Future Wave Web Developments

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I am finding the text “Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, In C# and VB” published by WROX to be a rather straightforward way to present and introduce ASP.NET with Visual Web Developer.  I am going through each of the chapters to get familiar with using the Microsoft Web Development environment, aka IDE (Integrated Development Environment).  As a web developer, I feel it will be very valuable to have a wide range of skills for offering, designing and developing web applications.

The Microsoft Visual Web Developer Environment is very comprehensive.  Very few similar tools for web development offer such an extensive set of features and encapsulate the ability to code in so many related technologies.  Dreamweaver by Adobe does come close to this, however, and it may be possible with the inclusion of various extensions to have the same functionality within Dreamweaver.

The topics I studied today mainly involve working with the Visual Web Developer tools for CSS design.

Recently I have been following the Training title “ColdFusion 8: Beyond the Basics” with David Gassner, published by Lynda.com  Today I have been learning about working with ColdFusion and external data services.  This began by covering how ColdFusion can access and parse XML data.  Using this information a data collection in XML format can be accessed and presented on the screen.  One example, might be to loop through repeating xml child elements that contain child elements themselves, presenting the information using one row for each repeating xml child element for the structure.

Later we took this knowledge along with information on how to access RSS (Really Simple Syndication) data to repurpose it for our own applications.  Using the cffeed tag, we can access data that is in RSS format - an xml format - or write to an xml format such as RSS, making it easy to create an RSS feed from content on a website.

For a while now, I’ve been looking for a way to present the poetry collection of Jean Jones.  Jean is co-editor with me on Word Salad Poetry Magazine, available on the web here. St. Andrews Press published a collection of poems by Jean Jones, entitled “The Birds Of Djakarta.”  In looking for a way to present those poems online, for Jean, I turned to Adobe Flex.  Adobe Flex is a tool for creating Rich Internet Applications.  Flex makes it possible to engage the reader in this scenario as well as offering a number of tools or components, as they are called in Adobe Flex, for presenting this content.

This publication is a work in progress as there are 40 poems in this collection.  So, it will take some time.  I am using Photoshop to create graphic images that present the text of each poem.  In Flex, I am placing these images/poems in an Accordion component, which allows one to reveal and read each page, like reading a book.  To see the collection go here:  http://wsmagazine.net/BirdsOfDjakarta/

I’ve come to find ColdFusion to be a great tool for rapidly developing applications.  It seems to be the goal of ColdFusion to make things simple.  I’ve been studying ColdFusion with the training title ColdFusion 8: Essential Training, by David Gassner, which is offered through Lynda.com   I’ve followed a few other training titles by David Gassner, which are available through Lynda.com

Lynda.com is a website offering a large number of different training titles.  When I pursued the Webmaster Certificate program at NC States’ Computer Training Unit, I learned a great deal but I think the classes or training titles with Lynda.com are proving to be more practical, educational and information. 

In the ColdFusion 8 Essential Training class we develop a art and artists database-driven website.  This website creates an administrative area where authorized users can add artists to the database, edit Artist information, and delete database entries.  Users also may sort and display art from the database using a variety of factors or filters, such as the name of the art piece, the price, whether the art is sold or not, and who the artist is, i.e. users can view all art in the database by a specific artist.

More ColdFusion applications will be described here as I continue to learn more about ColdFusion through the training title “ColdFusion 8: Beyond the Basics” training title by David Gassner.

Yesterday was one of those days when it seemed that the wild-wild web was a dangerous place where few can really enjoy its content without risk and that reliability and speed was a fleeting dream.  For me, I had been dealing with some kind of trojan or virus, or so I thought.  Everything was going wrong on my computer.  I would have thought that with 4 processor cores running at several billion operations per second, the simple actions I was taking would not really slow down the computer at all.  With these new quad-core (4 processor cores) I had hoped for great speeds for multitasking.

Unfortunately, something in the way of a virus or a trojan has been attacking my home/business network, or so I think.  My ISP (Internet Service Provider) came to replace the router and while testing things out found a trojan.  I’ll have to learn more about what these are.

Who the heck are these people that find it most exciting to create code that does things like this, causes chaos?  No one is going to be there padding them on the back saying, “Good job!”

For those interested in learning how to use Adobe’s Flex Builder 3 application or the Flex SDK, there is no better text than the Adobe Flex 3 Bible by David Gassner.  This is a very comprehensive text that covers a great deal of content.

David Gassner is the instructor for a number of video training titles offered at Lynda.com including ColdFusion 8 Essential Training, ColdFusion 8 Beyond the Basics, Flex 3 Essential Training, Flex 3 Beyond the Basics, AIR Essential Training and AIR for Flex Developers.

The contents of this book are too great to describe in a short blog posting, so get the book.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication

Many sites that feature content that is frequently updated, will feature options to subscribe via RSS - Really Simple Syndication.  Some examples of such sites that are frequently updated include news sites, blogs, web 2.0 social networking sites, photographic and Audio/Video publishing sites.   So RSS is:

• Format for publishing serial material - content that is represented by a series of sequential articles.  
• Content is “syndicated” through a “feed” or “channel.” 
• Content is viewed through a “reader” or “aggregator”

In the case of Blogs the content is published with the newest content on the top.  However, there are a variety of other types of online publications where new content is published frequently.   In fact, Future Wave Designs uses a Content Management System called Joomla to enable us to publish fresh new content frequently.

To get updates when new content is posted, you can subscribe to a newsfeed.  You would do that using your news “reader,” as mentioned above. 

There are a wide variety of news readers and we will discuss some of them later.

