Yummy…. Crow!
Yes, I will accept I need to eat some crow. I’ve been playing a lot recently with the .NET framework and C#. My PHP mistress got kinda boring. Same-o, same-ol’. I decided to give .NET another whirl because I wanted to port the ExtJS presentation I did for the local Spring users group to .NET.
Since I hadn’t really gotten in to .NET since v2.0, I got up to date with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5sp1. I knew I neeeded JSON for my AJAX, so I thought about starting with WCF. But to fully dig in to WCF, I needed to understand the new features in .NET 3.5, so I found some good tutorials on what was new.
I was really blown away with how far .NET has progressed. I’m a big fan of JavaScript, and C# in .NET 3.5 actually starts to look a lot like it. You can declare variables with the var keyword and you have anonymous classes and lambdas. I actually played with LINQ, and I have say I like it a lot. I will humbly eat that crow pie over the trash talking I gave LINQ serveral posts ago.
I’m still not down with the postback model for ASP.NET, but am playing with ASP.NET MVC, which is getting pretty mature in its fifth preview release. It will definitely be the way I head. I just need to sort out the WCF stuff for the JSON/AJAX calls and I’ll be a happy camper.
So in an epic “I will not eat green eggs and ham” kind of way, I’ve decided I really like those green eggs and ham. But it is a lot more like green eggs and crow in this case.
The Future of Browsing
The big news today was about Google Chrome. Chrome is web browser built by Google based on Webkit that is going to be their way of finally killing off Microsoft. They actually created an online comic book to explain why they created Chrome and the technology behind it.
What makes Chrome special compared to Safari or Firefox is their JavaScript VM called V8. The V8 JavaScript engine provides JIT compilation of JavaScript code, so your JavaScript RIA applications run with blazing speed. ExtJS is incredibly fast in Chrome. Another awesome feature is the ability to create a shortcut to a page that actually is an application link. For example, here is Chrome viewing the ExtJS API documentation:
Notice the window decoration with tabs, navigation, etc… Selecting the Create Application Shortcuts option will create a Start Menu, Desktop and/or Quicklaunch shortcut to the page you are viewing. Opening the shortcut opens the page as a pseudo-application, like this:
This creates a kiosk-mode view, without navigation. This web page of documentation is now essentially a standalone application. Google obviously intends Chrome to be the primary client-side hosting environment for its web-based application suite. This is also really good news for folks using JavaScript for RIAs. With the V8 JavaScript VM, you can have JavaScript performance on par with what a plug-in can do, and thus don’t need the plug-ins.
When Chrome goes final, I don’t see why anyone would not want to use it. It is extremely fast, with a clean UI and will completely change peoples perspectives on web-based productivity software. ExtJS becomes stunning in Chrome, and I’d actually bet that Google buys ExtJS to use it as their main JavaScript library. The only question becomes Google motivations. Will they “not be evil” or will Chrome turn into adware/spyware. Time will tell, but I’ll be using it until I think it is evil 
JavaScript at the Speed of Sound
The big news for the JavaScript world today came out of the Firefox development team. They working on a new JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey called TraceMonkey. This is going to have huge implications for building RIAs with JavaScript and will expedite the death of both Flash and Silverlight. Why use a plug-in when you can get this kind of performance in just the browser.
This is all slated for Firefox 3.1, so it is still early, but this, along with development in the Safari Webkit space, are going to make the JavaScript world a very interesting place to be.
More gory details can be found on Andreas Gal’s blog post about it.
Back to Business
So I had to ditch my PHP mistress for a bit and come back to the real world. I spoke tonight at the Spring Dallas User Group, giving a presentation on the ExtJS JavaScript library and integration with Spring MVC. We had close to 20 people in attendance, which was more then I expected given the short notice.
Erik Weibust and I had discussed me presenting to the group several months ago. I orginally planned to present in July, but vacation plans got in the way of the meeting date. In the interim, quite a bit happened in the ExtJS world. The fallout from the change to GPL from LGPL had simmered down, and they released a new version.
The presentation went well. Some folks had worked with ExtJS while others were learning about it for the first time. In spite of the turmoil from the license change, I’m still very excited about it. The 2.2 release added some cool stuff and I’m looking forward to digging in to it on a project.
For those in attendance, or the simply curious, I’ve attached the presentation, sample project and my own Spring JsonView implementation. Note that for the sample project, you will need to download the ExtJS distribution yourself and place the contents of it in the web/resources/ext directory. I didn’t want to redistribute ExtJS in my sample.
JQuery…. in action
We finally started a somewhat meaty RIA-ish project at work. My original intent was to use ExtJS for the bling, but it wasn’t through the corporate approval process and the available themes didn’t match the desired corporate color scheme. So instead of ExtJS, we’re using JQuery UI 1.5.
So far, I’ve been extremely impressed. It does not have near the number of UI widgets that ExtJS has, but I haven’t needed them for this web project. One of the most impressive things about JQuery UI is how easy it is to theme. Some silly-smart folks over at Filament Group created an on-line theming engine for JQuery UI called ThemeRoller. With ThemeRoller, I can specify the RGB values to exactly match the desired corporate color scheme and even add some cool effects. There is also a great blog post on how to use the ThemeRoller theme to create your own components.
I still like ExtJS, but I think JQuery and JQuery UI are really starting to get a lot of traction. The ability to create custom tailored themes is pretty huge for corporate and custom development, and right now, JQuery has the leg up on ExtJS in this space.