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OPFLY

THE

BEGINNING

DEMOCRATIZING

SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT

Aseel aldawoodKing Saud Universityaseel@ms2b.com

BSTRACT

In this paper an attempt is made to discover Popfly, what is it? What is the relation between Popfly and Silverlight? The target audience for it, can developers make use of it? Then we will discuss the usage of Popfly, and the categories it’s contain.Also how can the user access Popfly from within the visual studio development environment? What is the tool for that? Last but not least I made a little comparison between Popfly and another technology concerned in mashup creation Yahoo! Pipe.

Keywords

Popfly, Mashup, democratizing software development.

1. I

NTRODUCTION

The idea of software development without programming has become a thinking mania for all people. This saidto be democratizing software development so that all people can make applications without knowing how to dodevelopment.Popfly satisfies the condition of democratizing software development; with Popfly the user can generate someweb applications one of that is

mashups

, the concept of mashups that the user can take different buildingblocks and link them together to get some pretty good application results.

2. W

HAT

OPFLY

?!!

Popfly is on-line web development environment. It makes it easy for non-developers to create web sites,mashups and more, so programming is possible but is not required.Popfly itself is implemented using a combination of traditional Web application technologies (ASP.NET, AJAX,JavaScript, HTML, etc.) hosted in a highly available server infrastructure.

3.P

OPFLY

AND

ILVERLIGHT

Silverlight is a new technology introduced by Microsoft in April 2007. It is a plug-in for web browsers thatdisplays dynamic streaming content like video, audio, and images. [3]

Popfly is kind of drag and drop framework powered by Microsoft Silverlight development. It depends onSilverlight for the games and mashup to work probably. Popfly‘s environment is created in Silverlight.

1. T

ARGET

AUDIENCE

FOR

OPFLY

The target audiences are the non developers, but it is also useful for developers as well.

2.C

ATEGORIES

WITHIN

OPFLY

Within Popfly the user can create and share mashups, gadgets, games, web pages, and more.

5.1 Web Page Creator:

It is a powerful graphical editor; the users do not need to have any HTML knowledge. They can create aweb page, customize, edit, and style it without writing any code.

5.2 Mashup Creator:

5.2.1 What is a mashup?!!

Wikipedia defines a mashup as:

“…a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.” [4]

There is two kind of mashup content: the first kind is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed and thesecond one is a video player. Knowing that, the user can create a single block mashup or two-blockmashup and more.

5.2.2 What you can do with mashup?!

Tweak it:

The user can tweak theirs or other’s mashup by changing something minor such as a title, a colour,or an item being searched for by one of the block in the mashup. Then, he/she can save it on his/herPopfly account with different name.

Mashout:

It is not a single option, but several options, they are:



Embed it: display the HTML code to embed the mashup in a web page or in a social networkingpage.



Download as a Sidebar Gadget: save the mashup as a gadget on the sidebar of the windowsvista desktop.



Add to Windows Live Spaces: include the mashup in a windows live space.



Share on Facebook: share mashup on Facebook profile via a link.



E-mail as an E-Card: send a mashup to someone in the form of an E-card.



Email to a friend: send a mashup to a friend in the form of an email. [5]

5.3 Block Creator:

Users will need programming when they create blocks. The language that will be used to create the blockis XML, which is extensible Mark-up language, or they can use java script, which contains any metadataneeded to fully describe the Popfly block. This contains input/output type definition, icon URLs, and otherrequired intelliSence

information.

5.4 Game creator:

It is for creating games without writing any code .the user’s can do this by using simple and easy built-intools. Popfly game creator includes a lot of pictures that is useful when creating games. [7]If the userwants to modify the design of an item he/she can switch to XML surfs and change the code.

3.P

OPFLY

XPLORER

It is an optional plug-in that provides access to Popfly from within the visual studio 2005 developmentenvironment, which lets programmers and web developers: [8]



Create web site locally on their PC using Microsoft Visual web developer and open there webpage that they have created in Popfly.



Store visual Studio solutions on Popfly, making them accessible from anywhere.



Access friend’s projects, rate them, and comment on them.Visual studio is a programming environment with tool and technologies for professionalprogrammers.

4.P

OPFLY

. Y

AHOO

! P

IPES

There is another mashup technology, Yahoo! Pipes that some people compare it whit Popfly.There are many similarities between these two technologies. They differ in a little of things like that Popflyis more for user then Yahoo! Pipes.I find Popfly mashup stronger in term of visual representation and user interaction then Yahoo! Pipes. Inmy opinion the two technologies are complementary rather than competitive; we can use them together tocreate a powerful mashups.

“IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of auto completion, best known for its use in the MicrosoftVisual Studio integrated development environment.” Wikipedia, Located on the Internet atwww.wikipedia.org