Raible Designs

Macromedia Flash Remoting MX Released.

From theserverside.com:

Macromedia today announced Macromedia Flash Remoting MX for J2EE AppServers (and also for .NET). Flash Remoting MX allows you to connect any J2EE-backend (EJB's, JMX, Servlets, java classes) to new GUI written in Flash; it was already used to create a new Petstore GUI on top of the original Petstore EJB layer. [ press release ]

The interesting thing about this product is that it seems to be app-server agnostic. Here are the system requirements:

A 5.64 MB Download. It troubles me that it's a trial download though. That means that Macromedia is going to charge me if I ever want to use this. In other Macromedia news, they sent me an e-mail today asking me if I wanted to be a beta tester for HomeSite 5.2! My fingers are crossed for Java support.

XML-Based WYSIWYG Editors.

Maybe we should use the Xopus WYSIWYG XML editor for Roller instead of Ekit? It's pretty cool - at least the demo (might be IE/Windows only) I tried. The demo allowed me to type directly on the page and to change formatting of text simply by right-clicking. This screenshot seems to indicate a different editing mode than the one I saw. Best of all it appears to work in Mozilla and is open source. Release date? Currently we are working hard to release the final version before the OSCOM conference end of September.

Bitflux Editor also appears to be very cool - same type of concept with editing of an HTML page like you would in Dreamweaver. See the demo here. The good news? It is another open source project. The bad news? It only works in Mozilla. Nothing like shutting out 90% of Internet users.

All this good stuff found originally at Gerhard Froehlich's blog, who appears to have found it from Slashdot.

Our National Parks.

Last week, after the shindig in Vegas, my parents met me and we drove from Vegas back to Denver - through Zion National Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde National Park. The photo below is what we dropped our jaws to on Saturday morning. Click on it to view President Roosevelt's speech at the Grand Canyon on May 6, 1903.

"the one great sight every American...should see" -- President Theodore Roosevelt

Ekit Certificate?

In response to Dave's question - How much is it?

Good Advice from Aaron

at youngpup.net - How to Create Pop-Up Windows. It's basically a way to create javascript pop-up windows that are friendly to both web-savvy surfers and beginners alike.

Favelets to ease UI Development.

I forgot to post these last week - but for you Web UI developers - favelets (a.k.a. bookmarklets) can sure make your development life a lot easier.

A bookmarklet is a simply a javascript script masquerading as a URL. The pseudo-protocol javascript: tells the browser to have javascript interpret what follows. Otherwise they can be treated just like any other url, by inserting into a link, pasting directly into the location bar, or bookmarked or added to your favourites. Like many people I have the ones I use most often added to my links bar, where they become handy extensions to the browser's functionality.

Here are some good links for some cool favelets. Most of them seem to be targeting IE on Windows/Mac - and I found that some didn't work on XP/IE6 SP1. But still, they're great for validation and showing table/div borders.

• Sam-I-Am.com's Bookmarklets
• Favelets
• Liorean's bookmarklets page
• Show Tables (shows table borders)
• Show Divs (shows div borders)

In my search of these resources, I found www.web-graphics.com which appears to be a good blog on cutting edge web-ui technologies. Cool - I'll add it to my daily reads list. BTW, I've added a feature to Roller where you can make your Bookmark and Newsfeed folders collapsible/expandable in modern browsers. When I upgrade this site, it might be cool to split up my "Blogrolling" links into Java, Web UI and Good Reads - we'll see. Most of you are probably like me and are using Mozilla bookmark tabs feature to get your daily reads.

IFRAME not valid XHTML?

That's what the XHTML validator says. Dammit - I like iframes! I'm leaving it in, this site will not validate as XHTML 1.0 until today leaves the front page - oh well. :-(

Using another stylesheet switcher.

I've seen this stylesheet switcher before, but now I've found a good explanation about it. The problem I see with it is that it won't work in Opera, and probably not Konquerer either. The current one on this site works on all browsers, but doesn't allow me to validate my css.

To use ALA's stylesheet switcher, I'd have to change my stylesheet references from using @import url(...) to <link rel="stylesheet> src="...". The problem with this is that I use the @import syntax so Netscape 4 doesn't apply a stylesheet, and this site is still readable. Turn off the stylesheet to see what a NN4 user sees. If I use <link rel="stylesheet> src="...", then NN4 will apply the stylesheet.

The solution, as I learned at the conference last week, is to split up my stylesheets into a simple version and a sophisticated version - as explained by Zeldman. I might do this, but it seems like it might be waste to even care about NN4 users since no one visiting this site has used NN4 this month.

Scope Creep.

Have we run out of strategies for fighting this evil scourge? Is it hopeless? Maybe not. Hal Helms commits a little heresy at A List Apart.

Web-based WYSIWYG HTML Editors.

I think that WYSIWYG are great. However, when I switched to writing standards-compliant XHTML - I found that it became more difficult to rely on an editor. Both Dreamweaver and Homesite are pretty slick in that they give you "standards-compliant" markup when you have an XHTML DOCENGINE at the top of your document.

The reason I bring this up is because I have been advocating a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Roller - and now there is one! However, after looking at the code generated, I noticed <font color="#ac5454"> - yikes font tags! I pray that this editor has a "smart HTML" feature - but I doubt it will. Nor do I care - I love the feature and will use it often - I just have to remember to edit the HTML or this site will fail validation.