UI.ImageView in TideSDK? - tidesdk

A few years back I have been using Titanium Desktop to make an app for Mac. Having been satisfied I came back recently to it for another project, but apparently Titanium Desktop is now TideSDK.
Looking at the reference it seems that a lot of stuff has disappeared, I was mostly expecting more elements in UI, like ScrollView, ImageView and such.
Did they simply vanish from this new release or is it just not fully documented ?

First of all I need to make clear that TideSDK is not Titanium Desktop. While it began on legacy code, more than 1 million lines changes of code have been committed and the SDK has been in existence for almost a year now. You will find a different namespace but API compatibility.
The code base is quite different and has been undergoing major restructuring and improvements. That said, for the end user, it is just as friendly to use. We don't like to go back to discuss the past since we have contributed a body of code that allows developers to run TideSDK on today's modern operating systems. This was only the result of substantial efforts and the continued development of TideSDK by its contributors. If you experience any issues, please file them with on our issue tracker on github.

Related

Enterprise Framework - UWP Vs. Web

Broad, sweeping question here...
Assume you have built an enterprise level framework with some rich client in the .Net (Microsoft) sphere, with a WCF back end. Now, imagine that that enterprise framework's UI technology is being deprecated in favour of UWP.
The choices for a front end replacement basically are: UWP, Web (HTML), or some other rich client technology.
How would you go about the decision making process?
I personally lean toward a rich client where the user base is a captive user base. I mean, where the users' IT department is happy to install the necessary runtime environment on the machines, etc. This is usually not a problem with Microsoft technologies, and this won't be a problem in about 10 years when organizations roll out Windows 10.
But, people are telling me these days that web has come a long way. People are telling me that JavaScript frameworks are becoming very sophisticated, and that low level JavaScript for basic data binding and the like is mostly unnecessary.
I have really been turned off by web solutions like ASP in the past, but I do understand that technology has moved forward, and I do understand that Microsoft have been working on ASP.Net v Next which might actually be good?
The question is not so much what would you opt for? But, what factors would you take in to account to decide which platform to go for?
Opnion based answer here...
In a decision to adopt a particular tech for any project lies in many factors. I can cite two majors for your particular scenario.
1 - Client adoption. It's easy for the customers to use/install it? They need to pay some sort of license? Can it run in all platforms/devices the customer already own?
2 - Market adoption. It's easy for you co-workers to adopt it? It's hard to find/hire experienced/hardened developers? We need to pay some kind of license? Can I trust it ill be a long lived technology?
The answer to your question can be HTML.
Not only it is already got a lot of momentum in market, it ill take years to change it even if today someone (big like MS or Google) put some new (better) stuff on the table.
Also if someone on MS marketing dep say next week Universal Windows Platform or WinRT must die it ill die (like Silverlight). So Im not adopting some new technology just because some big player told me to do it.
Yes web has come a long way indeed. You can do a lot of amazing things just with JS+HTML+CSS those days. Also the right usage/architecture of it ill allow you to put your app running in PCs, Tablets and Mobiles (at a minimum cost to port between devices) and capable in running in anything can access internet.
I suggest you to catch up and learn a lot about webservices, Json, JS libraries like JQuery, Sammy and some nice stuff like Knockout, SPA, Angular, Node, etc.
Edit, answer to comments
To not start a chatty comment I'll respond here. Yes your questions and comments brings interesting questions. To let it readable for posterity both of us can edit answer and question to organize it.
Silverlight. How not love it? In special after strugling with flash. It's a shame MS pulled the plug (die in hell MS CEOs). When MS let it to die I was planning a big web app SL was my first choice. Why I changed my mind? Well 2 years to develop that app and at the end how much browser ill get along supporting it? The SL community is great, the tool is great but browsers can just say, Hey tomorrow there's no guarantee it keep working.
.Net and MS platforms. I'm a .Net developer. I adopted it since beta, first to work with winforms (in a previous life I was a proud Delphi developer). After a while started to work with web. I also worked in classical ASP (bad times) and loved .Net ASP from start.
You can run .Net apps in almost any PC in the planet today. Not exactly true for all mobiles/gadgets. For browsers pure HTML+JS+CSS ill to better because it's lightweight (done right). Also we can move a lot of thing to client side and just let it hit the server only when necessary. .Net apps can do that, sure, but ill never be light as a tailored HTML+JS+CSS.
In fact I believe you can do anything with .Net and you can do amazing things if you got a few good developers in your team. But depending on the project it ill do better (and cheaper) in HTML or PHP or Ruby or Java, etc.
In fact at a previous shop, with both PHP and .Net teams we found (after 1 year study, metrics, lots of projects) small projects are better done in PHP, larger ones in .Net (if I remember a medium project can be 4k to 6k men/hours).
The point here is. You really must read a lot about HTML, CSS, JS, SPA, Angular, etc. Bringing to live a big and shinning web app is challenging today not because what we can do (we can do anything) but how we can do. DDD, MVC, MVVM. Testing framework, etc. Man Node is the future (the concept at least).
Web developing really changed in the last years and with it the clients and users expectations. Today no one ill wait for more than 2 secs for a page to load. Everybody wants usability to be at the top of the table from project scratch. You app must be responsive, etc. (not using Dilbertian management buzz words here for the sake of it. Just stating usability is that important today).
And don't forget everyone wants it to be beatifull (from a graphical designer point of view) even if it's a dull B2B supposed to be used only by cave mens.
Even if you stick to a classical .Net app learn about the (many) options, that can bring a new wider perspective.
I have decided to answer this question here because we've had a lot more time to investigate and look at different options. The original question turned out to be a bit of a furphy. Pure UWP and Web are not the only options. There is also a Xamarin Forms as an option which includes UWP, Android, and iOS. As a personal preference, I am leaning toward using Xamarin Forms as a client instead of any other development platform because it supports three OSs out of the box: Windows 10, iOS, and Android.
I believe the answer to the question is: you should only develop a web app if you need to. Does your user base consist of people who will mostly prefer a browser over apps? Are your potential users likely to want to avoid downloading an app? Is your app very simple, and you want people to be able to dive in very quickly? Are you able to get away without access to things like the camera, location and push notifications? If you can answer yes to these things, then I think you should go for HTML 5/JavaScript. If however, your user base is comfortable downloading apps, and you think that your app will require a UI more sophisticated than most browser apps, I'd recommend looking at Xamarin Forms as the preferred option. We've had very good success with Xamarin Forms so far, and the UWP version of our Xamarin Forms app has turned out just as good as our first stab at a UWP app.
Note: I should give Web Assembly (http://webassembly.org/) an honorable mention here. This technology is being considered in all the big tech organisations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. One day, it may make deployment of native apps in a browser great again.