Here is a valuable course by David Gassner, an instructor with Lynda.com who teaches a number of courses available through Lynda.com.  The topic I am discussing here is  Flex 3.0., or more specifically, Adobe Flex Builder 3.0.  Adobe Flex is a collection of different technologies used for developing Rich Internet Applications.   So what is Flex and what is a Rich Internet Application?  The term “rich internet application” was introduced by Macromedia (now merged with Adobe) in March 2002 (ref: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/whitepapers/richclient.pdf ).  Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have the features and functionality of desktop applications.  This includes greater interactivity and ease of use, than one might find on websites that do not employ or display rich internet applications.  Rich Internet Applications can access databases as well, and utilize a variety of additional server-side programming languages.

[Note:  Look for examples of Flex Rich Internet Applications on the Future Wave Designs websites, in particular here at our Rich Internet Application Showcase link.] 

While Adobe Flex Builder 3 is not the only application tool for creating Rich Internet Applications, I personally find it to be one of the most powerful, feature-rich and easy to use methods for doing so.  In this course, Flex 3 Essential Training, available for purchase, on DVD, from the link included in this article, David Gassner does a wonderful job presenting the essentials of developing web applications within Adobe Flex Builder 3.

We begin with the basics, covering the native Flex application markup language called MXML and the use of the ActionScript 3.0 programming language which is often used within the code for Flex Projects and Applications.  We compare the use of the Design view with the Source view as well as the Debugging View and when to use each.  We cover the various controls and containers that make up the Flex Class library, moving to working with Data, including databases on the server and incorporating the PHP server-side programming language into Flex Projects.

This is a very comprehensive course, well taught and presented in an easy to follow format.  I highly recommend this as a Flex training tool.  As comprehensive as this is, there is still more that David Gassner covers about Flex 3 in his follow-up training title with Lynda.com entitled “Flex 3.0: Beyond the Basics.

This is one of those new and exciting applications from Adobe, a company well deserving of its reputation for creating innovative technologies for the web and desktop.  When I first heard about AIR - Adobe’s Integrated Runtime - I really didn’t see a use for this tool immediately.  Throughout this article, Adobe Integrated Runtime and AIR will refer to the same thing.  I work as a web developer, web designer and programmer, and as such, most of my work is on the web.  However, even before I jumped into using AIR, I was thinking about how exciting it would be to have applications that use the content of the web and yet not be constrained by the limitations of browsers.

Browsers have long been the only way to present content that is availabe on today’s internet and world wide web.  Adobe’s Integrated Runtime is an alternative way to present web content.  Many exciting applications are being created, using AIR, that access information, data and services on the internet and the world wide web.  It is also true that applications can be written for AIR that access services on your local computer.

If you haven’t used AIR on your computer yet, you will need to download and install AIR, the application itself, to be able to run applications that use AIR or run within AIR.  Adobe Integrated Runtime will run on Windows XP, Vista and some earlier versions of Windows, along with the latest Mac Operating systems (OS X).  Now, AIR is becoming available on Linux-based operating system environments as well.

Adobe’s Integrated Runtime is exciting for web developers and web programmers because we can use ourexisting skills, in developing applications for the web, now in developing applications for the desktop.  These applications can access content, data and services on the internet and the world-wide web.  Using the exisiting skills, that we as web developers have, we are able to develop applications for the desktop based on HTML/CSS and Javascript, Flash and Adobe Flex.  We, the developers and programmers, make it easy for you to install and use these applications that we create.

The best way to learn about how to create applications in Adobe Integrated Runtime is with this training title from Lynda.com called AIR Essential Training.  I’ve learned a great deal from this title and others by this author and recommend it very highly.

If you, your business, or organization has a website chances are that you want it to show up in the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and Moreover.  This is how people find you, by doing a web search at one of these search engines, typically Google, but not always Google.  There are a number of other search engines, and I list the biggest ones here.  It takes very little time to add your sitemap to each of these sites, when you have it ready, so why not list it on all of these sites?  This article will explain what sitemaps are and why they are important for you and your websites.

So, you might ask, “what is a sitemap?”

You might have seen on large sites with many, many pages, such as eBay.com, a link somewhere that says “sitemap.”  On eBay.com this link is in the uppper right when you come to the site home page (at least it is on August 24, 2008, as I write this).  This can  help you find things at the eBay.com site and other sites that use this.  This can help you avoid drilling down through menus and submenus, to find what you need. Perhaps you are thinking that your site is not as big as eBay’s site, so you don’t need a sitemap.

There are two types of sitemaps.  The one just described in the previous paragraph is a human readable sitemap, an HTML (or XHTML) sitemap.  There are reasons to offer something like this, even if your site is much smaller.  I won’t get into those reasons here in this article.  The other sitemap is intended for the search engines to read and is written in XML.  This sitemap is meant to be read by computers running a variety of software for crawling the web and gathering information.  There is a standard format for these sitemap.xml files in XML.  Learn what XML is at Future Wave Design’s Web Development Community Information site here.

You will want to submit this latter type of sitemap to the search engines, the ones mentioned above, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and Moreover.  By doing submitting your sitemap to the search engines, you are telling them what you have on the site, how it is organized, how to find everything and what is important on your site.  This increases the chances that the search engines will index the pages that are listed in the sitemap.  Before a search engine can display your web pages when someone searches for keywords related to your site, the search engine must index the site, adding the site and its pages to the index.

If you are not a coder or web developer, don’t worry, your web development professional should be able to do this for you.  If you wanted to try to create your own sitemap for your site, try this tool to Create your Google sitemap using the Sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com Sitemap Generator here. This tool will create sitemaps for a vareity of different search engines, in addition to Google.

Once you have the sitemap created, you are then ready to submit it to Google and the other search engines.  To submit your sitemap to Google go here. I did just find a site that will submit your sitemap to these search engines for you and it has a tool to create a sitemap.  Create and submit your sitemap with Sitemap Writer here. Further details on submitting your sitemaps can be found here.