Enyo: a component-oriented JS framework

Enyo first made an appearance on the HP TouchPad and was the framework used for WebOS applications.  However, after HP killed the TouchPad and put WebOS development on hold, HP has spun off Enyo into a standalone open-source JS app framework on Github.

The framework is being billed as device agnostic, that is web applications built with Enyo should work great on mobile, but also will live happily on tablets, laptops, and elsewhere. This is a good position to take, as increasingly web application developers are having to consider a wide range of target devices rather than just focussing on mobile and/or desktop browsers. For installed mobile apps, the project recommends using PhoneGap to package Enyo applications with native wrappers.

Another key feature is a component-oriented model, where you can take parts of your site and encapsulate them as reusable components – for example a common form layout or a common control type. This looks like an interesting way to create DRY web applications at the client side.

Enyo is still at quite an early stage of release, and most critically is missing the UI Widget components. Until these ship (according to the FAQ they should be out next month) there isn’t a great deal of point using Enyo unless the idea of component-oriented design is something you’re really into. However, looking forwards it could be an interesting competitor to frameworks like JQueryUI and JQuery Mobile.

I don’t know to what extent the original HP team are still involved in Enyo, but the project seems to be attracting attention on Github and a community is forming around it. It would be good to see some part of the WebOS dream live on.

For more information, check out the Enyo site.

Revolutionary messaging technology will challenge FB, Twitter, IM

I’ve been having a go recently with a really cool communication technology – just check out some of these features:

• It works on all kinds of devices and across all networks
• You can search, read and respond to messages even when you’re offline
• Works with intelligent filtering services
• You can send and receive messages with anyone on any network, not just the same service provider you use
• The server code is open source so you can run your own
• Completely distributed architecture with no central server or hub node
• Uses open standards for pretty much everything
• Clients for all platforms including mobile, even TV – and anyone can make their own client as the API isn’t proprietary
• You can send messages of any length, including rich text, images, links and documents
• You can create “lists” of people to message together as a group, again even if they don’t use the same server or service provider as you
• You can embed links in your web pages that automatically launch the user’s client with a new message to you (a bit like Web Intents)
• You can publish archives of messages on your own website
• You can save your messages on your own computer, back them up on a usb stick, or store them in the cloud – its up to you
• It doesn’t matter if the company that invented it goes bust or gets bored with it and stops developing it, as there are lots of alternatives and pretty much every tech company is backing it.

I think this is a really cool technology, and I encourage you to take a look at it. Find out more here!

However, not everyone is convinced yet and think that we should stick with proprietary messaging silos tied to one service provider such as Facebook and Twitter, despite the obvious risk of these services being discontinued, monetized, tracking your communications for nefarious purposes, and spamming you with advertising at any opportunity.

 

Creating “Write That Thesis!” at the ROLE developer camp

Last week I attended the ROLE Developer Camp in Leuven, Belgium in my role as a “developer advocate” for the project. ROLE has been developing lots of interesting technologies around flexible personal learning environments, and this event was partly to showcase some of those developments, and partly an opportunity to build some widgets with the prospect of prizes for the best entry!

I mentioned ROLE in a previous post, where I encouraged them to work with the Apache Rave project and its great to see this suggestion being taken up seriously by the project team; hopefully we’ll start to see contributions from ROLE to Apache Rave soon. Rave is a “white label” social network/portal platform that includes support for both OpenSocial and W3C Widgets (using Apache Wookie) and at the event Jasha from Hippo and I were each able to show W3C Widgets and OpenSocial gadgets being combined in workspaces which was a great demo.

For the actual widget competition, I worked with Li Na, Sten Govaerts and Felix Mödritscher on a fairly simple widget that tracks how well you’re progressing towards getting your first draft of your thesis written. While this sounds quite trivial, I think its best to work on quite basic problems and expand out (something I elaborated on in a talk at the barcamp). So we created a HTML5 app using Local Storage rather than any advanced APIs, and then created the W3C Widget package and an OpenSocial gadget.xml afterwards, lastly using PhoneGap to create some native mobile versions.

