Author Archives: Trond

The Future of Flash – some thoughts

By Trond. June 15, 2010

Once again Flash is in trouble. It’s not the first time, and I believe it’s still not the last. From Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, Google, Microsoft… you name them, they’ve probably had some thorn in Flash’s side.

Now it’s piling up for Flash again: Steve Jobs is crusading against Flash accompanied by the entire HTML5 consortium. Atop of this all major video-service providers, mobile phone makers, and a whole lot of others are now leaving Flash behind in the dust.
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Posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end, HTML5, RIA | Leave a comment

Silverlight 4 (Beta) unrolling!

By Trond. November 30, 2009

silverlightMicrosoft has really put an effort into the newest version of Silverlight (v4), making it into a fully usable platform for RIA development. I suspect the release of Windows7 has freed up some more resources for the Silverlight team. Microsoft has addressed much of the critique of the previous versions of Silverlight. A lot of new controls, support for data-binding, MP4-video and a lot of development-tools makes Silverlight 4 a platform worth checking out for your next RIA-project. I have scratced a bit on the surface of this upcoming release, and here are some of the reasons why I am looking forward to start with Silverlight 4.

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Posted in .NET, Front-end, RIA, Silverlight | Leave a comment

Back to basics with jQuery

By Trond. October 19, 2009

jquery

For a long time I have been using JavaScript for the bare necessities, relying on Flash to do the heavy-lifting. After investigating a couple of OK “Flash-sites” I found out they were not actually made in Flash, but in JavaScript. Seemed both had jQuery as the foundation for their scripting. I’ve been using jQuery blindly as a “switch-class” engine for styling only, but could it really do more than a little CSS-manipulation?

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Posted in CSS, Front-end, JavaScript, RIA | Leave a comment

…but Director wasn't dead!

By Trond. April 8, 2008

Everybody has written Director off for the past two years. “It’s dead and buried” we’ve been chanting. Well then, prepare for a miracle, because Director has arissen from the dead and has just been re-launched in a version 11.

Features include support for all known and unknown media formats (videos, images and audio), a brand new 3D engine with physics subsets, Lingo is “gone” and replaced with JavaScript as main scripting language, text-renderer, a brand new interface and of course a vast selection of new Xtras (plugins).

Director 11 is not a competitor to Flash due to the lower penetration of the ShockWave plugin (4,5 MB). However, it sails ut as a competitor to AIR, and a serious one as many of the new Xtras are certified with Vista and OSX. Many of the new Xtras have capabilities far beyond the AIR environment.

Adobe is pinpointing the game-industry as well as the traditional video and e-learning markets with this new release. Personally I see it as an actor on the application-market for specialized task-applications as well.

Check it out here.

Posted in AIR, Flash, Flex, Front-end, RIA | Leave a comment

Tamarin

By Trond. April 3, 2008

At the moment Adobe is lending both manpower and knowledgde to the open-source project called Tamarin. Tamarin is an attempt of creating a new OO-based JavaScript 2.0 standard up and running. Since both JS2.0 and Actionscript will be based on the ECMA-262-v4 standard it’s easy to understands Adobe’s “goodwill” regarding this project. (Erh… future incorporation of whole or part of Flash Player (AVM2) into browsers, for instance)
However, Tamarin is a joint venture by Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera etc and will likely pass as the future standard for the long awaited JS2.0 standard. Tamarin will be licenced under GPL, which means free use without modification.

Tamarin will be deployed in Firefox and SpiderMonkey as of autumn 2008, and the rest will follow.

Further reading: Tamarin FAQ

T:)

Posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end | Leave a comment

Cairngorm vs. Pure-MVC – some thoughts

By Trond. January 18, 2008

Very nice intro to microarchitechtures, Wojciech, and I believe a correct assumption that Cairngorm is the one to choose.

However I want to advocate the use of PureMVC. I tried to use a “semi-Cairngorm” approach on my latest project and having only mediocre knowledge of how Cairngorm works it took me too much time to wrap my head around it entirely. Maybe it’ll help if you could publish a hands on example made in Cairngorm.
I have now tried to make an ideal small-app in Pure-MVC and I find the concept of MVC-Facade much easier to grasp than the MVC-Service logic (This of course since I know the Facade pattern better ;) ) I like the strict use of mediators and proxies, the way you kind of information-hide all the VO/TDOs known from Cairngorm.
The main critique of pure-MVC is that the strict-typing of retun values from proxies is gone, all you get is generic objects. This is a big flaw since you loose the ability ty type-check return values. You’ll need to know what comes back. However  I feel the same problem is present in the Cairngorm’s VOs as well? Or am I wrong.
Pure-MVC has scheduled a new release “soon” and I am curious of what to expect. If they address the few flaws they have now it’ll sail up as the best cross-language microarchitechture to use, since Pure-MVC is now language-transparent (ie .Net-compatible and SilverLight-compatible). Cairngorm is currently bound to ActionScript (AS3).
However… the word on the net is that “if you’re gonna use a microarchitechture…use Cairngorm”, so one day soonI’m gonna make an effort and use it :)

Posted in AIR, Flex, Front-end | Leave a comment