Alex Barnett blog : Ajax, Microsoft

Geek Juice

alexbarnett — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:36:00 GMT

Yup, I've definitely been missing my feedreader (and now FeedDemon is free I really have no excuses to catch up).

So much good stuff out there, so little time! Here's a sample of the good stuff I've been running into...

MVC, I know what you're thinking...

Haacked shares his MVC joke - "So A Model, A View, and a Controller Walk Into a Bar"...ok, so that's a bad start.

Less of a joke though, more the future...I think therefore I click - Microsoft's investigation into the subconscious, studying thought patterns as part of battle against Apple, Google:

"When a Microsoft Corp. patent application for a method of sorting brain waves surfaced late last year, it drew quips that the company now plans to read PC users' minds, in addition to selling them software."

But that's a while off. I think.

Build it!

In the meantime, back to some semi-reality - here's a good Facebook app primer on How To Build A Facebook Application...and now you can add your own very own virtual realty into Virtual Earth: 3D Models in Mashups. Customize your own Virtual World on your website!

"In this release we added the ability to load custom 3D models as part of a Collection right in your own web applications"

Ship It!

Skyfire has emerged from stealth mode, this video shows the Skyfire mobile browser enabling Flash video through server-side rendering

"While the mobile phone industry scrambles to adopt faster graphics platforms for rendering video, a startup may have bypassed everyone with an approach so simple, you wonder why nobody tried it already"

It looks pretty slick and could well...It just needs to ship! Something else that needs shipping, and pronto...The World Wide Web Consortium releases draft of HTML 5:

"In its final form by 2010, HTML 5 is intended to bring the markup language forward into today's richer Internet environments, with new application programming interfaces to control audio and 2D video content."

And along the shipping theme, Tommy Williams of Microsoft's Data Programmability team describes how he takes a finished software product and gets it up on the Web for people to download.

Trends ~~It!~~

Here's a comment left by a Brian Campbell re: Tim Bray's 2008 Prediction 1: RIA vs. AJAX post.

"Well, one of the big trends is actually getting AJAX to be able to do what the RIA platforms can."

Yup. Lots more to do here.

And what consumer trends to we expect this year? How about the Expectation Economy? I read this, liked it, but thought: Isn't this really describing the experience economy?

A personal trend for me...How about enjoying the NJOY Electronic Cigarette. My wife got me one of these. I haven't got the balls to try this publicly yet...but my time may come.

And this year, how are devs really going make money with Web 2.0? I agree with Phil Wainewright's prediction:

"a groundswell of smart developers are going to use DevPay to make money under the radar screen"

Useful

Subscribed to Steve Gillmor's podcasting series - The Gang » Audio. It includes a fair amount of stuff I'm not really into, but some very good stuff that's right up my street. Just got to be selective about which episodes I'll listen to.

I liked this tool, FlickrDown - download and save your Flickr pics to your hard drive - pics by username, tags or group. Windows only. Sorry! Maybe Mac support in a future release?

Letting your customers know where you're going with your product, what criteria you're using to float some features / improvements to the top of your roadmap is obviously important when you're dealing with developer customer base.

But that's easier said than done. It's a balancing act - on the one hand you don't want to risk over-promising and under-delivering (in fact, you want the opposite) and yet you want provide the best level of visibility you can, so I liked how Ning is carefully introducing its future roadmap to customers in this post - January Product Roadmap - What's Next.

Defining Community

Having clearly defined and agreed term is generally a useful thing (Web 2.0 anyone?)...it gets us all on the same page when we're trying to figure stuff out together. Bob Rebholz of Microsoft's Community team is doing his bit to define the "Community" bit in Social system design part 1: defining terms

"Defining community should be easy right? And it is, sort of."

