There is a great article over at Ajaxian on programming for the Nintendo Wii. I bought a Wii myself a few weeks back and have been having great fun with Tiger Woods golf. (It is actually my first game console) Up until down the idea of playing a game console alone did not appeal to me but the Nintendo Wii experience is amazing.
The Wii console connects to the controller or Wiimote via bluethooth and uses an accelerometer built into the wiimote to detect the location of the wiimote as well as it’s acceleration. This leads to a really interactive experience for the user.
I have been amazed by responsiveness of the Wiimote and now Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith over at Ajaxian have developed an Ajax app that uses Wiiusej to interact with the Wiimote. The Wiiusej API is a java wrapper for the C based Wiiuse library.
We then wrote a Java class that acts as a state machine for what the remote is doing. It understands the movements, which buttons are pushed, how fast you are moving the device. With this data we could build a simple darts game. With the state machine Java code, and an Applet wrapper that exposed the information, we were ready to get to the Ajax side of the house.
I came across an interesting article by Masayuki Otoshi via Java World that discusses how to execute process definitions on the client side rather than the server side. This can come into play when making AJAX calls. As AJAX is Asynchronous, it is not possible to predict the order that your callback methods will be called in. Masayuki uses J-SOFA (Java/JavaScript Services Orchestration for Actions) to overcome this.
I haven't come across J-SOFA before but it looks like it might be worth looking at for situations where the order of callback methods is important.
…an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications.
I'm looking forward to playing around with this. I have being doing a lot of work with XSLT lately so it will be interesting to see how Google have married this with AJAX.
Exadel have just released a JSF editor with AJAX support.
JSF, a Web component framework, is the only standard Java Web framework,” said Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst for Burton Group. “AJAX, which makes Web sites more responsive, is enjoying an avalanche of grass roots support because of its portability and seamless integration with HTML. Together, JSF and AJAX offer the benefits of standardization with a rich internet experience; a combination that will be attractive to many organizations
Unfortunately, it is a bit pricey at $799 per annual subscription license. I am going to download the trial at the weekend and have a look. I have been using the exadel Studio for eclipse and found the it very good. (Thanks Colin for the recommendation on this one.) I had been looking for a good JSP visual editor plugin for eclipse for quiet a while and this seems to be one of the better ones.
On a different note, I have decided to change my hosting service to InterAdvantage. I have got a pretty good package and will be transferring over this blog to Wordpress as soon as the domain transfer goes through. I will post all new RSS feeds here before the change over.
Stephen Downey on May 8th, 2008
