This article is a transcript from a recorded conversation Yakov Fain had with
Anatole Tartakovsky and Victor Rasputnis – his business partners at Farata
Systems. This conversation took place on the mountain after the day of
skiing.
Yakov. There are many ways of creating Web applications and creating them for
the enterprises is not the same as developing a Web site for a pizzeria in
your neighborhood. During the last five years we’ve been using mainly Adobe
Flex for development of the front end of Web applications. Flex applications
work in a well known and predictable run-time environment called Flash
Player. The code is compiled and you have convenient tools for development.
Flex is undergoing “Under New Management” transformations these days.
Even though Flex remains the best framework for development of Web
applications, you can feel the pressure of HTML5. But us... (more)
The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing
the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining
the "reach" and "rich." At the same time, the gap between the technological
level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is
really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There
is no AJAX standards committee or community process in place. While software
vendors are crafting proprietary development platforms on top of AJAX (which
pretty much means "from scratch"), early adopte... (more)
Browser-based applications are widely used and we like the fact that we can
access them from anywhere. But from the users' perspective, the productivity
level of Web applications still doesn't approximate the productivity of
desktop programs. The good news is the gap is closing: the accumulated
potential of multiple technologies has boosted a whole new breed of
HTML-based apps that are as powerful as the desktop ones. Meet AJAX.
What Is AJAX?
The name stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XMLHTTPRequest and means you
can establish socket communication between browser-based JavaScri... (more)
A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java
application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers,
but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a
given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working
with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the
NetBeans team created a nice GUI designer called Matisse, which was also
ported to MyEclipse. Prior to Matisse, JBuilder had the best Swing designer,
but it was too expensive. Now a good designer comes with N... (more)
Browser-based applications are widely used and we like the fact that we can
access them from anywhere. But from the users' perspective, the productivity
level of Web applications still doesn't approximate the productivity of
desktop programs. The good news is the gap is closing: the accumulated
potential of multiple technologies has boosted a whole new breed of
HTML-based apps that are as powerful as the desktop ones. Meet AJAX.
What Is AJAX?
The name stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XMLHTTPRequest and means you
can establish socket communication between browser-based JavaScri... (more)