We also developed it using Dropbox as our collaborative IDE! This wasn’t completely ideal compared with SVN or Git but did mean we could all work simultaneously on the widget, although it worked best if we were hacking different files rather than all editing the same script, as it resulted in lots of conflicts. However as a quick “get it done” environment I think it worked pretty well, and we were very productive.  I’m sure this contributed to our winning First Prize (though I think the fact our widget is bright pink didn’t hurt either).

Try it out yourself at http://labs.cetis.ac.uk/thesis or get the code from github.

For more information on ROLE, see the project website.

 

Web Intents

Most web developers are familiar with handling integration with other applications using APIs and messaging protocols, but we could be in for a major shift in how we connect applications with the emergence of web intents. Some demos were released earlier this year to explain the concept, which is now undergoing development in W3C for a new web standard.

Briefly, the web intent approach relies on the browser acting as a broker between websites. Each website can offer to register itself to provide a particular service for the user, such as sharing photographs. When another website wants to allow users to make use of such a service, it creates an “intent” containing the type of service to be used, and the payload data. The browser can then offer the user with a choice of which service to use.

For example, if you use Flickr and Picasa, you might allow your browser to register these sites to provide the “share image” service. If you use a drawing widget, it could then have a “save” button that uses an intent. When you click “save”, you would be offered the choice of using Flickr or Picasa for saving and sharing the image you created.

The same approach can be used to share links and clippings as well as media.

The benefits range from minor things such as reducing the clutter of “share” buttons on sites, to potentially opening up services much more widely as developers no longer need to implement integration points for services directly. This means that rather than defaulting to a few widely-adopted services, niche service providers could also fit into the ecosystem alongside the well-known brands. In higher education, for example, specialised image collection and research link management tools could have the same effective level of integration as Flickr and Digg; likewise academically-oriented reputation and recommendation services could have as ubiquitous access as the Facebook “Like” and Google “+1″ services.

Currently, you can only use Web Intents via a JavaScript shim which can be used to create demos. However, its likely the technology will be standardised in W3C and added to browsers in the near future.

Digital wallets and mobile payments

I’m now spending part of my time working on the JISC Observatory, so I’ll be writing occasional tech trends posts here. 

While it could be argued that for most people money went virtual a long time ago with the emergence of online banking and debit cards, there is a strong trend towards “appifying” payments with digital wallets and mobile payment mechanisms.

Square[1] and Google Wallet[2] are the ones making the headlines, but others may be close behind.

In universities, contact-based payments are already used in cafes and libraries using cards such as Squid[3]. Contactless payments are also making their way onto the high street [4][5].

In a slightly more bizarre move, MasterCard is adding contactless payment technology to wristwatches [6].

Most of these systems use variations on RFID and NFC technologies, however perhaps the most critical component is the software, and the service infrastructure that lies behind it[7].

For education, this may not seem like a particularly important development, however most universities and colleges need to handle payments across a wide range of services and facilities (cafes, library, short courses, shop, events) and will probably need to start planning for accepting contactless payments across campus.

[1] Square’s updated Card Case app gets you a step closer to ditching your wallet
[2] Google Wallet is hitting the road for a 5-city tour with $10 “bribes”
[3] http://www.squidcard.com/
[4] Contactless ‘pay at the tills with a mobile’ system introduced 
[5] Firms hope London Olympics push contactless payment across Europe
[6] MasterCard Rolls Out Prepaid Contactless Wristwatch in U.K.
[7] Swift mobile wallet adoption hinges on apps 

Five Signals

I’m now spending part of my time working on the JISC Observatory, so I’ll be writing occasional tech trends posts here. 

Mobile

Every vision of the future now has a strong place for mobile [1][2]. We’re seeing consistent trends for increasing data use and service access from mobile, and ubiquity of devices, and a strong rise in smartphones as a % of total device ownership. The form factor for smartphones has been established as pure touchscreen interface, with a fairly stable set of standard sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone, camera). Innovation is mostly focussed on incremental improvements in each of these aspect [3]; however a recent game-changer is the Siri voice recognition interface [4][5], particularly for blind users, but also as an advance in interaction methods more generally.