How to update Flex SDK in Flash Builder 4.6

As an owner of Flash Builder 4.6 I'm struggling with 2 problems in my web application:
XML parsing makes the whole application sluggish
Russian input in TextInput doesn't work with Opera
I wonder, if there is a new Flex SDK available for download, where some fixes might have been integrated since the Flash Builder 4.6 release several months ago.
So I have downloaded the "Flex SDK version 4.6.0.23201 is the latest production quality release" and installed it:
However this seems to be a version, which differs very little from the stock Flex SDK included with Flash Builder 4.6 originally.
My questions is: is there some good (i.e. fresh, but also tested/stable) source for Flex SDK, which would be suitable for Flash Builder 4.6?
Maybe I can check out the source from some repository and build it myself (how, please?).
Does Apache offer anything, since they are the new owners?
UPDATE:
I've checked out Apache's Flex with
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flex/trunk flex
(and have yet to figure out, how to build it) - isn't it newer and better?
is there some good (i.e. fresh, but also tested/stable) source for
Flex SDK, which would be suitable for Flash Builder 4.6?
Yes, that would be Adobe. I am not aware of any updates to Flex 4.6 since it's release late last November. It's only been three months. I believe the bulk of Adobe's work around Flex has been getting legal approval to submit Flex to Apache. They are getting that slowly.
You can download the source for the Adobe Flex SDK from opensource.adobe.com. Read this for info on getting the source from the Adobe SVN repository.
Does Apache offer anything, since they are the new owners?
The Apache project is still formally waiting for donations from Adobe, including their testing suite. But, some code is submitted from Adobe. A few people have submitted some new components, and there has been work done around localization. The Apache project does not have a formal release yet.
You should be able to get the Apache Source from SVN as an anonymous user. The trunk includes the framework dump from Adobe; but I haven't delved in myself. I know people have successfully built the Flex SDK from the Apache trunk. Here are some instructions on how to do it with IntelliJ
I should add that I'm not sure if updating the SDK will solve any XML parsing issues you have. But, it's tough to say for sure since you went into no details on what those issues are. My mobile game uses a 30K line, 1MB XML file for the level definitions and it has no problems parsing it effeciently.
Flex SDK sources
You can find the latest source code through the Flex Apache incubator page and use Subversion to check it out. However since the migration of the Flex SDK from Adobe to the Apache foundation is still very much in progress, I sincerely doubt that there would already be significant changes that would fix your issues.
The actual issues
XML parsing makes the whole application sluggish
XML parsing is a pure ActionScript matter and has nothing to do with Flex. It is closely related to how the Flash VM works, which is still closed property of Adobe. I don't think it is subject to change any time soon, mostly because I've heard very little complaints about its performance and the E4X language is one of the most powerfull around. If you're having performance issues better have a look at your architecture or work with AS model objects instead of XML.
Russian input in TextInput doesn't work with Opera
This is either related to the Flash VM (see above) or to the Text Layout Framework, which is "open-source", but still in the hands of Adobe. Whether it should also be contributed to Apache Flex is still being discussed. In both cases very little will change in the short future, so I think you'll have to try another approach.
Are you sure it has anything to do with the SDK? If the problem of cyrillic chars exists only in Opera - then it's more like a problem of Opera and its Flash-plugin.
This is what you get with Flex SDK 4.5 and Opera 11.61:
There might be another problem if you're using some font that doesn't have the cyrillic char subset (e.g. not using the default font). But if that were it, it would affect all browsers, not just Opera.
привет землякам!

