Flex & REST: Fun

I’ve played a little with Flex in these last days, I’ve built up a Cover Flow Style Application to browse your Facebook friends.

It uses Facebook AS3 REST API and the SebCoverFlow library for the Cover Flow.

It’s online here, and the source code is here. I don’t know if I’ll spend more time on it but however, Flex & REST seems really the way to go.

Tibco GI? No thanks

Recently we tried TIBCO GI, I’ve to say that I’ve not been particularly happy with it, here is my list of cons:

• Not easy to test: impossible to test headless (is not supported by htmlunit), impossible to test with webdriver: Tibco provides a “Test Automation Kit”, however we had to write an extension of SeleniumServer in order to be able to write SeleniumRC from java… Pretty bad!

• It couples java, xml and javascript: yes it does, you write your objects in java, you configure them in xml and in the end you write some javascript that calls theirs java methods, a maintenance (and team on-boarding) mess!
• Yet another tool: to edit the UI there’s no plugin for Eclipse, you’ve to use a TibcoGI tool to edit the UI… Pretty bad!
• Small community: I found the community pretty small and completely unaware of the modern testing techniques (webdriver & htmlunit to start with)
• XML, XSL and Javascript: at the end it’s all about these three technologies, all together, a scary combination.
• Some browser are supported, some others.. No comment

Pros?

Well, you can write very quickly a pretty web interface but why not considering flex then?

A cool guy, a cool software: Balsamiq application mockups

Balsamiq mockups is a cool application to quickly, easily write applications mockups and share them on the web, some benefits taken from its website: 

• Improve your Usability
• Explore Different Designs in Minutes
• Get to Agreement Early with a tool everyone can use
• Cut down spec-writing time
• Spend your time coding, not churning
• Use it with your clients, Letting them help you bring their vision to life
• Integrated in the way you work, Web, Desktop or Web Office

Thanks to Alberto that forwarded me this blog post about the creator of this nice piece of software:

The story is about Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, a former Senior Software Engineering Lead at Adobe in San Francisco, who moved back to Italy and started a company called Balsamiq. 

His company is actually a “Micro-ISV” or a single-employee company. That is, a guy in a studio. A guy who wrote a product called “Balsamiq Mockups” which allows anyone to build a mockup of a GUI: the genius is that the mockup resembles one you would scribble on a piece of paper, rather than a computer one. It sells online for $79.

To make the story short, the product is fantastic and he grossed over $100k in five months. And the business is growing fast.

Why do I know? Because he made it all public in his blog. He promised he would do it. And you have all the measures of his business (and how much he is donating to non-profits).