Web Info & Tutorials

Posted by Dave Girouard, VP, Enterprise

We added OneBox functionality to our Google Search Appliance today, which means you can now find just about anything through your friendly Google search box. Lots of folks have been asking us - is this going to kill the corporate portal market? For the record, we have no desire or plans to kill anything. But it's clear to us that people prefer search to having every possible piece of information thrust at them willy-nilly. And they like having search front and center on their screens, not buried, as it is all too often inside company intranets. As industry-watcher John Battelle explains, search is so powerful because it responds to an expressed intent by the user. Shouldn't corporate portals do the same?

Google OneBox for Enterprise is cool because it takes a completely understood and tested design metaphor and extends it to another domain. Um, what I meant to say was, employees already know how to get movie listings, weather forecasts, and flight information through simple Google queries. So it won't surprise them (in fact it may delight them) to learn that they can get real-time contact info, sales forecasts, and customer information the very same way. We launched an initial set of OneBox modules with Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com; some of these partners talk about that here.

And there’s one more thing. We're also introducing an all-new Mini that's 25 times faster and half the size of its predecessor!

AP - Al Gore has a major campaign under way — to change policies on global warming.

AP - Normally adventurous Chinese diners are eating fewer owls, civets and other wildlife due to fears of SARS and bird flu, according to a survey released Tuesday by U.S. and Chinese conservation groups.

If you've ever wanted to just sit someone down and show them how to get to a certain section/feature on your site but couldn't, you might be in luck. There's a free service that's offered to record the movements that you make on a page and play them back to anyone with the right URL - Tapefailure.com.

TAPEFAILURE is a “history recording tool.â€? What this means is that anyone can record a browsing session using TAPEFAILURE’s recorder, then save it, and share it with others. Each recorded session can be played back virtually perfectly through our playback tool; as long as you know the tape ID or have a link, you can view your recorded session over and over again.

The site is designed for simplicity, and has a familiar browsing interface to make recording a snap. It's as easy as loading the page, and hitting the "record" button at the top. It saves what you've done/clicked on/scrolled to to their servers via an Ajax connection and passes back a playback URL. The playback is a real-time representation of what you previously recorded, right down to the page load times.

Tapefailure is an interesting expirement in uses for Ajax, but outside of site walkthroughs or training purposes, I'm not sure what else it might be used for.

Christophe Coenraets has written a tutorial Flexstore on Rails.

The tutorial takes Flexstore, a traditional shopping cart, and gets it going with Rails on the backend.

The example is interesting in how it shows Flash and Ajax working together. The main catalog is a Flash application on the right hand side, and on the left we have sliders and widgets using the Yahoo! UI library.

How does Rails fit in again? This shows Rails as a web service provider. The application uses XML builders (taken from Groovy XML Markup) to output product information in XML, which Flex then uses.

AFP - Nearly 250 cats and dogs have been found in atrocious conditions in a garden shed in southern England, the animal rights association that came to their aid said.

ICEfaces Community Edition, a version of the ICEfaces framework for J2EE developers to check out, has been released.

Demos

Chcek out online demos such as a component showcase, webmail, auction monitor, address form, and timezone.

The components of ICEfaces are:

Framework:

The ICEfaces Framework conforms to the JSF architecture and provides a portable mechanism for rendering JSF pages directly into the browser DOM (Direct-to-DOM Rendering), resulting in superior presentation of J2EE applications.  The benefits of the Framework and Direct-to-DOM rendering are numerous:

• Reduced page rendering times (improved responsiveness of the UI)
• Partial page update (eliminates complete page refresh and page flicker)
• Asynchronous page update (real time update of UI without the need for a user initiated submit)
• User context preservation (scroll bar positioning and user focus on page not altered during page update)
• Compatible with both Sun RI and MyFaces JSF implementations

Ajax Bridge:

The Ajax Bridge takes care of all aspects of communication between the server-side Framework and the client browser. It is mainly responsible for assembling DOM updates in the client browser, and propagating user interactions back to the server-side applications. This lightweight Ajax software layer provides the benefits of Ajax technology without requiring any JavaScript development. The Ajax Bridge supports rich web application deployment to all leading browsers with no need for proprietary browser plugins or extensions.

The Ajax software includes server-side and client-side elements.  The server-side of the Bridge is servlet-based, processes incoming requests from the client, and provides presentation DOM updates in response to the JSF rendering phase.   The client-side of the bridge is a 10KB JavaScript library that uses Ajax technology to establish synchronous and asynchronous communications paths to the serverside JSF application.

Component Suite:

The ICEfaces Component Suite provides a complete set of the most commonly required components including enhanced implementations of the standard JSF components as well as additional custom components. All these components feature additional benefits over other standard JSF components, such as:

• Optimized to fully leverage Direct-to-DOM rendering technology (partial page rendering).
• Support for additional attributes for ICEfaces-specific features such as partial submit and incremental page updates.
• Support for comprehensive component look-and-feel customization via predefined CSS-based component themes that are easily customizable.

The ICEfaces Component Suite fully supports look-and-feel customization via a set of standard CSS classes and pre-defined component style themes. Changing the look-and-feel or theme of a rich web application developed with the ICEfaces Component Suite is as simple as changing the CSS stylesheet used. A set of predefined themes are available to be used as-is, or customized to meet the specific requirements of the application. In addition, individual components may override the theme-based style settings to achieve the specific look-and-feel desired. It is even possible to change the look-and-feel theme dynamically and have the entire application instantly reflect the new theme.

For more information, see the ICEfaces Component Suite Overview.

See an online demonstration of the ICEfaces Component Suite Showcase.

Supported Tools,