Singapore Flex Usergroup

Wix is a new Website that allows user to create their own website and embeddable widgets from their drag and drop interface. The above is a simple widget made with Wix. This week, we are thrilled to be able to interview with Wix’s developers on the website done up in Actionscript

Development Related

Q: I find that Wix is built on Adobe Flash, is there any reason that Wix chose Flash over other technology like AJAX?
a:The reasons we choose flash are:
• The great graphical flexibility it offers
• ActionScript being a complete development environment (unlike Javascript)

Q: There are many templates in which we can choose from in Wix, how do Wix developers ensure that all these templates are compliance to the editor, while not sacrificing the design?
a: all of our templates are built using the editor, in that respect they are more samples then templates, the process of creating the templates allowed us to see what features the designers need to make their work easier while not sacrificing their design options

Q: Any frameworks (Cairngorm, MVC, PureMVC) / development methodology (agile, SCRUM) are adopted in the development of Wix?
Yes, we have used MVC for most of the framework, of course we did some adaptation to fit our unique needs, but we have found that by creating clear different modules for each part of the components we have managed to scale the framework easily, one of the reasons we have selected ActionScript is that is now evolved to the level where complex software patterns (like MVC) can be implemented. No other browser side language can provide the same level of OOP

We are now also moving to implement agile as our development methodology

Q: How do Wix developers ensures that new features on Wix does not ‘break’ the current website build on Wix? We understand that this might be important as Wix has a very complex engine.
a: You are touching one of the hardests challenges we have been facing, Wix generate XML documents in a language that is unique to Wix, we try to never change the language, in this language we describe the relationships between objects
The idea is that as long as we test that every object we modify can still read its own part of the XML document, we know we are ok.
In addition, we never change the language the base of our platform, we only add new parts to it.

Q: We know that loading and unloading of assets and resources is still a bug in the Flash Player for AS3. How does Wix overcome this problem in the editor?
a: This aspect demands a lot of work (although we would mention that adobe’s recent releases were very helpful in this regard). Our approach was to repeatedly check what features are problematic. For example we learned that when loading components into the main application domain can cause problems. We believe that the amount of attention we give to learning the bugs and work arounds of flash is one of the greatest services we offer our clients; making sure they don’t encounter the bugs they would have gotten entangled in working directly in flash.

Q: Will Wix be coming out with any SDK and open it to 3rd party developers to write plugin for Wix? (we will be excited)
a: certainly, this is in our near term road map, we are still discussing the details and timetable and we’ll be glad to inform you of our plans when they formulate

Q: Does Wix intend to come out with an AIR version of Wix, that allows user to create their website from the desktop?
a: we’ve discussed this quite a lot but decided that we will not do that any time soon. Our users benefit from the huge collection of components and media on our servers, and from integration to 3rd party services, all this cannot work in an offline environment. But of course we will consider this based on customer demand. Our experience in working with Air suggest this can be a simple task that can take as little as a couple weeks

Q: A few years from today, what does Wix think the RIA world will evolve into?
a: we’ll see a lot of efforts to given to the following features: online RIA development collaboration between the different developers and designers wherever they are in the world; true separation between design and coding replacing the active version of the application with one click development of the front end and back end of the application with the same tool self sustaining back end (you add a field to the application front end it is added to the database immediately).

Business Related
Q: People at large has been ratting that Flash is slow (we know its not!). Any reason why to have a builder for a Flash website?
a: Well, people confuse different things
• Flash website usally load all the content at once, so it appears slower, but, once it has finished uploading it works faster, at Wix we are trying to solve this by creating incremental download of media items from the server.
• Flash animations look slow – well, sometimes they are, but in HTML you can’t even get close to the same performance, an HTML webpage that does that same animations as flash would have been much slower, the simple truth here is that nobody even tries to do such animations with HTML
• Flash easily supports an ajax like methodology, where only the data needed is loaded at any time, and the rest cached, our platform is built by these guidelines and we believe will show people how fast flash can be.
We really believe that platforms like Wix can help reduce the amount of confusion regarding flash and the so called “slow performance”

Q: One of the key strength of Wix is its ability to integrate with current Web 2.0 websites like YouTube and Flickr. Any further integration with other websites are planned down the road? For example, it will be great if I can add a page that pulls the latest events on upcoming.org and display it there dynamically.
a: Absolutely, there are many such features planned, more video sites, rss viewers many more media sources and external services (forms, statistics gathering etc..). We just needed a ‘good enough’ product out of the door, and we will be adding this additional functionality later on.

Q: How do you differentiate yourself from other Flash Website Builder, like SproutBuilder?
a: i think sprout builder is not a website builder, it’s a widget creator, also it’s not designed with the simple user in mind. Wix is designed to enable everybody to create flash content. W
e offer more capabilities with less need for know how and no need for external tools.

Also, give the fact that we have our own development environment, we’re not limited by the Flex roadmap and could provide more capabilities based on user needs.

Q: How is downtime being handled that the moment. Currently all the websites that user built resides on Wix. In the event of maintanence, how does Wix ensure that its user website, which might be a business portfolio site, remains to function?
a: our servers are located in a top tier data center, in addition, everything is duplicated (two apps servers, two load balancers, two databases…), so if anything fails there is a backup already online. We feel we can be as reliable as any top internet site that users depend on for their livelihood.

Q: Wix Engine is very versatile. We can see that the same engine can be tweak to go into services like slide shows presentation, as well as Widget Builders, widgets for Facebook, etc. Is Wix looking into this area? Or any upcoming cool stuff you want to announce ?
a: we think in the future this separation will disappear, everything you have described is a web document with a different name, a widget is just a small website that can be embedded, all our sites can be used as widgets as well, even right now you can embed a complete website built in wix into your facebook/myspace, in the future we’ll make this integration simpler and smoother for our users
our vision is to create one platform that allows everybody to create any internet document they want of any kind, of course,
we believe a company concentrating only on developing a slide show component will always have better slideshows components than the ones we develop, that is why we are working on our SDK, to allow users to integrate the various component such as slideshows and use them within Wix

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Thanks to Wix for accepting this great interview! I look forward to their new features to come and in hearing them presenting Wix in the future usergroup meeting!