December 2006
by Jeb Boniakowski
At long last, Proto 1.5 is ready to download! Actually, it’s only been about six months since our last major release. That’s a pretty short product cycle, but believe me, it felt longer to us. I just wanted to write a quick post covering a couple of the highlights of the new release. Keep checking the blog, because we’ll continue to post more details. In the meantime you can download the new release and let us know what you think of it.
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by Jeb Boniakowski
Proto release 1.5 is now available for your downloading pleasure. In addition to a slew of powerful new features like Visual Basic for Applications integration and web services support, this release marks a major change in Proto's product line. Starting today, we're launching Proto Individual. It includes the full power of Proto and it's free for personal, non-commercial use. Essentially, the new features we've added to Proto over the last year have applicability far outside our homebase in the financial services industry, and we're really excited to see what people do with the functionality we've built. Interested parties are advised to contact us about commercial licensing. For now, though, please download it and let us now what you think!
New in Release 1.5:
by Jeb Boniakowski
Byron put together a video this afternoon that will show you a little bit of what Proto can do in about five minutes. Have a look (Flash).
by Jeb Boniakowski
eBay Technology Evangelist Alan Lewis on Rich Internet Desktop Applications:
I brought up the example of how the eBay category tree, when expressed as XML, is more than 20 MB large. Each eBay site has more than 50,000 categories, and that number grows every month. Lets say you want to build an application that lets users progressively filter (a la iTunes) the list of eBay categories. It would be pretty taxing on the back end to implement such a feature in AJAX. Now with a desktop application, you could download the category structure and cache it locally (something web apps can't do because of the security sandbox), and then in your application it is a fast local data lookup to filter the list instead of expensive remote processing.
This example illustrates that desktop applications are good not just for offline operation. In this example having more capabilities, such as the ability to write data to the hard drive, can allow for better experiences, and better applications.
Have I mentioned our new release has web services support lately?
by Jeb Boniakowski
Joel Spolsky wrote an article recently that's partly about the problems with technology journalism and partly about how No Silver Bullet implies that "Lego programming" will never make software development easier.
Software developers seem to have something of an immunoresponse to some of these ideas, one that's oddly not unlike the response Joel describes "real" C++ programmers having to VB. We saw this in the comments on a CNet article about Coghead.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that those of us in the Lego programming community don't intend to replace VB for building the next Quicken, just like the designers of VB didn't intend to replace C for writing video drivers. Rather than comparing Lego programming tools to C#, we should be comparing them to Excel, Access, Filemaker, and Lotus Notes.
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