Popfly: Mashups Made Easy

Today John Montgomery's NPT team launched Microsoft Popfly, a web-based development environment for building web applications with little or no code.  John shares some background and history on his blog, but what you really ought to see first is the Popfly video on the Overview page.  Seeing is believing!

This project has been around for awhile, but I must say it went from a lump of goo to a snappy "wow" creature in only a matter of weeks.  As John mentions on his blog, they rewrote the frontend only a few weeks ago to run on Silverlight instead of plain old JavaScript, to boost the features, the performance, and the visual sex. 

Galo and I got a ping from the Popfly team literally 7 days ago to see what sort of Windows Live stuff could be incorporated into the Popfly blocks toolset.  We showed them how to set up the Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control, they wrote some glue code in their block thingie, and poof!  We're in the Popfly blocks gallery!  Shazam!

(ok, so there was that one late night last minute panic crisis along the way, but the freakish HTML problem was finally identified and trivially solved so it hardly bears mentioning except to point out that it wasn't Firefox that was keeping us up late.  I'll post a tech note on what we discovered about IE's document.namespaces right after I get the stitches removed from my butt.)

Congrats to the Popfly team!  The world (including me) eagerly awaits your broader beta.  Meanwhile, please keep posting videos so we can see what we're missing.  :P

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• Anonymous
  May 27, 2007
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