What is microsoft popfly

Martin Heller is a contributing editor and reviewer for InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from to Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register.

Latest Insider. More are coming from Microsoft and third parties, Fernandez said. Popfly users can tie together these data-source, transformation and display blocks to create their own customized mash-ups. Popfly is more than a visual mash-up designer, however.

It also includes the Office Online Web-page building tool that is part of Office Live for individuals who prefer to build full Web pages. Popfly mash-ups, pages and apps are all stored in the Windows Live Storage cloud. Popfly was built in Silverlight. Microsoft has begun distributing a few Popfly alpha invitations and plans to allow the initial group of testers to distribute more invitations virally. Microsoft plans to make Popfly available for free; some third-party building blocks may require a subscription fee.

Some blocks will be restricted to non-commercial use only, the company said. Currently, the company is not sharing a timetable for when it plans to make the Popfly code publicly available as a beta or final release. Developers are in short supply. Here are the skills and programming languages employers need. Each block performs one basic data function. One grabs photos from Flickr, one loads Digg stories and another brings up a search dialog for the Seattle Public Library.

There are a few dozen to choose from. To build mash-ups using different services, you just drag blocks from the list onto the workspace in the middle of the screen. Each block has parameters you can set. For example, you can tell the Digg block to pull in 15 headlines or 5, or tell it to display upcoming stories rather than top stories. Each block's settings are dependent on the flexibility of its service's API.

Everything is drag-and-drop, and the visual programming interface is so simple to use, it feels like a video game. To pass data from one block to another, you connect the two of them by drawing a line between them with your mouse. Then you set up the second block by telling it how to handle the data you're passing to it. This is where I got stuck. Some of the data handlers -- all of which are accessible via drop-down menus in the blocks -- had me scratching my head.

My confusion probably stems from the fact that the data services I was trying to mash didn't have parameters that matched easily. A developer familiar with APIs could figure some of them out, but Popfly is supposed to be a tool that's accessible to non-developers. The Popfly team does provide some tutorials that walk you through the mash-up creation process, but at first hack, the experience is intimidating.

After some trial and error, I succeeded in generating a three-block mash-up. I took a feed of Digg's top stories, pulled out the story title and number of diggs, then plotted the number of diggs on a speedometer-type widget using a block called "Gauge. I used a couple of the simpler blocks in the system to dress up my profile page.

I grabbed an RSS news feed for Craigslist's listings of bikes for sale and put it into a reader widget. I took another feed for all of my images on Flickr tagged with "bike" and put them into a scrolling display frame.

In the end, I had a very simple, dynamic page that took about five minutes to build. During my experimentation with Popfly, my browser crashed several times. I experienced three crashes while navigating the Popfly mash-up creator, one while viewing a demo mash-up, and one while loading Popfly's built-in "Wack-a-Mole" game.