Well I’m sure my blog isn’t the be-all and end-all of the Internet but I do know I get many thousands of developers visiting here every month. I just charted one year of the browsers people are using to visit my site and its interesting to see the results. In a nutshell IE and Firefox are losing ground (in fact IE is losing ground the quickest) and Chrome is growing quickly – apparently taking share from IE and Firefox.
More telling is what has happened in the last few months.
With the recent release of GWT 2.0 there was a lot of newly added functionality. In particular today I’m going to focus on UiBinder. From the GWT website they explain UiBinder as: “With UiBinder, GWT now allows you to create user interfaces declaratively in XML instead of having to assemble them programmatically”.
Today we will work through a simple UiBinder application.
Google App Engine is a fast and affordable way to get your applications launched in the cloud. Today we are going to use the App Engine SDK for Python to send data from Flash to App Engine and back.
Node.js is very easy to use and very well designed. Today I’m going to build a simple socket server using the sample provided by the Node.js documentation and create a socket client in Flash CS4.
I love the fact the latest Google Chrome builds (version 4.0+) now support WebSockets. Recently I did a post on using Node.js (getting up and running) and if you haven’t read that post you might want to do that before continuing.
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on VMWare 6.5 Workstation and wanted to try out Node.js. According to the Node.js website Node is a way to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. The nice thing about Node is that it is event driven (making use of Javascript’s strength with events and also making it easy to learn) and there are no “locks”. Node is similar to Ruby EventMachine or Python Twisted. There is already a strong user community here.
Lets go ahead a build a couple simple apps using Node.js. I’ll assume from here that you already have Ubuntu 9.10 already running.
When most people decide to build a socket server for their Flash/Flex projects they usually turn toward using Java since there are many excellent ways to go about building on some great frameworks. Today however I’ll quickly build a socket server using Stackless Python and communicate to Flash CS4.
Diesel is a project similar to Tornado. From the Diesel website they describe it as: “Diesel is a framework for writing network applications using asynchronous I/O in Python”. Today we will build a simple Diesel application and communicate with it via Telnet. The potential of Diesel is exciting when you begin to understand how you could use it for Comet based applications.
I discovered web2py last night. This is unlike any web framework you’ve ever seen and its open source and 100% free. With web2py the batteries are included and there is zero to install additionally or configure. Its all self-contained, in fact you don’t even need a code editor to work with the scripts since one is provided and hosted in the web browser. The language used is Python and you’ll find a Python interpreter is already included as well. Simply download, extract, and then run the executable and your up and running and ready to create your first web app.
