Spring Web Coolness
I attended my first ever meeting of the Spring Dallas User Group on Wednesday. They had Keith Donald from SpringSource speak about the new Spring WebFlow 2.
Although my team uses the Spring Framework for all the projects, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Spring because I am not a fan of XML configuration. But the Spring Framework 2.5, with annotation-driven bean wiring has really started to change my opinion. I had similar feelings for Web Flow, but the v2 has definitely improved things. While I’m still not that excited about the core Web Flow state engine, they introduced Spring JS (JavaScript), which was very exciting.
Spring JS provide a JavaScript library for decorating pages so that you can add rich widgets for RIA-goodness but still have the page degrade gracefully in less sophisticated browsers. The original version was based around my favorite ExtJS library, but they changed to Dojo when the ExtJS guys shot themselves in the foot with the license change to GPL. This reinforces my opinion that ExtJS really screwed the pooch. They had the chance to be associated with the best Java framework out there, and lost it.
The user group meeting was very interesting and it was a great group of people. Since one of the organizers is a friend of mine, I’m even going to be the guest speaker in July talking about ExtJS and Spring. I’ll share more on how that goes as the presentation starts to take form.
Drinking from the Fire Hose
I’m about half way through Douglas Crockford’s new book JavaScript: The Good Parts. Crockford is a JavaScript architect and Jedi working at Yahoo!. He also maintains the JSON format and is on the ECMAScript committee. This book is his effort to shine a new light on JavaScript as a serious language in its own right.
The book is a concise 150-ish pages and it is information dense. In fact, it is mind-melting dense. Crockford says up front that it could take serveral readings to really grasp all the concepts and I would absolutely agree. I’ve been playing a lot recently with JavaScript, and thought I was starting to get the hang of it, but this book is like jumping from C++ for Dummies to Modern C++ Design. It leaves my head spinning, but is fascinating at the same time.
This book gets a big thumbs up and I would highly recommend anyone interested in what JavaScript is really about check it out. There are very few truly good books on JavaScript. This book, along with David Flanagan’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide are the best out there and should be the starting points for anyone who decides to make the effort to really understand JavaScript, the real language behind Web 2.0.
Friends don’t let friend do Flash
The final part of the Flash Wars series on AppleInsider ended pretty much as I expected. The author ended with a negative slant towards Flash and I would have to agree with him. What was even more interesting were the comments posted in response.
Since Apple has a large artsy following, many of the responses were from the design folks. I’m not real clear on what planet these folks are from. They were linking showcase Flash “site of the year” sites as a demo of what only Flash was capable of. Unfortunately designers create art to impress their peers, not their users, so the Flash sites had counter-intuitive navigation and way too much glitz.
The design crowd also doesn’t seem to realize no one cares about SVG graphics except themselves and banner ad companies. The latter group is pretty much hated, and I have never had a customer ask for SVG graphics. It is pretty clear the Flash crowd is completely detached from reality, which means it is only a matter of time before they are extinct.
So all the Flash developers out there have my pity. Some have spent years mastering a medium most people despise, and they’ll have to look for something else to do. You could almost say Flash is the new PowerBuilder, except that you could at least do productive work in PowerBuilder.
Flash in the Pan
Apple Insider is running a very interesting series of articles about Adobe Flash and its future. The first article in the Flash Wars series covered the history of Flash. The second part jumps in to all the hurdles and competitors Flash faces, from Microsoft to Apple.
I sat in on most the Flex track at Dallas TechFest, and it is an interesting technology. But I also share the same opinion as the author of the AppleInsider artice — Flash/Flex has a rough road ahead of it. One of the biggest points that I think a lot of folks won’t notice in the article is the suggestion that open standards are a competitor to Flex. By open standards, they mean Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML. I reached the same conclusing after playing with some of the first-rate JavaScript libraries out there like JQuery and ExtJS.
ExtJS, in particular, can do about everything Flex can do, and do it without a browser plug-in. It also has APIs around the non-visual aspect of applications that put Flex to shame. Although ExtJS has licensing issues which I’ve griped about before, if you accept it at face value as a commercial product, it really is the best thing going right now for building RIAs.