beTech :: Evolve Already

Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed presentation layer to leverage their .Net work.

But what’s captured the attention of the larger developer community is that Silverlight applications will work on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (yup, on a Mac) AND support non-MS languages. Furthermore, these apps will be delivered to the browser in Microsoft’s XAML markup language which means information within will be more accessible and findable by default than with compiled Flash/Flex apps.

What the heck is going on here? Silverlight just may be the first significant salvo from the more open, Ray Ozzie-powered Microsoft 2.0.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

More information:

• Channel 9: Scott Guthrie: Silverlight and the Cross-Platform CLR
• Webware: What is Silverlight, Really?
• TechCrunch: The Web Just Got Richer
• Dare Obasanjo AKA Carnage4Life: Silverlight: AJAX is now an Endangered Species
• Ed Burnett’s Dev Connection: Dissecting Silverlight

The Richmond Java User Group talk “Getting Started with Grails” is tonight (Wednesday, March 21st) at 5:30 PM in Glen Allen, VA.

Grails is an open-source web application framework that’s all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and the powerful and dynamic Groovy language. Together with these elements and Groovy’s ability to integrate seamlessly with your existing Java code, Grails finally legitimizes rapid web application development for the Java platform.

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Next Wednesday, December 6th, Michael Pritchard and David Moody will introduce the Adobe Flex Framework and then use it to build an engaging web application in front of your very eyes. The Flex 2 software is a rich Internet application framework based on Adobe Flash that enables you to productively create beautiful, scalable applications that works across most platforms. It includes an Eclipse-based development tool, an extensive visual component library, and high-performance data services to get up and started quickly.

Michael Pritchard is the CEO of WillowTree Interactive and has been building Flex applications since the original beta release in late 2005. David Moody is the Health Sciences Library Webmaster (and is also leading the exciting new beTech Web Development Server initiative—more on that soon). David was also an early adopter of ColdFusion and Macromedia products and has taught Web development at ITC for over 6 years.

I’ve just spent the majority of my weekend trying to install and learn about Joomla CMS, only to be disheartened when I came to learn how pitifully it supports web standards and Web 2.0 style app development. By the sizes of its developer and user communities (aka the “Joomlasphere”), and the near-fanatical loyalty and enthusiasm I detected as I visited Joomla-related sites, I assumed Joomla would have long been tweaked to rock out with things like CSS layout and integration of some of the new-fangled javascript dhtml/ajax/animation libraries. Not so, at least not without undue hacking and headaches. Read this and weep (look under the “Mambo” entry, as Joomla is a branch of Mambo.) I did, after successfully installing Joomla and spending about 10 hours this weekend reading documentation, installing extensions, and configuring the bastard.

After looking at the PHP code of the main Joomla content component, and seeing how riddled it was with tables, and realizing how inextricable tables were from its core, I proceeded to search for another CMS. This time I was going for something that was built to support web standards and Web 2.0. A quick Google search landed me at the MODx site. Wow! It seemed too good to be true. From their website:

“MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts—hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.”

MODx is written in PHP—support requirements are minimal enough for it to work on the UVa unix web cluster—it’s open-source, it’s free, and it looks remarkably well organized. I successfully installed it in the twilight hours yesterday, and have yet to really take it for a test drive. When I do, I’ll post my impressions and/or battle stories. One quick note: if you install it on the UVa web cluster you’ll want to rename some of the files to have .suphp extensions and put a little rewrite hack in an .htaccess file in your root. I’ll post specific instructions for this in the next few days.

Noting an opening in the Ajax frameworks field for a designer-friendly set of libraries, Adobe announced the Spry framework for Ajax yesterday. The demos look like any other Ajax implementation on the surface, but under the hood Adobe took a different tack. With Spry, Adobe is trying to create an Ajax framework for designers that is light and simple. Sure enough, what you see in the source code are links to JavaScript libraries, links to XML files, and a few proprietary (non)HTML attributes that handle much of the logic. It is very clean and straightforward and actually looks a bit like a client-side version of ColdFusion.

The fly in the ointment here is that Spry’s non-HTML attributes don’t validate. Granted, this is a preview release, but Adobe doesn’t seem to eager to break Spry’s embedded logic to comply with web standards. Adobe is considering creating their own XML namespace to solve the validation problems but, until that happens, most serious web designers may be too invested in web standards to make the jump to Spry.

Bottom line: Adobe is positioning Spry as the Ajax programming for the masses (sort of like what Frontpage was for dynamic content). If you’re a competent coder and you’re concerned about maintaining web standards, check out Prototype or Dojo.

As penance for missing Nathan’s no-doubt magnificent AJAX presentation yesterday, I thought I’d post a rare beTech blogule.

If you are like me, irrationally obsessed with frameworks and systematic approaches to coding (so you don’t have to think as much every time you code), then perhaps you’ll appreciate these few promising attempts to bring obsessive compulsive tendencies and rationales to the production of CSS layouts.

• Yahoo Grids CSS—a set of standardized CSS styles and templates to produce 100+ different layouts, total code weighing in at 1.82KB
• Layout Gala—a collection of 40 CSS Layouts based on the same markup
• A CSS Framework by Mike Stenhouse—an attempt to conceive of a modular approach to CSS to get a similar plug-and-play effect to unobtrusive javascipt
• In Search of the Holy Grail—a not-so-religious exegesis on what has also been called the One True Layout (not to be mistaken for the “Holy Gruel”)

If you’re looking for some best-practice/quickie CSS menu action, then try these:

• Listamatic and Listamatic2—two one-stop-shops (?) for fancy CSS-ified unordered lists to steal
• CSS Tab Designer—a free utility to whip up the CSS and markup for menus based on templates you create

Of course, if you want to get fancy flyout/dropdown behavior from your CSS lists, I have one word for you: “Suckerfish.” Go Google “suckerfish dropdowns” and you’ll be on your way. Beware that there is a potentially overwhelming number of derivative attempts at what the Suckerfish dropdown does. Basically it’s a CSS menu that uses the :hover pseudo-class for showing/hiding with a pinch of javascript for getting the effect to work in IE 5/6 (which doesn’t support :hover on anything but anchor tags.)

Happy styling. By the way, in case you don’t know what “OCD” stands for…

Hot on the heels of the year-old Ruby on Rails framework is a Python project called Django. But is Django just Python on Rails? Sam Newman has an excellent comparison of Django and Rails.

…the two frameworks were developed as a result of two very different applications - and most of the differences between the two are a result of this. If you are developing a simple (in a domain model sense) application where you want to use Ajax to deliver a great UI, Rails is probably for you. If however you want to develop an entire site with different types of applications within it - then Django?s plugable applications and general approach might be what you?re after…