RIA

Silverlight... Flex...

I've gotten my hands dirty with Flex 3 and didn't particularly like it. The emphasis on doing binding and pushing some of the dynamic functionality to the markup is unappealing. Furthermore, Flex, if you are not doing a mash up of services, tends to push you towards a 6-tier solution (unless you are using Adobe Air). You will need to have 3-tiers for developing your web services and a quasi-3 tiers (I managed to create 3 separate projects and link them with much effort) for your Flex application. Regardless, I didn't like it.

Enter Silverlight. I'm installing Silverlight 4 beta right now. Over the next few weeks, I plan to report back to you on how good (or bad) it is. However, Silverlight does look promising. If you are an idiot... err... I mean someone who likes to push binding to the markup it seems to support that, but it also allows you to do stuff programmatically, or so it seems. I'll let you all know shortly.

I'm still a fan of CSS/HTML/Javascript for most website development. Let's see if Silverlight can convince me the future is now.

Feeling Optimistic

Fluidity

Things have been busy, but I think I can promise myself to post a little more often now that I'm no longer leading a delivery team.

I've recently changed my role at Macadamian, and as a part of that change I get to research new technologies and do technology proposals as well be responsible for caring for developers careers, training and general well being!

One thing I have to say after nearly 2.5 years of being embedded in a J2EE application is wow... things have changed. I want to expand more on this. But I'll leave you with some reading for now.

Have a look at Pivots - a new idea of managing collections of data on the web by microsoft.

http://www.getpivot.com/