Fact is, Flash is here to stay – at least for the next 2-3 years, I assume, until maybe HTML5, Unity and/or others have gained more traction.

A question raised by a friend in a recent discussion was: What features, advantages etc. can Flash list on the “plus” side, besides an enormous installed user base? My reply was: “You already answered your question.”

The thing is, it does not actually matter how “bad”, performance-hogging, 3D-features lacking Flash actually is, if you want to reach a very broad audience, there still is no alternative to it.

Perhaps (un)surprisingly, little has changed since early 2008 when we decided to develop AT.LANT.IS in Flash.

Daniel James of Three Rings confirmed that with the Java version of Puzzle Pirates they majority of users did not even see the start screen of the game, because they needed to confirm to “Trust” the Java applet before – something they were not used to doing, raising their suspicion and in result leaving the game before it had even started. When they changed to Flash with Whirled, that problem was gone. (He was giving some exact numbers, as he likes to do, but I can’t remember exactly).

So, still a good opportunity for all you Flash coders charging a fortune for some AS3 lines…

I assume this is only interesting for a very limited crowd. Still, it is worth mentioning:

ImageMagick may behave as a complete (meaning 99%) CPU resource hog, if several convert processes are running at the same time, as described by several users in the forums.

What worked for me: disabling IM’s internal threading. Sounds weird, but apparently there are some issues (especially?/only?) on RHEL/CentOS machines.

Build with configure –disable-openmp, and several parallel processes did not stall the CPU any longer.

I’m quite happy with Google Analytics so far, but the fact that you don’t own the data coming from your users on your website (along with some remarks from our lawyer about exporting usage data into the US being not the preferred solution, especially in Germany) was enough to start looking around for other solutions.

Piwik is an downloadable web analytics PHP/MySQL application, that aims to be an open source alternative for Google Analytics. The feature set already is impressive, and can be extended through plugins.

A JavaScript tracking code snippet must be included on all relevant web pages, to enable tracking.

Speaking of plugins – there does not seem to be a whole lot of community provided plugins yet, and the list of available plugins is a bit cumbersome to browse and search (partly because its served by trac).

There is no out-of-the-box support for goals, but you get some extra reports like “Visits by local user time” that have no equivalent in Google Analytics (as far as I know – I’m no GA geek).

The GUI is informative and pretty to look at – but I guess the big thing is the API. You can access the data – your data – in JSON, XML, PHP or CSV format.

As I have no plans for the API so far, I’m most interested in comparing the numbers I get from GA with the ones from Piwik. I will report my findings here soon.

In the meantime, here are some slides giving some more detailed info about Piwik’s structure and features:

The most interesting features, like the Live Cycle Data Services, allowing server push-based RIAs, are very expensive, and I did not had the need for anything else that I could not handle using some simple (Y)UI thrown together and hooked into a DB using Grails.

Now, the current implementation of our Atlantis backend polls every n seconds from the server and new messages are added, via AJAX. This led to some browser stability problems and a general bottleneck if several AJAX-”windows” are opened and each of them refreshed every n seconds, respectively.

Affter some research, I stumbled across BlazeDS, which might solve this problem – another part of Adobe technology that was released open source, and should provide the basic functionality needed to access hibernated Java objects from Flex, plus allowing push subscriptions and notifications from the server to the client.

I will check out this tutorial about getting Flex, BlazeDS and Hibernate to work together.

Also, there is a great post about the differences of the various flavors and licensing details, as well as another one.

I will post my findings here.

The next chapter in this will (hopefully not) be this thing – introducing the DIY Meggy Jr RGB handheld:

Actually, I bought this MAKE book a couple of months ago, but never got to actually start working on some of the projects described.

Then I stumbled upon the Meggy Jr RGB and was instantly hooked. One very extremely cool example is Steven Read’s SuperMonkeyKong:

I already have some ideas what to do with it, once it arrives (and I assemble and solder everything). Let’s see how the motivation curve will look like, this time.

Idea: put a couple of these babies next to each other, and have them show the current number of open Jira tickets.

Hmm might be a bit pricey though, at $52 per digit.

Maybe I will write a Chumby widget to display various stats.

It seems the space for 3D gaming via web browser plugins is getting more and more crowded.

Of course, Quake Live created a big buzz (and long waiting queues) when they launched, GarageGames started their InstantAction portal and technology a while ago, same goes for the Unity web player, and now Google released their O3D API.

Still, there is no standard format – I’m not the expert, but for me VRML seems to be dead for over a decade now… (though I just read that it morphed into X3D, but are people actually using that for more than experimental GUIs, like… games?)

If you are interested, T-Mobile Austria is holding the first Android Developers Day on May 7th, 2009 (including the obvious must-have Web2.0ish barcamp-part).

On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems (Sun). The proposed transaction is subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

I wonder how this will affect the future of Java (as opposed to IBM)…