Alex Barnett blog : Dev

Designing Web APIs - Twitter Learnings

alexbarnett — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:08:00 GMT

Although I made it to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I didn't make it to a session Matt McAlister blogged about by Twitter’s Alex Payne and Michael Migurski of Stamen Design who presented learnings from the perspective of an API provider.

But I can see the slide deck discussing the Twitter API and so can you:

| View | Upload your own

More Web 2.0 session slides available here. Recommended:

Videos of sessions here. Check out Clay Shirky's session, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (a good read btw).

Time to Define "Platform as a Service" (or PaaS)

alexbarnett — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:27:00 GMT

Before joining Bungee Labs last year, I knew they were on to something big. I mean, really big.

A big idea, an ambitious vision: to provide developers with end-to-end development, testing, deployment and hosting of sophisticated web applications as a service delivered purely in the cloud.

Since we announced our private beta back in May 2007, we've had over 1,500 developers sign up. In January alone we had over 400 developers kicking the tires - not just signing up and disappearing, but 400 returning developers, learning, building and deploying out increasingly sophisticated apps on a fast evolving developer platform, requiring no install of anything on their machine - all through the browser.

And since May 2007, the trend to delivering software as a service (SaaS) has been moving at terrific pace. New web APIs are being made available every month and new announcements by start-ups as well established big players are reinforcing and fueling the acceleration to the inevitable world of cloud computing.

As we announce our move from private to public beta today, we've also tried to articulate the new category of product and service we believe Bungee Connect is at the forefront of defining, the category of Platform as a Service, or PaaS, and our big bet is that PaaS is the next big thing.

So what is a "Platform as a Service"?

In September 2006, Marc Andreessen posted his thought provoking "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" and it got a fair level attention from the web industry. And we took note. We thought what Marc was describing in his Level 3 definition where:

"A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.",

...was right, but only partly right. Given Bungee Labs' ambition and vision, we felt there was a lot more to Marc's definition of the highest level definition of an "internet platform", a definition more holistic and comprehensive than a runtime.

But we kept focused, kept working on what we were hearing our developers telling us we needed to fix and improve on Bungee Connect, to give what developers are telling us what they really want - a Platform as a Service - to provide everything required in the lifecycle for the development through hosting of full-on, sophisticated and highly interactive web apps, not just widgets.

As we were readying for our next phase -our public beta - we thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground and actually define what we mean when we use the term Platform-as-a-service, and thereby describe the comprehensiveness what Bungee Connect has to offer.

So early this morning, our CTO and Founder of Bungee Labs, Dave Mitchell posted a definition describing PaaS in concrete terms.

What follows is a summary of Dave's post, with a selection of my favorite "soundbites" and ideas, but I suggest you read the whole post for yourself - there's a fair amount to consider:

1) Develop, Test, Deploy, Host and Maintain on the Same Integrated Environment.

"It’s time to stop developing “here” and running “there”. Today, most applications are coded in one environment (usually custom-built for that project by a developer), then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production...In a completely-realized PaaS, the entire software lifecycle is supported on the same computing environment, dramatically reducing costs of development and maintenance, time-to-market and project risk. A PaaS should let developers spend their time creating great software, rather than building environments and wrestling with configurations just to make their applications run — let alone testing, tuning and debugging them...Also, an end-to-end PaaS should provide a high productivity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) running on the actual target delivery platform, so that debugging and test scenarios run in the same environment as production deployment.

2) User Experience Without Compromise

"A Platform-as-a-Service must deliver compelling user experiences, with all the richness and live interactivity that consumers have been conditioned to expect....Hiccups like software downloads or plug-in installations, browser dependencies and inconsistencies, or local executables break the web model, and are inherently less secure, less maintainable and less user-friendly. In order to be relevant and popular, PaaS must deliver the best user experience available on the web, comparable to or better than conventional approaches.

3) Built-in Scalability, Reliability, and Security

"Developers should be free to build applications with the comfort that the security of customer data, network traffic, source code (intellectual property) and even server hardware is maintained automatically by the platform through-out application development and delivery."

