Popfly is a great new service that Microsoft has created, which lets non-technical people create their own websites using their latest Silverlight technology. It's currently in Alpha testing, which means it is nowhere near the finished product. But it is definitely already turning some heads.
Mash it up!
One cool concept that is introduced in Popfly is a Mashup. A Mashup is a web application that combines information from two or more websites or sources. The Popfly editor really redefines the way a "developer" can create new web applications. People without any real technical experience can easily learn to create and customise their own applications by dragging and dropping Blocks onto the screen and setting properties. Here's a really simple example of a Mashup.
So, on the right you can see all the blocks that we have on offer. All I have done here is dragged the flickr and carousel blocks onto editor and connected them by clicking on their connectors (the blue dots on the sides). In the background you may notice that there is already a preview of the result of this Mashup. Now I can customise this by setting the properties of the flikr block by clicking the spanner (or wrench) next to it.
Here I've set the block to get the top 15 photos for a user by setting the Operation property to getUserPhotos, username to ducas (i.e. me :-) ), and number to 15. Clicking the spanner again will take you back to the editor. Now, I'll preview the application by clicking the Preview button at the top of the screen.
You can see here that it's actually gone and gotten the photos from my flickr account and displayed them in a groovy carousel view. We can go back the the editor by hitting the Customize button at the bottom of the page.
Another more advanced Mashup I've prepared is twitterEarth.
This Mashup uses the twitter block to get my friends' messages, then uses the GeoNames block to translate the location of the person who twittered to a latitude and longitude and passes all this information to the VirtualEarth block for it to display on a map of the earth. It also uses some custom code to take the map to the location of the last twitterer, which is why the VirtualEarth block is greyed.
Bringing it together
Ok, so what can we do with these Mashups? Well, Popfly also gives you the ability to easily create and format web pages. So, creating a new web page and hosting the Mashups I've just created couldn't be easier.
The designer is a lot like Office 2007 in that it gives you the ribbon bar at the top and is really quite intuitive. Also, you'll notice that there is already a working preview of what the Mashup will look like. Now, let go ahead and preview this.
The designer opens up a new window with the web page I just created and shows that a user will be able to come along and not only interact with the Mashup in the way I intended, but rate it, get it or customise it for their own use.
Overview
We've seen here that Popfly is more than just a new web page designer. It's a fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, web pages and applications. It also provides a whole community, which enables developers to connect with each other.
Popfly is another piece in Microsoft's outreach in helping non-professional developers build everything from Xbox games to Robotics to custom Web applications. It really is a new way of bringing excitement to the web.