Integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server

Mendix offers an out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Outlook Exchange server.

Advantages:

• Associate emails with data in your app (for example customers)
• Synchronize contact information
• Synchronize your task list

Technical features

• A .net based plugin in your outlook client to retrieve meta data from your web app
• A server side Exchange connector allows you to synchronize or use data from your Exchange Server

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It’s been a while since I last wrote here, so I thought I’d do something about that by mentioning some highlights as I’ve observed them coming by over the last year.

Dojo now has cross-domain loading built in. AOL acts as a CDN for Dojo these days, so you can build Dojo-powered JavaScript sites without having to push a copy of Dojo from your own server. In addition, this means we’re making steps towards sharing libraries across sites. The down side is that you have to trust AOL or an other CDN not to mess with the code..

Everybody and his/her dog now seems to have Eclipse integration. I have not been impressed. So let’s move on.

Brendan Eich has been pushing hard for “JavaScript 2″. A backwards-compatible JavaScript standardized in ECMAScript4. With optional typing, packaging and general ‘programming-in-the-large’, it’s no surprise that MicroSoft wants to kill this effort as fast as possible.

Yahoo is a company that, on the developer side at least, really seemed to ‘get it’ this year. Their YUI foundation gives a solid base-line for designers to work from clean templates. YUI CSS reset, grids and fonts should make any designer happy. (I use them as a base wherever I can before handing design over to a designer). Yahoo also did some JavaScript things, but they were late to the party and didn’t really contribute anything significant from where I’m standing.

Microsoft seems to have completely lost it. A new version of Visual Studio came out, but VS developers I talk to called it bug-prone and went back to a previous version. MS Atlas hasn’t appeared on my radar anywhere. Not being big on ASP.net , I’m perhaps a bit fuzzy on where they’re going with this (probably nowhere). The buzz in the blogosphere (yes, you can kick me for using that word) is that Microsoft is going to make microsoft.com a Silverlight-only website. Even if this isn’t true, Microsoft is losing ground fast in the software development world. (How many startups have you seen recently that use Microsoft technology on the web?).

The big players on the web are still Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft is just big and trying to acquire Yahoo. Yahoo is struggling with not being Google, so they might just sell out to Microsoft. Which would be a real shame, but that’s just business, I guess.

Google is trying to Not Be Evil and here’s hoping that’ll work out for them for the foreseeable future. Google has a few good things going for them. For example. recently, when a couple of hackers reverse engineered the Google Earth protocol to implement their own Earth view program – they didn’t get slammed with lawsuits. Instead they received a polite email from a Google R&D person explaining that Google pays for these images to a third party and that re-distribution would violate their ToS.

Browsers have been getting a kick this last year. Apple came out with Safari for Windows. Apple obviously isn’t used to deploying high-visibility software in a security-aware environment. The security community is used to ripping software apart on the Windows platform because it’s the lowest common denominator. Add to that the Apple marketing hype about Safari being ’secure’ and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. If I recall there were about 8 critical (and obvious) holes in Safari identified in the first 24 hours of it being available.

As a developer on the client side I have to say that Safari can kick ass (every now and again). Debugging is still a pain, but performance-wise it’s an A-class browser.

So is Opera, who made an unexpected entry on the console environment (on the Wii). Opera has been doing well on the mobile segment, but the console aspect gives them a new edge. Performance-wise Opera does well, but it’s completely lacking in serious development tools (such as an actual debugger or engine inspector).

Mozilla FireFox is doing .. well, alright. The extension environment is very leak-prone. The jump from 2,0 to 3.0 doesn’t seem that big. I’m biased because I spend most of my dev time in FireFox, so I only see the bad stuff. I’d like to see FireFox go back to the ‘only do fast browsing’ mentality, though.

Internet Explorer is still the same piece of crap it always was. The JScript engine in IE7 is a lot faster than the IE6 version, but that’s not saying much. Microsoft still hates standards and continues to make cross-browser/cross-platform developer’s lives a living hell. But what else is new?

Adobe released their JavaScript-ish engine as open source to the Mozilla Foundation. Faster JS in the next generation of Mozilla browsers.

Stevey Yegge liked Ruby on Rails enough to port it to a framework Google would accept. (Response here). This is actually the most interesting thing of the year. Not that it involves Rails, but it demonstrates the literal and bloody-mindedness required to get things done.

So, the last year in AJAX wasn’t actually very much about AJAX. It was all about market movements, improvements in technology and generally about moving forward. Developing new solutions. Providing more. Getting more done.

Everything else is just inconsequential.

In the mean time I’m still getting my teeth kicked in by cross-browser issues, but well, where there’s muck, there’s brass, right?