Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I found a neat little Javascript library called WireIt.  With this library, you can create Yahoo Pipes-like wires.  But the key underlying technology is actually another Javascript library called excanvas.  It's quite convoluted because excanvas is really a wrapper around VML that allows the dynamic shapes being drawn.  WireIt also utilizes Yahoo's UI Javascript to handle events, drag and drop and some level of animation.  It took some time to get over the initial hump for learning how to handle the thing.  Right now, the hardest part is determining how to get the terminal nodes positioned.  Once  you get it all hooked up though, it's quite neat as you can create visual workflows with Javascript.

Also, I had been working a bit with extjs.  I got to utilize the tree aspect.  It felt a bit difficult, but again, it's something you gotta get used to.  Lots of server programming to structure the output JSON for extjs to correctly format the tree.  The library is quite big so there's plenty to learn.  I like the fact that the library creates visually appeasing windows and components.  My only criticism, outside of it doing the same thing that Swing does, is that it's kinda awkward to program. So far, only jquery has been easy to utilize.

Finally, at home I'm messing around with Amazon's Web Service system.  I had long ago signed up for their API key, but never used it as I was too busy.  Now, I found some interesting applications and will make use of it.  In conjunction with Amazon's Web Service API, I'm using the Zend Framework.  I've been quite critical of the majority of it.  However, one nice thing is that it has several web service APIs bundled into their system.  So today I finally got a chance to dig a little into those areas.  It seemed a lot easier than creating my own parsing tool for handling the XML produced from the web service.