{"id":1208,"date":"2008-02-16T10:34:02","date_gmt":"2008-02-16T16:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/02\/16\/ria-weekly-007-ajax-with-jazz-web-native-interfaces-power-users-in-ria-blu-ray-iphone-rumors\/"},"modified":"2008-02-16T10:34:02","modified_gmt":"2008-02-16T16:34:02","slug":"ria-weekly-007-ajax-with-jazz-web-native-interfaces-power-users-in-ria-blu-ray-iphone-rumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/02\/16\/ria-weekly-007-ajax-with-jazz-web-native-interfaces-power-users-in-ria-blu-ray-iphone-rumors\/","title":{"rendered":"RIA Weekly #007: Ajax with Jazz, Web-native Interfaces, Power Users in RIA, Blu-ray, iPhone Rumors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Download the episode directly here<\/a>, or subscribe to the feed to have episodes auto-magically downloaded in iTunes or other podcasther<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ryan<\/a> was kind enough to edit this episode write up these notes – yuh! – so the “I” refers to him ;><\/p>\n

Coté and I introduce ourselves and Bill
\nHiggins<\/a>, a front end developer for Jazz. Bill starts by explaining what
\nJazz<\/a> is and says it started a couple of
\nyears ago with the goal being to create a collaborative development
\nplatform. Since the idea is focused around collaboration so one of the main
\nparts is being able to support multiple interfaces. It was primarily done in
\nEclipse and when Bill came on he started to work on the web interface for
\nJazz. Coté contrasts the current quick development process with larger cycle
\nprojects and Bill says that Jazz is actually on a pretty quick turnaround
\ntime.<\/p>\n

Coté asks if when they were building Jazz in Ajax if they looked at other
\ntechnologies. At first they started with a Java server side application
\naccording to Bill and after 3-4 months it wasn’t going to work. They got
\npermission to choose whatever technology they wanted and it was right around
\nthe time Ajax was starting to take off. Bill reminisces about a Joel Spolsky<\/a>
\ntalking about the Google auto suggest app from before Ajax really took off.
\nBill says that one of the biggest barriers initially was that there weren’t
\na lot of resources. They looked at a lot of the original platforms and
\neventually chose Dojo. He says that currently it’s about 40% Dojo and 60%
\ncustom code. Coté asks if it was a good idea to turn Ajax based on the info
\nthey had now and Bill thinks it is. Ryan asks what the other options were
\nand Bill talks about some of the other server side technologies they looked
\nat. Ryan asks about the Eclipse RAP project and whether or not they looked
\nat that since the project’s rich client is based on Eclipse. Bill responds
\nthat since it was very early they looked at it but didn’t go with it.<\/p>\n

Coté wonders how big a deal it is to have two separate interfaces for
\nthings and what the challenges have been to keep up. Bill says that one of
\nthe things they wanted to do was make the back end sophisticated so that
\nthey could specialize on each and make both interfaces high quality. Bill
\ntalks about it being difficult to have good UIs on every level if you try to
\nreuse code and methodologies. Bill talks about their server side and how
\nthey started with EMF but eventually moved to REST because it made it much
\neasier for both clients to talk to the back end. Reuse of the services made
\nit easy to reuse code and one of the benefits of REST is that you can easily
\nuse it within multiple clients. Coté asks Ryan about BlazeDS and whether or
\nnot BlazeDS could be used as a REST layer. Ryan isn’t really sure how that
\nwould work and wonders if you could use BlazeDS on a rich client like
\nEclipse.<\/p>\n

Ryan mentions Bill’s Uncanny Valley post and asks Bill how he thinks
\nabout the converging of a web interface and a desktop interface and how you
\nplan for that. He talks about his experience on Jazz and how it’s not a good
\nidea to steal user interface elements from other platforms. It looks out of
\nplace. Ryan asks about how a platform can build user interfaces that look
\ngreat everywhere and notes that some AIR interfaces look out of place on
\nsome platforms. Coté calls it the “WinAmp” problem because you could re-skin
\nthe application and the user interface was always so out of place and bad.
\nBill says the cool design shouldn’t stand out, the content should be front
\nand center. Bill brings up the example of Cloverfield<\/i> as using visual
\neffects in a background way to enhance the experience.<\/p>\n

Coté asks the question is it better to have really good functionality and
\na crappy UI or a really good UI or crappy functionality. Bill says it
\ndepends on what you’re trying to do and gives the example of an application
\nthat you’ll be using in your jobs for a very long time and says capabilities
\nare very important. We come up with the idea of the “F8 people” and discuss
\nwhen those simple, low-fidelity interfaces are beneficial. Coté notes that
\nwe don’t have a “civilian user” and a “power user” in the RIA world. Ryan
\nagrees and says that he believes it’s just because RIAs don’t have power
\nusers. Bill notes that those interfaces are perfect and people know them so
\nyou don’t want to mess with that. Ryan says that he thinks there might be a
\nUI that could make them more productive but Bill notes that people don’t
\nwant to learn new things and change can be bad.<\/p>\n

Coté mentions that he and Ryan have switched from Google Reader to using
\nNetNewsWire<\/a>
\nand what that means for interfaces. Bill still uses Google Reader and Ryan
\nnoted that his big requirement was that he could get access to the feeds
\nfrom anywhere. We compare feeds and talk about the <a href="
\nhttp:\/\/www.fourhourworkweek.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/16\/how-scoble-reads-622-rss-feeds-each-morning\/RobertScoble
\nfeed usability study<\/a> with the idea of looking at different user
\ninterfaces. Cote talks about what he likes in a news reader and how
\ndifferent RIA technologies could fit into that. Ryan says he really wants to
\nsee an AIR application from the <\/a>Newsgator<\/a>
\nguys.<\/p>\n

We dive into a talk about the Blu-Ray and HDDVD wars as Coté informs us
\nthat part of the Bu-Ray spec requires Java to be on every player. He says
\nit’s a JavaME implementation. Since most of the players are supposed to be
\nnetworked enabled, that opens up some interesting possibilities for building
\napplications. As an example he gives the Alien v. Predator movie which has a
\nJava game on the Blu-Ray disc and you can create a character which then
\nmight move around based on where you’re watching the movie. It’s a cool idea
\nfor RIAs on non-traditional devices.<\/p>\n

Finally we talk about the differences between the web and the rich client
\nspace and how the functionality is starting to converge. Coté brings up the
\nHTML5 spec and the new features that have been added to the spec but haven’t
\nbeen implemented quite yet. Bill talks about the fact that a lot of the
\nstandards innovation comes from other companies creating proprietary system
\nthat pushes the boundaries. He mentions Alex Russell’s post<\/a> about innovation
\nas a good read.<\/p>\n

In the news we talk about Flash on the iPhone, and the some of the new
\nbrowsers that are coming out including Firefox 3
\nBeta 3<\/a> and the new WebKit<\/a>
\nversions.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> also see Bill’s commentary on the episode<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer:<\/b> Both Adobe and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk clients list<\/a> for other RedMonk clients mentioned.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: bluray<\/a>, ibm<\/a>, jazz<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week we talk with IBM’s Bill Higgins and delve deep into the usability side of RIAs and UIs in general. We also touch on some interesting Blu-Ray discussion and Flash on iPhones rumor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-ria-weekly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}