Popfly now open to all for beta testing.
A while back I posted about Microsoft Popfly, which is a very cool site from Microsoft that lets you create web pages and web ‘mashups’ without writing a single line of code.
At first Popfly was invitation only but Microsoft have now opened it up to everyone for Beta testing.
I’ve been wanting to play around with Popfly since I first saw a demo on channel9, so I went to the site, logged in and had a simple mashup up and running within minutes.
You can watch the latest Channel9 video on Popfly here to help you get a better understanding of the product.
When you get into the designer you will notice a toolbox to your left that contains lots of Microsoft and user generated ‘blocks’
Popfly blocks are the foundation of building mashups and you can create your own using javascript, I used two of the pre-built ones to create mine.
I dragged on the Flickr block and entered my API key, what I liked about this was that the block automatically informed me that I need to generate and API key and also gave me a link so I could accomplish that very easily.
I then dragged on the Virutal Earth block and linked the Flickr to it. I then needed to go into the settings of the Virtual Earth block and wire up the inputs from the Flickr block, in this case it was the latitude and longitude values from my geo-tagged Flickr photos.
I then saved this mashup and run it.
A there you have it, a fully working mashup that was created without writing a single line of javascript. Of course you can build you own blocks and go much further with some very sophisticated mashups and your Popfly projects can also be integrated within Visual Studio.
I think you will agree that this is a very fun and creative tool from Microsoft, I hope it takes off.
