Gaurav

Using Silverlight with Ruby on Rails

In this post I will be showing a really simple example of creating a Silverlight frontend for a Rails backend. This is what I think will be a three part series comparing Silverlight with Flex.

The steps will be:

1. Creating a Rails application.
2. Creating a frontend for it in silverlight.
3. Creating a frontend for it in Flex.
4. Comparing the approaches taken in both the frontends.

I will try to keep changes in the backend Rails application to a minimum.

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Silverlight 2.0 Beta-1 now available, version 1.0 ported to Nokia mobiles

Microsoft has just released highly anticipated first beta of Silverlight here. The development tools for visual  studio 2008 can be downloaded from here. Tutorials are also available on the same site.

This link reports that Silverlight is now also available on the Nokia mobile devices (specifically S60 on Symbian OS, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets). It seems really strange that silverlight wasn’t ported to window mobile devices first. There is a version available for window mobiles as well. I hope it is better than flash lite which really sucks.

If the performance of Silverlight is anywhere near flash then it could be a huge success for Microsoft as .Net as a development platform is already very popular and developers can use their existing skills to create better web experiences. Also IronPython and IronRuby (two of the Silverlight programming languages) are much better (and faster?) languages than Actionscript and .Net provides a much bigger library set.

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Setting up BlazeDS with Flex

Let me give some introduction first.

BlazeDS is a server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that allows to connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR rich Internet applications (RIA). Because of its open licensing, BlazeDS is not precluded from being used with other client platforms, such as JavaScript/AJAX. (wikipedia)

Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flash platform. The initial release in March 2004 by Macromedia included a software development kit, an IDE, and a J2EE integration application known as Flex Data Services. Since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, subsequent releases of Flex no longer require a license for Flex Data Services, which has become a separate product rebranded as LiveCycle Data Services. (wikipedia)

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Amarok 2: now with 100% more audio playing on Windows – Amarok Blog

Amarok 2: now with 100% more audio playing on Windows – Amarok Blog

Here is come great news for windows users. The great linux music player is being ported to the windows platform. Here is a screenshot of amarok playing on windows.

But as the site says that it is still an alpha software so somewhat unstable. I am eagerly waiting the first version to come. I hope it comes out soon.

Tabs for windows explorer

QT Tab Bar is a new software that I have come across that alows you to have tabs on windows explorer.

It integrates very well in the windows interface and adds features that are normally associated to a web browser like firefox. When you middle click on a folder it opens in a new tab, middle click opens a tab and it also stores a history for tabs.

You can optionally make many more changes to the explorer making more usable and easier to navigate.

The download link is on this page.