Microsoft Popfly

Popfly is an easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, games, Web pages, and applications. Popfly is currently in Beta stage of development.

The Popfly includes four tools based on Silverlight technology, which are described as follows.

Game Creator

The Game Creator is a tool that allows you to create your own game or extend a game already built. It can be exported to Facebook, or be used as a Windows Live Gadget.

Mashup Creator

The Mashup Creator is a tool that lets users fit together pre-built blocks in order to mash together different web services and visualisation tools. Also available is an advanced view for blocks, which allows users to modify the code of the block in JavaScript, as well as giving users flexibility in designing the programs. Additional HTML code can also be added to the mashups. A feature similar to IntelliSense, with autocompletion of HTML code, is available as well.

The Mashup Creator also provides a preview function, with live preview in the background as users link blocks. Tutorials are available, and error notices are given to users when incompatible data is sent between blocks.

Web Creator

The Web Creator is a tool for creating web pages. The user interface layout is similar to the ribbon user interface for Office 2007. Web pages are created without HTML coding, and can be customised by choosing predefined themes, styles, and color schemes. Users can embed their shared mashups in the web page. Completed web pages will also be saved in each user’s Popfly space.

Popfly Space

Completed mashups and web pages are stored on Popfly Space (100MB maximum per user), where users also receive a customisable profile page and other social networking features. Public projects can be shared, rated, or “ripped” by other users. Popfly allows users to download mashups as gadgets for Windows Sidebar or embed them into Windows Live Spaces, with some support for other blog service providers.

A First Look at Ruby on Rails

Rails was intuitive, however Ruby is not. Ruby on Rails was very easy to set up and the scaffold saved a lot of time. The hard part comes in where components need to be edited/added/removed. Making these revisions in Ruby has a slight learning curve in terms of its syntax and have not seen its programming style in other languages done before (even though it was supposedly based on Perl)

In terms of running it I used Instant rails, easily downloadable from the site. Design was conducted in Aptana with the Ruby (RadRails) extension. All and All, once past the initial hurdles not a bad experience.

TinyMCE in Practice: Pros and Cons

TinyMCE has several advantages and disadvantages -

Pros:

• Easy to install.
• Works on IIS and Apache without any significant problems (Unlike in our case with FCKeditor).
• Many configuration options.
• Very lightweight.

Cons:

• Sometimes very slow load times.
• Is not available when on the onload event (Therefore, a try catch block is required to set data before Tiny is loaded).
• Some problems may arise when interacting with jQuery (such as the replacement of text and greying out of text field).
• Bullet points make the font go all weird (i.e. like this blog entry for example).

Summary of Rich Text Editing in JavaScript

A rich text editor is an online service that allows users to edit rich text within web browsers, and serialise it in a number of formats (such as plain text/HTML/insertion of embedded image types etc.). It is generally used as part of another service, for example Web publishing, Web-based email (Gmail uses it heavily) and other similar services.

Comparison of several editors: http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors.

However, the top 2 main ones are:

TinyMCE

is a platform-independent web-based JavaScript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released as open source software.. It has the ability to convert HTML textarea fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is designed to easily integrate with content management systems.

TinyMCE integrates with many different open source systems, such as Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and e107.

TinyMCE is compatible with multiple browers across multiple Operating Systems including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. There is limited support for Opera (haha Chris).

Install guide can be found here .

FCKeditor

is an open source WYSIWYG text editor that can be used in web pages. It aims to be lightweight and requires no client-side installation.

Its core code is written in JavaScript, having server side interfaces with Active-FoxPro, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript, Lasso, Perl, PHP and Python.

The FCK in FCKeditor stands for Frederico Caldeira Knabben (Although most people think otherwise from first glance).

It doesn’t seem to like IIS. When we try to create a page with a text editor in it, it throws a page cannot be found (for the area with the editor), but works great in Apache.

