Posts in the ‘Open Source’ Category

Can Flash Thrive Going Forward?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The short answer: Yes, if it changes its strategy to one that embraces and augments the open web ecosystem, rather than continuing down the path of trying to compete with or replace it.

With the recent anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 buzz caused by the iPad and sites like YouTube offering HTML5-enabled video alternatives, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on the opportunities and struggles Adobe faces with the Flash platform. Given my propensity as a strong open-source advocate, it may seem odd that I bother to discuss this, but it’s an interesting thought experiment for me on where Flash still excels compared to the open web, and how it can leverage that to thrive as part of the world going forward.

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Posted in Open Source, browsers | No Comments

Introducing Pintura

Friday, January 22nd, 2010
This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Server-Side JavaScript, Pintura, and Persevere 2.0

Pintura is a CommonJS/JSGI-compliant, server-side JavaScript-based framework for building rich Internet application with the REST architectural style, thin storage-oriented server design, and the consistency of end-to-end JavaScript. The Pintura framework forms the core of Persevere 2.0, and is the first framework built to run on multiple CommonJS platforms like node.js, Narwhal/Jack, and Flusspferd/Zest. It utilizes a layered approach to application development that facilitates straightforward, modular web applications.

Pintura is not a traditional MVC web server framework, which often conflate presentation and interaction concerns across the client and server, but rather follows the REST prescription of maintaining simple storage and serialization oriented server also known as thin server architecture or SOFEA. Pintura is designed to cleanly separate the concerns of presentation and interaction on the client, and storage and model logic concerns on the server. This design fits perfectly with comprehensive JavaScript frameworks like Dojo, General Interface, Cappuccino, YUI, and ExtJS that provide client-side MVC. In particular, Dojo has excellent support for standards-based JSON REST interaction that matches perfectly with this server-side framework.

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Posted in CommonJS, JavaScript, Open Source, Persevere | 3 Comments

Dojo 1.4 Released!

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Dojo 1.4 is hot off the presses, with more than seven months of significant improvements to performance, stability, and features.

Of particular interest:

  • IO Pipeline topics
  • dojo.cache
  • dojo.contentHandlers
  • dojo.hash with native HTML5 onhashchange event support where available
  • Traversal and manipulation for NodeLists (the return value for dojo.query)
  • dojo.ready (easier to type than dojo.addOnLoad)
  • Hundreds of refinements to the Dijit API and collection of Dijits, and a few new widgets in DojoX
  • DataChart widget and other improvements to charting
  • dojox.drawing lands!
  • Editor improvements and new plug-ins in both Dijit and DojoX
  • Grid is faster, and the EnhancedGrid lands!
  • ForestStoreModel for the TreeGrid
  • GFX improvements
  • dojox.jq, a very experimental module aimed at trying to match the jQuery API as close as possible, but using Dojo underneath
  • Dojo build system optionally supports the Google Closure Tools compiler
  • Significant speed improvements, especially in IE

Read the full Dojo 1.4 release notes for more details! And thanks to everyone in the Dojo community that helped make this release great!

Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Open Source, Vector Graphics | 2 Comments

Convergence of Chrome OS and Android?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Google recently was asked about something we have suspected: Android and Chrome OS may converge. From our perspective, Android and Chrome OS both offer compelling opportunities for building great web apps, but having two distinct operating systems from Google, each with different approaches to development, just adds complexity and confusion to the overall development landscape. Of course, it still bothers us that iPhone apps and Dashboard widgets aren’t interoperable.

Android has the first mover advantage of being deployed today to many devices, but to really get the most out of it, you really should develop using Java, or employ a toolkit like PhoneGap. Chrome OS offers the promise of using web technologies that are popular today, but is not yet production-ready, or optimized for mobile devices like Palm’s webOS.

The long-term expected convergence from Google makes sense. Convergence of Palm’s webOS with Chrome OS makes sense to us as well as they are both pushing towards having a very similar WebKit-based operating system for delivering web applications. Palm already appears to be moving in the direction of converging with Chrome through their adoption of key technologies in webOS such as Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. There’s nothing confirming that this will happen, other than it just making sense.

While there is a lot of short term interest in apps, you can still get significant results from mobile web apps, and the gap between a native app and a web-based app will quickly shrink, as evidenced by apps like Pie Guy. After all, web apps don’t require app store approval!

Posted in Open Source, browsers, thoughts | No Comments

Gears is Dead? Long live Gears!

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.

In their post, Read-Write Web asks if offline access is even necessary any longer. I guess they don’t spend enough time on airplanes or at hotels and conferences with poor internet connectivity! It’s certainly necessary, and while other browsers have developed significant offline capabilities, older browsers still need a plug-in like Gears.

