Performance comparison among JavaScript, Java Applet, Flash Player 7,8,9

A nice performance comparison among JavaScript, Java Applet, Flash Player 9
New (Actionscript Virtual Machine-AVM2) - ActionScript 3 as well as Flash Player 7 and 8 (old Actionscript Virtual Machine -AVM1 ) - ActionScript 2. It would be nice to see a comparison between Flex and Silverlight performance. If you know any good resource on this please leave a comment here.

Here is the link

Check out adobe.com/devnet!

Finding information on adobe site was never so easy. Check out the new site .It’s just wonderful! No information overloading. All the information you need is just one click away. You will experience a better navigation and find a greater consistency.

For Flex resources and tutorials. Check out this link

Mass migration from orkut towards facebook by the elite crowd of India?

I have joined facebook few days back after receiving tons of invites from my friends/contacts.I have noticed with all my surprise that lots of my friends have migrated to facebook from orkut.Alexa has already ranked facebook No.22 in India.By opening the APIs facebook has created a platform which empowers the developers to plugin features into facebook and get noticed by 30 million people connected to it.

Doug McCune has already added the flex based ShuffleBored app to facebook.

Here is a screenshot of my friends on shuffleBored:




Some facts about facebook:

General Growth
• More than 24 million active users
• More than 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
• An average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
• Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
User Demographics
• Over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities
User Engagement
• Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States*
• More than 40 billion page views per month in May 2007
• More than half of active users return daily
• People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily*
Applications
• No. 1 photo sharing application on the web*
• Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined*
• More than 1.8 billion photos on the site
• More than 6 million active user groups on the site
International Growth
• Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 2.5 million active users
• The U.K. is the third largest country with more than 1.4 million active users
• Remaining Top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Norway, Australia, South Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Sweden and India
-Source

I also want to see half a million Indian Flex Developers in next three years!

Dear Yakov Fain,

This is regarding your post "I also want to see a million Flex developers in three years". I liked your attitude towards the technology, especially when you say ' I’m not going to fall in love with any programming language, sorry, Flex. But I promise, we’ll have steady relations for a while’. You are sounding like a real businessman here :)! I agree that everything depends on the current market trend. Flex is hot and you want to explore or exploring the opportunity around. Good luck Yakov Fain! But I don't agree on the part that India is still asleep. Have a look to this post

Flex India is going great guns

This post will prove you wrong! As an early adopter of flex and being a part of the ever increasing flex developer community of India,I can assure you about a good competition soon from these new kids on the block.

Best Regards,
Debabrata

Should Flash/Flex Developers learn Java/PHP/Ruby?

Try this search query on flexjobs list
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexjobs/msearch?query=java&charset=utf-8

There are around 325 job posts for Flex Developers by the time I have posted this entry. Out of these 325 jobs, I have noticed 322 jobs require Java or any other server side technologies as a skill.

In most of the job posts at flex jobs list, I have found the following key skills and attributes for Flex Developer requirements:

• CF, .NET, PHP, JAVA, or Ruby experience
• Knowledge of MS SQL and/or MySQL
• Extensive background in Java or C++.
• Java 1.3+, .NET, C#, JSP 1.2+, Javascript,
• DHTML, ActionScript, CSS, Java Beans, XML, Struts, Servlets 2.3+, ASP,
• 4+ years JAVA programming experience required,
• J2EE/EJB3 experience preferred.
• Knowledge of back-end technologies such as PHP and Ruby on Rails
• Strong object-oriented development skills (Java, C++)

If you closely notice these requirements, you will realize that most of them are for Java Developers (or any other server side technology), who can work on Flex too. That means Flex is not the primary skill but a nice to have.

