Spry: Adobe in Reservoir Dogs Type Stand-Off

May 19th, 2006 "Spry":http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ oh why oh why? I am of course referring to Adobe's "recently released":http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html AJAX framework called Spry. See the problem I have with this is Adobe seem to be lining this up directly in comparison to Flex. After Adobe's recent adverts to "Go Beyond AJAX with Flex" they now seem to be hedging their bets by releasing their own framework in an arena with the other "135 other":http://ajaxian.com/archives/134-ajax-frameworks-and-counting frameworks (134 plus the "Google Web Toolkit":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html). There is now so much choice it's unreal and how many people are going to use Spry over Prototype, DOJO, JSON, Yahoo's web widgets and "all the others":http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Frameworks. The way I see it Adobe should be 110% behind making Flex 2 a success which is fairly unique in its industry (yes I know about "Laszlo":http://www.laszlosystems.com/ et al.) At the moment they are only diluting their position. The developer community is going to watch them plug each other while they go on hacking around with their favoured AJAX framework. This said, Spry actually looks quite good. It's very much based on loading then manipuling XML datasets and will feel very familar to Flex developers and using it's dynamic region markup does make a page quite readable and succient while other AJAX frameworks require much more effort to understand where the data is coming from and being manipulated. But why would I use it over Flex? In non-Flash based environments? Maybe but then i've got "Prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ and "Scriptaculous":http://script.aculo.us/for that. Instead what Adobe has done is sow doubt in my mind that they are not 100% sure Flex will suceed.....

WebDAV on Rails

May 8th, 2006 A little treat for you all. As part of a larger project i've been working on, i've created a plugin for Rails which allows for controllers to handle "WebDAV":http://www.webdav.org/ requests. At the moment it is only working for Rails 1.0 but i'll work on upgrading it. It's still only beta, has a few problems and doesn't do the whole spec, which is massive. But it's a good start. WebDav controllers can be registered by: 


  class DavController < WebDavController
    set_rails_webdav_root "directory_path"
    set_max_propfind_depth 1

  end
This will allow a directory under RAILS_ROOT to be accessible via WebDAV. You can also register callbacks to handle the assets after a request 

  def after_webdav_put
     logger.info("got a new file #{@file_path}")
  end
WebDAV is great and a Rails implementation will allow exposing not just files but a file-system representation of your data and system to users. Anyway i'll release the code soon but for now "here is a video":/assets/2007/2/4/WebDavOnRails.mov