Professional portal development demands special knowledge of Flash, JavaScript, Java-applets and ActiveX-components. All these technologies are not supposed to complicate your life. But sometimes it’s not so easy to enrich user experience going beyond traditional tasks and at the same time ensure great results in a short space of time. On this point Rich Internet Application and RIA development offers revolutionary possibilities that combined in a single runtime environment.

What does it mean for users? It means “all in one” or integration of content, communications, user interface and a set of custom components and. Of course, all these units work in real time.

What does RIA mean for programmers? First and foremost it opens doors to Rapid Application Development or RAD. Developers use advantages of Ajax GWT programming and in the shortest possible time create new web portals based on reusable program components.

Beyond question, web is a dynamic, vibrant platform, where it is very important to reduce the time from birth of new ideas to their realization. That is why such RIA components as Ajax Toolkit will be in great demand. They allow to make fast and easy changes in new applications, giving developers what they want at this very moment for this very project.

Today we continue our list of 14 the most relevant technologies for software developers adding some Web-oriented technologies to it:

#4. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
No matter you can love RIA or hate it, today developers use Flash not only for cartoons about politicians who sing silly songs, but also for more serious things. Flash has rich functionality to create applications using technologies such as Flex and AIR. Companies that develop Flash analogues, for example JavaFx and Silverlight, also improve similar features and increase productivity.

HTML5 soon will combine the full functionality of RIA, including connection to the databases and putting the official seal of W3C on AJAX technology.

It means that in the near future, the differences between RIA platforms will be decreased.

#5. Web Development
Web development won’t sink into oblivion in the near future. Many Web developers ignore, or at least only familiar with the basics, providing frameworks. However, companies want more and more people who able to work with these technologies. So, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML will be still successful even in 2014.

#6. Web Services
JSON or XML? REST or SOAP? This choice depends on the project, and work complexity increases without Web services technologies. Even those areas, where developers used ODBC, COM, or RPC, are gradually moving towards Web services.

to be continued…

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network software services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

YouTube, MySpace, Odeo, Flickr, Match and Facebook – all in one solution named ‘Dolphin smart community builder’. Developed for creating dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals.
Dolphin is absolutely free.

Dolphin is based on: PHP, MySQL, Ajax, JavaScript, Flash, Java.
Official site: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/. Demo site: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/doldemo/
Dolphin software contains most popular features peculiar to a common social network. Among them:

• Blog
• User profile
• Forum
• Audio/Video sharing
• Friends invitation
• Private messaging
• User groups
• Voting
• And much more

This solution is optimal for rapid start of your own social network (of course, if your goal is to get free solution).
There are many analogous solutions:

• Pligg
• PHPIzabi
• Elgg
• PHPFox
• Other

Also there are services for creating social networks.
Among them:

• Ning
• Kickapps

This software does not provide the source code (are not open source), they provide API. All interaction is held using XML and JSON. Solutions are not free.

Today Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for downloading. Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer 8 at the end of this year. All of you know that it will be more standards-compliant in the content rendering behavior. But also a new version of this popular browser will have a lot of features which can be useful for users and web developers.

There are some of them:
• Accelerators
• WebSliences
• Search providers
• Search suggestions
• Developer tools
• InPrivate browsing
• Deleting data for not favorite sites
• Browser security settings
• Ajax navigations
• DOM storage
• 6 connections to the host (instead of 2)
• CSS 2.1 support
• W3C ARIA support
• JSON Support
• Javascript improvements
• XMLHTTPRequest improvements
• And others

And I’m going to tell you about the features for developers in detail.

Web standards compatibility
The new version of IE is said to be CSS 2.1, W3C ARIA and HTML 5.0 compatible. And there is good news for developers whose web applications work properly for IE 7 or earlier and they don’t want to rewrite the layout. Using a special meta tag instructions you can choose an engine for your web-site rendering. For example:
[source='php']

Content goes here.

[/source]
Or put the next piece of code in Web.config of your ASP.NET application:

[source='php']










[/source]
Javascript improvements
• Fast arrays handling
• Strcat now is faster than ArrayJoin for small and large strings
• All methods for strings handling were improved
• Garbage Collector improvements.

Developer tools
IE 8 developer tools allow developers to debug javascript and make in place HTML and CSS changes. It also contains a profiling tool which can be helpful for checking the application performance.

Ajax navigations and DOM storage
IE 8 is said to support the development of much better Ajax applications. For example, it now treats windows.location.hash updates as navigation. You can therefore navigate using the back and forward buttons in Ajax applications, as on other web pages, something that was not possible previously and which was a source of irritation for users. Thanks to the use of DOM Storage from HTML5, the browser can now store large data volumes locally. As the new connectivity events allow developers to check whether the browser is online, applications can be written to like Google Gears, which works both online and offline.

Let’s wait for the release to see IE 8 in action!