4) Built-in Integration with Web Services and Databases.

"Applications need to leverage existing software investments in databases, and internal or external third party web services, requiring that the platform offer a wide variety of connectivity options."

5) Support Collaboration

"A PaaS must support both formal and on-demand collaboration throughout the entire software lifecycle (development, testing, documentation and operations), while maintaining security of source code and associated intellectual property."

6) Deep Application Instrumentation

"With instrumentation, organizations can see exactly how users are using the application, the type of performance they are experiencing and any application crashes. This information can also be leveraged to create new business models where costs are tied to actual utilities, rather than flat-rate subscriptions or licenses."

Over the next couple of years we expect to be hearing a lot more about PaaS and how "Y announcement" by "X company" is now providing true a PaaS offering to businesses and developers.

But saying you are providing a Platform as a Service has to mean something, and we think the above definition sets a high but reasonable standard that must be met for any company to claim they are providing a "platform-as-a-service' and legitimately describe themselves as a PaaS player.

The amazing thing is, for me at least, is that Bungee Connect is delivering all of the above, today. From our point of view, delivering PaaS - the real deal - is not statement of Bungee's intent, it's a statement of fact. It's bold, but so is our vision. Yes, we've still a lot to do before we're commercially ready and we think that's coming soon, but so much is already there. Try it out.

What I'm reading...

alexbarnett — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:06:00 GMT

There are a whole bunch of interesting posts / stuff I find on the net that I bookmark on del.icio.us (at least, I think they are interesting). Over the years I've been experimenting with different ways of sharing these with you. My most recent solution has been to include my del.icio.us links within my feed as seperate items. The problem with this approach is I haven't had a permalinked way of publishing these to my blog with a way to easily edit prior to publishing...also, having the daily summaries del.icio.us format in a feed is lame.

So I going to try something new. Instead of having the daily del.icio.us link summaries published as RSS items within my Feedburner feed, I'm going to publish these as blog posts. It should make things more economical from the consumption point of view (I don't think the "Links for 2008-01-20 [del.icio.us]" blah blah feed item titles are pretty). To do this, I have:

disabled the del.icio.us feed syndication from Feedburner (the Link Splicer)
have installed Josh Leggard's Insert Feed Content plugin for Windows Live Writer - this lets me populate a draft blog post with the latest items from any feed (my del.icio.us feed in this case - I'll still use the service for bookmarking) that I can then include / edit / add more commentary before I post to my blog - along with a custom post title.

Better me thinks. I like Harry Pierson's and Assaf's Labnotes style of providing links with commentary...over time I hope to emulate these.

So here goes - this first effort will be larger than future posts like this...shorter in the future.

OpenID - Getting Traction

Telegraph to become OpenID provider
"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider."
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID; Users Able to Access Multiple Internet Sites with Their Yahoo! ID
Sweet!
Stories we want to see in 2008
"Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Endorse Support OpenID and OAuth"

Cool UI / Vizualization and Useful Bits

external hard disk treemap
"an external hard disk that shows the content of the hard disk on its outside skin."
Fascinating new way of entering text
"Dasher is a really fascinating interface that allows you to write by browsing through letters using a finger, mouse or some other pointing devise."
How Does FeedDemon Calculate Attention?
Nick Bradbury: "FeedDemon's algorithm for determining a feed's attention rank has changed since I first wrote about it, but it's still very simple."
using delicious on your iphone
Perfect. All I need is an iPhone now.
wmIRC.com - IRC client for Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC / Phone Edition
"IRC for when you're on the move."

