techno.blog("Dion")

AIR had their big launch this week, and I am very happy for the folks over there to have that 1.0 out in the wild. It is a huge deal. I really like the idea of taking Web technology and development skills, and expanding them out from the desktop browser into new worlds such as the mobile device and the desktop itself.

Who knew that little XHR would grow and the Ajax universe would expand in such a way that you can imagine a time 2 to 10 years from now where the world of Web vs. desktop vs. mobile no longer make sense. Many universes are combining. Surely in the future we will have APIs and services. You will be able to use JavaScript to talk to native services on a computer, as well as services in a cloud. It will all start coming together.

With Gears, you can start to see this vision. Starting with LocalServer, Database, and Workerpool; then maybe seeing notification, crypto, messaging, location, shortcut, and more.

Here we see more and more services being made available to the Web developer in a way that makes sense to them.

AIR has a set of APIs too of course, but there are a couple of differences.

1. Desktop focus

AIR is very much about building desktop applications using Flash and Ajax. If you want a desktop application, you can choose AIR as a choice versus Swing, WPF, Cocoa, etc.

Gears is about adding more value to the browser itself, and letting you keep building your Ajax applications, just with more power. We will constantly be adding more and more APIs and services for you to work with.

2. Control

Adobe develops AIR, and they have plans for the future, which I am sure are constantly changing. You have the power to change their mind by being vocal customers.

Gears is an entirely open source framework. Although Google has the majority of developers on the project, you have different advantages, due to the open source model:

• If you are running into an issue, you can get down to the metal and look at the source code. You can even contribute a fix!
• You can scratch your own itch. Let’s say your company has a particular Gear that you would really like to see. You can create that Gear yourself. If it is generally useful (which is normally the case) then you can propose it to the Gears community, and it can get into the Gears distribution itself. That’s right guys, you can write your own Gears. Of course, there is no guarantee that your Gear will get in the distribution. If that is the case, you still have options though. You can distribute your own MyGears. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, but at least you have the option

This is why it is a big deal that Gears is open source. I know that it is hard when a company like Google is behind it, but I hope to see some non-Google Gears getting out there and attaching themselves to the browser service bus that is “Gears”.

Gears and AIR

Gears and AIR are very different, and although there is an overlap, they are complementary too. I would love to see some convergence in the future where Gears and AIR APIs join together. That would be a win win for everyone in my opinion. I would also love to see AIR open sourced, which isn’t a crazy idea given how Adobe has been moving in that direction for many of their projects.

I wonder if 2008 will be the tipping point over in the US where we see more developers targeting mobile versus desktop. I am sure it is going to happen some day…. but when is that?

Kevin Lynch at Engage told us that he believes we will be developing for the mobile form factor and extracting desktop interfaces from there, rather than the other way around.

I am twittering the Engage event using hashtags.

In honour of the Oscar’s, which itself honours those of us who make millions of dollars for doing their job, I thought it was time for the geeks to have their own award show. This is the first in a series that awards a Lisa to those that deserve it.

To start with, Adobe announced Air today, and they win the award for “Most Overloaded Product Name” :)

In all seriousness, congrats to the Adobe team for the 1.0 release!

What about the other awards?

• Lifetime Achievement
• Community Waiting for an Update
• Biggest Hack for a Language Runtime
• Most Original Name for a New Language
• Most Format Restrictive Language
• Best Comeback for a Programming Language
• Most Overloaded Product Name

Got some ideas for awards you would give?

If Ryan and I were in marketing then we would be talking about “making your iPhone applications BREAAAAATHE” or something ;)

Ryan has a wrapper that lets you run iPhone applications inside of the AIR container:

This implementation just uses the mx:HTML tag with the location set to http://iphone.facebook.com with some extra code to handle the custom chrome and the option to make it transparent. Ideally I could take all of the source code for the iPhone application and have all of those files locally installed with the application but going through that code was more time than I had. You’ll also notice that it just refreshes the entire page. My plan is to go through the iPhone facebook code more and call the function that loads the feed information and just refresh that. I’d also like to be able to detect when a new feed item comes in and bubble that up so I can show a notification but detecting changes to the DOM isn’t easily done with AIR so I need to check with the engineering team. I’m going to have some followup posts this week discussing little parts of the application and I’ll also post the source code later this week (I just need to clean it up).

