Cool RIA Sample Apps: Buzzword, Parleys.com Beta
Buzzword
In the second Canoo RIA newsletter, we added a new category featuring cool sample applications. Here’s what we had to say about Adobe’s online word processor, Buzzword:
Buzzword (http://www.buzzword.com/) an online word processor is an example of a successful Rich Internet Application.
The application is based on Adobe’s Flash, Flex, and AIR technologies. Users access the software by means of a hyperlink and can open, write, and edit documents just like in MS Word. A local installation of the Buzzword software is not required. Like Google Docs, the documents are accessible online.Buzzword was purchased by Adobe in October 2007.
For further details see:
Parleys.com Beta
Another cool Adobe Flex / AIR application that I’ve seen running on the screens of our developers’ laptops is Parleys.com. Christian wrote about this application in his JavaPolis blog post. Parleys is an online application to view the JavaPolis video and slides (there is a Canoo talk as well, but the sound is very low and hardly audible 
). After installing Adobe AIR, the videos can be downloaded and viewed offline. A cool feature if you’re travelling with lots of time to spare.
For further details on how to login into the browser version or how to install the standalone version, see this page.
Last week beta version 2.1 was released.
And here are two screenshots (click for large view) showing the application:
Greg Holmberg said,
April 29, 2008 @ 10:58 pm
OK, maybe I missed it in all these postings, but dare I ask the seemingly obvious question?
You have all these postings about the cool GUIs with attractive visuals, animation, sound, and video that one can build with Flex, Air, JavaFX, etc. Then you have these postings about ULC and its future, which doesn\’t appear to include these elements.
The contrast couldn\’t be more stark, and yet you never address it. The plans for ULC \’08 are to make it easier to program and configure, which is great, but if I can\’t build the consumer, multi-media apps I need to build, then ULC isn\’t an option. Which is a shame, because I love your networking and server-side API.
I can\’t help but think you\’ve given some consideration to making ULC competitive with Flex and JavaFX. Perhaps the easiest would be to integrate JavaFX on the client side of ULC, since JavaFX is based on Swing.
But I don\’t see anything like this in your plans. Is ULC resigned to only be used for boring Swing apps (tables, trees, buttons, etc)?
====================
While I\’m at it, have you considered making all or part of the ULC code open source? It may be that the limited development bandwidth of a small company is holding back the rate of innovation in ULC. By opening up the source code, you may get multimedia features that you don\’t have time to build yourselves. It seems like Flex/Air and JavaFX are passing ULC by, and you may not be able to catch up on your own. Perhaps you could figure out some strategy to keep certain parts of the code private (the add-ons for example, i.e. the visual builder and the test driver), so you can make your money selling those, and supporting the whole thing.
I personally think the ULC architecture is great (there\’s nothing else like it, as far as I can tell), and I\’d just hate to see it die. I\’d really like to be able to use it in my Web 2.0 internet application (forums, IM, chat, live video, desktop/window sharing, conferencing) because I think it would save me building a lot of networking/caching/back-end stuff and also be very efficient with network bandwidth, but it just doesn\’t have the features to build that. Nor do they seem to be on the horizon.
Bruno said,
May 1, 2008 @ 7:44 pm
Swing does not have to be boring. For the last couple of years Romain Guy and his coding mates have been presenting a session called “Filthy Rich Clients” at JavaOne and they even published a book on this. One can do a lot of things to pimp the user interface of a Swing application and what can be done with Swing is also possible with ULC. We will shortly be releasing a ULC demo application which features a greatly enhanced user interface.
While filthy rich user interfaces are possible with Swing, multimedia is somehow neglected by Swing. Since Java FX is based on Swing the same holds true for this new kid on the block. We still see multimedia not being relevant in the enterprise application market, which is the target market for ULC. For most enterprise applications it’s more about highly efficent and productive user interfaces which can be quickly developed. Expert workers don’t need lots of gimmicks and visual wizardry but responsiveness. Visual adaptations are usually limited to applying the company look and feel to such applications.
Admittedly, multimedia is becoming more important in the consumer market. However, Java is still weak with multimedia and Sun has to do something about this if they don’t want to loose this market completely.
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