As it turns out, the Cappuccino team has been busy hacking away on some very impressive stuff. Today at the Future of Web Apps Miami, they announced Aristo and Atlas.
Aristo
Cappuccino worked with the popular design firm Sofa to create Aristo, a new open-source look-and-feel that will be freely available, including the source PSD files complete with all layers intact. Anyone may use the look in their own projects. I didn’t get a close look at the theme, but it seemed quite nice.
Atlas
Atlas continues Cappuccino’s efforts to essentially port Apple’s Cocoa stack to the Web. Atlas itself looks like a mash-up of Flex Builder and Interface Builder, all running in a browser, but continues to hew very closely to Interface Builder’s approach. For example, just as with Interface Builder, you can bind properties on components to other components or to code through visual drag-and-drop operations (complete with the same blue connector line).
What’s more, Atlas introduces the equivalent of Interface Builder’s “nib” file (though I forget what their version is called).
In a live demo, Francisco Tolmasky built an RSS reader using an entirely visual approach. Francisco made it clear that he doesn’t think code will go away, but instead, he feels the amount of code required to create a web application will dramatically decrease.
They also released a screencast:
Multi-platform Support, including iPhone JavaScript Wrappers
Atlas also supports targeting multiple platforms, letting you create different interface files that bind to the same back-end code. They’ve even bridged native APIs and exposed them to the JavaScript environment and provide a PhoneGap-like way to run such applications as native iPhone applications. Wow.
It’s hard to overstate how impressive the Atlas demo was; the release should be coming at some point in summer 2009.
You may remember Sanjiv Jivan as the GWT-Ext developer that changed over the debacle. He then went on to start work on a GWT version of SmartClient libraries and has now released SmartGWT 1.0.
It is a tour de force of not only a huge widget library, but he explains how it is much more:
So what’s so smart about SmartGWT? Let me try to explain. SmartGWT is not just another Widget library. While most Ajax frameworks focus primarily on presentation and displaying mostly read-only data, either local or via XML / JSON, SmartClient was built with server side integration in mind. Most enterprise applications are not just about about data presentation, but about being able to propagate data changes made by the user to the backend. So while its tempting to use library X that has a cool tree widget, it’s not until you actually try to use it your application that you encounter the real world hard problems. For example, how do you take data from your business objects on the server to not only display in a tree widget, but also be able to update your data model when, say, the user reorders the tree nodes or make edits / deletes in the UI. How do you display hierarchical data where nodes may have hundreds of children? And so on..
Most Ajax frameworks stop short and leave it up to the user to manage state on the client side and propagating the changes to the server. This is not a trivial problem! Over the past few years UI widget libraries have improved significantly and there are now various options available to users. Simply put, having good looking widgets is not the hard problem today. In addition to having good looking widgets, having end-to-end integration of the UI components with the backend is the hard problem. It’s this 20% of the functionality that takes 80% of the time in building most enterprise applications.
The showcase will give you a good feel for what is out there, and it contains some interesting items including:
Miller Columns: The ColumnTree provides an alternate navigation paradigm for Tree data, sometimes called “Miller Columns” and seen in iTunes
Nested Grid: A convenient way to display 1-n relationships
Printable Views: SmartGWT supports printable views of its components.
Tile View: Representation of data as “tiles”. Again, TileGrid supports data binding so sort / filter and edits can be easily performed.
Calendars : A Google Calendar like widget that supports databinding so edits and drag drop changes can easily be propgated to the server for persisting.
TreeGrid : Supports multiple columns, editing, column locking, lazy loading and more.
Really amazing work. Sanjiv recently had a Q&A session with InfoQ where he talks about the approach taken in developing SmartGWT and the his thoughts on the differences between SmartClient and Ext.
To the ranks of Ext JS, jQuery UI, Dijit, and others comes JxLib, a new browser-based UI toolkit built on top of MooTools. Jason Fournier from the team passed the announcement to us:
JxLib includes layout managers, buttons, tabs, toolbars, dialogs, panels, trees and a basic
grid control all designed to work together. It is heavily based on
using CSS for presentation and includes two separate ‘themes’ that you
can easily switch between. New themes can be constructed by modifying
the existing themes…
JxLib has evolved out of a generic web-based UI toolkit…
for building web-mapping applications. It has been distributed under an MIT license for a couple of years, but this is the first time we have actively attempted to build an open
source community around it. We are excited to share this project with
others, and invite users and developers to join the project.
