Figleaf Software has just released WYSIDRAW 1.0, a pretty cool Flash component for shared drawing and whiteboarding.  When used standalone it allows any end-user with Flash Player 6 to easily draw and markup a graphic or create one from scratch, and all the graphic data can be saved via XML to your server of choice.  The more powerful use is when it is combined with Flash Communication Server, where it becomes a shared design and whiteboard environment.  Take a look at the live demo happening on their site. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

I couldn't make it work, but it sure looks interesting as a component that can be put inside a nice frame.

Ah, what  Don Park is on about is WBI - indeed not part of Sash at all but something completely different - a programmable proxy. It could be used with Sash, it could be used with anything (inc. Zeepe or, well, anything). They (IBM) claim the history is interesting and entertaining - I might just about go for interesting, but entertaining, no.

Sash is Trash.

Sash is also slow, bloated, and bewildering.  A simple weblication that should require only a few K of JavaScript and DHTML somehow end up almost a megabyte of download.  Funny thing is that source code (wdx) files are indeed small (a few K) as expected but compressed.  What is the point of using compressed source format when binary ends up being hundred times larger?

Installation of these weblications is even worse.  You have to individually review and grant security rights to them.  Why not just download them into a quaranteened area and then ask when they are actually used for the entire group of weblications?  As it is, they are discouraging people from trying out sample weblications with all the warnings and prompting.  Its like a waiter asking the temperature and ratio of tomato over brocolli in my salad.  Can't IBM afford to have a UI specialist review Sash?

Sash is huge and makes one wonder what is in it.  Even worse is the development environment which seems as big and slow as Visual Studio.  I'll bet most users will gladly trade fancy debuggers in return for ability to directly edit with a simple text editor and test with a web browser.

Put it all together and one ends up feeling that Sash is nothing more than a pile of glittering Trash.  All the neat ideas, potentials, sweats, and dreams that went into it ends up being nothing because of bad amateurish execution. [Don Park's Blog]

One hopes, modestly, that Zeepe is more than a pile of glittering Trash.

Don Park [Don Park's Blog] joins in about Universal Personal Proxy and opines that IBM Sash is almost exactly what they are talking about.

First, I don't think that's at all what they are talking about - to me the UPP discussion has been about a proxy that sits in on all your 'conversations' on the web, filtering, analysing, categorising, agent based recommendations etc. Indeed this is not a new idea but is not what Sash is for, but then he goes on:

It has a cool IDE for writing weblications.  There is even a Linux port of Sash.  What really intrigues me is why it hasn't taken off.

Indeed. He has an idea:

One has to download a large toolkit and myriads of extensions.  Web developers need only a text editor and a FTP client. 

Well, Zeepe is small (approx 260K), does an aweful lot of what Sash does and (ahem) needs only a text editor and FTP Client.

 

A comprehensive look at skins for Windows.

Yes, this is a Microsoft MSDN article! "Learn how to call a .NET-based Web service from a UNIX-based system and how to return a Microsoft .NET DataSet to a Perl array using SOAP::Lite. " He starts the artic;e talking about Interop and then returns a Microsoft .NET DataSet.... [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Mightly useful snippets of info in here for anyone trying to connect to a .NET based web service, i.e. anyone not using a VS.NET generated client.

Sam Ruby: SOAP by Example.