Ajax13 - Yet another online office suite!

Everyday new web 2.0 applications appear and users have many options to choose from for any of their task! Be it blogging, photo share, social networks etc. Recently we have seen Google, Microsoft and others come up with online office solutions. These kinds of applications are here make software installations a history. Let me introduce an online office suite called Ajax13. I am not sure why "13" but, the Ajax 13 Inc. is a software development company that introduces web-based applications written using the AJAX based methodology. And their vision is software-as-a-service, which is gaining great momentum these days.

Ajax13 offers 5 online applications. They are ajaxWrite,ajaxSketch, ajaxXLS, ajaxPresents and ajaxTunes. The first four make up web-based office suite similar to Microsoft's Office. These applications have been designed to look like Microsoft Office, making it easy for anyone to start using it without needing to learn a new program.

ajaxWrite is a word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word documents. Apart from MS Word document formats it can handle Open Office format, PDF etc. Thus in a way you can convert your doc file to PDF file through a simple "Save As.." function. But when I tried it out, I couldn't even save ordinary doc file to my hard drive as the Ajax13 team promises. All I get is "java.io.IOException:Conversion failed".

ajaxSketch is a drawing tool that provides an environment for diagramming, creating flow charts, free hand drawing and more. It has been designed to look like Illustrator, but the interface is clean and very easy (except that it is slow compared to ajaxWrite). It supports the SVG format and nothing more. I tried the "Export" menu and was expecting to see a large list of possible exports, but i found only SVG format.

ajaxXLS is just a spreadsheet viewer that allows you to easily open any xls file. The Ajax13 team has a separate spreadsheet editor in Beta stage, but it is still in early stage of development. It has been designed to look like Microsoft Excel, but they promise to have compatibility with Open Office.

Now onto the last product, ajaxTunes. It's a music player that lets you play high-quality streaming music straight from the Internet on any computer. It’s a decent web based layer and they have provided the facility to add it to any website. Thus you can play a song or provide a song list to your website visitors. Apart from these features, you can make use of an AJAX based music manager to which you can upload music available on the web, called Sideloading, so you have access to your favorite songs from anywhere.

Ajax13 team have lot of work to do if you see what Google and others have come up with.Google have recently updated their Docs and Spreadsheets's looks.They have come up with a new interface that looks like windows explorer and easy to browse. But these competitive Web 2.0 applications are going to bring more and more feature rich applications online.

GNU ready to Launch GPLv3!

GNU GPLv3 has gone through first,second,third and forth draft and lots of debate.Now FSF (Free Software Foundation) is all set for the official release of the GNU GPL version 3 on Friday, June 29. With this new release GNU community hopes to defend the efforts to make free software proprietary.

The core legal mechanism of the GNU GPL is that of copyleft, which requires modified versions of GPL'd software to be GPL'd themselves. This was the concept which Richard Stallman came up with and he will anounce the release of GPLv3 at Noon (EDT). You can view the live stream from www.fsf.org.

Ext, Yet another Ajax &UI Library!

Here is another Ajax & UI library worth looking at! Ext is a client-side, javascript framework for building web applications. It’s developed by Jack Slocum, who started off creating extension utilities for the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. It was then called “yui-ext”. Now Ext is an independent framework which is gaining popularity at a rapid pace.

Ext is dual-licensed under the LGPL and a commercial license. And this is an important flexibility option that you will find in Ext. With regard to support of different server platforms, Ext runs on any platform hat can process POST requests and return structured data. Remember, Ext is a client-side framework!

Ext is built on a slightly different architecture. I would say it’s an enhancement framework. It requires you to include one of the following base libraries: YUI, jQuery or Protoype/Script.aculo.us. Apart from that Ext also have native Ext adapter, so the external libraries are no longer required. But this feature is available only from version 1.1 onwards. You can also use Ext along with GWT and other libraries. I am sure the library support of Ext will increase in future.

Now for development using Ext you will find best tool combination for debugging your application is to use the Mozilla Firefox browser with the Firebug add-on and optionally the Web Developer add-on. If you are looking for an IDE, Spket IDE will be the one you should use! It’s a toolkit for JavaScript and XML development. It supports Support for ExtJS 1.1 development. It also supports JavaScript code completion. Apart from that Spket IDE supports Laszlo, Silerlight and Yahoo! Widget.