The Examples page, available off the main project’s page, showcases many of the built-in components and features. The source is hosted on Google Code and there’s a JxLib Google Group as well. After playing with the examples, JxLib seems quite polished and a welcome addition to the crowd. A year ago some folks may have counted MooTools out of the game, but with at least one major release this year, a revamped website, steps towards a plug-in community, and a now a quality UI toolkit, MooTools is in the game.
As I say in this podcast interview, I got an early look at 280 Slides the application that launched yesterday to much acclaim. People are calling it “Keynote on the Web”, which the team finds very humbling, and hope that one day they have all of the great features (and more!).
I really like these guys. A couple of them worked on cool products at Apple, and it turns out that they started the language and runtime work back at school.
Objective-J is the language that takes JavaScript and makes it Objective (as Obj-C did to C). Lots of square brackets. When the browser gets served .j files, it preprocesses them on the fly. This means that you can do things like, use standard JavaScript in places.
Cappuccino is the port of the Cocoa framework.
The guys talk a little about the toolchain an why they did this, and even how it enables future cool things such as generating a native Mac application from the same code.
We also get into the fun cross browser issues that they work around, and how they are abstracting developers high up, so you don’t have to deal with these issues.
Finally, I was excited to hear that they will be open sourcing the code at objective-j.org shortly (may not be there yet). They are going through the usual issues of choosing a license (Apache2 please?), a source control system (Subversion vs. Git), and documenting the thing ;)
The team was very interested in learning what JavaScript developers think (They have heard from Objective-C folk who love it), so let them know in the comments!
We are for this release MIT licensing our skins. Not only is the skin files MIT licensed, but our entire DOM structure is now 95% compatible with ExtJS which means that if you can get hold of skins for ExtJS you can also use those skins for your Gaia applications. Or you can create skins yourself commercially using our skins as a basis which will have a market for both Gaia Ajax Widgets and ExtJS. We have tried very hard to be 100% ExtJS DOM and CSS class compatible with ExtJS, unfortunately this was impossible since we were also determined to be 100% XHTML compliant for this release and this meant fixing some XHTML bugs in regards to the DOM structure of ExtJS. This though also means that our previous skins are no longer working with Gaia. Though I think you should be able to find a “gazillion” free ExtJS skins out there if you look which should by far out-weight the backdraft of not being able to use the “old” skins anymore.
Appcelerator is a fairly new open source toolkit on the block that is trying to be an Open Web RIA to compete with Flex and co. with high profile folks such as Marc Fleury as advisors.
Nolan Wright, CTO, has written a piece for syscon entitled The Next Web Development Episode Is RIA + SOA. In the article Nolan talks about Appcelerator and how it fits into his world view:
1. Design the "look" of the application
This is the general appearance of an application. It includes things like: color, fonts, graphics, and a general page layout. Common toolsets: HTML, CSS and images
2. Integrate Widgets
Widgets encapsulate a set of common capabilities within a single component. They typically contain both “look and feel†as well as a set of pre-defined dynamic behaviors. They are a fundamental building block of an RIA.
Common toolsets: ExtJS, Dojo, Yahoo YUI and several other small widget projects
3. Add dynamic behavior to the user interface
Creating dynamic behavior in the user interface involves two things:
Event handling
Document Object Model (DOM) Manipulation
Event handling is the ability to know when a particular event occurs (e.g., a user clicks a button or a service response is received). DOM Manipulation allows you to dynamically change the user interface based on the receipt of an event. Common toolsets: Javascript libraries like JQuery, Prototype, and Scriptaculous
4. Consume services
Consuming backend services is a key capability of an RIA. It enables the creation of single page user interfaces that exchange application data with services. It also enables a clean separation between the user interface and the service tier. The most common method for interacting with services is Ajax. Common toolsets: Javascript libraries like JQuery and Prototype
5. Create services
Services provide an interface to data and application business logic. Common toolsets: There are several frameworks available for creating services in your programming language of choice.
To illustrate the DSL that Appcelerator uses, Nolan has some comparisons between jQuery code such as:
on=â€r:load.combo2.response then value[property=rows,text=text,value=value]â€>
</select>
We have been talking about the world of SOA coming to fruition for quite some time. TIBCO GI was talking about this several years ago. Is 2008 going to be the year?
Yahoo's Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and - even more importantly - developing applications for it. This is FireEagle:
Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user's location? Or, maybe you've found a way to capture someone's location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.