Yakov Fain has a nice and interesting post under the topic
Should Java developers learn Flex - mixed feelings
I have also experienced this at my work, where Java Developers are embracing flex not because of the love for the technology but for the pressure from their employer. Big companies are adopting RIA extensively as their future technical direction and trying to make use of existing developer base. It’s all good. Learning a new technology is always fun. The success story of Flex as a technology lies mostly on this mass migration of developers. But what about the existing flash developer base? Should they also learn server-side technologies and upgrade themselves for the demanding market? The job requirements trends at flexjobs suggest us to learn and have a very good command over server-side technologies too. Being just an Actionscripter or Flex Developer is not going to fetch good fortune in today’s competitive market. Now flash platform is no more restricted to client side technologies. Gone are the days, when we used to have timelines, Movieclips to create nice and fancy looking animation and intros using flash.To become successful in flash platform, one has to have very good understanding of Eclipse IDE, Adobe LiveCycle, Servlets, JMS, J2EE architecture and the list goes on.

Jooce in India: strategic philanthropy

Before delving into a discussion on Jooce in Indian context, let us consider some of the available statistics on Indian internet users:

• Less than 5% of India’s populations are online
• Home PCs at 3.5 million out of a total of about 210 million homes
• “India has the fastest growing Internet user base in the Asia Pacific Region" -IDC report
  
• The Internet & Mobile Association of India predicts that internet users will grow from the current 39 million to a 100 million by 2007. A majority of these users will be accessing the Net from cyber cafes

I have traveled and stayed in almost all of the big cities in India and have noticed the ever increasing crowds of the cyber-nomads around the cyber cafes. Most of them are young generations addicted to social networking sites .Due to this increasing number of net users, internet service provider Sify’s iWay Cyber Cafe Chain already crossed the 3100 mark in India.

Jooce, a Paris based startup is targeting those cyber-nomads. They are coming up with a flash based webOS and sharing platform. Jooce has got that X factor in its user interface.

Jooce could be used as a private online desktop with public file sharing capabilities. It is a online space to keep, view, listen to – and instantly share files, photos, music and video with friends.

Considering the large number of cyber cafe users, I can see a bright future of Jooce in India



I can feel the pulse of their marketing strategy just looking at their blog. The proper term to describe the strategy would be ‘grass root level penetration’.

I could not resist myself from quoting jooce’s blog where they say,

“As we prepare to launch private beta it is worth reminding ourselves that potential applications for internet platforms are not always obvious to those of us in the western world who own several laptops, PDAs or PCs.”

So true!

“If a community believes a product is going to contribute to the education of the next generation and create a brighter future for them, they will find the money to pay for it,” said Dan Shine, Director of the 50×15 Initiative, speaking in the “Connecting the four billion” session. “If you spend time in any one of several developing countries, you soon start to appreciate that it is standing room only in cybercafes. There are huge market opportunities that are largely untapped.”

I agree on the above “strategic philanthropy”. I wish if we can come up with a product something like jooce in our own. I hope some day Indian MNCs will realize the potentiality of Indian market and work on it rather then focusing on outsourcing work only.

Good luck jooce!

Real-time charting solution: Lightstreamer an alternative to Flex Messaging Service

I have been working for real-time/streaming data/charting solution in flex for last couple of months. We are using Flex Messaging Service which comes along with the Flex Data Service (Adobe LiveCycle Data Services). Few days back I checked Lightstreamer as an alternative to Flex Messaging Service. They have just released SDK for flex 2.0. I have configured and run the demo app in my system. It’s really easy to configure. I wish to code a nice app using Lightstreamer soon.

Lightstreamer Flex SDK

The new Flex SDK features a native ActionScript 3 library that handles the communication with Lightstreamer Server and offers a high-level API, used by Flex developers to exploit the publish/subscribe paradigm implemented by Lightstreamer. The Flex SDK, that is shipped as part of Lightstreamer Presto and Vivace editions, will be demonstrated at AjaxWorld 2007 West (September 23-26, 2007, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA).