Adding Social bookmarks in New Blogger

People have started to using social bookmarks and its very common in blogs.But majority of these bookmarks are from sites like AddThis or iFeedReaders or AddThisBookmark etc. In this entry,we will see how to add social bookmarks to a new blogger.

Adding the new bookmarking links are not same as the old blogger.For the old blogger the blog entry url was represented as <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> and title as <$BlogItemTitle$>.Whereas in the new blogger we have these represented as data:post.url and data:post.title respectively.

In new blogger you need to edit you template HTML to add these bookmarking links.In Templates, select "Edit Html" and check "Expand Widget Templates". Search for <p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1' />. Remeber that post-footer-line-1 will put your social bookmark links in footer's first link. If you intend to change the line, update the appropriate <P> tag. Also remember to close the tag in the end!

Add these to the required <P> tag :

Add to:
<a expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title'>
Digg</a> |
<a expr:href='"http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url= " + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title'>
Del.icio.us</a>

Now simple save the template and you have your social bookmark added!

Adobe rolls out Betas

Adobe Systems announced the public beta of Adobe Flex 3, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) formerly code-named Apollo, Adobe Builder Beta and Flash Player update. With the new Flex and AIR Abode is pushing itself up in the rich Internet applications (RIAs) competition.

Adobe Flex 3 Beta:

The new version of cross platform, free open source framework for creating RIA adds rich new UI capabilities, enhanced developer productivity, desktop deployment and enterprise testing and performance tools. The Flex 3 public beta also marks the first significant deliverable for the open source Flex project, beginning with the availability of nightly builds and a public bug database. Some of the key changes in Flex 3 from its predecessors are:

• Enhancement to designer/developer workflow.
• New Containers (mx:ConstraintRow and mx:ConstraintColumn).
• Code enhancement include: faster compilation, compiler class caching, deeper language intelligence for AS3/MXML/CSS, Code Search, Refactoring, Code Outline, Profiling, Profiling Live Memory Data, Enhanced Module support, and Multiple SDK support.
• New Widgets, Components and Classes.
• Smaller SWF file.

Ted Patrick had a week long blog entries on the new Flex version. Each of the above mentioned features is explained in detail.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR):

Apollo Runtime becomes Adobe Integrated Runtime. The cross-operating system runtime was code-named Apollo. It allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. Now AIR is set to become a major runtime that all the desktops will have. AIR will also pay a major roll in RIA, mashup softwares and Web 2.0 and beyond.

Adobe Flex Builder 3 Public Beta:

Flex Builder 3 Public Beta is available for download in Adobe Labs. This early public prerelease version begins a new, more transparent product development process from Adobe, with frequent, regular access to early builds and greater insight provided into the feature roadmap and planning process. The Flex Builder 3 beta release will provide you with an opportunity to explore powerful new features. Some of the new major features include:

• Support for the new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).
• Code Refactoring.
• Memory and performance profiling.
• SWF file size reduction through persistent framework caching.

You can also view the complete detailed specs for Flex Builder 3.

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 1:

The new Flash player is code-named "FrogStar". It adds support for caching the Flex Framework within the Flash Player. Moving forward the Flex Framework will be cached within the Flash Player dramatically reducing the size of the output SWF files. SWF files will contain only your code and Flex Preloader containing the caching/loading logic. Some of the new capabilities of Flash Player are:

• Flex Framework to be cached for use across domains.
• The Player Cache will support Flex 3.0 and future versions of the Flex Framework.
• Flex Framework now supports Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL's).

Conclusion:

So with these new features, Adobe is trying to capture the market which other Ajax libraries have. The size of SWF has been an issue for some time. I know some of the projects which opted other technologies like Openlazlo and others due to the size of SWF file.

Another important factor is with Sun’s JRE. Unless Sun reduces the size of JRE and make it more portable, its new RIA technology JavaFX will find it difficult to compete. Compared to Sun Micorsystems, Microsoft seems to be making ground with its new Ajax projects and other .Net enhancements.