So I attended an “Intro to Unicode” class yesterday which would have been so helpful before my last job at the IAEA. After having tackled the i18n problem there, Mojibake seems old-hat.
In other news, I finally installed Aptana. What a great piece of software. It’s refreshing to be using an IDE again although months of command-line interaction have tuned my rusty chops.
Not much to report because it was a short day today. A session on MVC for AJAX proved interesting though heady.
One of the topics covered is certainly not bleeding-edge but still fascinating nonetheless: a comparison of traditional MVC apps vs MVC as implemented using a browser and then bringing it all back to AJAX as an implementation of traditional MVC-like paradigms *in* the browser.
I think I need to find more developer-centric conferences in the future. My attention was brought to one by O’Reilly as well as another one held both in SF and Boston. Hopefully, you’ll see me there.
I missed a three-hour intro to Flex last week at work so it was good to have the opportunity to attend an “Intro to Flex.” Maybe it’s just as well that I missed last week as I didn’t have to spend that long to learn the basic concept of Flex: markup in XML, render in SWF.
Saw a pretty cool demo of this where, at least according to the rep demoing the product and judging by what I saw in the demo, you can construct a visualization (e.g. graph/diagram/chart) in a Java thick client (Swing?) and then export it to the web with the same sort of WYSIWYG AJAX-y functionality as is in the thick client!
Suh-weeet!
2007-09-26 UPDATE: Last night I got to thinking… as part of the demo, I had seen charts/diagrams/etc. in a fat Java client and then the same elements in a webpage which seemed to have the same functionality. It struck me; as part of the demo, I didn’t see an ILOG representative actually generate the webpage incl. graph elements from the Java client.
This morning, I went in to the ILOG booth to have a second look. Come to find out, the graphing components are made available in an MVC fashion but the AJAX interactivity isn’t provided out-of-box, meaning that to get true Java-2-AJAX we would need to implement lots of “V” and “C” (the components are encapsulated as “M”.) Oh. That adds a lot of development time…
I was in a presentation on building RIAs with OpenLaszlo by this guy when I finally got it.
We was demonstrating a pretty basic Hello World-like app and it wasn’t until the end when I had my epiphany. With about five minutes left in the presentation, he switched the output of OpenLaszlo from Flash to DHTML and the DHTML interface looked *almost exactly the same* as the Flash UI. Woah.
