Appcelerator - The start
I had a free workshop this morning that was promoting a couple of open source products. The first was a relatively new AJAX framework called appcelerator. I was impressed with the product enough to want to try it out. On top of that I think we've got a short term project that might be a good fit and a way to get some experience developing an RIA application.
I've now downloaded the SDK and installed it. First of all, the dev kit recommends that you install it as root. As a former SA I'm not really comfortable installing something that's not an official package from my linux distribution as root. However, it was able to install it to a directory off my home directory with a few minor hiccups. The nice thing is that it looks like ruby (never used it before) is able to download/update packages on its own.
So now that it's installed I've headed over to the doc section of the site to go through the getting started guide. Here's one of the most frustrating parts that I've run across so far. In order to run the project creation app, you're required to have an Appcelerator Developer Network login. I had to wait for an email confirmation before I could even continue the getting started project. I understand that appcelerator is a for profit company and they want to be able to try and sell their support services to people using their product, but don't force a user to login to your developer network just to start creating an application. That's rediculous. That's almost like if someone sold me a set of colored pencils that I couldn't actually draw with until I called and activated them.
Still hopeful that this framework is at least most of what I hope it will be. More to come.
I've now downloaded the SDK and installed it. First of all, the dev kit recommends that you install it as root. As a former SA I'm not really comfortable installing something that's not an official package from my linux distribution as root. However, it was able to install it to a directory off my home directory with a few minor hiccups. The nice thing is that it looks like ruby (never used it before) is able to download/update packages on its own.
So now that it's installed I've headed over to the doc section of the site to go through the getting started guide. Here's one of the most frustrating parts that I've run across so far. In order to run the project creation app, you're required to have an Appcelerator Developer Network login. I had to wait for an email confirmation before I could even continue the getting started project. I understand that appcelerator is a for profit company and they want to be able to try and sell their support services to people using their product, but don't force a user to login to your developer network just to start creating an application. That's rediculous. That's almost like if someone sold me a set of colored pencils that I couldn't actually draw with until I called and activated them.
Still hopeful that this framework is at least most of what I hope it will be. More to come.
posted by Keros (again) at 8:27 PM
1 Comments:
great set of criticisms... let me see if i can address some of the issues:
- you should be able to install anywhere you want as non root but if you install in a folder that requires root (it will make you switch to root). if there's something we can do to improve this, let me know..
- the dev network login requirement will get completely lifted in about 2 weeks when we launch the new dev network and distribution site. we're not doing the restriction to make money... the new site will be completely open (no login to get information or anything, only to post questions, or wiki-edit docs, etc). also, the software won't require anything - but if you do give us your login, we're working on some really cool stats if you want to opt-in about your app.
we're working pretty hard to improve the product and we have a long way to go... we're working hard on a few major items that you might be interested in:
- the upcoming 3.0 release will have jquery at the core and we've totally re-worked the parsing engine and a lot of the core language features - the result is the library is ~40K gzip+minified (includes jquery too!), and its easier than ever to extend.
- we're improving the native out-of-the-box REST integration so you can do REST via the UI messaging in a snap
- we're working hard on increasing the UI capabilities to make it easier to do layouts, themes and UI controls.
- we're introducing new backend support such as Spring dmServer, Zend, Grails and Django.
Again, we welcome your criticisms and your suggestions for improvement. We're listening. Thanks!
Jeff Haynie
Appcelerator
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