Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

Someone told me about this post of Christian Cantrell’s (of Macromedia and Adobe fame) listing several incredibly handy AS3 libraries.

These free open source libs are as follows:

• as3corelib: various utilities like advanced date parsing.
• as3exchangelib: talks to Exchange servers.
• as3nativealertlib: a modal alert that appears in its own native window.
• as3notificationlib: creates notification windows, and provides a layer of abstraction on top of OS-specific notifications.
• as3preferenceslib: manages application preference persistence, including encryption when necessary.

So I was looking into in-browser compression for my RobotReplay work..

This is actually a really hard thing to Google because of the confusion with gZipping JavaScript resources for lower file sizes on the web. That particular problem is easy to solve and commonplace. What’s really unique and interesting to me are the applications of gZipping content in JavaScript for offline storage or delayed transmission, or for compressing Ajax requests over an uncompressed connection. It could also be a little useful for the purposes of encoding your data from prying eyes.

Why we might want to perform gZip compression in a JavaScript program:

• Reduce data footprint before storing in offline storage (IE UserData, Flash SharedObject storage, sessionStorage, globalStorage, Google Gears, etc etc) since all of these have limits to how much you can store.
• Reducing bandwidth requirements for transmitting large amounts of data via an Ajax or cross-domain XHR request.

I can’t think of any others right now but I found this showing a working proof of concept of LZ77 (gZip) compression in JavaScript. There are some ‘catches’, however.

This was only really useful if you are compressing large-ish amounts of data (10K+) or the benefits derived from compression don’t outweigh the costs, which are: larger footprint for your JavaScript program, the inherent hassle of dealing with compressed data, and also performance.

Also, this proof of concept really illustrates how SLOW JavaScript is in general. Even compressing small amounts of data can take several seconds. So I wanted to find a better way to do this. So I worked on finding another (better) way to compress the data.

Then I had an idea.. what about using Flash to do the same thing and then use ExternalInterface to marshal between your JavaScript program and the Flash movie? It was worth an experiment.

So here is a demo showing compression of text data using the same algorithm in JavaScript and AS2 (Flash 9) via external Interface.

Note: in the chart below, smaller is better.

Again the demo is here: http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/demos/compression/index.htm

Download the source here: http://blogs.nitobi.com/alexei/demos/compression/nitobi_js_compression.zip

I’m here in Chicago attending MAX ‘07 with Andre. We were surprised and thrilled today to see the Nitobi Salesforce.com AIR application demo’d by Ed Rowe, VP Engineering for Adobe Integrated Runtime at the keynote on Monday morning! (see photo). We’re really thrilled about AIR, mainly as a tool for increasing the penetration and relevance of SaS applications and also distributed Enterprise Software that we build in our consulting services.

It was also great to see our book (Enterprise Ajax) available at the bookstore next to the AIR bus.

BTW if you are at MAX and want to get together to chat about Ajax, AIR, RIA, or whatever, just ping me at [email protected]. I’ll also be giving a talk with Andre on Tuesday at 1:30 on Ajax development within AIR. Be sure to check it out if you want to learn a bit about that process.

Dre did a pretty interesting podcast with Ryan Stewart of ZDNet. Lots of meat on Apollo. Worth a listen:

http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre/?p=300

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One of the overarching concepts in Web2 I believe is about combining together different web assets, like web services, Ajax, mobile technology, and even the individual energies of users to form something that adds to more than the sum of its parts.

I think that’s partly why a lot of major players have been very accepting of mixed media, and specifically the use of Flex in very high profile web environments.

Slow down.. hold the phone.. whats so special about combining something like Ajax with a technology like Flex? Is this just more marketing speak for ‘buy my stuff‘ ? No.. actually we dont sell any Flex stuff. I think its worth looking at though:

What Ajax provides:

• Easy, incremental improvements to existing HTML-based apps
• Some rich interactivity when combined with client-side JavaScript
• Cross browser, cross platform, “through the firewall” deployment

What Flex provides:

• Richer UI than is possible with Ajax alone
• Native libraries of presentation-layer and busines-layer tools (XML, Charting, Sound, etc, etc)
• Cross browser support (I think flash is somewhere around 95% browser penetration for the modern players)

One of the big challenges in the past has been skills, and the difficulty of ramping up with a new technology.. well, Adobe is moving forward with a free JavaScript interface to the Flex platform called FABridge. I spent a few hours with FAbridge to produce this demo, and I found that while it is still a little thin, it provides a very reasonable way for a JavaScript developer to get immediate value out of the Flex platform.

A similar project for older flash players is Paul Colton’s AFLAX, which I personally love.. what I especially liked is not having to open up the Flash designer to edit the flash file itself.

I’m not suggesting that we should look for ways to do EVERYTHING in JavaScript, but definately this is a great way to get started.

Check out the demo I did to show off our Ajax components working with Flex:

• http://labs.ebusiness-apps.com/
• The Actual Video
• The ‘Less chatter, more APP’ version