20 posts tagged with "featured"

Building asynchronous real time apps with bidirectional communication has traditionally been a very difficult thing to do. HTTP was originally designed to speak in terms of requests and responses, long before concepts of rich media, social integration, and real time communication were considered staples of modern web development. Over the years, various solutions have been hacked together to solve this problem. You can use plugins like flash or silverlight to make a true socket connection on your behalf - but not all clients support plugins. You can use long polling to manage multiple connections via HTTP - but this can be tricky to implement, and can eat up system resources. The Web Socket standard promises to give web developers a first class socket connection, but browser support is spotty and inconsistent.

Various tools across multiple stacks have been release to solve this problem, but in this post I would like to talk about the first real asynchronous client/server package for ASP.NET: SignalR. SignalR allows .NET developers to change the way we think about client/server messaging: instead of worrying about implementation details of web sockets, we can focus on the way communication flows across the various components of our applications.

Frink! is a mobile client for the web site Reddit. It is designed specifically to be used with tablets, taking advantage of gestures in a unique user interface. Right now the app is available in the BlackBerry App World:

Frink: Blackberry app world

How do the internal workings of a browser that was released only two years ago have an enormous ripple effect on the future of streaming media on the internet? Last week Google announced on their chromium blog that they're dropping support for the h.264 codec, in favor of the open source Ogg Theora and WebM/VP8 codecs. This is yet another snag in the messy attempt to unify the playback of video in HTML 5, as we now find the #2 and #3 most popular browsers lacking support for what currently is likely the most ubiquitous encoding format. So how did we get here?

The browser wars are back​

Over this holiday break I had the interesting opportunity to write a bookmarklet for a friend who runs a comic based website.   Instead of just manipulating the currently loaded page, the bookmarklet needed to send a list of images to another site.  Often when writing bookmarklets, we tend to only think of loading our code in the context of a HTML content page.  How often do you test your bookmarklets when the browser is viewing an image?  In this article I am going to go through the code I used to bootstrap my bookmarklet script, and discuss some of the interesting challenges I experienced along the way.

To get started with this code, I used a fantastic article by Tommy Saylor of Smashing Magazine. It gave me a good start, but certainly left a lot of details out, and in my case, caused a lot of bugs.

Welcome to the first part in a multi-part series on building Adobe Flex projects using The Apache Ant Project.

So why would we want to use ant to build our flex projects?  Flash Builder does a great job of building our actionscript and mxml.  But it does not do a great job of integrating into our existing automated build frameworks.  For those of us who have been writing Java in an enterprise environment, Ant is common knowledge.  If you've spent any time working with the Microsoft .NET platform, you may have been exposed to NAnt or MSBuild The idea is that we need to have a reliable, repeatable build process that can execute outside of the context of our development environment.  For my team, this means an independent build server (in my case, a virtual machine).  An independent build server means nightly builds, and software that can run without the user at the keys.