Start Building Your Own Web Applications via Popfly

Popfly is a Microsoft tool built on Silverlight and hosted online, set up to streamline the process associated with code design to a mundane experience by transitioning programming under a graphical user interface umbrella. In this manner, users will be able to create "mashups", gadgets, Web pages and applications without having to write a single line of code. According to Microsoft, Popfly is comprised of a collection of online visual tools designed to act as the medium for building content, while also offering a social network, enabling the hosting, sharing, rating, commenting and even remixing of materials. The public beta of Popfly can be accesses via Firefox 2.0 or IE6 and higher and delivers support for JavaScript, Ajax libraries, HTML, XHTML, CSS, WMV, WMA, MP3, Visual Studio Express projects, JPG, PNG, GIF, and EXEs.

"The interface utilizes 'blocks' to allow users to create applications. Blocks are a mechanism which allow users to pull data from other web sites/services, manipulate the data and output it in a new way all using a graphical interface and no code. This allows users to create brand new web applications in minutes without any technical experience or messing around with APIs. What's more the block architecture is completely extensible so users can easily create new blocks to pull/manipulate/display their data in new and exciting ways and there's also a really strong community around the product allowing you to share both your blocks and finished apps", revealed Ed Dunhill, Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist.

"Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, revealed that the company's Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer introduced the public beta of Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit. Somasegar also pointed out the fast pace of the evolution of the project. Popfly was launched into alpha some five months ago and in the meantime, the number of users grew to over 50,000. The tool essentially delivers the possibility of creating customized/personalizes on-line experiences, and in this context, Microsoft can only hope that it is poised for success.

A representative of the Popfly team enumerated the new features available concomitantly with the public beta:

"- Gadgets. Popfly can create both Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets and Windows Live gadgets.
- Tweaking and Properties. Last iteration, we added "tweaking," but many blocks didn't have a lot of properties to tweak, so we added properties to a host of our output blocks including Photoshow, Virtual Earth, PhotoSphere, Gauge, and Page Turner.
- Tweaking and the color picker. When you tweak a mashup you now have a color picker so you don't have to remember the alphanumeric codes for colors.
- New and updated blocks. Popfly has a category for new and updated blocks.
- New screencasts. Updated videos explaining how to use Popfly.
- New blocks. Notably one we did for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit.
- Updated block documentation. Courtesy Andy, our resident block program manager.
- Privacy statement. We've also slightly modified our Privacy Statement, so check it out."