Alex Barnett blog : Apollo

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

Salesforce - Marc Benioff keynote

alexbarnett — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:43:00 GMT

I'm here at the Salesforce Dev Conference in Santa Clara this morning and listening to Marc Benioff keynote who started his session 30 mins ago.

First he opened up with acknowledgement that there is a the Google / Salesforce rumour flying around this morning but explained that he wouldn't comment on it today - not confirming nor denying...So no 'official' news there.

I'm interested to hear how he explains the Salesforce SOA announcement this morning. Will post thoughts here later...

Update - 11:00 PDT

Adobe's Kevin Lynch is showing off an Apollo app running on a Mac, one as local front-end UI to Salesforce.com API, another app as a UI to ebay webservices and using local Mac resouces as an occasionally connected app, built using Flex. Video, music, etc. Pretty slick. Seems more and more to me that Silverlight / Flash / Apollo are on for huge developer mindshare battles over the next few months/years.

Update - 11:20 PDT

blah, blah.

Update - 11:35 PDT

Salesforce SOA...here we go...

My understanding of what he just said ~~(I didn't catch his name)~~ Adam Gross (VP, Developer Marketing): So you will be able to connect external, 3rd party webservices (FedEx, Google, Oracle, Hoovers, etc) and wire these up on the Apex platform, coded in Apex code. This then creates a new Apex code layer...exposed as a new API you can program against. "SOA as a service".

The scenario they are showing: Salesforce app connects to an Oracle DB to query customer data and invoice details through a WS layer, then importing that data in the Salesforce DB. Then use this new customer record and use some of this customer record data to query against a Dunn and Bradstreet service and a Zip code service, which again it imports into the SF DB. Then Apex code is generated that can be executed on Apex platform. The wiring experience is not a dev UX environment, but an html form based with some Ajax interaction - more of a business user interface to wire stuff up. Nice.

Update - 11:53 PDT

Salesforce SOA expected to be ready for developer preview in August.

Benioff is back on stage. Is reminding everyone he started as a dev, talking about his ealry days in the games industry, telling some story about 2 dev machines as Macs - wired together by cables, one acting as a compiler, another acting as...oh whatever...the point is that is how he met Guy Kawaski...he's on next.

Update - 11:56 PDT

Guy Kawaski is on stage. In response to Benioff's story - "You are so full of crap, Marc".

Update - 12:40pm PDT

Guy Kawasaki's talk was advice to entrepreneurs. Entertaining. Partially random notes I took...

1. Make meaning
- Curve 1: Ice Harvesting
- Curve 2: Ice Factory
- Curve 3: Refrigerator
"measurements are only statistics, and statistics lie"

2. Rolle the DICEE
- Deep: Fanning (Reef) - sneaker soles that open bottles
Intelligent: BF-104 Flashlight (Panasonic) - batteries
Complete: Lexus - more than...
Elegant: Nano (Apple)
Emotive: Harley Davidson

3. Make Mantra (piss-take of mission statement creation excercise. Wendy's as example - "the mission of Wnedy is to deliver suprior quality products that blah, blah, blah"

Should be:

Wendys: Healthy fast food
FedEx Peace of mind
Nike: Authentic athletic perf
Target: Democratizes desgin

4. Get going
- Think different
- Polarize people (don't be afraid to)
- Find a few sole mates (Steve and Woz, Bill had Steve)

5. Define a business model
- Be very specific (your customer's money is actually your money, they are just temporarily holding for you)
- Keep it simple
- Ask women (men want to kill things, women do'nt have this flaw)

6 Niche thyself
2 axis:
X - Value to customer
Y - Ability to provide unique product service

Get it high, and to right. Smart Car, Trek Lime, LG Kimchi refrigerator
low, left - dotcom
high, left - stupid
low, right -

7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
"drowning is a growth industry"
10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font

8. Hire infected people
- Ignore the irrelevant (I loved Macs)
- Hire better than youself (bozo explosion)
- Apply the shopping center test

9. Lower the barriers to adoption
- Let a hundred flowers blossom (postscript save Apple)
- Find the true infuencers (the air is thin at the top)
- Ebrace your evanglists

10. Don't let the bozos grind you down

Blog - http://blog.guykawasaki.com

Keynote over....

Adobe on Apollo Compeitors

alexbarnett — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:08:00 GMT

Very interesting post by Andrew Shebanow (senior computer scientist at Adobe), reflecting on some of the reactions and comments he's heard since Apollo went alpha, including comparisons made with other offerings (Microsoft's WPF, Dekoh, Joyent Slingshot + magnetk, Yahoo! Widgets and Firefox 3.

Highlights for me are:

On WPF:

"Apollo competes with WPF - this meme is attractive to journalists because its easy to write a sexy story about a war between two large companies....Apollo’s can succeed even if WPF proves to be extremely popular, and vice versa.

On comments that Apollo is closed source and proprietary:

"Its true that a number of the pieces that make up Apollo are closed source, but how important this is will vary from developer to developer, and the story around Apollo alternatives is generally even worse."

On Dekoh:

"one thing that they have revealed is that the product relies on a centralized “Dekoh Network Service” for identity, sharing, and so on. The bottom line is that with Dekoh, you are making your application dependent on a closed source, propietary Dekoh service that will own and leverage information about your users and their data."

On Joyent Slingshot + magnetk:

"Downsides are a lot of potential security issues (no sandbox?)...More disturbing, though, is that it sounds like Joyent will be charging a royalty for distributing applications based on their runtime unless you are a customer for their hosting service...much less open than the Apollo model where the SDK and runtime are both free of charge."

On Yahoo! Widgets:

"I don’t really get the comparison, but even if you do think they serve similar needs, the fact is that Yahoo! Widgets is just as closed source and proprietary as Apollo, if not moreso"

And Firefox 3:

"its still fundamentally a web browser and it is nothing but vaporware at the moment."

The comments conversation to Andrew's post make enlightening reading too - I'd also be interested in hearing his thoughts on the Dojo Toolkit / dojo.storage.