Nikoport

This month, Google has released quite a number of updates to its services: Google Trends, Google Analytics and Google Maps.

Google trends has introduced a new area - “hot trends“, which display the hottest trends in the search, or the way i understand it - it should show those phrases which have received a sudden increase of the searches. Besides hotness (right now from “medium” to “on fire”), the results also displays related searches (similar ones), peak time and most used searches location. During an intensive web search engine optimization it could be quite an important criteria to look for.

Google analytics has launched a completely redesigned interface, completely based on Ajax. They are still maintaining the elder one, for a couple of weeks, but the users are suggested starting their “migration” to the new one. I found the new interface sometimes being quite unstable, crashing the Firefox completely, but since it must be a “beta” release, i hope they will improve the service very fastly. No webmaster or search engine optimizer, who uses Google Analytics will like to continue using quite buggy product. Besides some crashes (something to do with the Firefox extensions ?), the new interface is quite different, and one have to get used to it, so i confess, that for the most of the time i still continue using the old one, while trying to push myself into learning the new one. I hope to be able to “move” to the new one during next couple of days.

I am still fuming about Google Zeitgeist and the absence of Portugal from the results, and by the way, at this very moment they have 2 Irelands listed at the menu links, which should be quite a surprising fact to the united kingdom government. I gotta email to someone at Google, telling them to stop ignoring portuguese optimizers. =O)

p.s. I have forgotten to mention the Google Maps update, which includes now 360 Streetside Views. As usual, this update is for US-based map only(it will be available in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco at the moment), but in the nearest future. Some people over the net have already reported that it helped them avoiding traffic, so it sounds to be a good update, but since Portuguese map has arrived more then a year after american and british counterparts, i am not expecting any “important” info for me in the next months.

Microsoft has officialy released a new beta of Visual Studio 2007 (codename Orcas) as a part of the Community Technology Preview (CTP). In the past years, Microsoft has finally started more open process with the community on their development tools like Visual Studio. Being a regular Microsoft development tools user since Visual Studio 97, i am really excited to try out this new version, which includes .NET version 3.5, as well as much improved data management (with each version of Visual Studio, Microsoft improves this area greatly, in my opinion. Visual Studio 2005 made some very good steps with a better data-presentation separation). Another important change is ASP.NET Ajax integration, and if someone managed to miss all the Ajax buzz, then this is your chance to check it out. Every web developer, working on Windows, should check out the new Visual Studio 2007 beta at least to see if there are any improvements for better web standards handling, as well some very important fixes(there are billions of developers all around the world, crying for finally fixing the visual developer part).

Interesting is that beta1 of Visual Studio is not “feature complete”, which means that there are still some features, not integrated into this version, which is unusual, since normally “alpha” is a version with not all features available, while “beta” is a feature complete version with some functionalities having problems. Anyway, it does not really matter how they name this version, but Microsoft has hinted, that the second beta of Visual Studio, this time with all features available, will appear on MSDN until the end of this year.

If you do not have MSDN access, then you can just experiment with an Express Edition of the Visual Studio 2007, which is freely available for everyone.

I am still busy with a lot of web projects to find time to test it, as well as with PHP for Delphi, but as soon as i can, i am going to publish some kind of a review on both of the tools.

Google and Microsoft together have joined the OpenAjax alliance, which is quite a funny fact, because Google actually is one of the co-finders of this alliance. It is a kind of weird when a co-founder delays its decision about joining a project that he created. This fact is a very important issue for the future of the Ajax, as having so many enterprises on board, who influences a lot the development of the hottest net application strategy of the last years will hopefully help them to develop a new strategy for Ajax development. A very important fact, which is quite forgotten by a lot of people, is that at the same time W3C is developing a new standard for Ajax, and this whole thing may turn OpenAjax vs W3C, and since i believe that W3C do not have a lot of credit lately, they better join forces with OpenAjax or they risk end their standard development which will be ignored by the vast majority of the browser developers. Important notice is that between those who participate in OpenAjax alliance there is a big important name missing - Apple Inc, i guess they are going to join at some point, cause all other major browser developers including Opera are there. Important to notice, that besides browser developers some big names for the server side applications and servers are there, such as BEA, Oracle, Sun and Sofware AG. The big question is who’s going to be the first to publish the specification, and who’s specification is going to be really adopted by the vendors.

Microsoft has announced, that it will open the source code of the FoxPro core modules to their CodePlex community development site. This announcement comes just a couple of days after telling the world, that the last FoxPro version, will be really the last FoxPro. FoxPro times have passed and a lot of products, even Microsoft itself with Access and SQL Server defines the borders and frontiers, where are not much space left for FoxPro, though for some of the cases FoxPro still may be one of the best choices available.

It seems, that the big corporation decide to make a commercial product into an “open source”, only in the case when this commercial product do not have a future anymore. A good example to compare would be Borland with its Interbase database (from closed to open source and back), and Sun with Star Office (closed->open source->both ways). It seems to be a pretty common practice, for a product survival, since Netscape has turned its dying Navigator into flourishing and powerful Firefox. I believe, that the decision of turning FoxPro open source is something, that should have appeared already some time ago, this way a lot of work and forces would be saved from disappearing.

I have been playing and testing the available alpha version of the Microsofts new kid on the Ajax block - The Atlas. Atlas is an add-on for the Visual Studio 2005 and is the response to all those javascript libraries available on the market, to all those Web 2.0123 applications which have appeared on the net in the past years.

There are no doubts, as it is an early version, a lot of the functionality is going to change and starting building important applications on the Atlas at the very moment is not the best decision - we mortals do know what is going to be different in its next version.

