RIA Weekly

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Joshua Marinacci joins me to talk about more about JavaOne and JavaFX. We discuss:

• Josh’s coffee places: Allen Brothers, Dutch Brothers.
• Josh’s take on JavaOne and CommunityDay.
• In talking about Kenai and Zembly, we get into a discussion about moving parts of the software development process into the cloud.
• We then talk about the Java Store, which he’s been working on in the recent time. See his recent Q&A on the Java Store.
• The difficulty of collecting money in these stores - figuring out regional tax laws, income tax, etc.
• JavaFX 1.2 - lots of control improvements & additions. Redoing GUI concepts - separating styling from controls. Button, slider, checkbox, but some things missing: table, tree, combo box. No more layout managers, there’s containers. No ties to AWT and Swing, everything is skinable with CSS. Also: charts. Linux and Solaris support.
• JavaFX tools? Updates Production Suite for CS4. More people working on the open source Eclipse plugin. JavaOne showed sneak-preview of the design tool. Also the other fun JavaFX Wii-mote and motion sensing demos during the Gosling talk. See the JavaOne Toy Show replay.
• Also, we rat-hole on JavaFX profiles - desktop and common, and I’d expect mobile out there. But Josh, says they’re trying to limit them.

Ryan wasn’t able to join as we recorded this at the ungodly hour of 8AM PDT ;>

Disclosure: Sun is a client.

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This week, Ryan and I are joined by Dave Wolf from Cynergy Systems, a firm that specializing in RIA development. We spend most of the time talking about Dave’s take and Cynergy’s involvement in the RIA space, but we get to a handful of news items at the end:

• Last week we mentioned a “working with RIAs” report they did with Forrester. We go over the suggestions and tips - small teams, rich experiences don’t come from cubical farms, but open places where you can “smear monitors,” getting designers and developers to work together. Moving beyond the “isolationist” phase of J2EE and web app driven development. Using mutual-respect and tooling.
• Grooming developers and designers to fit into this milieu, applying the usual cultural fits for tech-people. Also, “you only use full-time employees” - talent becomes a competitive advantage for Cynergy.
• We talk about the kinds of things they work on: telcom expense management, retail banking, fleet management, hip-hop site. Also, software companies realizing they don’t have to compete “feature-by-feature” as taught by the iPhone, growth in ISVs that is.
• Ryan asks if the iPhone is the best way to pitch RIA to “the boss.” Pretty much, Dave says. It’s a good example of how RIA tricks and whatnot can be powerful and useful.
• What kind of interest are you seeing with Microsoft Surface?
• “Desperately trying to get away from The Mouse.” 60 years later, we’re still using the same input device - “Mouses are strange.”
• How do you choose the RIA framework to use, out of Flash, Flex, Silverlight, WPF, etc? We ask Dave to go over the types of applications and audiences (”users”) that each technology works well with and doesn’t work well with. The IDEs on both sides are good.
• Ryan draws out more of Dave’s negatives about each platform - this is all an attempt to get back to the desktop - Flash Platform struggles a little bit with the designer/developer workflow, the life-cycle for the software between the designers (with PSDs) and the developers (with Flex and other code). Microsoft’s difficulty is player penetration, learning through the difficulties very quickly - catching up with Adobe/Macromedia’s 10 years in 2 years - “the ability to chase tail-lights.”
• All that said, Dave says, we believe they’ll be a duopoly in our work in the future.
• We discuss the old idea of having one UI instead of many: moving beyond “least” in “least common denominator” - applying the multi-screen, multi-modal thinking to applications - making it OK to have 5 UIs, for example.
• What’s the experience been like with maintenance, across many versions of years of the RIA-based software?
• Moonlight 2.0 Preview - see some other coverage from Mary-Jo Foley and Tim Anderson.
• Don’t forget to leave a note in the Flex Builder for Linux “bug” listing.
• Ryan mentioned the New Your Times AIR app write-up, the Times Reader 2.0, which talks about how the Times used and RIA for their readers and why.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Microsoft is a client as well, as is Sun.

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You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, while Ryan was living in the future (or, “down under” if you prefer), I had on a guest co-host, Charles Lowell. You may know him from one of my other podcasts, DrunkAndRetired.com. I had Charles on because he’s something of a UI specialist and has done much work with Swing, Ajax, and dabbled plenty in Flex and JavaFX. I wanted to take this chance to get one developer’s perspective on building rich user interfaces and, as you’ll see, some specific RIA frameworks and issues as well. Here’s roughly what we discussed:

• Charles tells us his development history, esp. with respect to to UI’s, like Swing and Ajax
• He tells us how his passion for ruby was translated into his current passion for JavaScript and the different UI glue-work he’s been doing over the recent users.
• I ask Charles to detail the work he did at is company, The Front Side, with Freestyle, the Ajax UI->web server protocols and state sharing. We discuss the problems with the framework they developed, particularly with storing state on both the client and server side and how that makes garbage collecting a pain.
• Now an indie-programmer, Charles works with several different clients developing UI’s. Recently, he tried to pitch using JavaFX to a client and he tells us how that went - not too well.
• This gets us into a discussion of JavaFX and the technical and business reasons to use or not use it. He likes focusing on JavaFX as a way to do Swing better.
• More generally, we talk about The Market’s desires when it comes to RIAs and rich-UI functionality. Charles is see a lot of pull for UI functionality that’s difficult to deliver in Ajax, but easier in more traditional desktop GUIs or, we hope, RIAs.
• Getting to the only, major, even slightly-related RIA news of the week, I ask Charles how Oracle buying Sun purchase effects his view of JavaFX.

One items we didn’t cover was Adobe’s “Strobe” project. If you’re interested, I gave a small amount of commentary in this week’s Numbers post. Ryan has a small write-up as well.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Sun and Microsoft are clients as well.

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