF developers. We wanted to make our enterprise-grade components available to those people. Now they are.

What we’ve done (to be specific) is provide a direct conversion of the server-side Nitobi XML API in the form of a basic CFTEMPLATE include. This provides a global set of functions for reading and writing to our XML schema. Since this is new territory for us, we wanted to try a very basic implementation of this API to guage response and collect feedback before producing a Coldfusion module or CFC. We’ll be releasing a CFC (Coldfusion Component) some time in late November or December pending feedback from customers.

If you’re looking for where to download our Coldfusion components go to

• Free trial downloads

Once you download, you’ll want to take a look at our tutorials for Grid and Combobox:

• Grid Coldfusion Tutorials
• ComboBox Coldfusion Tutorials