Map Chat Followup

What a week it has been! The news about our WebORB chat example with Google Maps spread in less than 24 hours and hit a number of blogs, digg.com, msnbc and Slashdot. Less than a few days after opening up the example, we had thousands of users hitting our WebORB Message Server. That was quite a scalability test! Everyone loved the idea and people continue raving about it. (Listen to the episode 18 of Diggnation to hear Kevin Rose talk about it) In overall the response is so positive we decided to productize the idea. I cannot share any details at the moment, but as soon as we have a proof of concept ready, more details will emerge.

Google Maps AJAX Chat

In case if you have not tried it yet, visit our 'google maps ajax chat' here. The example uses the WebORB Message Server to enable public and private chat. The example also demonstrates features like passing complex types between connected clients and private messaging (implemented as private map sharing). We will be writing up an article soon describing the implementation of the client side of the example.

The map sharing functionality in the example has just been slightly improved. We listed to the feedback and incorporated some changes to make the feature more noticeable.

Free Flash Remoting for .NET

I briefly mentioned it in the previous post, but news like that definitely require one of its own. So what's news? Simply put, we included support for Flash Remoting into the free Standard Edition of WebORB. Currently WebORB is the only product in the industry providing a no-charge option for Flash Remoting developers working with .NET. Let me try to address some of the questions you might have:

Q. How can I get the standard edition of WebORB?
A. The process is quite simple. Register and logon to the 'downloads' area on our website (http://www.themidnightcoders.com/download/) . Download WebORB 2.0 Beta 3. Use the form on the same download page to generate a license key for the standard edition. Upon completion you will receive an email with the license key and instructions for activating it.

Q. What are the limitations of the WebORB Standard Edition for .NET
A. The following page from our user guide provides a comparison between standard and professional editions of the product: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/doc20/?t=5 .Basically you get full blown Flash Remoting capability, you can invoke any method on any .NET object or 3rd party web service. You can do data binding and retrieve database records just by returning instances of DataSet from your methods. Database paging however is available in the Professional edition. Also service/method security, message server, management console, support for abstract arguments, service and argument factories, call tracing are the features available in the professional edition. Most importantly professional support and upgrades come only with WebORB Professional.

Q. Do I still need Macromedia's Flash Remoting gateway?
A. No, WebORB is a complete replacement of the Macromedia's Flash Remoting Gateway. Simply drop WebORB assembly into your ASP.NET application and your classes are immediately available to the Flash Remoting clients (if you would like to secure them, consider upgrading to WebORB Professional :). WebORB is a non-intrusive solution, we do not require any changes to your classes at all.

More to come, stay tuned.

WebORB 2.0 Beta 3 is released

Some thought this day would never come.. :) BUT, the release is out there, and we're so psyched about it! First of Beta 3 is the last pre-production release. 2.0 should be going into production in about 2 weeks. The quality of Beta 3 is quite high, but we still want to give it some more time, especially with what we added in Beta 3. Specifically, the release contains 2 major enhancements:

1. WebORB Message Server has been revamped. We added long missing documentation, client side API (for both AJAX and Flash clients), chat example. One of the coolest improvements in message server is it can now serialize any object delivered to a channel. What it means is that AJAX and Flash clients or server-side can broadcast any object type (primitives, strings, dates, arrays and complex types). When those objects arrive to the clients, the system automatically converts them to the appropriate types. So if an AJAX client sends a JavaScript object to the message server, WebORB delivers it as an ActionScript object to the Flash clients and a JS object to the HTML clients.

2. Self-licensed Standard Edition. We always had WebORB Standard Edition, that's not new. What is new though is support for Flash Remoting for .NET and self-managed licensing. That's right if you are working with .NET you can get Flash Remoting for free using WebORB Standard Edition. To get the license key, just log on to our download area and generate one for yourself. We have single codebase for both Professional and Standard editions of the product, the license key is what disables features in Standard.

Now that the release is out, the blog (and our site) should become more dynamic, so stay tuned for more updates, articles and examples.