Tag Archive for 'jooce'

As you may know I have been involved in a start-up called jooce. For the last couple of months we were in a private beta for family and friends. Now we open up the curtains a little bit more. Public beta should start next monday. Now the reason why I write this is because I am so excited about our technology. If you look at a system like ours you easily say “I can do that in a day”. I did the same mistake. Before I started working on this sort of beast.

jooce is not an online desktop. Technically speaking it is a platform that allows you to communicate using our IM client and share files instant using an online storage. The whole client is based on AS3 plus the backend — a combination of Java and C++. Since we have an eclectic cocktail of knowledge at jooce I am proud to talk about some features that we came up with.

Media player with seeking using a “big disk”. One of the main features is the media player. The jooce media player allows you to seek through files just like you know it from the Flash Media Server. Since we are a poor start-up we went with the cheaper solution. red5 as the weapon of choice has been optimized and extended to stream files over the network. If we have the time we surely will contribute this to the project. It is so great seeing files being streamd over the network using our internal protocol.

Multiple caching solutions are a second piece that makes such an application actually what it is. All client side operations are done immediately and you only have to synchronize with the server. Unless of course data is requested from the server like opening a folder for the first time. And also pictures are cached as single instances. Basically if I go to your “joocetop” and drag a wallpaper that I like to copy it over to my stuff I will have the same version as you have and it stays cached until one of us actually modifies the data of the file.

Another thing are APIs in the jooce system. All of the components are self-made. Our datagrid can handle more then a 1000 items and for me it scrolls as smooth as it would have only 100. There is a 3D engine involved in switching desktops wich runs fullscreen for me at a 90fps — take in mind all the other stuff that is going on during that process while hopping from one desktop to another. We also use our own event system to get rid of a lot of overhead regarding the memory. It is a mixture of the DOM event model and WinAPI.

So there is a lot of other stuff I could talk about. Like our Webupload supporting YourMinis embeds. We also have a simple physics engine in the system for springs and other funky stuff. But what was it actually that I wanted to say..? Ah, yes. I love my job!