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

Next Wednesday, January 17th, Trey Mitchell demonstrates how to put together a simple, elegant Google Maps widget using GMapEZ. Some examples of his work can be found at Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Virginia Festival of the Book. If you’re interested in embedding maps in your pages or if you’ve already done so, please join us next week for the presentation and ensuing discussion.

Trey Mitchell is the Webmaster for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and recently presented Spunkicast to an enthusiastic beCast audience.

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.

Nobody knows for sure yet if it’s real or an elaborate hoax, but Scrybe looks amazing in the video. It’s probably the closest thing to a DayPlanner—with all the scattered notes and pencilled margins—that there is online. But, of course, there’s more! Watch the video and see how far the Web 2.0 bar has been raised. Here are a few of the features promised:

• Work offline and sync when an internet connection is available
• Navigate in a contextually rich interface (that uniquely solves many data overload issues)
• Easily work across multiple timezones
• Organize your thoughts with bookmarks, web snippets, images and files
• Share and collaborate with friends and co-workers
• Print in elegant, compact and handy print formats
• Import and export from other apps easily

Heads up! South by Southwest Interactive 2007 conference registration is now open. Act before September 29 and pay only $225 for a 4 day ticket to the most geekalicious experience available anywhere.

From March 9th through the 13th, Austin Texas is quite simply the center of the web universe and everyone who is anyone is there. Chat it up with Jeffrey Zeldman, Robert Scoble, Molly Holzschlag, and Shaun Inman in the hallways or even give the Web Standards Project and the Microsoft IE team a piece of your mind on one of the panels.

And, oh yeah, the program schedule is pretty grand too (with a new feature that allows you to pick the panels that end up in the final schedule). Tempt yourself some more and check out the videos and podcasts from 2006. Then hurry up and register, the good hotels go quickly.

Relay is a slick file manager that works more like the ones found on your desktop (Mac or Windows) than in your browser. Thanks to Ajax and a little help from PHP, MySQL, and Perl, Relay is able to offer:

• drag-n-drop files and folders
• dynamic loading file structure
• upload progress bar
• thumbnail view, including pdf
• multiple users & accounts

If you need to manage files within your web application, take this sweet little application for a test drive (online demo available). It seems to cover all the bases and, best of all, it’s free!

Sorry, this isn’t about trendy desktop fish. The Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB) is too busy to bother with fishies—its mission is to collect and sort links to all the Web 2.0 applications existent. In alpha itself, MoMB offers several different views of its lists mashed up with del.icio.us stats. Think of it as a Billboard Top 100 for web geeks. It’s cool stuff and it reveals a lot of gems that might slip by (check out TypeTester and gliffy).