Selected tech. stack for web application - criticism / comments?

I'm about to build my first serious Lisp-based project: a web application that will need to scale to tens of thousands of users (not concurrently - probably hundreds, at most, concurrently).
The stack I'm intending to use looks like:
Weblocks web framework with a BerkeleyDB back-end
Elephant object database
Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)
Ubuntu Server (10.04 LTS)
I have two areas of concern re. this stack:
Is Elephant dead? The latest release is getting on for three years old ... which could just mean that it's stable I guess :-)
As a relative newcomer to Lisp (but with significant RoR & ASP.NET experience) are any of those technologies likely to melt my head?
Feedback on my choices, & suggestions of alternatives, would be appreciated.
Elephant is effectively unmaintained. It does not work on current SBCL and the patch to fix the issue has not been applied. It's possible that someone else might pick up the development but it's not clear in the short term if that will happen. Some people use Rucksack as an object store, and bknr-datastore is also interesting.
Ubuntu is fine, but don't use Ubuntu Lisp packages; it's better to get SBCL from www.sbcl.org and libraries via Quicklisp. Because of that, almost any Linux will work equally well. I use Debian for my Lisp-powered website.
Weblocks is a continuations-based web framework - it is a very old approach, it should not be used for developing modern web-applications.
If you don't mind using PostgreSQL for persistence, you should check out Postmodern.
I have tried Weblocks, and i have made a simple web app also. But when i want to write a more complicated app, i found Weblocks is too limited. It lead user to write more widgets, but i suppose widgets cannot solve all web UI problem. I even read 80% source codes of Weblocks. But .... finally i decided to change another Web framework. What i really need, i suppose, is a url routing library like Ruby on Rails, Restas is fine. I tried it, and i wrote a blog library which support themes like WordPress using Restas. Restas is easier than Weblocks, but more powerful in my opinion.

Migrate Vb to Vb.net

Hai Friends
I having the project in Vb i want to migrate that project in the vb.net.any tool available pls inform me.i have tried a lot.i have not installed the visual basic.with the help of remote server i am running that project.
Quite a few versions of Visual studio have a built-in Upgrade Wizard to help you with converting VB6 to Vb.Net code. I know that VS 2005 Pro has it but I'm not sure what other versions.
Here's an article about how to go about upgrading. And there's even a complete free e-book about it as can be found here.
Aside from the sources Ho1 mentions some of the biggest pitfalls are the lack of control arrays, printing and graphics. The printing can be partly mitigated by the use of Printer Compatibility. You can download the PCL as part of the Visual Basic Power Pack 3.0.
If you have room in your budget I would recommend ArtinSoft. www.artinsoft.com. They have a trial version that you can test out. They have been named Microsoft's preferred VB to .NET upgrade solution provider.
I have trialed artinsoft's upgrade companion.
I have also looked at vbmigration partner.
This is my, very limited, anecdotal experience.
On vbmigration partner they have some sample conversions of projects they found on planat sourcecode.
One is call ezdatabase.
If you run vbmigration partner's conversion it will crash if you click the connect/disconnect button more than twice.
On the vb6 version you can click this all day without crashing.
This project is small enough to put through the artinsoft trial of vbuc in its entirety, so i did that.
However after i converted it, there seemed to be a lot of compile errors.
It's not a fair comparison as obviously vb migration partner had lots of opportunity to perfect it before putting the converted code on their website. and yet it was easy to crash.
However I was also disappointed with artinsoft's tool as this was just a small (few hundred lines) crud application and yet there were a lot of compile errors.
Make of this what you will. I would like to hear of others' experiences.
EDIT : On the other hand if this is a true test of the relative capabilities of vb migration partner and artinsoft vbuc then vb migration arner is clearly the winner in this example

a simple .net website source control system?

I work in Visual Studio working on sites mostly myself and occasionally I start on new features for a site and bam a bug pops up on the live site and now I am in the middle of changes and can't post a fix to the bug until everything I started to change is complete.
So I am looking for a nice an simple way to work with this type of situation - any suggestions?
Are you asking for a recommendation of a source control system? SourceGear Vault is free for single users.
I am big fan of subversion. There also plugins for VS to work with subversion repository.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/
I am in a similar situation and I use Perforce. It is free for up to two users and integrates well with Visual Studio.
Subversion is well supported and has tools for most any environment. It's also mostly straightforward to use, so you should be able to get up and running quickly.
If you need to work on a lot of separate features and bugs at the same time, you might try Mercurial instead. The tooling support is a lot less mature but I find the distributed design to do a better job of merging and facilitating work on separate issues concurrently.
But really, if you aren't using anything currently and aren't sure what your needs are, just choose one that has support in the IDE/tools you use. It will probably be Subversion.

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