About me

October 27, 2005
Welcome!
 
I am the editor of this blog. My name is Marius Alin Popescu. I am a Romanian software developer working in France (since 2001), mostly in Delphi and .Net. I am currently working at PC PAL, near Paris (France), as a solution developer and architect for healtchcare desktop and web applications. I am married and father of two daughters and a little boy. Love listening to progressive music, take a bike or walk in the roundabouts, fishing from time to time and definetly having good laughs as often as possible.
 
Working in Delphi for all this time (more than 12 years now) gave me a lot of experience in the (database) desktop software. For the last couple of years, however, I watched more closely the web side of applications development. Coming from a mostly desktop oriented programming language, I had/have interesting if sometimes painfull experiences on my web development "conversion" (Delphi, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails and now ASP.NET MVC).
 
This blog is mostly about web development, thinking about a "new web" i.e. better using the current one, and about Delphi now and then. You can see from my early posts that I was (still am) floating on the web 2.0 wave of ideas and developments. I think both desktop and web development can and should learn from each other’s strengths and issues. The two worlds are more and more close nowadays, especially since the AJAX boom (around 2004).
 
Another area of interest form me is the visual design of software applications. The company I am working for produces some really advanced scientific graphic controls specialised in children growth charts. Our clients usually include them in their own applications (web and desktop). 
 
***  Please use this blog as a mean to communicate on the ideas and thoughts posted here. Relevant comments are appreciated - abusive or irrelevant comments may be deleted, at my discretion. You can contact me on e-mail at mapopescu@gmail.com.
I am also blogging in Romanian at http://escu.wordpress.com (music, cooking recipes, …) and http://dece.blogsome.com (kids’ say).***

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Blog split in two

October 12, 2005

I decided to make some changes in my blog. I am splitting it in two distinct blogs:
The present one (http://mapopescu.blogsome.com) will remain in English, dedicated to web development, with a new tagline: “The web desktop”.
The posts in Romanian have moved to http://dece.blogsome.com, where I will continue to post stuff in romanian, related to kids mostly.


[romanian]
Am decis sa despart blogul acesta in doua: unul care va ramine in engleza, despre tehnologii web etc (http.mapopescu.blogsome.com) si altul ce va fi scris in româna, dedicat in mare parte copiilor (http://dece.blogsome.com).

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Websnap and AJAX

October 10, 2005

So, after some bitter comments about Delphi’s Internet technologies, I’m back to something more … let’s say happy.

I must say that from the 2-3 sites where I tried to use AJAX with Websnap the experience was rather good. They were sites already in production, done with Websnap’s classic components, plus internal stuff.

The need was for me to explore how this AJAX-thing can be used and for the clients to gain some speed or responsiveness where possible.

In the AJAX-driven world, on the client-side there are some new challenges. Like the AJAX communication, the UI dynamics etc., stuff not needed or mostly covered by the designer till now. From the Rails worls I used prototype , a very simple to use and painless to integrate javascript library. It is conceived to integrate a framework, so go get it :)

For the interface dynamics I used the much praised yellow fade technique, even if I used something more appropriate for the sites’ color scheme, plus a lot of the code from the prototype library. The rest was almost all written from scratch.

I think this is th way to go for starters, you must find an area that has to be improved and use AJAX. Or rather found areas that could be rewritten using AJAX. Either way, beware of the rocks. There are some.

Anyway, it was a rather pleasant experience. I think Websnap could be used as a base for a AJAX-driven web framework. I see very easy some of Marco Cantù’s ideas fit very well - like the XMLAdapter or his XML documents framework he recently talked about. Also, the ClientDatasets ar every fit, as they can render as XML very easily.

My ideas are not very clear and I’m afraid Delphi’s recent years of hickups (let’s just stay at this calm, friendly word) will force us to seeother lands, more fertile, more friendly … I begun to study Rails this summer and it felt so good. I saw the Castle project rising in the ASP.NET world too, and all of these ar every good ideas.

I don’t know if there are some Delphi users that passionate to start an open-source web framework, but I surely love to see one.

*Update*: _Mon Dieu_, “Marco Cantù”:http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/web20.html just hit it in the head again :)

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