Google Gears - GApollo?

Just found this one - Google Gears.

Seems that idea of making web applications capable to work offline is quite popular these days. Pioneered by Adobe Apollo and now we have Google Gears.
Looking at the list of supported browsers

Apple Mac OS X (10.2 or higher)
Firefox 1.5 or higher
Linux
Firefox 1.5 or higher
Microsoft Windows (XP or higher)
Firefox 1.5 or higher
Internet Explorer 6 or higher

am not impressed that much. Second, is the "clever" idea to put SQL statements in javascript code - it's very easy to hack the application if you know the database structure. And finally you will get the famous Google attitude - it's free so we won't bother making it look nice and easy to understand - the samples are ugly, the documentation is far from perfect.

getters & setters

Just in case you didn't know that, you always need to specify get & set methods for Java class if you need it properly deserialized on the Flex part.
For example
Flex:

[RemoteClass (alias="core.company.CompanyRegionDescBean")]
public class CompanyRegionDescBean
{
public var url:String;
public var name:String;
}

Java:

public class CompanyRegionDescBean implements Serializable{

private String url="";
private String name = "";

public String getUrl() {
return url;
}
public void setUrl(String url) {
this.url = url;
}
public String getName() {
return url;
}
public void setName(String url) {
this.name = name;
}

}

Now, if you remove setName - you will always get name as null on Flex side.

You should also make sure that all your variables are named according to Java conventions, for example, they should start with letter in lowercase.
Just try this one..

private String Name = "";

And you are also in trouble.

Flash to SilverLight converter

Robin Debreuil, creator of Xamlon (C# to SWF converter) is working on SWF to XAML converter, the results are very interesting and promising - check out his blog.

Google, what's wrong with me?

Got this yesterday when trying to add a new post

What the hell?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.
To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon.
In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run
a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

Yahoo web messenger

I really like what Yahoo is doing with Flash/Flex.
http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/
just another brilliant piece of work

Yahooo!

http://www.forbes.com/topstories/home/feeds/ap/2007/05/04/ap3685735.html

Software maker Microsoft Corp. asked search engine operator Yahoo Inc. to re-enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion, the New York Post reported on Friday.

Well, this does seem to make sense.

SWX - a great idea

SWX – new format of exchanging data between flash and server.

The idea behind is that you get a small SWF file holding your data back from the server, thus making it possible to show progress bar to the user, there’s also no additional data parsing required as the data within SWF is immediately available after load.

Great stuff, Aral!

Alex

Google - don't be evil !

Google products are definitely cool. I'm pretty sure they scale well, their code is obviously very object-oriented, system components are loosely-coupled, and business logic is separated from the presentation and all that stuff.
There is only one little problem - everything they do (except GoogleMaps) looks like crap.
Sorry, Google, don't mean to abuse, but someone should tell you the truth.
Your products look like they were created by 'will write HTML code for food' guy.
I have my own vision of why it always happens with Google – the nerds (erm, sorry, I meant to say, engineers, although Google prefer to call them geeks) just don’t pay attention to how it looks like because it’s not that exciting as recompiling Linux kernel or improving bubble sort algorithm.

Google, please, please, I’m begging you, find someone who DOES care of how page looks like - we are not GoogleBots, we want it looking nice.

Don't be evil to me Google, my heart hurts when i see Google Video or Docs&SpreadSheets.

back links for free

Do you read monthly bug reports? I never did, and don't think I ever will, cause I don't see a point - you just need to watch for DaveN's blog :)

As he discovered phpinfo() has an XSS vulnerability (PHP 4.3.3 - 4.3.6 are affected) so you can pass the link(s) as a parameter to any phpinfo() page and it will show it on the page. Well, there are a lot of phpinfo pages availble on the net, and a lot of them even have PR>3

I bet BlackHat SEOs soon will start sponsoring developers to make backdoors like that open.
Or did it already happen ? :)

Take care,
Alex