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RIA - Rich Internet Application
tools - is part of the huge wave of application development tools that
will be sweeping through this Summer and Fall of 2004. RIAs will considerably
simplify and speed up development of rich, cross platform Web UIs for J2EE,
Web Service and even some CORBA and .NET systems. Web developers would
be grossly remiss not to take a look at the diversity yet richness and
performance enhancements which these tools provide. Yes some of the tools
are in beta; but
they are so good we had to preview them. |
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Bring on the BASIC Clones -
Looking for a cross platform version of Visual Basic did not turn out
to be as dreary a task as anticipated. Instead,
there is a treasure trove of very good variants of that oldtime Dartmouth
programming religion - including a product from Professors Kemeny and
Kurtz. Ranging from some great game-making BASICs to a real cross platform
gem in RealBASIC, check out how BASIC does not necessarily mean VB. |
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SwishMax -
Swishzone has has been laboring down under for at least 2 years retooling
the popular Swish 2 into SwishMax and in the process have proved
they understand aspects of animation better than their Macromedian
mentors. Flash is more than data processing - its roots are rich
media and animation. SwishMax has done what Macromedia has yet to
do - come to grips with giving designers and developers a primarily
drag, set and drop approach to animation effects. And its much stabler
too. |
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Macromedia
Dreamweaver 2004 -is one of those upgrades whose value
is in the eye of the beholder. Web shops that want to deploy CSS, Cold
Fusion,
or ASP will have a substantial Dreamweaver 2004 upgrade. But shops
committed to DHTML, Java, JavaScript and XML will have substantially
less to choose from and cheer about. Yes there are dozens of GUI nip/tuck
jobs; and the performance and reliability/security improvements are
appreciated. But this is the contingency or "it depends upgrade." |
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Macromedia Studio MX2004 -
Macromedia, after playing coy at its late July financial analyst
briefing, unleashes its MX2004 product suite of upgrades. And its
a double, not a home run. The new Flash improvements, especially
for Flash MX2004 Pro edition are must haves - considerably advancing
the goal of making Flash a database server aware app
viable for delivery of cross-platform, rich media experiences. But
Dreamweaver 2004 & Cold Fusion 6.1 are only workmanlike improvements
while Fireworks 2004 and Freehand 2004 still suffer neglect relative
to competition. |
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Whither JavaScript ? -
In the complex world of web development, arriving at good, open standards
- even for a language as solid
as JavaScript - can be a mysterious and complex processs. Currently
improvements to ECMAScript/JavaScript are coming from some key
non-Netscape sources as JavaScript increasingly becomes the glue
language for more and more ISVs. |
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Time to Upgrade Browsers - For reliability and security reasons
alone, users should upgrade their browser to one of the two best browsers -
Mozilla 1.5 or Opera 7. Yes, by a longshot Microsoft has conceded the top browser
position
just in features and functionality let alone superior cross platform reach of
Opera and then Mozilla. And now that Microsoft will not update its browser
until 2005 at the earliest, new improvements coming in Mozilla (native SVG,
themes) and Opera (voice, gestures) are very compelling |
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Demo software is buzzing again. For quite sometime Dan
Bricklin's Demo 2 or Lotus ScreenCam were all you needed. But with travel
and documentation budgets being cut drastically, more organizations are
looking for novel ways to accomplish support, training and documentation
tasks. And "show me live" is winning a place alongside "tell
me in words". |
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Macromedia
Contribute 3 - is unique among programs because it allows
users to directly edit files on a Website in a controlled fashion and
with some measure of protection against concurrent updates. One can
think of Contribute as FTP++ or Content Management Lite. The key is
Contribute's ability to get people responsible for content able to
edit web pages directly and safely. |
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Macromedia's FlashPaper may
be the best software graphics innovation for 2003. It is that
elegant and simple. From any Windows 2000
or XP program you print to a file and get a .swf Flash file that is
capable of displaying the printed document/ graphics/ presentation
with uncanny
fidelity - and just about anywhere: Web browser, Window, Mac or Linux
desktop, kiosks, and some PDAs and mobile phones. This is what Adobe
should have done for Acrobat's PDF file creation years
ago.
But
Macromedia
did
it first
and very well
indeed. |