This is a natural fit for certain applications such as Facebook. Doesn’t this application now look a little like Adium sitting over there?

This, once again, gets me back to Face IM. Similar form factor, just add a few more abilities than you get with the iPhone client (which is optimized for having a crappy keyboard etc).

Ryan, we should get together and hack on this bad boy sometime!

JavaPolis is a fantastic conference. Denver is a city that feels like a town, and JavaPolis is a large conference (3200 this year) that manages to feel like a community. It all comes from Stephan and his great team, all volunteers, at the top.

One advantage of speaking at the conference is that you get to talk in a movie theatre. This year, they perfected the experience by having a picture in picture situation that showed speakers and slides together. Like this:

When you go to the same conference year after year, you get to pick up on memes. This year I was a little surprised by some of them.

GWT

I have seen that GWT is successful (way over 2M downloads now for example), but at last years show most of the people talking to me about it were doing so in a “I think I will check that out soon” manner, with a few users.

This year though, people from all over were talking to me about fine details, and about their many projects in production and development. At this point they had gone through a couple of the GWT releases too, and I was often told something like this:

I love the fact that every few months a new GWT comes out with a compiler that makes my applications significantly faster.

The compiler updates from 1.3 to 1.4 and to the bugging 1.5 are quite impressive. Quite a few folks were running on head and I was told “I am so glad that someone just checked in support for Enums at last!”.

I also found it interesting that the majority of people were using GWT-Ext, and that Mattias Bogaert was funding the update to Ext 2.0, which I am excited about (I worked on an Ext 2.0 toy on the plane trip home that I will blog about shortly).

Now, some of the usual suspects were talking about GWT such as Didier Girard, who I got to finally meet. He is such a nice bloke, and told me about a few GWT related libraries that I need to check out. He also interviewed me on video, where I gave an honest account about my Ajaxian feelings. I also met Cyprien Noel, of JSTM4GWT, which is an interesting object replication framework for GWT. I am interested to see how it would work with Gears.

But apart from these season vets, I also talked to companies that have poo-pooed GWT in the past, and are now picking it up, or thinking about doing so.

This all being said, this is a Java conference, so you would expect to see a higher number of “give me Java not JavaScript” folk, but I was still astounded by the numbers. I really think that GWT has reached a tipping point.

Flex my Java guy

One of the morning keynotes was a split session, with the best piece actually being Stephan and Ben showing off their new Flex/AIR-based parlays.com. I got to interview them about it, and will get it up on Ajaxian at some point soon.

It is really well done, and although Stephan bleeds Java, he realised that for what he wanted, Flex was a good choice. He even tried JavaFX but of course, it is too early.

This wrapup of this keynote tells the story on how truly poor the Sun session was. Wow.

Adobe had a booth, a keynote slot, and lots of talks, but there was no better advertising than seeing this application.

Of course, it was a pleasure seeing the usual suspects in Europe, and having a fun time with all.

Au revoir et voyez-vous l’année prochaine.
Het goed tot ziens en ziet volgend jaar u.

A friend works over at Burton Group, and I happened upon this lovely subtle UI that gently lets you know that the element is clickable. Ah, when designers get creative…

I was speaking to a friend, who is an open Web kinda guy, and we had a giggle when we looked over at the Adobe and Microsoft Silverlight booths and he said “maybe Flash and Silverlight will split the Republican vote”.

Now, the idea of splitting the Republican vote is one I like to think about, but I hadn’t thought about it with the RIA context. By adding Silverlight as a platform we will see more flash rectangular boxes right? Maybe, maybe not.

Will the fight for good RIA people have some move from Adobe to Microsoft? Or will the entire pie grow by a large amount?

In the fight itself, will Silverlight win as it is a “new” look. This is where the Giuliani comparison really fails. Adobe has actually done a really good job. It can’t be linked to George Bush (who hasn’t). But maybe the social conservatives who don’t like Rudy because of his views on abortion, or the odd picture of him in a dress, can be linked to certain Adobe fans?

Watching the huge booths of both Adobe and Microsoft one thing is for sure, the primaries are here, and the general election is coming.

The Open Web needs to be ready.