Author Archives: Rob Smart

Web front end for Second Life ?

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With the enthusiasm for Second Life going strong among our group the ideas are flying everywhere. One major area of interest is getting information from outside in and vice versa. Along this theme one idea was that of presenting Second Life in a browser, this is in someways a step backward but would allow access to Second Life to be more pervasive and accessible to the majority, dipping in to the game for a short period of time or when on the move at an internet cafe could then be possible.

I stumbled across Hive7.com this morning when reading an article by Phoenix Psaltery in the latest copy of the excellent Metaverse Messenger Second Life’s web published news paper. Hive7 is very much modelled around Second Life, placing you in an MMO setting with custom scripting and object creation, only this time its all 2D in browser and written as an AJAX application. It’s a great example of what can be done when you’re prepared to push browser technology near to its limits. Unsuprisingly Hive7 has attracted the attention of Pathfinder Linden who spent some time there creating a replica of one of Second Life’s welcome areas. There isn’t currently any link up between Hive7 and the Second Life world, but with the similarities I’m sure either the Lindens or Hive7’s team are thinking about it….

Good move by VMware

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VMware have released the VMware player a cut down play only Virtual Machine that will run images created using their VMware Workstation, ESX and GSX products.

This is a clever move by VMware, the VMware player will be especially useful in the Enterprise market where pre-installed demo images of serious heavy weight middleware and other applications are an easy way of providing try before you buy demos. The availability of a free player will help encourage software firms to use VMwares fully featured products to create such demo images.

The player could also help in the uptake of linux as well, there are plenty of pre-installed Linux ISO images out there such as Knoppix to use in VMware. This provides a free means for users to try out Linux while still running their Windows setup.

Laszlo King of rich client technology?

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Rich Client is a term thats been hanging around for a while now, it describes a group of applications that provide more client end functionality than traditional websites would.

Encompassed in this group are technologies and methodologies such as Flash, AJAX, XUL and XForms. It’s all about giving users more interactivity and providing an experience that would normally be associated with desktop client software.

A new contender has recently grabbed my attention, OpenLaszlo is well placed to come in and steal the limelight from some of the other rich client solutions I’ve mentioned. Laszlo applications are written in XML and JavaScript and compile into Flash to run in the browser, this essentially means that we can write Flash applications in the same way we would with DHTML. Laszlo has a Server side component in the form of a J2EE web application that will run on Tomcat, WebSphere etc. It’s also open source and there are no restrictions on selling the applications you create with it.

Recently our Department was approached by a customer to produce a prototype vehicle dashboard for an offroad vehicle, it would be a browser based app which would take vehicle stats and display them for engineers to examine. Aha I thought, the perfect opportunity to try out Laszlo. I had a very short timescale (as we usually do with these prototype projects, in this case 10 days) in which to get a fully functioning system that would take raw data straight from a vehicle and present it in a graphical manner.

Choosing Laszlo was a bit of a risk, my experience with it was limited to what I had read on the OpenLaszlo website but it was open source so I figured if I hit any sticking points I could probably just patch the Laszlo source. Thankfully I didn’t have to do this, I found the XML markup Laszlo used to have an intuitive set of tags and attributes very reminiscent of DHTML and the scripting language stuck rigidly to that of JavaScript syntax. As a result my development work got off to a quick start.

As I continued I kept discovering little niceties of Laszlo. For one it’s extremely simple to work with XML, binding UI elements to data just involves setting an xpath on the UI element. There are also plenty of server communication options including standard HTTP connections, RPC, and WebServices setting it up nicely for an SOA implementation. There is also a nifty persistent connection interface which allows you to push data down to the client from the server, perfect for pubsub or Instant Messaging applications.

At the end of the day, I’ve come out with a very pleasant impression of Laszlo. I managed to produce an XML data driven graphical UI application in less than 10 days that most importantly worked and that our customer was happy with.

– Rob Smart (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)