After experimenting available for the download examples and playing a little bit around i have decided for me, that as long as i wont see something close to the release candidate of it - i am going to stick to the “usual suspects”.

So, what about the first Atlas coming ? Honestly saying - i am a bit disappointed, as i was expecting a little bit more “robust” product, less quantity (no 100’s of kilobytes) and more quality (less bugs). Also i am a bit surprised by the “xml-script” appearance. I don’t know if we need one more xml translation script language at this very moment. Wasn’t Microsoft developing its own version of the Mozilla’s XUL ? I don’t think it is reasonable to go into the 2 direction at the same time, when everyone else goes the third one, but hey, i know the history of the Microsoft, and their capabilities of changing the things =O)

Today I was thinking a lot about Backbase and their future. From one side Atlas will help them to break into the bigger masses, but from the other side - it will probably sweep away the biggest market share, and i would still prefer a smaller fish to get bigger, instead of the bigger sharks consuming everyone around.

No, the world is still spinning in the very same direction, and the xHTML code produced by Visual Studio + Atlas is still invalid as it shouldn’t be, some exclusive IE things (nothing unexpected here, but still it hurts a bit).

Waiting for the next coming, as there are no doubts, it should be more interesting…

Hello Macromedia Adobe !

Last year, we’ve seen a very interesting move of buying Macromedia with all their big assets like Flash, Fireworks, JRun, ColdFusion and a “foto-realistic” Dreamweaver. =O) Lately i’ve seen a lot of pages, using visual javascript libraries like “Script.Aculo.Us”, “Rico” and so on, which are starting to replace the Flash animation.

One of the designers i know, told me a story that while submitting a work proposal for a client she was referencing to the use of one of those libraries, as a “Flash-kind Animation” and i caught myself thinking that it is probably the most common explanation for their’s use. Today i was visiting Microsoft Visual Studio page and have noticed that they also have moved away from using flash animation into the direction of the javascript libraries. This page from the Blizzard Entertainment represents another example of moving away from the flash solution. I believe that this year will mark a lot of redesigns moving away from the flash animation to the use of the javascript libraries.

Why ? Because they are “lighter” as components, most web-designers and web-developers know how to use javascript, because they do not require the presence of a flash designer and no Adobe fees are required ( for aquiring the Flash solution ).

So what about the future ? Is it going to disappear ? Substituted ? Ignored ?
No way. There are thousands, if not millions flash fans and users. Also, flash has its own market, which i believe, is about to be changed a little bit.
While having no real competition (as at this very moment =O) ), for any rich-client working with some data and creating some visual impact, we are going to see some real changes in the nearest future. Yes, i am talking about pages made with Ajax (XmlHttpRequest) joining with those visual libraries.

Having done one site almost =O) completely with Javascript and Ajax, i have to say, that though without any doubt, it is not the most perfect site on this planet, but still with a nice visual impact, i confess of starting believing more and more in the future of this solution. (Almost, because there was one little thing, which by the design requirements was possible to do only in flash).

Of course, we are facing just the very first generation of those visual javascript libraries, and the solution is far from being perfect or even reaching the Flash level, but i would say, that in the next coupple of years, this solution is going to provide something pretty similar with the flash, if of course Flash is not going to advance.

When is it all going to happend ? Starting from yesterday.

I am excited to see if the Adobe is going to react in some way.

I have to confess that i am starting to enjoy more and more the job, that Thomas Fuchs is doing. The newest version has finally answered my prayers by introducing the queue effects limit ( an effect attribute parameter “limit” ), auto-scrolling option for Draggables and Sortables, and among other things, all programmers favourite “bug fixes”.

The queue limit has finally helped me solving a problem for a website i am doing right now, as i have allready thought about submitting this request, cause my need to limit the number of the effects being executed at the same time was so big, and the available time is so small, that i was allready imagining myself implementing this functionality, and then explaining it to the others involved into this project. Right now all i have to do, is to update the library - fantastic ! =O)

I hope that such new functionality as a : making a pause during the effects, dragging multiple items, effects applied to the multiple items, as well as a better and more complete documentation will be implemented and/or included in the future ( 2.0 or maybe 3.0 ) versions. Having tested a lot of the available javascript effects libraries, i have to say that for me scriptaculous has definitely found a place in my arsenal of the web tools.

Why AJAX vs Web ? Because it seems that ajax is rapidly conquering the net, but at the same time, after working with this concept for quite some time, i can say that it can be a pure pain in the ass head:

1. No usable “back” buttons - in the most cases after clicking on the “back” the application dies instantly
2. Asynchronous operations - while executing a script don’t forget, that your AJAX request may not have arrived and(or) still not being processed, so all sequent actions counting with an “instant” execution may be badly “disappointed”
3. Complicated cascading changes - don’t forget, that there are some events in HTML, which are not executed automatically in Javascript (for example changing selected index of the <select> element wont fire the onchange trigger)
4. Too “fat” clients - user don’t like their experience of slow browsing, and that is one of the reasons why they love AJAX (no pages reloading), so making a very rich “fat” client will make them remembering the page reloading experience, and then - you will get no big point in using AJAX
5. There are still some users around with browsers which do not support the XmlHttpRequest
6. AJAX is not a savior - it wont save you from the normal coding problems, nor will it provide with a brand new GUI interface - because you will still have to check & test your GUI’s usability

Dont get me wrong, i am not against AJAX methodology, i am hardly using it, but i think that it requires a lot of attention, and as it is still “young”, there are a lot of problems around, waiting for the developers, starting with it.
If you are not afraid of all these things - then go on, make yourself a name with a new “web 2.0123″ application =O)