Entries tagged with “adobe air” from Paul Lopez Unwired

A growing community of developers continues to enhance and support a very useful JavaScript toolkit, called Dojo. This toolkit handles cumbersome tasks for eye-popping web applications using DOM manipulation, Ajax, animations and pesky event normalizations needed to get applications to behave correctly in multiple browsers. While the Document Object Model (DOM) dates back to Netscape, web browsers didn't need DOM to render HTML. This all changed with Web 2.0 UIs where JavaScript needs to dynamically modify or inspect what's coming across on the web page. There are even extensions for supporting design patterns, wrappings and persistent storage for Adobe Air, a Rich Internet Application framework.  The Dojo Zoom application here only has 50 lines of source code. It is all self-contained and of course, no Postbacks! With the help of a couple of community members, what started as a simple drag and drop example grew into a fully featured application showing off Dojo's power. As you move the overlay box, you can resize and create a zoom in the right panel. Very cool.

HTML5 is an optimistic standards effort designed to bring all browsers, markup languages and plug-in APIs under one common industry framework. There has been an accelerated effort in technologies designed to make SaaS more robust by making web applications "behave" more like fat desktop applications. Concerns about connectivity, web response time and user experience have tapered the widespread adoption of these applications in the enterprise. Most success has occurred in the consumer/social web space. One promising development is the proliferation storage APIs. This facility creates a small database that is installed on the end user's client machine to enable access to application features normally operated while connected to the Internet. The one year old Google Gears is making some headway. MySpace has integrated Gears into its messaging application. Yahoo has introduced BrowserPlus in an effort to challenge both Google and Adobe Air. The idea is to have a web application accessible from the user's desktop much like a tray application or a native OS-based executable. One Yahoo demo allows users to edit photos on a desktop with Flickr before uploading to the web thereby increasing the speed and performance of such an operation. Most RIA APIs provide three things: a local database ("SQL Light"), a local object caching mechanism for images or web pages and thread pools to allow asynchronous tasks to occur in the background. These are the integral components of the architecture that enables a rich user experience. Go check out Buzzword.com for an Adobe example of a word processor written entirely in Flex. This brings us back to HTML5. Microsoft, Adobe and others (like CURL) are pushing ahead using some of the storage APIs from HTML5 but leaving other parts of the standard on the shelf. Apple has supported the Webkit open source project with Safari and has re-engineered their own site (removed Adobe Flash & PDFs) by using Ajax instead of proprietary alternatives. It will become increasingly difficult to try to adopt some kind of standard; HTML4 was probably the most successful. Innovation is very impatient with the standards process altogether I'm afraid. Being locked in to a proprietary approach may continue to inhibit the adoption in the enterprise. Most IT shops will choose to utilize a best of breed approach for specific RIA implementations in the short term.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) allows users to run web applications natively on a desktop without having to launch them in an open browser session. This will begin to blur the lines between a PC "fat client" experience and a web browser experience.  One Adobe AIR application for Ebay allows bidders the ability to monitor their auctions without going to the website by having their bid status made available in a Window desktop tray application. There are several other examples from the New York Times, Yahoo and SalesForce.com. I see this move toward Rich Internet Applications (RIA) as significant because of its impact on the SaaS market. One of the biggest drawbacks with hosted office applications for example is the issue of being disconnected and not being able to access user files. Future development in RIA will include the ability to load a small encrypted database on the client side, thereby retaining portions of the user state machine.  The battle has already started at the mobile device level with Microsoft squaring off with Apple. Microsoft recently announced they will support Flash Lite for Windows Mobile while Apple has rejected it for the iPhone "due to performance issues." The truth is Adobe Flash Lite is already on over 450 million flash-equipped mobile handsets today and expected to grow to over 1 billion by 2010. Another major inflection point will be the post-Ajax development world when we see Adobe's new Flex and Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 come in to the picture. The benefit of Flex includes cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and when combined with creating offline applications utilizing AIR, you have what will become the next browser war in the making - only without the browsers!  I will be posting more regarding Flex, but if you want to see what it can do, go to buzzword.com and create a simple account. You'll think you are interacting with a Mac application when you are really running this over the Internet. The user experience is amazing. Now we just need to add presence, video, click-to-call and collaboration tools in an RIA "widget" thereby increasing the capabilities of this technology.