Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/05/22/popfly_diy_mashups/
Microsoft launches no-code mashup tool
Visual mashups for the MySpace generation
Posted in Software, 22nd May 2007 10:30 GMT
Popfly, Microsoft's first Silverlight application, is a visual development tool for creating mashups without writing any code.
Dan Fernandez, lead product manager in Microsoft's developer division, wants Popfly to reach what he calls "the MySpace generation" who want cutting edge web gadgets without cutting edge coding.
"We have Visual Studio Express and we actually have had 14 million downloads since November 2005. To give you an idea, World Of Warcraft, a very popular game, has eight million users worldwide. So we have huge download numbers, especially for tools.
"But one of the things we found is a lot of people that tried it weren't programmers, they had never written a line of code and they thought it was hard. This is the MySpace generation. They're writing markup, they understand tags, they're not necessarily writing their own JavaScript but they're taking JavaScript and tweaking it - it's the copy/paste world. This is our tool for the people that want to create stuff; they don't necessarily know how to write the first line of code but they want to create something and have it running within a couple of minutes, with no code."
Fernandez sees a wide market for Popfly. "The number of worldwide developers using non-professional tools from MySpace to VBA to simple scripts - that's over a 100 million people. They vary in sophistication and we want to have tools for all types of sophistication. The biggest number [of them] will be the users for Popfly; they want to create, they don't want to code. Our goal is democratise development."
He demonstrated using Popfly to create a gadget showing tagged and geo-tagged photos from Flickr in a 3D sphere, with the image you hover over zooming to show a larger view and metadata.
"This is our gratuitous 3D," he joked. Then changed it to mapping the images on Virtual Earth. The Popfly interface shows a list of controls that it calls "blocks".
According to Fernandez, "you can think of blocks as wrappers for things like data services, data transformation services, logic and presentation services. Under the covers it's just JavaScript, HTML, XML, and Silverlight. They're totally extensible, you can look at the source code of our blocks and remix it. With Silverlight 1.1 the people who are .NET developers and don't want to use JavaScript can use this. You could write a Perl block."
You can also add your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
To mash two services together, you drag the appropriate blocks onto the design service, drag lines between the nodes on each block to connect them, choose the operation you want to use and get a live preview on the design surface. The blocks have what Fernandez calls "smart defaults" so a block for photos will look for an image URL automatically. You can see a real time preview even without having an API key for the service you're working with if the service allows demos. While working on the blocks the preview displays in a transparent layer in the background.
Popfly gets round the cross-site scripting issue that makes most mashup development beyond geo-tagging complicated, claims Fernandez.
"We have a class called Environment and you just say where you're pulling XML or text from, and you can do that directly. That's one of the biggest pains [for novices]. You don't have hosting, you don't want to write code and there's the cross-site problems; all those are taken care of."
Publishing the code is simple too. There's a one-click publishing option not just for Windows Live Spaces but for any blog engine that supports the MetaWeblog API. This includes WordPress, Movable Type, and Community Server, so mashups can be embedded in a blog post. You can also copy and paste the IFRAME code onto your website. Popfly also includes the web page builder from Office Live so you can create the web pages to put it in if you don't have other tools.
As well as simplifying mashup creation, Fernandez hopes Popfly will make publishing and sharing mashups and gadgets much easier. "We're trying to make application development social and make application sharing social. If I want to share a Windows application today, there are sites like Download.com where you have to pay $50 every two months; it's really commercial. If it's just fun freeware there's no easy place to share it. The social part we want to do is we want to do for applications what YouTube did for video, where users decide what the best application is; they can share, they can remix, they can comment."
To that end there's a social network as part of the site, and every published Popfly mashup includes links to rate the mashup, copy it to your site, add it as a project to your own Popfly profile to customise, or copy and paste the code from the web page without needing to sign up for Popfly yourself.
You save Popfly mashups as Vista Sidebar gadgets; Popfly can also share Windows applications as well as web mashups using the Popfly Explorer Visual Studio 2005 plugin. At the moment that doesn't work with Visual Studio Express, but the Popfly team is working on enabling publishing of source code and completed projects, including Windows Forms, WPF, HTML, CSS, AJAX or Silverlight projects, from Visual Studio Express.
"This is where we get viral sharing of applications," claims Fernandez. "Somebody writes the next cool application; the next Napster, the next peer to peer MP3 player can be discovered through Popfly."
You'll be able to search Popfly by keyword, "so you could find anything that' written in Visual Basic that uses Twitter, direct from Visual Studio".
The intention is to have the Popfly service be useful for mainstream developers who won't use the drag and drop design surface too. "We want to have a spectrum of tools so that people that do want to use this to code, people doing JavaScript, DOM, and AJAX manipulation today, they can do that using Popfly as well."
For example, Fernandez suggests Popfly applications mixing peer-to-peer TV with phone integration to displayer caller ID and voice recognition so you can tell Media Center whether you want to take a call.
Microsoft chose to show off the private alpha of Popfly at O'Reilly's Maker Faire in San Mateo, Silicon Valley, an event that's all about hands-on technology development and hacking in the traditional sense.
The gathering featured giant Tesla coils generating lightning, human-power fairground rides, hand-built robots and rockets, and open source implementations of everything from USB controllers built into model planes, to 3D printers that print objects with sugar, cheese, or epoxy resin.
Popfly is a lot more mainstream than many of the projects on show and doesn't require access to welding equipment, propane, high explosives, ultra-high power, or a soldering iron, but it's still about being creative. ®