We have moved.
After almost an year of thinking iteratively and recursively, we finally got our all new domain name. SO that now we can freely host our projects and small Widgets. And to commemorate that, I even made an desktop application in Flex, that reads live feeds from nytimes. com, timesofIndia.com and bbc.co.uk. Its just a modified RSS reader, powered by AIR, but more of it later.
So the news is we have moved. And henceforth you can check out our take on technology.
Choosing a domain name was the tough part, and we had been vacillating for almost an year. So much so that I vented it out on one of my blogs . And thanks to buymedomains.com’s suggestion (we are hosting it elsewhere, wherein we already have a hosting account), we liked the domain name, and got it! SO check us Buzyy & Me at our new blog. 
NeYawn
Porting Stockastica Application to AIR
Now that Stockastica is fully ready, I have been working on porting the Stockastica Flex application to AIR.
Porting any Flex application to AIR involves changing the <Application> tags to <WindowedApplication> and adding an XML file. It is painfully simple. I did spend some time adding features that are specific to a desktop application.
We also spent some time modifying the CSS properties to give it a customized look( though I am pretty sure I managed to ruin even the plain vanilla look ). It felt weird knowing that I was modifying the presentation layer of a desktop application using CSS. But it works flawlessly and I was really impressed, especially after I had gone through the harrowing experience of styling and skinning the Silverlight app. Using XAML resources is not as intuitive as using CSS.
Here is a screencast of Version 2.0 of the App I finally prepared after porting it to AIR. I am sorry about the large resolution. Will post another one on a lower resolution soon. Hope you like what you see. Please leave your comments below. I would love to hear any suggestions.
Buzzy
Stockastica Version 1.0
Things couldn’t have gotten better.
Almost an year back, Buzzy had developed this App Stockastica, a virtual stock market game using Visual Studio, retrieving live data from Nasdaq.com. It retrieved the Quotes of 20 companies, and displayed them wherein, users could buy and sell stocks using virtual bounty. At the end of the day, the person with the biggest net assets won $50 real money from the organizers! The UI was simplistic, and minimalistic. But then thats what you can do when you are on a self motivated project with a deadline of 4 days, and you have no idea whether the idea is feasible.
That was then. Thanks to Raghu, Technical Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Bangalore, who came to our college and held a 2-day workshop on Flex, we got a bit into Flex. And then, we decided, we would go for developing the App in Flex this year. A few months later Flex 3 was released, and we got a free copy of Flex 3 for students, and started out building the App in Flex 3.
And here it is- Version 1.0 of Stockastica.
[ The Screencast is made using Jing, which is a recent discovery, and which is awesum too!]
[ P.S. We ARE still working to better the Plain Vanilla look, getting more and more confused, every time we tweak it 
]
Flex vs. Silverlight: My Views
I have been developing on both Flex and Silverlight for some time, and now is as good a time as any to evaluate these two exciting technologies. My goal was to create two similar applications on both Flex and Silverlight. I decided to redo the Stockastica application. It is an online stock trading simulation. Last year it was done using ASP.NET. This year I decided to use the new RIA technologies to dive into the world of Web 2.0.
A word of caution here. I might be slightly biased towards Flex because I have been developing on Flash for quite some time and I find it simply fantastic. Also, I used the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to build the application. It is obvious that the final release of the product will address some of the issues described here.
I will put up screencasts showing both the applications in action soon.
So, let’s begin…
| Flex | Silverlight |
| Almost everyone has Flash Player 9 installed on their systems. So there are no extra downloads required to view these apps. | Installing the Silverlight 1.0 plugin was a hassle for me. Then the upgrade to the 2.0 version was not as seamless as I had expected. Almost no one has the Silverlight plugin (But Microsoft has Windows update on their side, one ‘Critical Update’ and the problem is solved ). |
| Flex has a rich control library ready for use. | Even in Beta 1, many controls are missing. Though I expect this problem to be solved by the final release of the product. |
| Supports all image formats. | Does not support the GIF format. Why? Wasted half an hour on this problem before I realized this. |
| Even though AS3 is 10 times faster than AS2 (Ask someone who has worked with particle systems), it still cannot compare with the power of C#. Also, can only program in AS3. | Very powerful and easy to use. You can use JavaScript, VB.NET and C#. |
| Linux support |
No Linux support. That’s just wrong. |
| Databinding is a snap with the [Bindable] tag. | Not as straightforward, but can be done anyway. Also, more powerful(in my opinion). |
| Data transfer via the proprietary AMF using WebORB, Fluorine, etc is faster than traditional web services. | No such format for data transfer. Will have to stick to SOAP and REST web services(for now). |
| BlazeDS, the real time data push and remoting platform is open source. Very exciting. | !! Did not find much information about this. |
| Styling is simplified by using CSS to style your components. Implementation is not complete though. Stuff like background-repeat is a glaring omission. | Have to use XAML resources. Found this unfamiliar. |
| Debugging is a bit of a hassle. | Debugging using Visual Studio is very easy. |
| Accessing web services requires manual creation of ActionScript proxy classes. You can automate this by using FlexTense though. | Accessing web services is very easy. Just add a reference to the WebService in Visual Studio and lookup reference.cs for the good stuff |
| Size of the compiled SWF file is smaller than that of the uncompressed Silverlight component. | Size of the Silverlight component is larger. |
| !! | Get 10 GB of hosting space free with Silverlight streaming. Deliver rich media. Awesome. |
| Animation is time based. | Animation is frame based. Can’t say which one is better. |
| Cannot be search engine optimized. Bots can’t read the contents of the SWF file. | I am confused about this after the introduction of the .XAP file. |
| Deploying the final application is a snap because there is only one SWF file. | Lots of individual files to be deployed. |
| Got my copy of Flex Builder 3 Pro for free. If you are a student or faculty member of an educational institution, you can too. | Express editions of Visual Studio are available for free. |
Those are all the points that come to mind right now. Will update as I find and learn new stuff.
Buzzy
