Microsoft Popfly is Public

For some time now Popfly has been around as a private alpha. Now it has been opened to public as a beta version of it!
So what is Popfly?! Popfly is a Web 2.0 application allowing consumers (and developers *gg*) to do a lot of cool things.

One part is the Webpage editor, which you can use to build webpages and host them on Popfly - so if you want to build a private website, just use popfly:

The other part, which is even more interesting in my opinion is the Popfly Mashup Builder.

With the Mashup Builder you can create own little applications with the metaphor of building blocks.

 

Choose a block out of the toolbox and drag it onto the design surface. Each block can hav input values and output values. You can then connect these input and output values to a pipeline of blocks. The exact mapping of input parameters can be done with in a configuration view.

At the end of each pipe there should be same output-block, which generates visuals. Then you can preview your mashup.

For those interested in more development-oriented tasks: Everything is established in background by the use of JavaScript.
So if you want to build more complex mashups, you can tune the code in the so called "Advanced View":

Another option is to build custom blocks, which is also done with JavaScript and a custom XML file for the specification of the input and output parameters.

Later you can share "Mash Out" your application, which can then be embedded into blogs (see upper left corner of my blog) or sidebar gadgets for instance.

By the way: Popfly was developed in Silverlight 1.0!!

So there's lot of fun there, not just for consumers!

I'll soon publish another article on popfly..