Once you got in you'll be able to download development kits in several languages including PHP, Python, Ruby and of course JavaScript. All the API calls are REST and the API authentication is handled via OAuth. The output format is either XML or JSON. The code is licensed with BSD and you can even contribute to the FireEagle source at a code repository.
The available API calls are:
user
Returns the location of a specific user in a location hierarchy format.
recent
Returns a list of users of the application who have updated their location within the given amount of time.
within
Takes a Place ID or a WoE ID and returns a list of users using your application who are within the bounding box of that location.
update
Sets a user's current location using using a Place ID hash or a set of location parameters. If the user provides a location unconfirmed with lookup method then Fire Eagle makes a best guess as to the user's location and updates.
lookup
Disambiguates potential values for update. Results from lookup can be passed to update to ensure that Fire Eagle will understand how to parse the location parameter.
The uses for a service like this are endless. From sensible search applications that show you places of interest nearby your current location up to real-life games of high-tech hide and seek everything is possible.
The Pownce team has been working hard to get their API up to speed and have gotten the API to a point where some cool applications can be built from it. Yesterday, they announced v2.0 of the Pownce API:
We’re sorry it took so long for us to release a complete API. We’ve taken great care to provide the best experience for developers and we hope the wait was worth it. Going forward, we’ll be working hard to keep Pownce the best social messaging application out there.
Well worth the wait, new features include:
Ability to post notes
Ability to post messages, links, files, events and replies
Ability to fetch lists of private and friends-only notes.
Integration of OAuth token-based web authentication.
This should open the doors for building new custom Pownce clients and applications similar to what's been done with Twitter.
In addition, the Pownce team has created a new application directory to showcase applications built by developers.
WaveMaker has just released a new version of its open source Visual Ajax Studio v3.1.1. It is similar to TIBCO GI, but built on top of Dojo with JavaScript output that is very terse and even looks like something you may have written (which is rare indeed for a tool).
Studio lets users create database- and web service-driven Ajax web applications using a wysiwyg visual designer. WaveMaker helps users create simple applications without any scripting knowledge, while developers can easily add Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Java code to create complex application behavior.
Studio is a web-based application that leverages the Dojo Toolkit to create pages containing widgets and Dojo Dijits. Users drag and drop to create complex page layouts containing the Dojo grid, Dijit based forms, Google Gadgets, and a variety of other included widgets. Developers can even author their own widgets and include them directly in the designer.
A Java-based backend provides access to database, web, and user created services. Applications are deployed in a standard WAR container for use on a variety of Java application servers. For ease of use, Tomcat is included with the installer. It's also possible for Ajax developers to use their own backend with Studio generated web pages.
Wavemaker Visual Ajax Studio is available under the open source AGPL version 3 license as well as a commercial license. Download Wavemaker Visual Ajax Studio at wavemaker.com.
WebCream has been renamed and a new version launched as AjaxSwing 2.0, a framework that "does all server communication via asynchronous JavaScript and uses partial page updates to reflect changes in the browser."
New Features
AJAX functionality for component rendering and asynchronous communication with the server
Asynchronous submit of client-side events and operations
Partial page updates only to changed components
Dramatic speed improvements in rendering and request processing
Row context menus in JTable (see TableSupport)
Custom node icons and context menus in JTree (see TreeSupport)
Improved scripts on UNIX platforms
Allow environment variables and directories of JARS in agent.classPath
Mashable.com is best known for their up-to-minute reporting on trendy websites and social networking news. Along with their standard news, they regularly make posts that list out great resources for different web technologies. Well, it looks like Mashable's Sean P. Aune spent the whole weekend on a new post because he's listed out 250+ tools and resources for coding the web.
While many of the sites will certainly be familiar to Ajaxian readers, there's sure to be plenty of new reading material and tools for all to enjoy. I personally had never heard of Load Info - Gif Generator, a site providing Ajax indicators, and I'm sure I'll find even more great sites as I scan all 250 listings.
Included are links for Ajax, CSS, ActionScript and JavaScript tools as well as sites catering to server-side technologies.
Ben and I have been surprised at how the universe of Ajax continues to expand. This redshift which has taken it past the browser onto the phone, the Wii, and the server is amazing.
Another technology that has done a similar thing is OSGi in the Java space. It started as a component model for devices, but has since grown to the desktop with Eclipse, and now the server.
