Internet body approves corporate web suffixes

Internet body approves corporate web suffixes – http://pulse.me/s/i87x

Internet Filter Bubble

Image via CrunchBase

I came across this topic on “filter bubble” via a fellow blogger. Although the blogger talks about the filtering in context to Atheism, amongst other things, I find this discussion very relevant to how we are building our web today and also very relevant to my job today.

I have been a part of a project/product where we did have similar discussions and ensuring that people are getting information relevant to them. The filter bubble that Eli Pariser mentions in his talk is exactly what we did try to build in our product and are even trying to do so today. We pick up programs that people have selected and we then pass on content based on the selections.

We do not go to the extent of what has been mentioned in this post where a common search result gives back different results. Eli also accepts the fact that personalization is important and we would definitely want to have some results based on what we like; it is simply a way to provide links that we like. However, it is equally important for me to view what are other areas in this regard and especially the view point of other group; to bring in a little flavor to the topic. however, if Google and Facebook or Yahoo and other giants are not doing that for us, then we are doomed. They need to add capability to ask the user what they want – preferential results or just results. Users need to have options, to decide what they need to view. We do not want things to be edited out for us and us not knowing what has been edited out. That way we just don’t know what we are missing – thats not what internet is supposed to do. It is like going into Nike and not knowing that Reebok also exists. Not Fair.

 

Eclipse takes a leap with Marketplace

This is something not new to world, but is to me. Last night, when I started to upgrade my development environment to use Eclipse Helios, the very first thing I needed was a plugin to get met maven based projects working – m2clispe. Like in the past I started to search the net for a URL that I can dump the “Install Software” screen and navigate through the various options and then find any missing dependencies to get that going.

But, I was in for a surprise – Eclipse Marketplace. I read about Eclipse launching a marketplace a while back, but because I was not actively developing back then, it did not register. However, a tutorial reminded me the Marketplace.

The experience from there on was simply wonderful, something that I am not familiar in the Java world of development. Kudos to the Eclipse team to get this one going.

Nest step if to install many more plugins in my new Helios before I get back to development.

 

Flex is easy to start with

I asked my nephew to use Flex instead of JSP for his college project, and here is what he has to say after a few hours of work in Flex.

woow nw im enjoying using flex… making use of containers, Accordion, TabNavigator… many more stuff, displaying things in alertboxes having nice fonts… so many options to add in a simple project!!! will work for 4-5 days on frontend then will switch to blazeDS!!!

Kudos to the Adobe team.

Performance | Advanced DataGrid rendering

In one of my projects there were some custom needs where we wanted to display values in cell based on the data passed. This led us to write custom ItemRenderer’s. Considering that we were creating multiple instances of Containers like Canvas, Box with-in led me to thinking how would Advanced Data Grid, respond to this custom code. Upon certain tests for 100 to 10000 rows i came up with good looking results. Find them in the document.

Icons for Flex – and these are free!!

“Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can’t say fairer than that…

Colloborative working model using BlazeDS

Flex using BlaseDS provides a messaging framework that allows you to publish and subscribe to messages. In his recent post Christophe Coenraets has provided an example (includes source code as well), that shows how can you do something similar.

I am in middle of understanding the architecture, hoping to build an article that explains how to use the same constructs in your application as well.

Could making CSS for Flex be easier?

Maybe there is a faster way, but I found this one really good. Checkout: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mc/archives/2007/02/new_flex_style.cfm

Creating Layouts in Flex

Creating layouts in Flex should be easy, specially when you are using Flex builder and drag and drop capabilities. But, it is a little tricky than it seems and if you choose to ignore some of the finer details, I promise you will be stumped mid-way. While, I found some articles, but I still find something consolidated that I can get into my head. These are all scattered away (maybe I can not pin-point to the right stuff yet). Here is my attempt to put down in black-n-white some guidelines and rules as to what you should be doing and what not?

While all the feedback and comments are welcome, I would appreciate if you can collaborate with me on this one for us to have a comprehensive set of guidelines

Flex default layout manager, containers and children follow sizing and measuring algorithms to layout the pages and this exercise can be very resource intensive. You never know the client (PC) that will be running your application. Also, what you can not do is to have a minimum requirement like 2GB ram on all systems that run the application, because that would not be possible practically. This is not a game but an application that business users will work on.

Rule 1: Avoid unnecessary container nesting

Coming from an HTML/CSS background it is easy to fall prey to this habit when the objective is to have flexible designs. One example where things can go wrong very quickly are

When you have such kind of nesting, the containers run measuring and sizing algorithm on children. Now, if you have some of the children as containers themselves this can be very time consuming. This will also be a performance issue if you are choosing to resize your screens as the same algorithm is executed again.

You must be asking what should we be doing if we find ourselves in such a situation? Look for alternatives. You should re-evaluate your choice of containers, a better option is Constraint based layouts which makes use of Styles, Horizontol & Vertical alignments, margins, and spacers.

Rule 2: Do not use absolute layout techniques

This technique needs you to define co-ordinates (x,y) for objects. While, this technique is most performant as the there is no need for the player to find out positions for the children, it is not a recommended practice. This approach will not provide you flexible designs and re-sizing the browser window will not resize and re-layout the objects. Try avoiding this one. This approach can be used only with Canvas or Application with layout=”absolute”

Also, you can choose to hard-code widths and heights. This also is a quick win solution because the player need not calculate sizes of objects. In many applications, you will find that this is anyways needed, because, you would not want to extend/shrink the size of your controls like TextInput with changing browser size.

Rule 3: Make wireframes before you start making layouts

This is a very handy and good practice. If you can, then make sure you have a paper-layout (wire frame) of your application design. This will help you in understanding the application design and assist in choosing a container appropriately

Rule 4: Use Navigator containers

Navigator containers like Accordion, TabNavigator and ViewStack has built-in deferred creation policy. This means that all the controls are not created at application start-up, but are deferred until you have activated that view.

Rule 5: Use Box when you have line up things in one direction (horizontally or vertically)

You should be using Box, HBox or VBox only when you have to logically group some controls together and place then in a layout. Do not use nested HBox and VBox to do placements on the screen.

Rule 6: Use Constraints if you have applications that can change size

You can use top, bottom, left, right to set anchor point on the application. This will ensure that your containers and controls would be anchored to the borders as defined by you. Let us say that you have set a control with left=10 and right=10, this will mean that as you resize the application, the size of the container / control will change.

I will try to code an example and upload the same for you to view in some time.

Flex skinning

A blog that has some nice videos about flex skinning