Hugo Sombreireiro

Adobe Developer Week presentations are now available for on-demand viewing at the Adobe website! Check them out if you missed any of them or just want to revisit some of that interesting content! Go here!

A new site dedicated to the development of ColdFusion backed Flex application is now online at http://flexcf.com. It carries some interesting content already and more is announced to be available soon. Keep an eye on it

I’ve recently blogged about cfExt, a ColdFusion wrapper for the ExtJS library. Well, now it’s time for PHP developers to feel happy! ExtPHP is a wrapper for the ExtJS 2.0 library that will feel much more intuitive for PHP developers.
For just a quick example using ExtPHP, to create a login window (we’re going to create just a window on this example), you just need to do this:

$jswin = new Ext_Window(
         $wincfg ->
                 layout('fit')->
                 width(300)->
                 height(150)->
                 closable(false)->
                 resizable(false)->
                 plain(true)->
                 items($login));

$window = new JsVariable('win',$jswin);
$window->show();

And there we have a window. Of course you can add variables, content and methods to the window but that will be covered later with a proper post. ExtPHP is currently available as a Technology Preview on sourceforge. Get it here.

YUI (Yahoo User Interface Library) 2.5 was released on Feb 20th. This is a great lib (and works great with ExtJS when needed) and they have a very cool demo of it running on Y!’s developers site so, check it out. Want to know more about the release itself? Check out the official blog post.

cfExt is a ColdFusion wrapper for the ExtJS javascript library but unlike ColdFusion 8 original support for ExtJS 1.0, cfExt wraps ExtJS 2.0. It’s being developed by Dan Vega (kudos to you Dan) and, even if it’s a work in progress, it’s already a very cool tool. Check it out at RIAForge

You may be aware that Google as a toolkit out there to help Java developers to code cool ajax web applications - it’s called the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). However, even if powerful and relatively easy to use, GWT is, and forgive me for the bluntness, “butt ugly”. On the other side of the fence we have ExtJS with gracious and visually pleasant widgets. Some folks had this great idea of combining the two of them and out it comes GWT-Ext now on it’s 2.0 version. They’re sporting a kick-ass demo gallery! Don’t miss it.

Folks at ExtJS just released version 2.0.2 of their popular library (1.0 was bundled with ColdFusion 8 ) to meet compatibility requirements with AIR 1.0, just released by Adobe. Also, check out their new AIR version of ExtJS Docs.

Adobe is turning some of its products into open source projects. No news here, they announced it a while ago, But now they have their open source projects website online. For now the Flex 3.0 SDK and BlazeDS are the stars of the company. Drop by and take a look.

It’s official!

After a sort of long but very productive beta testing period at labs.adobe.com both Flex and Flex Builder 3.0 and AIR 1.0 are now shipping! I’ve been playing around with Flex and AIR for quite some time now and I can only tell you they are great tools. Meanwhile, Flex Builder for Linux systems is available at Adobe Labs as an alpha release. If you’re a Linux fan, check it out.

For those who don’t know what  I’m talking about, take a look here to learn about Flex and here to learn about AIR. And if you’re really curious and want to try them out, use one of the links bellow:

• Adobe Flex Builder 3.0 Stand-alone (60-day trial)
• Adobe Flex Builder 3.0 Eclipse Plug-in (60-day trial)
• Adobe Flex SDK (free)
• Adobe AIR 1.0 (free)

If you’re too lazy, here’s a quick intro. Flex is a way to create Flash applications (don’t bash me, I know it’s not that simple but hey, this is a quick intro) not by designing them like traditional Flash but coding the application, including the interface. It was once defined by Adobe as a presentation server but I think it’s a little more than that. Since Flex 3 has been released I’m seriously considering moving away from AJAX technologies and start to develop frontend stuff just around Flex. As for AIR, it’s Adobe Integrated Runtime, it’s “just” a way to run all those cool web apps right on your desktop. You heard me, not on your browser…on your desktop. Oh, and because it sports an integrated SQL engine, you can even run them offline and sync with online apps as soon as a connection is available. Want to know more? Go to the links above or wait for one of my next posts where I’ll be covering these technologies.

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying out IBM’s Lotus Quickr Services for Portal running on a Windows 2003 R2 Server.

For those of you who don’t know Quickr, it’s a ready-to-use web-based collaboration tool with features such as content libraries management, team places where project teams can convey information and documentation of a given project, presence awareness (through Sametime), blogs and much more (check my link above for more detailed info from IBM). It’s also heavy on AJAX (they use the Dojo Toolkit) and implements a different approach to collaboration environments by introducing the infamous (or maybe not that so) concept of Web 2.0 interaction. This version I’m trying works based on Websphere Portal but you can also get it in a Domino “flavor”. Anyway, like said earlier, if you want to know more just follow the link.

So, I’ve installed and been using it for a couple of days and here are my thoughts so far:

Installation

I was kind of afraid this would be a bad experience. Not so much because the product had any bad references but because installing anything J2EE under Windows 2003 can be somewhat tricky. This was, all in all, a very pleasant surprise as all went smoothly from the WebSphere AS install to the Quickr install and config, including the installation and configuration of DB2.

First Impression

Installation went by and I didn’t even noticed it. So, I open my browser, create and account and I’m off to exploration land. First impression: nice color pallete The environment is inviting and pretty intuitive.

Another cool aspect is the Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office connectors. After install you’re able to access the content repository through your Windows Explorer.

Also, if you’re using Microsoft Office for content creation (like 95% of the computer world), you’ll also like the possibility of checking-in and out, as well as publish, documents from within your apps.

Another cool feature of this product is the ability to drop documents from your desktop into the browser and have them integrated in the library.

Down the line

After only a couple of days, there’s only this one thing that I found annoying and irritating: the ajax behaviours are somewhat insconsitent. Maybe that’s just because they ported Dojo 0.4 and since then it got 0.6 and a 1.0 releases.
All in all Quickr is a very interesting tools with a very interesting price. Expansion and scalling capabilities are very interesting too. I’m planning to write a couple of articles providing an in-depth look at the both front and back-office stuff so, stay tunned.