To ties these together, the Eclipse Foundation has announced Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.0:
RAP 1.0 is the first Ajax platform that allows developers to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using the Eclipse component model, based on the OSGi standard. OSGi is a service-oriented, component-based environment that promotes the interoperability of applications and services. Organizations using RAP are now able to create Ajax and RIA applications that are component-based and integrate into existing enterprise systems.
RAP 1.0 includes features well-suited for enterprises that are building a large number of new applications based on Ajax and RIA technologies. These features include:
The ability to create and deploy RIA or RCP applications from the same Java code base, allowing organizations the flexibility to create browser-based RIA application or desktop-based rich client applications.
Support for creating Ajax applications based on the OSGi component model.
Java development tools that tightly integrate with the Eclipse platform and allow developers to quickly develop, test, debug and deploy RIA applications.
A complete set of frameworks for creating Ajax applications that support scalable user interfaces, complex widgets, databinding and loose coupling for UI elements.
Jochen Krause sat down with me to chat a little about what RAP is about. He talked about how the target audience for RAP is Java developers in the enterprise setting. If you know RCP/SWT and you want to develop rich browser applications, you are set. Jochen says that his company has seen that they can share the same base of code (~80%) for products that deploy to the web and the desktop. You get the benefit of using the same workbench and extension points that you know and love from RCP.
RAP is very different to something like GWT. RAP runs the logic on the server, and emits JavaScript for the controls at runtime (as opposed to compile-time). An implementation of SWT runs on the server and people can extend your views and perspectives to add functionality.
Jochen also thought that JSF wasn't as well suited to Ajax development due to its history as a document-centric technology. Many in the community would disagree with that (just ask the Seam folk!).
When developing your RAP applications, forget about the web a little. You can't style things with CSS as their needs to be a stricter mapping between the Java and JavaScript components. They do have a properties system that is similar to CSS in some ways.
Tooling is a definite benefit. You get all of the Eclipse tooling joy, and there is future work being done by many companies such as NEC to give you a rich DB -> client UI experience. This isn't done just for RAP, but for Eclipse in general, and RAP gets to piggy back on the work.
All in all it is interesting to see what happens with the marriage of OSGi and Ajax!
Sun Labs has released a new Lively Kernel project that takes the Morphic UI framework that Sun developed for Self, and implements it in JavaScript.
This enables you to run the kernel and start interacting with the world. There is one world.
Why did they do it?
The Lively Kernel places a special emphasis on treating web applications as real applications, as opposed to the document-oriented nature of most web applications today. In general, we want to put programming into web development, as opposed to the current weaving of HTML, XML and CSS documents that is also sometimes referred to as programming.
A key difference between the Lively Kernel and other systems in the same area is our focus on uniformity. Our goal is to build a platform using a minimum number of underlying technologies. This is in contrast with many current web technologies that utilize a diverse array of technologies such as HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, PHP, XML, and so on. In the Lively Kernel we attempt to do as much as possible using a single technology: JavaScript. We have chosen JavaScript primarily because of its ubiquitous availability in the web browsers today and because of its syntactic similarity to other highly popular languages such as C, C++ and Java. However, we also want to leverage the dynamic aspects of JavaScript, especially the ability to modify applications at runtime. Such capabilities are an essential ingredient in building a malleable web programming environment that allows applications to be developed interactively and collaboratively.
Nitobi"s Complete UI is a powerful set of components that will give Dreamweaver users the ability to present data in an engaging format in a fraction of the time," states Michael Lekse, Vice President of Sales and Services at WebAssist. "Dreamweaver professionals looking to enhance their user interface functionality should turn to Nitobi with confidence."
The easy drag and drop feature for Dreamweaver reflects Nitobi"s philosophy of fast, easy web application development--a key selling point of Complete UI. Complete UI components are designed to be easy to implement and to help create web applications with intuitive and graceful user interfaces. The Complete UI suite includes:
Grid -- A cross-browser spreadsheet with Excel "copy/paste", LiveScrolling, and more.
ComboBox -- A drop-down menu with autocomplete functionality, similar to Google Suggest.
Calendar -- A high-performance calendar picker that can be used with Nitobi Grid or in standalone web applications.
Callout -- A rich, skinnable tool-tip that prompts users with real-time feedback and helpful instructions as they navigate through an application.
Fisheye -- A tool bar menu featuring fisheye magnification, similar to Apple OS X tool bar.
