Blogs

Alexei (still doesn’t have a blog so I can’t link to it!) just pointed me to a bunch of articles that have recently linked to our company or articles we’ve written.

1. Alexei White, a product manager for eBusiness Applications Ltd., gives his take on Ajax and its ability to accelerate Web applications in this week’s issue of Network World. Let us know what you think.- AJaX Appeal – Network World

2. Unlike the other RIA platforms, AJAX can be incorporated incrementally to existing websites. “It is possible to use ‘just a little bit’ of AJAX with an existing application, and see immediate, incremental benefits,” said Alexei White of eBusiness Applications (EBA). He added: “I can still have exactly the same HTML table as I had in my old application, but use AJAX to generate it on-the-fly – saving lots of time.” –Web based Applications – The IEE

3. In assessing the technological risks associated with Ajax, AjaxInfo.com founder Alexei White offered three strategies in this posting. White suggests using a third-party framework to “leave browser compatibility and optimization issues to the experts,” moving as much processing onto the server as possible, and testing your applications at regular intervals. – Year in review: Ajax makes news, but will it make the grade?

I just wanted to give a quick “congrats!” to Alexei, Dave and Asa Zanatta of Spirit Communications for all hard work they’ve been putting into producing quality AJAX content, articles and blog postings!  It’s a lot of work but it feels good when other experts to link back to it!

Hey all you AJAX developers, designers and implementers out there we want to know how you’ve built a kick ass AJAX web app that’s helped an enterprise class business (fortune 500ish). Dave, Alexei and I are working on a book and are going to be featuring real-world AJAX case studies. It doesn’t really matter how you’ve developed it we just need to know:

* Background of the firm and the application infrastructure
* Description of the business or technical problem that was addressed through the use of Ajax
* Details of the solution and the development process
* Outcome of the implementation

Email Alexei for more info awhite [at] ebusinessapps [dot] com.

Well I’ve finally broken down and I’m looking around for a new blog tool (a desktop program I can use to compose, edit and store blog posts then publish to my blog). I’ve downloaded Ecto and got it up a running pretty quickly. So far it seems good. Simple user interface, syncs well with my existing blog posts and has good support for tags and categories that my Word Press blog uses. Although it’s not free, a 21 day trial and $17.95 price tag seem reasonable to me. No WYSIWYG editor though:(

Why someone hasn’t built a kick ass web based user interface for blogging is beyond me…especially since if they used AJAX + Flash it could be used online and offline:P Soon enough. I’m guessing it’s hard to make a buck building blog software.

(Update: Ecto is no where near as good as Performancing’s FF plug-in for blogging)

Technorati Tags: blogs, web2.0, apps

There’s up coming web development conference in London, England,The Future of Web Apps, that has lots of AJAX sessions. Unfortunately I won’t be able to hop across the pond and make it to the UK for it, but Dave Johnson our VP of Engineering will be there so drop him a line and chat him up because he’s really knowledgeable about all things AJAX and wicked smart, if you’re nice he might even be able to hook you up with some free licenses to our AJAX compoonents. He can also talk up a storm about solar cells, photo-voltaics and other crazy physics stuff…but I’ll let you go there.

Just reading through a great blog about usabiilty and UI design by Jensen Harris. One point he makes well is about the importance of fast user interfaces to enhance usability. This should be obvious but fast interfaces are easier to use, allow quicker learning and allow users to be more productive. This is the reason why people should look at AJAX for web interfaces vs standard html interfaces, however it seems this gets lost in the shuffle with some of the frameworks and sites coming out. We put a lot of work, thought and time into making our web UI controls faster, maybe more than we should…but we truly believe that faster user interfaces help users and provide a better user experience. It’s not just scratching our own itch to build fast software…well not entirely:-) Slow software sucks.

Check out Jensen’s blog it’s full of great information about usability in general and specifically about some of neat UI stuff in Office 12 including the new ribbon menus.