The video of the London Ajax Comet panel has now been posted along with some slides.. also Dylan has posted some photos he got an audience member to take too.
Here are the links:
Video/Slides: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/ajax-ria/comet-panel/zx-486
Photos: http://flickriver.com/photos/dylans/sets/72157624493006656/
Now you can see what a bunch of Comet vendor geeks look like!
Thanks again to Dylan and Skillsmatter for hosting the event.
I have been blogging on CometDaily since before we started Platformability so thought I would take a look back and see if there was anything there that might be of interest to our Platformability audience.
Early on in CometDaily’s lifetime I wrote a piece on the Evolution of Comet at Caplin which covers how Caplin’s core technology has evolved since the start in 1997. The article was written in 2007, so I thought I would say how things have moved on since then.
The article finishes off talking about Caplin Trader our Ajax trading front end framework. This is still a large focus for Caplin, but we have also expanded out. There is a lot of extra functionality on the backend that was developed along with Caplin Trader – higher level integration to Trading and Permissions for example. Although Caplin Trader allows you to host other RIA technologies within it, we also wanted to more openly support other client side technologies in their own right. So we worked on these APIs to create Caplin Xaqua which is the full stack of our software, from backend integration APIs, through Liberator (and Comet) out to our StreamLink client APIs, which we expanded to include .Net, Silverlight and Flex.
Coming back to Comet, with the new client APIs and also new browsers and browser versions, we improved our coverage of Comet techniques to ensure the best possible connection is made for each scenario.
And the future? Well I have blogged about HTML 5 WebSockets more than once and to reiterate, it is a good new tool for Comet server implementers (rather than people developing web applications themselves) and i’m sure when the market share for browsers supporting WebSocket grows we will be adding the capability to Liberator and Streamlink.
Microsoft’s MIX10 Developers and Designers conference is currently running in Las Vegas. Sadly I’m not attending as it sounds like lots of fun…
There has been lots of buzz and some really interesting bits coming out so far including Silverlight 4 RC, Internet Explorer 9 preview (with HTML5 and CSS3 etc.), Windows phone information, etc.
Scott Hanselman has posted a great roundup of the announcements and keynotes.
We’ve all seen the retail and consumer space push to ditch IE6 gathering pace over the last 6 months, including a petition to the UK government and Google’s announcement that their online productivity suite stopped supporting IE6 yesterday. But the corporates (and specifically banking) have been a lot more reluctant to follow suit. But is this about to change?
Rumour on the street has it that, finally, the investment banks are going to start abandoning IE6. Barclays are allegedly going to do an enterprise-wide rollout of IE8 in Q2 of this year (put back from Q3 last year). Even more surprising (and impressive) is a rumour that Standard Bank of South Africa are going to ditch Microsoft browsers completely and move to Chrome for their corporate standard!
I was going to blog about HTML5 WebSocket last week, but got side tracked. In the meantime Greg Wilkins wrote an excellent piece covering some of what I wanted to say – http://blogs.webtide.com/gregw/entry/websocket_chat
The idea of WebSocket is sound – it should get past some of the limitations of the various Comet techniques used today on various real time websites. It gives you full duplex communication between a browser and a server – Comet fakes this somewhat, but in most cases it is sufficient.
Some people seem to think that WebSocket is going to mean no more Comet servers and no more frameworks for real time data. But as Greg points out, WebSocket just doesn’t give you enough.
(More …)
No, that title isn’t a typo. Today, the little master, Sachin Tendulkar scored 200 runs in an ODI, the first time that has happened. That’s cricket in case you were wondering.
Cricket is played all round the world most of the year round, which means there are often games happening while you are sitting at your desk at work – or maybe you don’t have Sky Sports and have to follow the scores online even when at home.
So what do most people do? You sit there working while one of your browser tabs is open on http://www.cricinfo.com updating you with the scores. There are other sites too, but from my experience CricInfo’s ball by ball approach gives me the most information.
On November 10th Caplin and Finextra sponsored a webcast discussing issues surrounding single-dealer portals in capital markets. We have the highlights and while much of the discussion was purely business focused, part III discusses the emergence of Ajax versus Flex and Silverlight. It’s a very interesting topic and there’s been much debate over which RIA technology will dominate with various ways of looking at what determines technology choice.
From a business point of view the conversation gets interesting when Kevin Bourne asks “do you not want to see a point where people want 100% of the choice but all out of the can with a library of applications that they can then tailor much more specifically to what they want to deliver to their clients?”
You can see the other highlight videos on the Caplin Systems You Tube Channel.
You can also download a full transcript of the event:
Buyers Market – Single Dealer Portals and Courting the Online Client
Joe Armstrong in a recent blog post (which made it to reddit) announces the coronation of HTML 5 websockets now that Google has added them to Chrome. He’s also pleased to relegate Comet, long polling and its friends to the grave. This confuses comet with the techniques used to achieve it.
One of the big benefits of Caplin’s browser-based SDP platform, Caplin Trader, is that it can run in virtually any browser without the need for plugins or special configuration.
This is no mean feat for a complex, high performance, low latency trading portal framework written in JavaScript and running to >250KLOC. Although IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are similar enough to make it relatively straightforward to support each of them, IE7 and, particularly, IE6 are a different story. They are riddled with quirks and bugs in their layout, rendering and memory management engines. In addition, developer tool support is starting to lag. Worst of all, their performance is diabolical compared with the recent crop of competitors.
However, IE6 is often one of our customers’ main target browsers by default. Sadly the big financial institutions, and to a lesser degree their clients, run with locked-down and often out-of-date desktop components. This limits their capacity to upgrade or install new browsers, though it’s true that some of the smaller firms are able to do so more easily.
So, should we continue to support IE6? How should we encourage our customers and users to move to newer browsers? What are the benefits of doing so?
Could it be that the time for Silverlight in finance has come? Does Adobe Flex solve any of the complexities of building web applications? Where does Caplin Trader fit in to this landscape? These are all questions that I am hearing (and asking) increasingly at the moment – so here’s how I see it…
There has been a big push from Adobe towards using Flex (and to a lesser extent LiveCycle Data Services – their messaging product) for trading portals and you can certainly build a flashy offering, as can be seen in the recent launch of Morgan Stanley’s Matrix.
But questions still remain over the ease of development and deployment of such a large-scale enterprise application, and though the Flex Builder seems to make this easier, digging beneath the surface can make for a frustrating experience, as Alex Vandeberg’s excellent analysis recently described.
Could Silverlight be an answer to this?
