Andre’s Blog

Building our sweet Ajax suite

December 8th, 2006

I couldn’t help but throw that cheesy title in for some reason:P You might notice that our blogs have been pretty quiet the last little while. I just wanted assure our customers, readers and the community that everything is going great here at Nitobi. The year is coming to an end, but we ain’t slowing down yet. On the contrary, we’ve wrapped up a few interesting customer projects some involving consumer Ajax user interfaces to help improve the results of ecommerce sites, I’ll be blogging more about these as we’re allowed. We also helped another software company get our Grid to render with ridiculous amounts of data, about 150 columns by 1000s of rows…now that’s some Ajax heavy lifting. There’s also the infamous Ajax book project, Enterprise Ajax, we’ve been working on for Prentice Hall. As I type this Dave is finishing the final few pages of Chapter 5, which is the final piece. It’s been a long road on that one and we’re looking forward to handing it over to the crew at Prentice Hall to let them work their magic. Dave’s going to be stoked to get back into focusing on our suite, which I’ll talk more about in a minute, and getting another Grid point release out next week with some nifty new features.

So the suite, the long awaited “when are you guys going to build something other than a grid and combo” Ajax suite is getting so close we can taste it.

We’ll announce the official roadmap and timeline next week, but for now here’s what I think will be in it:

• Tree
• Tab
• Input Masks (Editors)
• Date Picker
• Fisheye Menu
• Callback

We chose these based on the reference app UIs we wanted to be able to build.  We came up with a shipping management applications and invoice application.  We came up with these based on a number of factors, but largely based it on what we’ve seen our customers doing with our components and the types of applications they’re building.  We took this approach so that we could easily make decisions on features and ensure that we were building components that would work nicely together to solve a real problem.  Alexei’s been designing some pretty awesome mockups for them, hopefully we can give the world a glimpse of those next week as well.

Ok just want to give y’all a quick update.  Back to hack day! (I’ll talk about this more monday, but today is the first official Nitobi Hack Day!)

Technorati Tags: ajax, suite, components, tree, tab, inputfields, datepicker, fisheye, callback, design, usecase

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Flex with Ajax Tutorial in Adobe Dev Center

December 7th, 2006

A demo and tutorial we (Alexei, Dave, Agus) put together about using Flex, FABridge and Ajax is now up in the  Adobe Developer Center.  Check out the article here.

It’s been great working with the developer relations team at Adobe, hope to do more in the near future:)

Technorati Tags: ajax, flex, fabridge, nitobi, dashboard

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XUL != Ajax (Don’t believe the hype)

December 5th, 2006

I guess we know we’ve hit the peak of hype when products mislead users by including a popular tech buzz work in their name when in fact it has nothing to do with it.  I read an article covering a so called Ajax Spreadsheet application, called “AjaxXLS“, notice how Ajax is in the name of the product.  But then the article goes on to say:

AjaxXLS is a XUL-based Web application

And XUL isn’t Ajax, for the same reasons java Applets, Flash or XAML aren’t.  End of discussion.  Dion knows this and explains why:

Even though “Ajax” is in the name, note that ajaxXLS technically uses XUL, the XML User Interface Language, for creating the user interface. This is a source of some controversy since XUL is not technically considered Ajax and requires a plug-in in Internet Explorer (though XUL support is built into Firefox). ajaxXLS did not run in Internet Explorer in my tests. This could be considered antithetical to the promise of Ajax to run in virtually any modern browser and has made the product the topic of discussion by Ajax purists.

This is no minor issue to debate, it’s a show stopper.  At best FireFox has 10% market share.  IE had just about 99% market share a few years ago when all the technologies for Ajax were first added to it, but it wasn’t until FireFox implemented the XHR that Ajax was cross platform and acceptable for mass consumer applications like Gmail or Google Maps.  The fact that you need a plug-in to run XUL, which Microsoft would view as a competitor to their XAML/WPE/WPF initiative, means XUL has a very steep uphill battle to compete for widespread adoption.  If I was going to build a web app that didn’t run natively in a browser, I wouldn’t choose XUL, choose Flash at least then you’re starting at 98% penetration which is still a challenge for rapid adoption compared to Ajax which runs everywhere.  Calling AjaxXLS an Ajax application is misleading and will ultimately create a lot of FUD.  Apparently even the Wall Street Journal is confused about this.  (I also have no idea why AjaxLaunch is using phpBB as a blog…but that’s another story). I feel this is as bad as marketing diesel (Firefox) cars as having engines that can run on gasoline (IE)…you can try but don’t be surprised when your mechanic (IT support person) laughs at you when it doesn’t work.   There are Ajax spreadsheets out there, but this isn’t one of them folks.  Don’t believe the hype.

The strange thing, IMO, is that it’s still a useful application.  Lots of FireFox users could benefit from it, it’s just the way they’re marketing it.

Back to editing Enterprise Ajax…

*Bold emphasis in quotes is mine.

Technorati Tags: ajax xul ajaxxls ajaxlaunch hype spreadsheet fud confusion

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