JavaScript Debugging Features of Aptana

One of the useful debugging features Aptana provides is the ability to set breakpoints and trace through JavaScript code. When the code is executed, it will pause at the line where the break is placed. The state of any variables are shown throughout the process and each step will execute remaining code at each separate point. This helps by providing a simple way to locate and fix errors and at the same time following the process carried out by the code itself.

The way in which it is done is by splitting each of these methods into views. An explanation of these views can be found on the Aptana site.

There is also a comparison of these debugging features to other tools found here.

Differences Between RSS and ATOM

There are several differences between the RSS and ATOM standards, namely their:

• Content Models: RSS may contain either plain text or escaped HTML as a payload, with no way to indicate which of the two is provided. Atom, on the other hand, provides a mechanism to explicitly label the type of content being provided by the entry, and allows for a broad variety of payload types including plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, Base64-encoded binary, and references to external content such as documents, video and audio streams.

• Data Formats:The RSS specification relies on the use of RFC 822 formatted timestamps to communicate information about when items in the feed were created and last updated. The Atom working group chose instead to use timestamps formatted according to the rules specified by RFC 3339.
  
  
• Internationalisation: While the RSS vocabulary has a mechanism to indicate a language for the feed, there is no means by which a language for individual items or text elements can be specified. Atom, on the other hand, uses the standardized xml:lang attribute to make it possible to specify a language context for every piece of human readable content in the feed. Atom also differs from RSS in that it supports the use of links to resources and unique identifiers to contain characters outside the US ASCII character set.

• Modularity: The elements of the RSS vocabulary are not generally reusable in other XML vocabularies. The Atom syntax was specifically designed to allow elements to be reused outside the context of an Atom feed document. For instance, it is not uncommon to find atom:link elements being used within RSS feeds.

jQuery

Week two’s research topic was the jQuery Javascript library.

Its strengths are that it is fast and concise and has to ability to simplify HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. It has a lightweight footprint (typically 15kb in size), is cross-browser and is CSS3 compliant.

jQuery was designed to change the way that we write web applications by emphasising the interaction between Javascript and HTML. A notable site to mention is: http://jquery.com/.  It contains information about what jQuery is, tutorials on how to use it, how it interacts with other libraries and all the jQuery documentation.

Other JavaScript libraries out there are Prototype and script.aculo.us, as well as JavaScript widget libraries such as Ext and Dojo Toolkit.  Companies and groups such as Microsoft and Yahoo! have also developed their own JavaScript-based user interface libraries, which find their way into the web applications developed by these companies.

Distributed Systems

Week one’s research topic was distributed systems, here is a bit about them:

Distributed Systems are hardware and software systems containing more than one processing or storage element, concurrent processes, or multiple programs.

This is useful in situations where a very large computational problem needs to be solved and resources, such as supercomputers, are not as easily available.  With DS, a task may be split up into smaller chunks of data and performed and processed by the many computers owned via the general public.  Examples of some such projects are BOINC (open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing) and SETI@HOME (searching for extraterrestrial intelligence).

These systems also incorporate concepts to design programs to run on many processing cores as multi-core systems become more widely used.

More information can be found within this wiki.

Installing IIS

I installed an IIS server on my virtual machine by the use of the add/remove windows components.

Whilst checking the web server service to be installed, a number of other services were set to be installed as well. Windows prompted me twice for the location of the install disk, which i had to change from D:\ drive to C:\.

After the installation was complete I was able to go into Firefox browsing localhost to connect to the web server, however could not browse to it in Internet Explorer. I was able to put a simple html page into the C:\InetPub\wwwroot\ folder named test.htm and navigate to localhost/test.htm in order to view it.

The only web server I have previous experience with is Apache, so it will be interesting to learn some other ones too.

My Previous Web Experience

Some of the things I have learnt in the past:

- Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, HTML/CSS

- Perl, CGI

- PHP (Only a bit)

- Database: Oracle, MySQL.

Most of these were learnt throughout the Web Applications, Database Management and Modular Programming subjects here at Bond. My most favourite project would probably be the second Web Applications assignment where we had to create a website with flash, java applets and several other things embedded into it.