After years of promise it really does look like mobile is the next big thing? But what mobile platform will prove to be the most popular? It seems to be a two horse race between iPhone and Android, with Windows Mobile lagging somewhere in the distance – or is it already a non-runner? In any case it’s been delayed until late 2010.
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Would anybody want StreamLink for Windows Mobile?
Phil Leggetter
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Scaling Flex for enterprise applications
Martin Tyler
Last night Phil Leggetter and I attended a session on Scaling Flex applications run by Skillsmatter. The video of the event has now been posted.
We found this interesting as we as a company have entered the world of Flex. Our product is a Flex library API, which is part of our Caplin Xaqua offering, whereas the session discussed creating a Flex GUI application. It was good to see that there are a number of powerful Flex application frameworks and that they could easily be leveraged to use our library. The talk covered frameworks, modularisation techniques and tools that have been used by Lab49 in the various Flex projects they have been involved in.
Borre Wessell of Lab49, who gave the talk, also covered their agile development process, which sounds fairly similar to ours even though they do more consultancy and we do a mix of consultancy and product work.
It was also interesting that Borre recommended using Flash Builder 4 beta as we also found that was better with its integrated unit testing and other productivity enhancements. Tool support does seem a bit lacking in some areas for Flex – whilst there is a memory profiler as part of Flash Builder 4 the performance testing seems to be very much a manual process. We prefer to have performance tests as part of our automated processes so you can catch any regressions as early as possible.
Next week I will post my followup to my previous post about streaming technologies, which will touch on the LCDS approach compared to Caplin’s methods.
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Streamlink for Silverlight for Mobile
Phil Leggetter
With the recent release of Caplin’s Streamlink for Silverlight it’s exciting to find out that Microsoft plan to release a Silverlight for Mobile devices.
The goal of Silverlight is to provide a consistent experience across desktop and mobile phones. Developers will be able to easily optimize Silverlight applications for mobile form factors or run existing Silverlight applications on mobile phones.
The great thing about this release is that any existing Silverlight applications should work on any mobile device with Silverlight installed. The question about this is that if you design a user interface for a desktop browser how will it fit on a windows mobile browser? Well, Microsoft plan to give developers the ability to “optimize Silverlight applications for mobile form factors” which sounds like they will give us a way of dealing with the obvious UI differences between desktop and mobile platforms, as well as the underlying runtime issues.
We’ve already blogged about what impact Silverlight may have on single dealer portals. I’m really excited to see what developers can do using StreamLink for Silverlight to enable the real-time web on a windows mobile device. What opportunities might Streamlink for Silverlight Mobile enable?
Silverlight for Mobile
Read the Silverlight for Mobile FAQ for more information.
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Getting realtime data into Excel
dom
Starting with Excel 2002, Microsoft have included the RTD interface which allows Excel to poll for data. Polling seems to be a much more efficient way of getting data into Excel than the classic approach which is pushing – it’s not uncommon to find yourself pushing when Excel isn’t ready which results in lockups, inconstitencies and other undesirable effects.
The RTD interface is small (6 methods) and Kenny Kerr has a great series of articles about RTD on his blog so I won’t repeat that information here and instead concentrate on integration to StreamLink.NET and pulling in real time data from a Caplin platform deployment.
The following walkthrough is a short example of how to do this, there’s no error checking, logging and certainly the example is nowhere near production quality, however it does demonstrate that linking up Excel and data from the Liberator is straightforward.