SaaS Stuff

Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 101.
How to package up the SaaS platform
Phil Wainwright: "Sun’s intervention gives MySQL’s open source database an aura of greater enterprise readiness than it previously had, backed up by fully accountable support offered on a traditional commercial basis."
Updates to URI Syntax in Dec 2007 ADO.NET Data Services CTP
Astoria gets URI syntax updates.
The Idea of Software as a Service Platform
I still don’t see desktop GIS being replaced by web services anytime soon.
600 Web APIs
Programmable Web's 600 web APIs.
Enter the Internet Cloud
"The Internet cloud [is] where the distributed and programmable network of services across the globe will serve all the data, resources and functionality we will ever use." Good quote ;-)
Your Data in the Cloud - URL-based computing, SimpleDB, Astoria, etc.
Michael Cote: "the question for Astoria, SimpleDB, and all these “the non-relational database” databases isn’t so much a question of a good idea or not, but the way the technology is packaged and delivered."
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
Dion Hinchcliffe on the worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.
Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008
Phil Wainwright: "The coming year is going to be a pivotal one for anyone involved in software-as-a-service."
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
New book by Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? "A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid." Next - everything software.
Is Red Hat's New Development Environment Destined for an Amazon or IBM Cloud?
Dana Gardner: "Tools in the clouds."

Developer Cults and Dataheads

Sriram Krishnan: Amazon SimpleDB - Technical Overview
"I love the data model for SimpleDB."
The Cults of Programming
"In my experience with various programmers over the years, I've realized that most of them fall into one of several cults which describe their behavior." Via Assaf.
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster
How many of the 15 Twitter employees are dedicated to managing all this?
Eventual Consistency Is Not That Scary
"Get ahead of the curve and understand for your application what the consistency requirements will be."
Eventually Consistent
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the concept of eventual consistency in the context of data replication."
Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay
"With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us."
Facebook Right, Scoble Wrong: Social Network Interoperability and the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp
Dare Obasanjo: "The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service."
ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Transforms SQL Server into an Atom Store
Wow.
Rails 2.0: It's done!
Er, Rails 2.
Volta Fundamentals
Erik Meijer's latest. In essence Volta is a recompiler.

Uncategorizable But Good.

Lessons from Star Wars
Johnnie Moor's pointer: "Stephen Anderson shares his presentation about what designers can learn from the making of Star Wars."

Podcast interviews - smart people in the world of the web

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:41:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people in the world of the web. We publish these as a podcast series (the Bungee Line - podcast feed here) over on the BCDN blog.

If you have ideas about someone you think we should interview, let me know! We're focusing on topics we think web developers might be interested in the worlds of software as a service and web app development, in particular profiling web apis. Related topics are good too.

I've listed out below our most recent podcasts below...plenty more in the works (previous podcasts are listed here). Hope you like :-)

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

alexbarnett — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

To kick off the new year, I presented to around 40 or 50 members of Utah Technology Council (UTC) last week. The title of the topic they asked me to speak about was "Trends in Software as a Service Platforms". I searched around for some ideas and came across two recent posts predicting trends in SaaS for 2008, one by Phil Wainewright "Eight Reasons SaaS Will Surge in 2008" and Jeff Kaplan's post "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services in 2008". I decided to borrow liberally from these (thanks Phil and Jeff) and mash these two together (along with a couple of thoughts of my own) and present "8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms" to an audience made up of CTOs and VPs of engineering and development for software companies in the Utah area.

In preparation for the presentation, my boss (Martin Plaehn) at Bungee Labs suggested I write up my presentation as notes blog them afterward, so here they are.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend
Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS
Software vendors stampede into SaaS
All is being virtualized
Explosion of Web APIs
Economic factors favor SaaS
Enterprise and SMB IT embraces SaaS
SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

1. SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend

Most of us have witnessed and many of us have been a part of the transformation in the way goods and services have been digitized, virtualized, delivered and consumed. Software, the data behind that software and the functionality that software provides is no different - software is subject to the very same transformational forces.

Just think about how even a class of product that is natively digital - such as software - has been transformed in the way it is delivered and consumed. For prosperity's sake, I've still got a few of those ZX81 software cassettes stashed away somewhere, gathering dust, looking ever more antiquated with each passing year. How will today's mode of software delivery and use look to us in a few years from now?

