Zimbra
June 4, 2006 | 3 Comments
For a long time I’ve been touting Zimbra as the greatest available web-based mail client. I’ve never gotten around to mentioning it here, but I figure it’s time. In fact, Zimbra is more than just a web-based mail client, they call it a collaboration suite. Basically this means it has email, calendar, and contact management. It’s all Ajax based, open source, extendable, and provides a free version.
In addition to the fantastic interface, it is also a complete email server with industry level SPAM protection built-in. The email server supports IMAP and POP so users can continue using whatever desktop application they may prefer as an alternative to the web-based application.
With my general unhappiness with Outlook and most other web-based email solutions, I really wish I could use Zimbra. Go check out the hosted demo.
Tags: AJAX, collaboration, email, web 2.0, webmail, zimbra
Google Calendar Beta Available
April 13, 2006 | 1 Comment
I found out from Matt today that Google Calendar is now available! Matt has been waiting for this for awhile. If you have been too, go get your account, it’s easy and worth it.
The interface on this new product is great, very similar to GMail or any of the other Google services. However, I do have a couple complaints.
They did not implement any sort of desktop plugin for synchronization. I’ve been playing with Airset for a few months now, and it has this functionality. As a guy who needs to use our institutional Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server to interoperate with co-workers, Outlook is my glue, and desktop sync would make my life easier.
My other complaint is that there is basically no integration between Calendar and GMail. I want similar functionality to how Zimbra is able to detect dates inside emails you receive and allow right click capable add to calendar. If you haven’t seen this yet, go watch their demo, it’s slick.
OK, so these are frosting, but I expect perfection from Google! I’m sure these features and more will be slowly rolled into the product over time.
Tags: airset, calendar, gmail, google, google calendar, Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server, web 2.0, web20, zimbra
Behaviour, Return of Clean HTML
March 9, 2006 | 1 Comment
As we’ve begun adopting Ajax, JSON, and similar JavaScript heavy technologies a problem quickly arose. Suddenly our clean HTML was being cluttered with tons of script tags, onclicks, and other various event handling functions. Trying to extract this logic back out of the HTML was a definite desire for us.
Enter Behaviour.
Behaviour uses CSS selectors to specify what elements to apply JS handlers to.
Check out these demos. View the source and you’ll see clean markup that is free of logic. This allows us to step back and once again fully separate the presentation layer from the application layer.
Tags: AJAX, behavior, behaviour, css, functions, html, javascript, js, JSON, programming, web, web 2.0, web development, web20, xhtml
Wufoo - Form Builder
February 26, 2006 | Comments Off
Matt has been using this interactive form builder as an example for our form builder he is writing as part of a prospective student portal we are writing for Plymouth State.
Today, I found an even cooler one called Wufoo (not Hufu) over on a sweet Chinese blog that previously linked to me. Wufoo uses a heavy union of Ajax and Flash techniques. It may be a little heavier on the Flash than I would have gone, but it is still really cool.
Tags: "form builder", "prospective student portal", AJAX, form, hufu, web 2.0, web development
FaceBook - A Social Requirement in Higher Education
February 1, 2006 | 25 Comments
Facebook is a social site targeted at people associated with colleges and universities. Its popularity has gone through the roof this academic year, a quick peak at Alexa and you’ll see how drastically its rank spikes.
During the winter semester Jenny was taking a class. A fellow student contacted her and informed her that she was the only one in the 15+ student class who did not have an account on Facebook. In fact, he was a bit annoyed at her for this and felt she really needed to create an account.
The level of involvement students feel with Facebook is astounding. This social software has become the preferred collaborative environment for them. By choice. Not by some academic decree or because people thought students needed to use it. They chose this product for themselves.
Wondering if this one example was an oddity and not truly indicative of an overall trend at Plymouth State or higher education in general? Casey got the following from Facebook: “There are 3,975 registered users at Plymouth State University. Like the other schools on the site, over 60% of them log in every 24 hours.”
That means approximately 2,385 users are logging in to Facebook each day. Our campus portal gets around 3,800 uniques daily and we make it difficult for students not to use that…
Tags: education, face book, facebook, higher ed, higher education, plymouth state, plymouth state university, social, social software, university, web 2.0
S5, A Good Start
January 18, 2006 | 2 Comments
I really like the idea of having all my office applications replaced by web based versions. I want to be able to manage any document from where ever I’m sitting on whoevers computer. I then also want to be able to collaborate and share viewing and/or authoring with whomever I like.
Writely does this very well as relates to Microsoft Word. For three months now I have used Writely exclusively for my word processing needs. I no longer have any use for Word.
S5 is billed as “A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.” Check out this example slideshow. I love what they are accomplishing with their standard, and it is purely XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the background.
If someone can take this concept one step further and build a nice WYSIWYG tool to create slideshows and make it web based, PowerPoint may be the next Office application I stop using.
Maybe the Writely developers could add a simple tab to their app that allows creation of presentations on the S5 standard… Whoever does it, I’ll be in line for the beta, as I’m sure thousands of other will be as well.
Tags: collaboration, excel, html, javascript, presentation, presentations, s5, standard, web 2.0, web20, word, word processing, writely, xhtml
What’s XOAD?
December 3, 2005 | 2 Comments
According to XOAD.org:
XOAD is a PHP based AJAX/XAP object oriented framework that allows you to create richer web applications.
XOAD, formerly known as NAJAX, has many benefits:
it uses JSON and native PHP serialized objects to communicate,
special attention has been paid to security,
supports server side events (observation),
client side events (XOAD Events),
server and client extensions,
HTML manipulation (extension),
Caching (extension).
And more
As a PHP programmer, this is an exciting idea. I’ve used SAJAX, but it is not as easy as I think it could be. If XOAD improves on this, then this is cause for celebration.
Here are some example apps.
Tags: AJAX, internet, JSON, OOP, php, programming, SAJAX, web, web 2.0, XAP, XOAD