Express yourself with Popfly

By Ed Dunhill, Academic Developer Evangelist

This year Microsoft has released a raft of products for the less technically minded from the Expression Suite to our latest offering; Popfly. Popfly is an online tool used to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages and applications.

Popfly is made up of two distinct parts; Creator and Spaces. Creator is primarily a tool for creating mashups but also has Web page creation functionality which allows users to choose templates and customise their colour schemes through a simple GUI (Graphical User Interface). However the really cool part of Popfly is the easy way it allows users to create ‘mashups’.

So, what are mashups? Well according to Wikipedia they are “...a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” That’s exactly what Popfly allows users to do, through a clever user interface built entirely in another new Microsoft technology called Silverlight (Silverlight is a cross platform browser plug-in offering developers the opportunity to create rich internet applications within the .NET framework).

Popfly’s Mashup Creator is built around a concept called Blocks. Each block has different functionality allowing users to pull data from various web services/sites, combine and manipulate data from these different sources and display this data in new and exciting ways leveraging the power of Silverlight. By using these types of blocks together users are able to create unique web applications which use data from multiple sources. For example an application could be created using the Flickr, Geotag and Live Earth blocks. Geotagged photos would be retrieved from Flickr (according to a particular search term set by the user) using the Flickr block, the geotags for these photos would then be translated to longitude and latitude using the Geotag block and then finally these photos would be displayed on a Live Earth map according to the coordinates where they were taken. An application such as this could be built in only a few minutes with no code whatsoever using the Popfly GUI.

Clearly Popfly is a powerful tool for non developers who want to create rich web applications without having to learn to code. However Popfly really comes into its own when developers get their hands on it. This is because Popfly offers developers the opportunity to build their own blocks (using JavaScript) allowing complete extensibility. In fact, an SDK is available to developers once they are logged into the tool and plugs straight into Visual Studio. Developers can create blocks that can pull data from any source, manipulate it in any way and display the result in any style!

Popfly Space compliments the Creator tools by offering a community interface allowing users the opportunity to share their creations in terms of mashups, blocks and gadgets. Users can make their creations public or keep them private and if public they can be rated by others and embedded on external websites. Users can also modify all content made public to add extra functionality.

The bad news is that Popfly is currently in private alpha meaning that only those invited have access to the tool. However, the good news is that anyone can request access simply by logging into the tool at popfly.ms with their Microsoft Passport account. This will add your name to a waiting list and when the next batch of accounts are released you should receive an invitation to your passport email address. Express yourself today at https://www.popfly.ms/!

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  July 11, 2007
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