The web wants to connect things, and that's interesting. But connecting and interacting with "live" data, information and remote functionality make things more interesting.

At the fundamental level, the web connects things. It connects people to people, businesses to businesses, and people to businesses. Since the early 90's, the web has enabled the connection of so many things to so many other things at an ever accelerating rate, and yet we crave even more connectivity. But we increasingly also want the ability to interact with those things.

And it is the nature of these connected things that have changed since the early internet. The early web was good at connecting to static views of information and accessing limited and rigid functional services, very much a read-only mode. Then, as we learned a) the ability to read more dynamic-type information - at least regularly updated, and b) access richer remote functionality, we created whole new opportunities for ourselves. Next, we grew our ability read and write against dynamic, near real-time data and information and to program against remote functionality to create a new class of web applications leveraging those capabilities - and hence a new order of business and experiential opportunities have emerged. Some label this as "Web 2.0".

At its essence, it is the "liveness" of these real-time read-write data, information and functional sources available as "always on" services and the increasing ease to connect to, interact with - specifically change those resources available as live, programmable services that allows us to create new value out of those resources, opening up brand new market opportunities for businesses and the compelling, rich "live" end-user experiences of tomorrow.

2. Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS

Not surprisingly, Wall Street loves the the predictability of subscription services. It's good for cash flow, forecasting and business planning.

The venture firms also relish the opportunities that are opening up in a software as services-oriented economy. The ability to circumnavigate the incumbent software players with new disruptive technologies and propositions that are significantly easier to try and access for prospective customers compared to traditional software evaluation, along with usage and subscription-based business models verses the old licensing model makes investing in services-based software companies very compelling propositions from the venture firms' point of view. We should also see healthy M&A activity based on these similar opportunities in the coming year.

And then there's the trend for offshore / IT business process outsourcing. These providers will surely get in the game and make their plays through investments in and acquisitions of SaaS vendors that align well with their current core businesses.

Add to that the excitement we're reading about the SaaS space from the IT Analysts, journalists and bloggers, plus the new book by Nick Carr (author of “IT Doesn’t Matter”) - delivered by Amazon to me last week: “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google”. I think there's little doubt Carr's excellent analysis of the computing industry as an analogy to the electricity industry's shift to a utility model will be on business bestseller list for much of 2008. His messages resonates with corporate executives and end-users agree with him:

IT is a needless hassle,
it should be as easy as electricity and
be as reliable as a utility

3. Software vendors stampede into SaaS

The Big Software Players are following the early SaaS successes

CRM as a case in point. If you've been following the CRM software market, you'll know about the noises Oracle-Siebel, SAP and Microsoft started to make in the 2007 about what they are are lining up for the 2008 in terms of CRM as a service. Their efforts to emulate Salesforce.com's success delivering CRM as SaaS will be key strategic bets from the incumbents' point of view - and loud, price and functionally competitive propositions from the point of view of their existing and prospective customers.

CRM is just one of the multiple horizontal solution categories to transform from on-premise with traditional licensing model to a service-based delivery and subscription-based revenue model. ERP, supply chain, e-commerce, HR and many more...the horizontal solution list goes on. And then there are the vertical solution players...

Here's another data point to consider regarding the move by traditional software vendors to a SaaS model:

“15-20% of application ISVs have already either begun new skunk works initiatives or gained access to SaaS assets and development experience through M&A activity”
(Source: Key Trends in SaaS: 2008 and Beyond, Saugatuck Technology)

4. All is being virtualized

Virtualization is a technology trend.

Virtualization enables hardware as a service. The demand for virtual machines met by hypervisor software (VMWare, Xen, Hyper-V) and the success of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the last couple of years point to a continuation of further virtualization of applications and hardware. Virtualization is accelerating the move from traditional on-premise software to services.

Virtualization is a business trend.

We continue to become a mobile workforce. The younger entrants into the workforce in service-oriented economies expect and want to be always connected. It's very hard work, if not impossible to get your traditional on-premise applications and centralized servers sitting behind a firewall to serve today's mobile workers. SaaS and managed services meet the needs square on.

