Dave Johnson

We were able to get out the Q2 release of Complete UI without too much trouble!

With the help of a keg of beer last night Jake, Mike, Alexei and I were able to pull everything together at the last moment (of course there are a few small things we are still fixin up) and get it out there. Grid is looking awesome with much improved performance and we have also released Spotlight and Calendar - as I have mentioned previously.

Its up online so check it out and let me know what you think

Time to catch up on my blog reading / writing and have a looooooong sleep.

A mere two days now until the next quarterly release of Complete UI!

We be workin hard like little elves to get out a very much improved version of Grid and new products called Spotlight and Calendar.

To celebrate our efforts we will:

a) Ship Complete UI Q2
b) Drink a keg of beer and play XBox
c) …
d) Profit!

I don’t even want to think about what might happen if we don’t release on Friday!

In between all the other exciting stuff happening here like JaveOne, XTech and RobotReplay, we have also been working on improving the Complete UI suite!

In particular we will have a new Calendar control (which is integrated with Grid of course) and also something we call Spotlight that can be used to build a tour of your web application for help users.

What I have been working on (as anyone who has seen my twitter can attest to) is fixing up our flagship product, Grid. I have mostly been focusing on two aspects of it:

• Improving layout and theming. This has been a long time coming and it is much better now but there is still some work to do to get it up to par with all the other components. Layout has been changed a lot and should make it much nicer to work with.
• Improving performance. Another thing that has been a long time coming is better general performance. We have slimmed things down a bit in terms of code size and in fixing the layout we have also increased performance significantly.

I should also mention that Mike has been doing a bang-up job lately on getting the Java backend code ship shape as well as improving the docs - which everyone will probably be very happy about!

There has also been a slew of bug fixes going out for several of our customers that will become available to everyone with this release.

We are shooting for June 1 (this coming friday) so stay tuned!

Finally, here are the slides from my XTech presentation about declarative Ajax. Hopefully there is something vaguely useful for people in there

I have got my JavaOne sessions slides up on Slideshare now. Slideshare rocks!

It is nice having time to actually look at my email and check out what has been going in the world! Having been thoroughly swamped with preparing JavaOne / XTech talks, conitnuing product development and support, and flying half way across the world I finally have a spare moment to report on a few things of note that happened this past week at Nitobi. Luckily I can lift most of it from Alexei

First of all we have released some new support for Complete UI on Java. This coincided with our presence at JavaOne of course. The new stuff includes support for Eclipse, JSP taglib, servlets, Struts and more. Check it out here. Alexei even created a way cool video overview and posted it here - he has such a good screencast voice!

There is some other video to watch as well and that is a video interview Andre did for WebProNews about Nitobi and RobotReplay.

The Enterprise Ajax book is now available on Rough Cuts. The other thing in this vein is that it looks like we will also be producing some video content to go along with the book - should be interesting to see how that works out!

Next week, I will be in Paris to give a presentation at XTech on declarative Ajax programming - 9am Thursday May 17. I will talk about some of the driving factors behind declarative Ajax and have a few examples / demos. XTech is a really good quality conference I think and there are lots of interesting people going to be there - it should fun!

Some other Nitobi people (Jake and Brian) are going to be down in Portland for RailsConf over the Canadian long weekend (ha!). Hopefully they will find some good Rails action and have a few nice Portland brews!

RobotReplay is continuing to evolve and we are getting very close to moving some of the service over to EC2 and getting all the servers organized in preparation for a few way cool new features. Last week we got around to implementing a few new things as well and started to purge people’s old sessions to help keep things working smoothly

We also have a few cool new projects and products on the go that we will be blogging about soon!

Here is the presentation that I gave at CommunityOne down at JavaOne entitled Ajax to the Moon.

Take a look at the PDF and I will try and get the slides up with slideshare though it doesn’t seem to be working quite right at the moment.

Update: Here are the real slides!

I have been playing around with RobotReplay playback and made a simple little mouse trail. Check out the movie of a test playback below.

Just starting to scratch the surface really!

Also posted over on the RobotReplay blog.

I am leaving for San Francisco first thing on Monday morning and then off to London and Paris on thursday for XTech.

If anyone wants to meet up for a beer and chat about Ajax, Flex or our new RobotReplay service!

Can’t wait to get back to London!

For those of you out there that are thinking of using the JavaScript Flash Integration Kit for building an application watch out for this little bug.

In the FlashTag.addFlashVars(string) function it just sets the internal variable this.flashVarsStr. However, in the FlashTag.toString() method it checks if the this.flashVars variable is null or not to determine if it should write the flash variables into the Flash HTML tag. To fix it, I just changed it from this:

Other than that it seems to work pretty nicely.