In the interim, what should you do if you want an offline application? Do you develop for Gears and HTML 5 features? Do you wait for Chrome Frame to integrate offline capabilities? Do you use a toolkit like Dojo which will wrap the various possibilities? Or do you rely on something else like AIR, Titanium, Prism, or Fluid? The answer really depends on your application. If it is live now, you plan for the future but you keep going with Gears and/or Dojo Offline. If you won’t be launching for some time, you may want to talk to us about your offline app options.

At the end of the day, Gears is open source. If there’s a long-term need for its existence, the community can pick it up and run with it! Thankfully end-of-life isn’t the certain death-knell that it is with closed-source software.

Posted in Open Source, browsers, offline | 4 Comments

Persevere 1.0

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Persevere 1.0 is now available for download. Persevere is a JavaScript storage and application server that uses a standards-based interface of HTTP/REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and REST Channels. Persevere is designed for rich client applications and can be used with any framework or client. The Persevere Server runs on Rhino and provides persistent data storage of dynamic JSON data in an interactive server side JavaScript environment with the following key features:

  • Create, read, update, and delete access to persistent data through a standard JSON HTTP/REST web interface
  • Dynamic object persistence – expando objects, arrays, and JavaScript functions can be stored, for extensive JavaScript persistence support
  • Remote execution of JavaScript methods on the server through JSON-RPC for a consistent client/server language platform
  • Flexible and fast indexed query capability through JSONQuery/JSONPath
  • Comet-based data monitoring capabilities through HTTP Channels with Bayeux transport plugin/negotiation support
  • Data-centric role-based object level security with user management, Persevere is designed to be accessed securely through Ajax with public-facing sites
  • Comprehensive referencing capabilities using JSON referencing, including circular, multiple, lazy, non-lazy, cross-data source, and cross-site referencing for a wide variety of object structures
  • Data integrity and validation through JSON Schema based definitions
  • Class-based data hierarchy – typed objects can have methods, inheritance, class-based querying
  • Pluggable data source architectures – SQL tables, XML files, remote web services can be used as data stores
  • Object versioning with transactional history of record states

Persevere in use

Recently, Cramer Development put together a slick little application for making sticky notes. They discuss how quickly the application came together, as Persevere allowed them to quickly establish a data API, and then focus on the client side interface.

Other users include:

  • DataStream Content Solutions is using Persevere to build an XML repository for legal data in combination with MarkLogic.
  • Montana State University is using Persevere for their Yogo Data Management Project.
  • Another multi-national company is using Persevere in production for Intranet applications, with consistent usage from a number of users.
  • And, of course, we at SitePen are using Persevere for a number of the applications we are developing.

Numerous others are using Persevere in a variety of ways.

Learning more

There are a number of resources for learning more about Persevere and getting started with it.

What’s Next

With Persevere 1.0 finished, we are already working on the next version which will be based on the new Pintura architecture. Pintura is the new JavaScript core for the Persevere HTTP interface that is based on the CommonJS and JSGI API. Pintura will run on any CommonJS/JSGI capable JavaScript engine (support for V8, JSCore, and Spidermonkey coming).

Posted in News, Open Source, Persevere | 6 Comments

Why We Love Chrome Frame

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Google today announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in that selectively upgrades Internet Explorer without breaking existing sites. Think of it as working like Flash, but for open web technologies, replacing Internet Explorer’s entire rendering engine for sites that include a single meta tag indicating that they would prefer to use Chrome Frame rather than IE.

So why is this a good thing?

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Posted in Open Source, Performance, browsers | No Comments

Facebook and FriendFeed’s Tornado is now Open Source

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Orbited, cometD-python, and other Python Comet servers have new competition in the form of Facebook’s now open source Tornado web server. Tornado was part of the technology acquired by Facebook when they purchased FriendFeed last month, and Facebook has decided to open it up under the Apache version 2 license.

Tornado supports long-polling and HTTP streaming, but also includes many of the web site building blocks found in frameworks like Django. This is a really exciting announcement as Facebook and Google (with their Wave product) have both made major announcements around Comet technologies, bringing real-time capabilities to the mainstream, under open source licenses.

Posted in Cometd, Open Source | No Comments

Queued: Architectural Decisions

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together. Developing with AIR puts you squarely in the browser-based application model, but aside from that it mostly stays out of your way as well. As part of our series on the Queued development process, I’m going to take a look at the decisions we made and the philosophies we adopted for the project. It should provide some insight into our process.

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Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, Open Source, air, ajax, css, offline, queued | No Comments

Queued Overviewed

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

At SitePen, we help our clients build great web applications. Most are not available for public consumption as they live behind company firewalls and/or require licensing. On the other hand, Queued is free and open-source software, BSD-licensed, and hosted on Google Code.

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Posted in Dojo, JavaScript, News, Open Source, UI Design, air, ajax, offline, queued | No Comments

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