Spotlight -- A tool for creating stylish guided tours of websites and applications.
Tabstrip -- Folder tabs for navigating to different sections of a web application via Ajax or iFrame requests.
Tree -- A hierarchical data view, similar to the folder view in Windows Explorer.
Ajax Toolkit -- A library of fully-documented tools used in Nitobi components that can be re-used in your own applications, or to build your own components.
In addition to Dreamweaver support, Complete UI includes enhancements to Nitobi Grid, including expanding spreadsheet-style rows and even better performance.
What better way to check this out than a set of screencasts?
Aaron Newton and Jep Castelein wrote in pointers to a recent Joel "on software" Spolsky's essay, which this time around has an Ajax focus.
His whole essay revolves around this observation:
So, we don’t care about performance or optimization much anymore. Except in one place: JavaScript running on browsers in AJAX applications. And since that’s the direction almost all software development is moving, that’s a big deal.
Using the history of DOS and Windows applications as his guide, he makes three conclusions based on this point:
First, the observation that a slow application today may not be slow tomorrow:
[Historically, the] developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications.
Second, we're likely to see some sort of uber-Ajax toolkit emerge. It will be slow, but see the previous point:
If history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows. Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.
Third, once this happens, the applications with custom-rolled UI toolkits will be obsolete:
And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.
Time will tell if Joel's naive application of history to the present will bear out, but it's hard to dispute that in a year or two, JavaScript will be much, much faster.
I did smirk a bit when reading this bit:
You can follow the p-code/Java model and build a little sandbox on top of the underlying system. But sandboxes are penalty boxes; they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead... Sandboxes didn’t work then and they’re not working now.
Someone tell that to Microsoft and Adobe, quick! ;-)
UPDATE:
A commenter complained about my use of the word "naive" without supporting comments. I don't want to bore the community with my own essay, but in brief:
Every Ajax/Web 2.0 play and its dog are trying to repeat the DOS/Windows history, but it's an entirely different marketplace with perhaps three orders of magnitude more players. Despite a few hundred years of business precedents when Microsoft came around, no one predicted the DOS/Windows monopoly--but plenty of pundits were off predicting other interesting futures based on their analysis of the past.
I think it's a touch naive to assume that:
The NewSDK will be the second coming of Microsoft Windows; this is exactly how Lotus lost control of the spreadsheet market. And it’s going to happen again on the web because all the same dynamics and forces are in place. The only thing we don’t know yet are the particulars, but it’ll happen.
Any web developer knows that an imperfect free market with imperfect bickering standards bodies can perpetuate wildly inefficient and incomplete platforms for an awfully long time--despite a clear motivation from a lot of big companies to create a large, high-level standard set of cross-platform APIs. Throw in the open-source wild card, where large numbers of developers create amazing software for no particularly compelling financial motive, and the traditional predictable dynamics of the marketplace are further disturbed.
If recent history is any guide, it may be that instead of some "NewSDK" taking over, we're more likely to continue to see incremental improvements throughout the web stack and gradual cooperation amongst browser vendors. Cross-browser-OS-compatible-across-every-web-app drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste? Yeah, maybe, but if that's going to happen, it's probably more likely to emerge via HTML5-like efforts than a new high-level GWT-like platform.
Am I wrong in thinking Joel's history lesson a bit naive? Where do you think things are headed?
ActiveState have announced the launch of The Open Komodo Project which will offer an open source code base from which to develop integrated development environments.
The Open Komodo Project, based on the award-winning Komodo IDE, is a new initiative by ActiveState to create an open source platform for building developer environments. The Open Komodo Project will create Firefox-integrated web developer tools that support the open web.
Best known for their ActivePerl, Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE development tools, ActiveState wanted to give back to the open source community which has long supported their products and efforts:
Meanwhile, our friends within the Mozilla Community were looking for tools and applications that advocate the open web. Since Komodo is built on the Mozilla platform and ActiveState has had a long-standing relationship with the open source community, making Komodo a part of the technology stack for the open web was an obvious choice, one that benefits both the open source community and ActiveState.
Very few of the Web IDE vendors seem to really “get†the web, and along with the folks at Aptana and Panic, the ActiveState bunch have impressed the hell out of me with their constant support of Open Source, deep understanding of why webdev sucks, and what they can do to fix it.
The first technology preview is expected to be ready by early November along with access to a public source repository and the Open Komodo website.
, Framework
