Behind Genexus

Showing Events

2009-06-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

Image Galleries, Videos, Maps, Charts, are essential controls for data visualization.

Applications today need to deal and visualize a lot of rich data. Probably one of the most recurrent data pattern is an Event Collection, basically you have a chronological serie of events and you need to show them in a rich way.

A common way to showing these data is a Scheduler control , we have been working in a really cool user control in order to give Genexus users the availability of showing this data pattern.

Some screenshots:

Month View

Adding events directly in the control
Day View

How to load events? Using a DataProvider.

The control raise AJAX events like EventAdded, EventUpdated, EventDeleted so that you could update your datastore on them.

We continue working on it but it'll be available very soon.

You can do it using Genexus

2009-06-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Some days ago Gustavo unveiled some screen shots of our new User Interface for Genexus Server and today you can start trying it online

You need a Genexus Technical user account in order to start browsing all the knowledge in Genexus Server .

Marcos was guessing how we did this product. The answer : We are using Genexus.

At the end the GX Server UI is a web application so we decided to use Genexus to develop it and Genexus Server to host it and work with our team on this KB. At the end of the day we are doing bootstrapping and dog fooding of the Genexus IDE and Genexus Server.

We can summarize our architecture with the following figure:

The Genexus Visualizer and the Authorization & Authentication modules have been written with Genexus.

Some days ago Google previewed the Google Wave showing us a lot of cool stuff we can do in a web browser, they mantra was: “You can do it in a web browser” , I’ll modify this phrase for this post and say: “You can do it easily with Genexus and browse it in a web browser”

Think twice

2009-04-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

Somebody once said something like (sorry I couldn't find who),

"Whenerver somebody says 'it can't be done', they are usually interrupted by somebody who is already doing it"

This phrase has stuck in my mind every time I say NO (If you are following me on Twitter, don't worry, I'm not going to twiter about it every day ;).

Why all this? well, I feel that the Javascript community is constantly interrupting the development of RIA applications saying: "hey, here you are, it's the same sample up and running using Javascript."

And lately they've added a new word at the end of the phrase: "here you are, it's the same sample up and running FAST."

So far, this history has been full of interruptions from Javascript in the RIA world

· Javascript was not developed for this use --> AJAX applications work everywhere

· Javascript + DOM is a bad programming practice --> many easy to use frameworks, such as jQuery wicht hides DOM management

· Too many bad controls --> many high quality controls based on Javascript frameworks.

· Too slow --> High performance Javascript engines

· Graphics? --> Canvas HTML5

I think Javascript technologies will continue to grow; and technologies like Silverlight, AIR and JavaFX wich will also continue to grow, are now useful for many scenarios.

I could say "use AIR or Silverlight if you wanna create cool animations, graphics, performance, etc" but I'm not going to say it because these guys will probably interrupt me:

http://blog.thejit.org/javascript-information-visualization-toolkit-jit/

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/canvas3d/

http://www.ajaxrain.com

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/chrome-experiments-are-here.html

In our DTM (Development Team Meeting), I said that: "It's very difficult to find a good spreadsheet control to be integrated in our applications for use directly over a blob in the database"

Well.... Zoho, Genexus, and Gonzalo reminded me about this phrase again and did it

So, in software development I recommend you remember this:

think twice before saying "can't be done"

By the way, if you are a soccer fan of Nacional you know it is very difficult to catch up with Peñarol, but I'm not saying it's impossible ;) Take a look at this spreadsheet