Blogs

Earlier this year I was interviewed for an article on RIAs in ComputerWorld (sorry you need an account to log in).

Here’s an excerpt:

Developer: Nitobi Software Inc., Vancouver
Project: Nitobi Complete UI is a set of nine user interface components for rich Internet applications. They’re
designed to help RIA developers save time by plugging in whichever Nitobi modules they need rather than
recreating the functions themselves. They include, for example, a spreadsheet module called Grid, a Calendar
module, and ComboBox, for completing data-entry fields by searching a database as the user types.
How it works: All the Nitobi Complete UI components are written in HTML and JavaScript. Nitobi has offered the
components since 2004, but more recently has used Adobe AIR to give them the ability to work offline as well as
online. That means users can transfer data between their desktops and the Web more seamlessly, says Andre
Charland, Nitobi’s chief executive, and they can take data such as contact lists with them even when not connected
to the Internet.
Best practices: If you take the time to understand what AIR can do, says Charland, “it’s amazing to me how close
we can get to traditional desktop software.” The key is understanding and fully exploiting its capabilities.
For instance, he says, AIR can provide native access to Flash on the desktop, and it’s possible to call Adobe’s
ActionScript directly from JavaScript.
Because AIR is still in beta, he notes, it remains a “moving target” for developers. Nitobi tries to deal with that by
being very open with its customers about ways in which things could change.

Obviously things I said didn’t come through in the translations and AIR is 1.0 now it’s more stable. Other than that it’s a nice plug.