14 DAY TRIAL // Popfly is a Microsoft tool dedicated to enabling non-professionals to create and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly is currently in Alpha stage and the testing build requires an invitation for access. According to the Redmond Company, the tool is compatible with IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0, on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Mac OS X. Additionally, users will require the beta version of Silverlight 1.0.
"There's an obvious desire or need for people to want to create online applications, but it's too difficult today. So our goal is to democratize development," stated Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's lead project manager for Visual Studio Express.
Microsoft's Popfly project is directly subordinated to "Soma" Somasegar, Chief of Microsoft's Developer Division. Microsoft is offering both the Popfly Creator and the Popfly Space as integer parts of the Popfly project. The first is a collection of online visual tools for creating Web pages and mashups while the second is nothing more than the community Microsoft hopes to gather around Popfly.
"A CTP, for example, is basically designed to enable customers to work with a certain feature or set of features -- no gaurantees about quality outside that feature set. A Beta is typically at a higher quality level than a CTP and will work for more complete scenarios. But Popfly is a web site. We will be updating it every couple of weeks. And right now, there is a long list of thing we want to fix. So Alpha to us means, "We're working on it, but there will be warts." At some point, more things will work the way we want them to work and we'll call it beta. And at some point after that, we'll call it RTM," explained a member of the Popfly team.
The bottom line is that Popfly will enable virtually anyone to create a web page. No programming skills are needed. Popfly is designed to bring web page and mashup building to the masses, taking code completely out of the equation.