I think around 2005 AJAX crept into buzz worthy status. Book publishers were happy again. Eric Pascarello got to laugh at everyone for making fun of his love for JavaScript. Rich Internet Application became the defacto term for web 2.0. And developing web applications now meant knowing nearly 10 entirely different technologies. I'm not complaining. It has paid my bills as well.

Then, all of a sudden, and it seemed as if it were out of nowhere, Flex announced itself to the world. Microsoft counters with Silverlight. Sun realizes they dropped the ball, again, and started working on JavaFX. Here is how I remember it going down.

Macromedia announces Flex. Right out of the gate they had the FlexBuilder IDE, all the widgets you really needed, Data Service Providers, documentation, tutorials, evangalists. Adobe buys Macromedia and it gets even bigger. Flex goes open source. Everyone is talking about it. Book publishers get to make money again. Key Sun engineers leave Sun and go to work for Adobe. But where are the Flex driven applications? Where are the AIR applications? I'm sure some of you will drop a few links in the comments. But considering the number of blogs I read the the number of different kinds of websites I visit not only for fun but also to try and keep abreast of the latest and greatest going on in development, I have yet to run across a Flex driven web site.

On the heals of Flex Microsoft announces Silverlight. Support in the latest Visual Studio already there. Documentation, evangalists, controls, Data Service Providers, integration with all that is .NET. Book publishers are happy again. But where are all the Silverlight driven web sites/applications? Again, I haven't ran across any.

JavaFX announces itself to the world. There is an SDK you can download. Little to no documentation. No IDE support. Not even a beta version is available. A year later we have some documentation. A couple of books. Still no 1.0 release. Netbeans is the only IDE with true built in support. Doesn't work that great on Linux (even though Java is multiplatform). Obviously, no non-demo applications driven with JavaFX. The JavaFX website isn't even driven by JavaFX.

What does all this mean? Nothing really. These RIA technologies are popular the same way all these Web Frameworks are popular. Everyone thinks they are cool. Everyone blogs about them. In the real world, no one really uses them. They are all designed for cookie cutter web applications which we all know don't really exist.

With that said, FLAME ON!

I'm working on a Swing application and I need the ability to have application wide hotkeys. Basically that means no matter what I am currently doing in my app specific keystrokes always do the same thing. For example I am mimicing IDEA's CTRL+N functionallity. When CTRL+N is pressed a dialog opens with a textfield that allows me to type in a search string. As I type a list below the textfield populates with what my app thinks I am looking for.

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I discovered an interesting gem today while inspecting the header data for a web application I am working on. When you use JQuery to send an AJAX request to the server, JQuery places a nice little header entry:

X-Requested-With : XMLHttpRequest

Before, I would typically just stick something in the request params to signify an AJAX request. This is not life changing or anything by any means but it sure was nice of the JQuery folks to do this for me. Now I don't have to do it myself.

I try to keep this weblog as much about development as I can and not so much personal but I had to share this. Today I bought my first R/C vehicle in probably 20 years. I'm running it with a PowerMax 3300 NiMH 6 Cell battery pack. With this battery I get about 40 MPH. I bought two batteries so I'd have a bit less time between runs. I ran it twice today and it was a blast.

For the second time 3 days Ubuntu (8.04) has given me the partial upgrade request. The first time it happened I posted a thread and it had to do with dependencies not making it to the repositories at the same time. You can read about it in the thread I linked.

Now it's happening again.







Looking at the list of updates there are a bunch of OpenOffice items that are unchecked. I'm going to wait a day or so before trying to update again. I don't want to deal with the same things I had to the first time. Luckily it resolved itself quickly enough. I just hope this doesn't become a common thing with Ubuntu.