5. The explosion of Web APIs is upon us

According to ProgrammableWeb.com, there are 559 commercial and public APIs available today, most of these are new and there are plenty more to come. How many will we see go live this year? And how many private web APIs are there and will be developed and consumed in the coming year?

Data from ProgrammableWeb.com

6. Economic factors favor SaaS

On-premise software requires upfront capital investments
To lower costs, many companies hold back on their capital investments to mitigate their risks, especially in recessions
Adopting on-demand services on a pay-as-you-go basis will be a perfect sourcing strategy for businesses seeking greater cost-controls and flexibility – the utility model

All well and good, but the real economic value of SaaS is that fact that it unleashes new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality.

7. Enterprise and SMB embraces SaaS

When it comes to IT, who doesn't like

Low-maintenance?
Low cost?
Low-resource profile?

IT and business folk like these things, and externally delivered SaaS applications deliver these benefits.

8. SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

The more mainstream SaaS becomes the more the large vendors will be forced to offer effective platforms for ISVs, enterprises and SMBs.

If the move by the software vendors from traditional on-premise software to a services model is to be successful, they will need to provide programmable interfaces - not just end-user interfaces - to their services for their customers. Customers need and want the ability to access, intergrate and create new value out of live, programmable data, information and functionality living in the cloud. And in turn these same customers will want their custom-developed composite applications and integrated data available as programmable services - yet more APIs.

Customers want to unleash new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality through the development of their own applications programmed against those resources. And in turn these same customers will want their own custom-developed composite applications and newly integrated data available as end-user interfaces and as programmable services - yet more APIs. These customer needs will drive the software market to provide platforms to provide businesses and developers with with end-to-end:

programmable services and data integration
application development, testing and collaboration tools
deployment and scalable delivery

...all as a service with a utility model.

(hey...I needed to mentioned Bungee Connect just the once ;-).

2008 will mark a the proliferation of such offerings as "platforms as services" (or PaaS) through 2009, where then the consolidation will begin. Interesting SaaS and PaaS times ahead.

Update 2/20/2008: see "Time to Define "Platform as as Service" (PaaS)

The presentation seemed to go down pretty well and we had lots of interesting discussion throughtout. One of the topics we discussed was data security in a SaaS world. Don Kleinschnitz (VP, Development at Symantec) followed up with a mail linking to his blog covering Security 2.0 topics.

Again - thanks to Phil Wainewright and Jeff Kaplan for their post and to Martin for suggesting I blog this.

Outing dirty laundry

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:02:00 GMT

It's Jay Bazuzi's last day at Microsoft to become a stay-at-home dad. At one point Jay was development lead for the C# editor in VS.

We've not met, and I'm sure he's a lovely chap and all that, but I did catch his parting wave on his MSDN blog, where he's provided some "tips" on software development for his ex-dev-collegues...not too pretty.

I'm not sure what value there is in hanging out your team's dirty laundry "in public", rather than including this kind of info in his internal leaving mail. Each to their own I suppose.

ADO.NET Entity Framework video- 1 year later

alexbarnett — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:04:00 GMT

Some old Data Programmability teammates of mine, Britt Johnston, Pablo Castro and Mike Pizzo (well, Mike's not that old), are interviewed by Charles Torre in this Channel 9 video to discuss their progress, challenges and customer feedback in the last year since announcing the first ADO.NET Entity Framework CTP, including some details on project Astoria and LINQ to Entities support, details on the Beta 2 and Tools CTP released earlier this week (the entity model designer is v.cool), plus the future of the Entity Framework.

P.S. Michael - in case you're reading: reconsider the shorts for the next interview :-P

Ozzie's "Cloud OS" Raises More Questions than Answers

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:04:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie's briefing this week provided quite a bit more detail around Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" strategy. It's definitely worth a read (or a look, and if you're feeling too lazy for either you can read Nick Carr's summary).