About Lightstreamer

Lightstreamer is a push/streaming engine based on the AJAX and Comet paradigms that can deliver real-time text data to Web browsers (pure HTML applications, with no downloads) and to any client applications. The Lightstreamer Server can handle thousands of concurrent clients and implements advanced algorithms, as bandwidths management, congestion control, dynamic filtering. Lightstreamer (legal entity Weswit Srl) is part of Par-Tec Spa. Development began in 2000, originally by the financial system Integration activity within the group, then in 2004 Lightstreamer became an independent ISV to provide ‘push technology’ to a wider global market.

Flex Builder: An error has occurred. See error log for more details

How Many times have you encountered the problem while refreshing your flex builder or opening a mxml file?

• An error has occurred. See error log for more details.
• Unable to create this part due to an internal error. Reason for the failure: The editor class could not be instantiated.

I get this error more often. How I solve it?

Earlier I use to go to my workspace directory and delete the entire .metadata folder without knowing anything. In this way I used to lose all my settings.

Recently I have found a better way of solving this problem:

• I go to [workspace directory]/.metadata/.plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.codemodel/searchCache

• Backup the directories in there that end with “.index”. zip them up and keep them somewhere else
  
• Now delete the directories and keep the file “catalog.xml” file as it is there
• Run builder again and I should not get any error now
  

The problem is that the lucene index was corrupted or lost, probably during a failed Flex Builder shutdown. When flex builders starts it tries to load the lucene index but it fails to load that file and then it throws the error.

Web 2.0 Entrepreneurship: business ethics and yaari.com

All this started few months back when I had started getting mails from my friends and contacts to join yaari.com, an India focus social networking site but I have never acted upon that. My inbox was getting flooded with mails from my contacts to join that site. Out of my surprise, I noticed that I was getting same mail again and again from the same contact. All these days it was limited to my contacts only. So it forced me to think that it came from my trusted contacts only. But when I received the same mails from two of the technical groups I belong, I could not resist myself from expressing my frustration out there and I came to know about a cheap tactics of generating traffics by the people behind yaari.com. One of the members of the group mentioned about the privacy policy of yaari.com. It says in its policy that the user will allow yaari.com to use his/her address book. It also forces the user to enter his/her gmail/yahoo id and password. It’s very frustrating to know the terms and condition of yaari.com mentioned in their privacy policy. Very few people read the terms and conditions while signing to any site and the after affect of it could be worst then just spamming the inbox. Websites like yaari.com and mushrooming web 2.0 sites are so desperate to increase the member base that they often forget the moral and ethical aspect of business. Some time they don’t even have a privacy policy in place. Personally I don’t provide my email address and password to any site which I don’t believe but instead of that I do get spam mails everyday.

I will just quote two frustrated members of that site from flex India group

Oh... Sorry Debabrata and FLEX_INDIA team, I am sorry I don’t know how to stop this spam. Can any please help me? Or else we need to complain yaari.com about this

I am really sorry for this kind of mail. But trust me, "yaari.com" is among bad sites which I was not aware of. I had just registered/subscribed my account into it, just to know what this site is all about. But it has somehow taken all the e-addresses from my address book, and sends such a mail request/spam mail to all my email address. I would have never forwarded such mails to professional forums/professional people. I am unsubscribing myself from yaari.com. It’s just that I am one among who got caught by them. And I replied for letting all the members know about these bad/banned site "yaari.com". And please be aware of such sites (which prove themselves to be like orkut.com) and not to subscribe to it!! I am sure there must be many like me who might have got stuck by this yaari.com. O please unsubscribe from it, before something unusual happens. It has just has stolen all the e-mail address from my contact list and forwarded such kind of mail to everyone.

After reading all these posts in the list I started digging on the site and the people behind the site. I came to know that the people behind this initiative are not any ordinary people but having a strong academic background. Some of them are Stanford alumni.I think we can expect some sort of business ethics from them.

What people say about this site?
I have seen number of posts around the blogsphere expressing the outrage and frustration against this site.

1.Aalap.com
2.Startupsquad.com