journal

So a press release yesterday talks about the Gears introduction but includes Adobe’s Lynch stating that they will be including it in Apollo. So there are a couple of major things going on here. Google is working with Adobe. That’s pretty major. I talk to alot of developers and they’re all inclined to jump on Flex more than anything if they needed to build a serious internet app. And Flex is open source so Google may just be eyeing it for future development to keep on the same playing field as Microsoft with their Silverlight technology. The fact that Google is building an offline database is seriously important for Google’s future online. Another seriously important thing for Google to do is to work more with rich app technologies so that they’re indexable and searchable or maybe a whole different model needs to be worked out. The fact that Adobe is building it into Apollo also changes the lack of Safari support since Safari and Apollo both use webkit and Adobe has stated that they’re actively involved in webkit’s development. So all in all I see a major trend going on here. Google, Apple and Adobe are all working around webkit. I smell a merger coming.

First off, sorry, I’ve been OBE for a while but I’ve been keeping up with the latest. Just no time to voice them. Well… until I came across this little snippet. Which talks about Google’s new offline storage solution and how they’ve opened it up to other developers and how this is going to bring offline storage to their web apps. So I try it out in Safari and it doesn’t support Safari. Yes, Safari is my new IE6. If it doesn’t support Safari, its not worth it, maybe in the future but just not now. So this cuts into my whole ‘retrofitting’ mantra when it comes to RIA development. Why does Google think that continually pushing html development, a markup that was never designed for internet applications worthwhile? They keep trying to push it to new limits without ever thinking is there another way we should be looking at this? Adobe, Microsoft and Sun seem to agree, why not us? So I ask myself, what are they thinking man?!?!?!?

Ok, this is a 3 pager, but I insist on everyone reading it. Its that good, enjoy.

Now this is interesting. I came across Linq recently and was really impressed with it. Check out this video. But I was stupid impressed when I saw they included it in Silverlight 1.1 More details below…

Linq is one of the many .NET features we’re pleased to include in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release. Linq in Silverlight supports key Linq-to-Object scenarios available in the desktop version, such as queries built on IEnumerable and the ability to implement a custom Linq provider.

The Details:

A very large subset of the System.Linq and System.Linq.Expressions APIs are available in Silverlight.
In fact, the only difference is that the following methods aren’t public in 1.1 Alpha.
Expression.Compile()
Queryable.AsQueryable()
XLinq and DLinq aren’t in 1.1 Alpha
If you miss any of the above features, remember this is just Alpha and we’re eagerly looking into adding them to upcoming releases. XLinq in particular would be a key addition…

If you haven’t already, now’s a great time to download the Silverlight developer tools. And if you haven’t worked with Linq yet, the 101 Samples site has a wide range of Linq intro examples.

It’s just like being there!!

So I read a post on Ryan Stewart’s blog about Ajaxian’s post on the death of ajax. And I’m thinking to myself, is this deja vu or what? Alot of the dhtml developers like myself already came to this conclusion years ago. Don’t treat hypertext like rich internet apps, its not. Hypertext was designed to link documents with basic formatting. Real internet applications can’t be contained to the browser. If you ever wanted to change the posture of your web application to a more desktop like application you would have to create an entirely new application, for multiple operating systems no less. Lets take Google reader for example. Great app…slow as hell. But I can create an app just like it in c# and it smokes. So what’s my point? Its pretty simple actually. Ajax was designed to improve the user experience. I see it being used to create full blown apps which are annoying because they’re introducing alot more problems than solutions.

So the conclusion I came up with back then is the same one I have now. Html apps suck period.