It's been a year since Ozzie took over the role as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates, and I think it is exciting to see his influence further emerge throughout the business, architectural and experential direction of Microsoft. The 30 year old company needs this injection - a shot in the arm. And his vision is the right one. It is the only one that has any chance of seeing Microsoft through its need for growth.

However, as the Ozzie's "Cloud OS" story slowly becomes more concrete, the future influence that Microsoft will have throughout the software and internet services ecosystem is becoming less clear.

Yes, we know Software as a Service (Saas) is becoming an increasingly significant trend, and we know that the enabling role Web Services (SOAP and REST based) has to play as part of the overall move to a distributed computing model is becoming ever more central, and we know that the browser will continue to further its dominance as the primary interface between humans and data, functionality and people, but what is not so clear is how many "major players" there will be in that future, what their roles will be, nor what the roles of the "everyone elses" will be.

Microsoft Partners have been assured a place by Microsoft's side in this future, but does anyone really know? How will all this fall out? How will Microsoft's traditional partner profile fit into Ozzie's new brave future? What kind of ecosystems will emerge? Will Microsoft's ecosystem of tomorrow look radically different to its ecosystem of today? Who are the Microsoft partners of today who will find themselves competing head-to-head with Microsoft tomorrow? What will Microsoft's competition of the future even look like?

The answers to some of these question may surprise us. How many people, for example, would have imagined a just few years ago that search engine providers or an online bookseller or online university network would emerge to become a serious potential competitor in the computing and software space of Microsoft? Not many. In the second internet age Microsoft's future competition and partners can literally come from any direction at any time. And they often do. In many respects, the future looks bright, but I suspect that for many in the software / computing industry the future is also very cloudy indeed.

Bungee Labs - interviews on Podtech

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 May 2007 00:44:00 GMT

Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices, popped over to the Bungee Labs offices a couple of weeks back and recorded two video interviews for Podtech. Here they are:

Bungee Labs and Their Ajax-Based IDE

"After years of working with developers at Microsoft, Alex Barnett thought the pitch from Bungee Labs was too good to be true. A Web-based development environment with the richness and power of a fat, local IDE but with a easier way to share, test and publish applications to the web? Then he saw it. Seeing lead to believing. Now Barnett is sharing the story with others as the community manager at Bungee Labs."

Demo: Creating Hello World with Bungee Connect

"Brad Hintze, product marketing manager at Bungee Labs, shows Brad Baldwin the benefits of Bungee Connect, a rich Ajax and browser-based development environment. Hintze quickly mashes up the Rhapsody service showing how easy it is to create and deploy Web apps with this next-generation IDE."

If you like what you see, sign up for the private beta over at Bungee Labs site. For this beta phase, we're looking specifically for devs who are familiar with the web APIs from the following service providers:

Amazon: (e.g. E-commerce Service, Simple Storage Service (S3), Mechanical Turk, Alexa)
Ebay: (Ebay Web Service)
Google: ( e.g. AdWords, Google Maps)
Microsoft: (e.g Windows Live Search, MapPoint)
PayPal
Real Networks: (Rhapsody)
Salesforce.com
Yahoo! (Flickr, Yahoo! Mail)

I'll be at MIX07

alexbarnett — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:34:00 GMT

I'll be heading down to MIX07 tomorrow. Let me know if you want to hook up (ping me at )

There will be a torrent of Microsoft product announcements over the next few days - Sam Sethi has made a number of predictions on what some of these will be.

One of the sessions I'll be looking forward to is Pablo Castro's talk that Sam picked up on (I used to work with Pablo in Microsoft's Data Programmability team). If you are going to MIX07, DO NOT miss this:

Accessing Data Services in the Cloud
Speaker(s): Pablo Castro - Microsoft

Come learn about new Microsoft technologies that enable you to make your data available over the Web through a simple REST interface and using open formats such as plan XML, JSON or even RDF. We also discuss the underlying entity framework that makes it easy to model, publish, and program against your data over the Web.

Announcing Bungee Connect

alexbarnett — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:11:00 GMT

At last, I can tell you more about what Bungee Labs has been up to...

