Blogs

Ok, I know there are lots of web development tools out there… even good general ones like IntelliJ (Commercial), JSEclipse (Commercial), Dreamweaver (a bit dated – technology wise), Visual Studio (great, but commercial, and doesn’t support a lot of non-ms stuff, strictly speaking), Netbeans (for Java).. but I was still waiting for a good web open source, community supported IDE for developing Ajax and general web stuff..

Now I think we might have it! Enter, Aptana.

Just in case you’re wondering.. I have no ties to the folks at Aptana.. have never spoken to them (to my knowledge).. so this is basically unsolicited feedback.

Aptana is a web IDE based on Eclipse. It has code-assist support for Dojo, Javascript, CSS, HTML, etc etc. It validates your code and alerts you to problems, it allows for workspace management. It does code beautification and formatting. It’s extensible. It’s cross platform! Its open source.

I especially like how it shows browser support in the code-assist view for HTML and JS.

If you’re at all interested in checking our a new IDE.. look at aptana. I’d like to see this project get some community support.

It’s great to be here in Portland at Webvisions, a conference for web developers, designers, and the like. Dave Johnson, our illustrious CTO, is presenting on the Ajax User Experience.

He’s giving us a good history of Ajax.. beginning with the advent of JavaScript and CSS, and leading to the naming of Ajax by JJG.

He gives us 3 ’stories’ that encapsulate the important of Ajax in the world today:

Its about the Data

– Getting fluid access to data on the fly

– Librarian analogy – Web 1.0 – having access to one librarian getting you information / Web 2.0 (Ajax) – having a stream of librarians available to you to run back and forth to the book shelves as you need information.

Collaboration

– Why collaboration? Working on the same thing at the same time right? Yeah. project planning, document coauthoring, real-time communication.

– Opportunities: Data push – forcing information FROM the server down to the client

– Other oppotunities: Heartbeat – monitoring data changes on the server by periodically polling the server for new information.

– Other opportunities: Throttling – Controlling the pipeline – not congesting it by trying to force too much info through it.. dont transmit mouse moves and stuff.. wait a minute! Why?? I want that information! Dave! Explain yourself.

Web / Desktop Interoperability

– Yet More Opportunities: WPF / Flex & Apollo / XUL.

– Challenges: Rich media! Video, etc… cant be done with ajax along. Also: Offline storage (use flash for this). Drag and drop between browser windows and between the desktop and the browser. File IO.
– Big highlights: Dave did a wicked demo of copy and paste between our ajax grid and MS Excel.. got quite an audible wow from the audience!
Great presentation Dave! Hope he puts his slides online.

eBusiness Applications, founded in 1998, has been rebranded as Nitobi. This affects our name and brand identity only, and does not affect our services or products.

Who is nitobi and why are we doing this? Dr Inazo Nitobe� (notice the spelling difference) was a philanthropist, statesman, and educator. In Vancouver, BC (where we are located) lives the Nitobe Memorial Garden, a Japanese garden carefully crafted and cared for in memory of this amazing individual. At Nitobi, our people are focused on living in harmony with nature and we collectively pursue outdoor pursuits like biking, snowboarding, skiing, hiking, and climbing. The icon of the Inukshuk (part of our logo, and part of Canadiana) is an image of a person constructed by the Inuit people in northern Canada. The inukshuk represents our creative and artistic approach to building components, and our focus on people (developers and end-users).

The reasons for our rebranding have to do with communicating our mission and values more effectively to employees, shareholders, and customers, and helping our stakeholders locate us on the Internet, and understand what we offer and stand for.

The tagline “Built for People” stands for our mission to build software components and applications that help users get their jobs done faster and better. Our focus is usability – for developers and end-users, and this focus is reflected in the features we put into the product, and the care with which we build and document them.

We’re really excited about this new stage in our development. As we grow we want to really focus in on what is important to us. The Nitobi brand will help us do that.