Analytics

Analytics and “big data” are terms being applied to all kinds of sectors and topics, including learning, health, management etc. Mobile analytics [6] is an emerging area, where organisations try to take advantage of the contextual data possible with mobile platforms. In education, areas where analytics are being applied include tracking learner attention [7], behaviour management [8], truancy [9], teacher performance evaluation [10] and school dashboards [11].

Tablets

The tablet computing category now appears stable, and has effectively killed off netbooks. From the top end iPad, to the $35 device from India [12] [13], there is now a wide range of devices spanning 7″ to 11″ screen form factors. Attention is being placed, as might be expected, on educational applications [14], and in particular to the area of textbooks (see below). A future vision from Microsoft [1] also puts an emphasis on tablets, with possible new future forms including foldable tablets, tablets that can link together into larger canvasses, and surface-based computing.

 Apps, Widgets and Appification

“There’s an app for that” has entered popular culture; almost any service can now be envisioned as an app, from healthcare [15] to agriculture [16]. The key challenges are device and OS fragmentation keeping costs high relative to returns for new entrants, also a worry for education as “bring your own device” can mean “bring your own interoperability problem” [17]. However services like PhoneGap (acquired this month by Adobe [18]) based on HTML5 and W3C Widgets are emerging as the way to solve this in the short term. W3C gained very significant interest in the are of “offline web applications” from a wide range of vendors, suggesting the area of partially-disconnected applications could be one to watch [19].

e-Textbooks

The “textbook problem” seems to have rising prominence in education technology policy. In Asia, there is a strong push for e-books, e.g. in China from a slow start last year [20] huge growth is now likely [21]; in South Korea [22] there is also a major national strategy. In the US, the concept is even making front-page news [23] although the focus is more often on the hardware – especially iPads [14], although the Kindle Fire platform seems to be garnering attention too [24]. Even Steve Jobs’ posthumous biography states it was his intention to disrupt the textbook market [25]. Again we have an issue of standards and interoperability, particularly as we move beyond basic PDF and e-Book formats towards e-textbooks providing advanced  capabilities such as built-in testing and feedback functions.

REFERENCES

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/microsofts-vision-of-the-mobile-future-is-astounding-video/

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/rim-mobile-future-video/

[3] http://www.tmdisplay.com/english/news/2011/2011_1020.htm

[4] http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

[5] http://mashable.com/2011/10/03/iphone-5-assistant/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[6] http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/10/mobile-analytics-unlock-the-wh.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oreilly%2Fradar%2Fatom+%28O%27Reilly+Radar%29

[7] http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=56221

[8] http://www.classdojo.com/

[9] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-30/robo-truant-tech-and-other-apps-to-fix-education-jonathan-alter.html

[10] http://formativelearning.com/

[11] http://eduvant.com/

[12] http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/10/can-a-35-tablet-be-as-effective-a-learning-tool-as-an-ipad/

[13] http://liliputing.com/2011/10/aakash-android-tablet-hits-india-for-60-or-less.html

[14] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Many-US-schools-adding-iPads-apf-1245885050.html?x=0&.v=2

[15] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/mobile-health-apps-arrive-09292011.html

[16] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/farmers-turn-grass-into-cash-with-the-grassometer/

[17] http://mfeldstein.com/does-byod-solve-or-worsen-k-12-tech-woes/

[18] http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20114857-264/adobe-buys-phonegap-typekit-for-better-web-tools/

[19] http://www.w3.org/2011/web-apps-ws/Papers

[20] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2010-08/02/content_11080657.htm

[21] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/china-sees-e-book-boom-prefers-e-books-rather-than-paper-books-survey/articleshow/8054153.cms

[22] http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/0706/In-South-Korea-all-textbooks-will-be-e-books-by-2015

[23] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/education/19textbooks.html?hp

[24] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/amazon_kindle_fire_scare_apple.html

[25] http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/steve-jobs-had-hopes-of-disrupting-textbook-market/33912

Monster Math

I made this silly counting game for my kids, but you might find it fun too…

Monster Math