We've just announced details about Bungee Connect, a 100% on-demand web development and deployment environment that will be going into Beta phase in May.

Over the next three days at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 and on bungeeconnect.com we'll be providing a lot more detail on exactly what Bungee Connect is, how it works and why we think it will be a big deal when we go live.

So before I go on, let me quote a couple of people who have already seen Bungee Connect in action behind closed doors. The following are from tonight's two press releases (1 and 2)

First off, Dion Hinchcliffe:

“Ajax is just the beginning of the RIA story and Bungee Labs provides the rest of the solution with a web-based IDE, on-demand scalable deployment, a well-designed community model and a built-in component ecosystem with real-world licensing options,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet blogger; President/CTO, Hinchcliffe & Co.; and editor in chief, AjaxWorld Magazine. “Bungee Connect is a surprisingly complete one-stop shop for the RIA development, deployment and operations lifecycle.”

Next, Dana Gardner:

“Given the current disjointed state of tools, testing and deployment models, most developers find creating rich internet applications (RIAs) to be complex, time-consuming and expensive,” said Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions. “By combining development, testing and deployment functions into an integrated, low-cost-of-entry service approach, Bungee Connect both broadens the numbers of developers that can produce web applications as well as slashes the barriers of entry for creating innovative ecommerce services and web-based businesses."

The Bungee Labs team has been working very closely with the Amazon team (and others API providers) the last few months to make sure Amazon's web services "just work" with Bungee Connect. Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon's Web Services:

“Bungee Labs’ decision to make their development environment integrate seamlessly with Amazon Web Services is great news for our developer community,” said Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. “AWS developers can now use Bungee Connect to directly access our services, which means they can build Web-Scale applications in an easy to use, browser-based development environment.”

Another provider of web APIs, Salesforce.com has also been working closely with the Bungee Labs engineers. This time a quote from Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com:

“Salesforce.com has demonstrated that the innovation and ideas of the consumer Internet are at the core of the next generation of business applications. Bungee Connect together with Salesforce.com’s Apex platform makes it easier for developers to create mashups for their businesses, and in doing so hastens the transition from traditional enterprise software to the new on-demand model of building and deploying applications.”

So, what is Bungee Connect? Well, it's a lot of things:

Bungee Connect is a completely web-based integrated development environment (IDE) for building and deploying rich Ajax web applications, from simple web apps to seriously sophisticated Ajax applications. No install for developers, no installation of delivery infrastructure, and no client install for end users.
Bungee Connect is for developers, not for consumers. Yes, it provides a huge amount of automated support for the integration of SOAP and REST-based web services, Ajax app development and state management. You can develop sophisticated apps that integrate powerful (as well as simple) web services plus develop your own logic without having to write a line of code. It massivley reduces complexity. But, nonetheless, it is for developers, not consumers.
Bungee Connect provides a completely integrated means of deploying apps to the live web. No FTP. No separation between your dev, staging, production and live environment. No local set-up on your machine. No bits to install anywhere. No web servers, no app servers, no stacks, nor libraries to install, patch or manage. No 'Yak shaving'. It's all taken care of for you. You develop your app through the browser, then deploy your app through the browser and map the app to your domain / URL (or embed the app in your site) - It's your app. Oh, and you get IE, Firefox and Safari cross-browser compat taken care of too - you build your app once and it just works in these three browsers. Sweet.
Bungee Connect includes a whole code share and team collaboration concept. You can keep your code proprietary, or you can share it with other Bungee Connect developers in your workgroup or with the wider Bungee Connect developer community. There's a lot more to this than I can cover here and I'll be writing a lot more on this soon, but I like how Mat Asay described the community aspect as a 'Sourceforge for the 21st Century'.
Bungee Connect allows developers to leverage the world of web APIs. We've been working with the API engineering and evangelist teams at Amazon, Ebay, Google, Microsoft Windows Live, PayPal, RealNetworks, Salesforce.com and Yahoo! to ensure Bungee Connect works sweetly with the multitude of their rich APIs (both WS* and RESTful). The aim is to ensure Bungee Connect can work with any web service that you choose and by working with these teams and their APIs in developing Bungee Connect, we've got a great test-bed to make sure we can achieve this goal.
Bungee Connect is No Fee for the developer to use in developing and testing Bungee-powered apps. You only pay once you've deployed your app commercially or unrestricted. We expect this to be US$1 per computer-network-interaction-hour, billed monthly. Again, more on this later.