Microsoft and Google join OpenAjaxAlliance

alexbarnett — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:25:00 GMT

I missed this yesterday, but biggish news in the Ajax-o-sphere - Brad Abrams and Brandon Le Roy announced Microsoft is joining the OpenAjaxAlliance. From the press release:

""Microsoft is joining the OpenAJAX Alliance to collaborate with other industry leaders to help evolve AJAX-style development by ensuring a high degree of interoperability," said Keith Smith, group product manager of the Core Web Platform & Tools to UX Web/Client Platform & Tools team at Microsoft Corp. "By joining OpenAJAX, Microsoft is continuing its commitment to empower Web developers with technology that works cross-browser and cross-platform.""

This OpenAjaxAlliance blog post also mentioned the confirmation of Google's membership, joining a growing number of Ajax players (full list here).

In case you are wondering what the OpenAjaxAlliance is, here is the blurb on their site:

"The OpenAjaxAlliance is an organization of vendors, open-source initiatives and Web developers dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. The alliance's prime objective is to accelerate customer success with Ajax by improving the customer's ability to mix and match solutions from Ajax technology providers and helping to drive the future of the Ajax ecosystem. "

In a nutshell, Interop.

Thanks to Tommy for the heads-up.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and links

alexbarnett — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:19:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie has announced the final release of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (aka "Atlas").

Q406 computer books sales

alexbarnett — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:16:00 GMT

Tim O'Reilly has posted the second part of the Q406 computer books sales report, comparing Q4 2006 with Q4 2005. This is for top selling computer-related books sales in the US, not just O'Reilly titles. Always interesting as an indicator of trends.

Here the highlights for me...The following compares Q4 2006 to Q4 2005:

Overall 'computer' book sales up 4%
Databases category up 6% (I can't see the detailed breakdown in the enterprise db space other than SQL Server is up and Oracle is down - hope Tim provides an update on this later)
Programming languages: Java down 14%, '.NET languages' up 34%, Ruby up 53%, Python up 37%, Perl down 23%,
Web design and development category up 7%
Ajax up 55%, Rails up 43%
Business apps category down 8%: 'crm general' up 256%, collaboration down 23%, Sharepoint down 24% (Sharepoint Server 2007 coming)
Windows XP down 33% (Vista effect I suspect...)

2007 to be a big year for 'Rich Internet Applications'

alexbarnett — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:39:00 GMT

The following is a short description of Adobe's play for 2007 - Apollo - big news in my opinion:

"Apollo, the code name for “a cross-operating system runtime” is a platform that will allow developers to create to desktop applications using existing web development skills such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax."

A big play indeed.

Things I heard in this TalkCrunch podcast interview by Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor with Adobe's Chief Architect, Kevin Lynch: Cross-platform client runtime (Windows, Mac, Linux), supports Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) scenarios and local data storage. No 'direct' revenue model - devs can use Eclipse IDE, but the strategy seems to be to have Apollo drive sales for designers ' developer tools Flex, Blaze ('better tooling support for Apollo') and media server sales and to drive end user adoption of other Adobe products (runtime is free for end user - Flash, PDF authoring tool Acrobat). Currently in beta, Adobe might be v1.0 by July / August timeframe.

Apollo was touched on during Adobe's latest earnings conf call, Larry Dignan reports:

"Chizen told analysts to think about Apollo the same way they would characterize Adobe Reader or Flash Player, its a client that can be used to help others build unique applications and allow Adobe to sell more tools."

With the development of Adob'es Apollo and Microsoft's WPF/E and the continuing rise of Ajax, 2007 is destined to be a very interesting year for Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Update: Amyloo found this recorded presentation by Adobe's product managers introducing Apollo.

Atlas Beta (or Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta)

alexbarnett — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:17:00 GMT

Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta (code-named “Atlas”) is now available to download - it provides a preview of the fully-supported version of ASP.NET AJAX scheduled for release by the end of this year.

Frank Arrigo has some useful links relating to this release.

Update: Microsoft's Scott Guthrie a posted a lot more detail on this beta release.