Mrinal Wadhwa, is a Rich Internet Applications Consultant from Bangalore, India. He uses this blog to study the evolution of a richer Internet.
I discovered Mate a little over a week ago and I am already using it in a live project. The Mate website describes it as ..
Mate is a tag-based, event-driven Flex framework.
Flex applications are event-driven. Mate framework has been created to make it easy to handle the events your Flex application creates. Mate allows you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered.
I’ve been struggling with Flex Builder these past few days. There’s something wrong with this one particular project which takes way too long to compile while all the other projects seem to be ok. I haven’t been able to figure out what’s wrong with this one project and frankly I haven’t spent much time on it either. I wonder if there is a debug switch that I could turn on and look at a log that would tell me more about what’s happening. If you know about such a switch or any other way that would help me figure out what’s going on, I’d appreciate the help.
Meanwhile, I was reminded of a performance tweak many people used when working with Flex Builder 2 but I somehow never had to resort to it since Flex Builder 3 came out…. read more
SAP Widget Foundation is a desktop software that exposes a REST API to SAP systems. After you have installed the widget foundation, it exposes the interface as a localhost url using a local webserver instance. You can configure BAPIs that you want to expose from the widget foundation admin interface, under the hood though it uses SAP Java Connecter (JCo) and SOAP Web Services to communicate with the SAP back-end.
Now that we have a url exposing a REST api, it is fairly easy to use an HTTPService and have Flex/AIR applications talk to SAP. Here is a video that Abesh created a while ago that walks you step by step through how to do this.
Abesh has now also released an AS3 wrapper around the exposed REST API, which makes it even more simpler to use this method of communicating with SAP from AIR applications.
There are of course several other ways of making AIR talk to SAP, the most obvious one is to expose a BAPI as a web service and make Flex/AIR talk to that directly using the WebService component. You could also have a server part to your application and have that communicate with SAP using the various connecters available for various programming platforms.
When I was working with SAP my job was to create prototype applications that showcased how data from SAP could be used in conjunction with various RIA technologies to make life easy for the enterprise users and I found the widget foundation approach of making my applications talk to to SAP very easy and useful, I hope you do too.
NYTimes has released a Mac OS version of their desktop application Times Reader, so I decided to install it and here’s what I saw …
WO ! .. Silverlight for a desktop application? .. I continue installing and get it running and to my surprise it does in fact use Silverlight …
You can read a detailed description of the Application here on The New York Times blog, this is what they say about the technology used ..
Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.
Now this is not a new approach in the Flash world, but I think this is the first time it has been done with Silverlight.
In the process the guys at NYTimes were able to create a framework that does a lot of what AIR does .. native window, file read write, same code for web app and desktop app etc etc. This is very intriguing because if Microsoft decides to build upon this approach they could come with an equivalent of AIR that can run Silverlight based desktop applications across platforms. Of course, they do not need something like this for Windows since conceptually a Silverlight app could be compiled to run on Windows desktops, but this could be an interesting approach for them to take on other platforms. What do you think?
Rich Internet Applications have been gaining a lot of popularity lately, but I had recently written about how some of the most popular tech blogs like TechCrunch, All About Microsoft and ReadWriteWeb had not done their homework and published information that is ridiculously wrong.
One of the most ludicrous results of their posts has been the several ill-informed comparisons of Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight all over the web. Even thought both AIR and Silverlight enable developers to build Rich Internet Applications, both of them are very different beings and cannot be compared…
Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together
Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.
In response to my posts, Peter Elst started a badge campaign to let the world know that it is wrong to say the words AIR and Silverlight in the same breath.
So here’s my badge, feel free to use the image in whatever way you like and help spread the word.