And there's so much more. Tomorrow, anyone attending Web 2.0 Expo will be able to get hands on with Bungee Connect. We've got a booth with PCs (Windows, Macs and Linux) with the browser open (IE, Firefox and Safari) where you run through some tutorials and judge for yourself if you think we're all smoking crack (see pics below - no crack, just the booths). We'll also be updating the site with screencasts and plenty more details and Martin will be presenting and demo'ing with Brad on Wednesday morning. And by then I'm sure David might have something more to say too...

To underline a couple of points here: we're not live yet. We go into Beta in May and are looking for web developers who ideally already have experience in progamming against the APIs of the companies I mentioned earlier. So sign up if that sounds like you...

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Update:

Dana Gardner has written up his thoughts on Bungee Connect.
Short but sweet mention on Mashable.com by Pete Cashmore.

Update 2 (4/18/07)

Richard MacManus blogged it over at Read/Write Web
Ryan Stewart blogged us too :-)

Adobe's Apollo goes alpha

alexbarnett — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:08:00 GMT

Ryan Stewart has the scoop and links to Adobe's Apollo which has just released to alpha.

For details, check out the Apollo Developer FAQ.

1 in 4 Developers To Get RESTed

alexbarnett — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:12:00 GMT

AJAXWorld has reported a couple of interesting data points from Evans Data Corp’s latest Web Services Development Survey (the article refers to the Spring 2006 survey - I think this is a typo as the Winter 2006 Survey has come out).

First, The REST (Representational State Transfer) 'style' use is on the rise: The Evans Data survey found a 37% increase in respondents implementing or considering REST. Now, as a mentor of mine once said to me, "X% of f*ck all is still f*ck all", so this data really needs qualifying to understand significance of this, I haven't seen original survey data (but I intend to). I do know that there were 400+ respondents.

However, this is noteworthy:

"with one out of four surveyed saying that they are considering REST-Based Web Services as a simpler alternative to SOAP-based services".

So, if you are one of the 3 out of 4 developers that are not considering REST, then you might want to take a look here.

Another data point in the survey: close to half of developers surveyed say they are already working with AJAX or plan to do so in the coming year.

Dr. Peter Chen - the ER Model and ADO.NET Entity Framework - Podcast

alexbarnett — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Dr Peter Chen, inventor of the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), visited the Microsoft Campus to provide a lecture sharing his thoughts on the ADO.NET Entity Framework. As we were planning his visit, he was very keen to make sure that his views could be shared with a wider audience beyond Microsoft employees, so we agree to record some sessions while on campus.

His original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), published in 1976 is one of the most cited papers in the computer software field. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him, Sam Druker, Jose Blakeley, Britt Johnston, Erik Meijer, Pedro Cellis where we heard how his ideas on the ER model were formulated some 30 years ago. Lot's more fascinating conversation all about this history of databases, and their future too...

The next morning, I picked up Dr Chen from the hotel and drove him to the recording studio to meet with Britt, Jose and Brian Beckman where they got talking for an hour with the microphone on. Here's the podcast, hosted on Channel 9 (.mp3 here) It is superb. I mean it. If you're into 'data', you'll love it.

"Beckman interviews Dr. Chen along with Jose Blakeley, Software Architect, SQL Server, and Britt Johnston, Director of Program Management, Data Programmability. Join as we discuss the ideas behind Dr. Chen's original paper, how these concepts have subsequently influenced the software industry and database technologies, and how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is an execution runtime for the ER model."

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...)