Mrinal Wadhwa is a Software Architect form Bangalore, India. He is interested in User Interfaces, Databases, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Networking, Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Software Design, Architecture, Scalability etc. and is working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup.
Sun Microsystems today announced a preview release of the JavaFX SDK.
I’ve been observing this new entrant into the RIA space from the outside but today I thought it was time to dig in a little bit. So I got my hands on the latest Netbeans wit JavaFx support and cooked up this little Hello World application…. read more
I’ve been building applications for Adobe AIR since its very first public alpha and I totally love it, its a brilliant platform that opens up several unexplored possibilities by allowing web developers to extend the reach of their applications to their users’ desktops. One aspect of AIR applications that is not talked about enough though is Security.
AIR applications are installed on your desktop and have access to your file system and the Internet at the same time, and this can be a dangerous combo. There are several measures taken by the AIR runtime to ensure the security of your information, you can read more about them here, but all in all, just like any other desktop application, you are trusting the creator of the AIR application to be true to his word and not do bad things with your data …. read more
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.
Google Gears is a very interesting platform. It’s a browser plugin that is aimed at extending the abilities of web browsers to satiate the needs of modern day rich web applications. The Gears website defines it as follows ..
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
- Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
- Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
Gears today provides some very interesting features like a WorkerPool module to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution, a LocalServer module that allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally without a network connection, a Database module that provides browser-local relational data storage, a Desktop module that allows you to create desktop shortcuts for your web applications and more.
There are some very interesting features in the works as well like Desktop Notifications from browser apps, Multiple file select, resuming uploads, geolocation support etc.
All the above features have the potential of drastically changing the experience users have when using applications in the browser and that excites me 
Many of these features can be very useful for applications that run in other plugins like Flash Player or Silverlight Player as well… read more
Adobe has released a security bulletin announcing a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the History Management feature of Flex 3 ..
A potential cross-site scripting vulnerability has been identified in code used by the Flex 3 History Management feature. It is recommended that developers who have History Management enabled in applications developed with Flex 3 update their deployed applications and development environments with the instructions provided below.
