Spicing up user experience w/ Silverlight – Tech Session, Day 2

This session was probably the biggest disappointment of the conference so far… not that I really have a lot of high hopes for Microsoft’s RIA framework, but this was just ridiculous.  The speaker was not an employee of MS, so I’ll cut her some slack… but if her attitude towards the framework is any indication of the real motives behind Microsoft creating Silverlight then they simply don’t get it.  Several times the speaker repeated the line “isn’t this cool!?” to the room full of dead quiet developers.  Some guy spoke up, “Doesn’t Flash already do this?”.  Yea, it’s basically exactly like Flash, except maybe more like Flash 4.  She was all excited about the drag-and-drop controls, most of which do already exist in flash (graphing, sliders, etc).  A lot of people, including myself, jumped out of there a few minutes early…

IDE + Framework Roundup 1

A few of the sessions that I’ve decided not to go into detail about were basically sales pitches (I’m using the term loosely – Most of these are open source and free to use) for a development IDE or framework… here’s a few of note:

• Aptana Studio & “Jaxer” Ajax Server – This IDE has support for HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Ruby On Rails. It’s interesting because it supports most of the popular javascript libraries (prototype, dojo, etc) and offers some pretty slick code completion. It also seems like a pretty swell IDE for the iPhone SDK (The speaker built a small web app for the iPhone in a matter of minutes). The Ajax server allows for server-side javascript.
• jMaki -A mashup framework, in beta, created by Sun Microsystems. This seems to have a lot of potential. Basically they created wrappers for several popular js toolkits which allows developers to use PHP, JSP, or whatever to embed the javascript code. It abstracts the event model of whatever particular js library you use into your language of choice. It is supported (with the help of plugins) in Netbeans, Eclipse, and ANT-based tools.
• Webtop – Also created by Sun, Webtop is based on jMaki and is essentially an open source, extensible iGoogle clone.
• ICEfaces – Java EE Framework for building asynchronous, real-time social web applications.