Alex Barnett blog : Live

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 :-)

(Hints of) The Future of Windows Live as a platform

alexbarnett — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:30:00 GMT

This story at Redmond Developer News discusses the future of Windows Live as a platform and includes an interview with Adam Sohn, director of worldwide sales and marketing in Microsoft's online services group.

Main points of the article (plus additional notes and links):

"Microsoft's MIX07 developers and designers conference is set for the end of April in Las Vegas, and promises to be the venue where the company reveals more of its plans to make Windows Live into a bona fide platform for third-party developers"

Here's the MIX07 site

"First, the company is working to present a more cohesive architecture than it has previously for its emerging Live Services businesses "

Sohn: "With the emerging framework, APIs fall into two fairly distinct categories-infrastructure and applications"
LiveSide has intepreted the breakdown of the two categories as mentioned in the article as follows:

Infrastructure Applications
     identity      IM
     relationships      search
     advertising      Spaces
     domains      mail/calendar
     storage      classifieds (expo)
     mapping

"some of the pieces have been delivered, at least in version 1 form. Others, such as the Windows Live Contacts Control, which Sohn describes as providing access to "probably the largest social network on the planet," are still in beta test."

The documentation for the Windows Live APIs is called the Windows Live SDK and was announced end of January
Here's a link to the Windows Live Contacts Control beta

"As Microsoft is developing the software needed to make Windows Live work, the company is also dashing to create enough server space to provide Live services on a truly global basis. That is, Microsoft is investing heavily in data centers to support all of those users and their services"

Sohn: "This is a scale game"

Robert Scoble's reaction to the piece:

"I’m worried about the boil-the-ocean approach. Web developers like small, discrete APIs
...Oh, and they like to see lots of iterations, er, small improvements in the service over time that demonstrates a team’s commitment (Virtual Earth got dozens of little, and some major, improvements over the past three years)."

And LiveSide:

"Developing an architecture around Microsoft's Live services has been and will be a big part of what happens in this coming year and beyond. It may be why Ray Ozzie has been so silent lately. We may find out as early as his keynote at Mix07. "

I suspect there will be some more reactions to the RDN article, so I'll update this post if I see stuff of interest.

Live Search SOAP API - Out of Beta

alexbarnett — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:07:00 GMT

Nathan Buggia has announced news that the Live Search SOAP API is now out of beta.

Interesting question Nathan asks at the end of his post -

"I know the SOAP API is all fine and dandy for the Java or ASP.Net developers out there, but what about everyone else? Yes you - JavaScript, PHP, Python, and even Ruby coders! What are you guys looking for from a Search API? REST, JSON, ASCII? We’re all ears…"

Photosynth tech preview now live

alexbarnett — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:25:00 GMT

I signed up for a Microsoft internal preview for employees a few weeks ago and had a play - it's amazing. Now it's your chance.

"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."

From the Photosynth team blog:

Q. What does Photosynth do?
A. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured.

If you want to see what this is all about without installing anything, check out these videos. Want to know how it's all done? Read this.

microformats everywhere + live data web

alexbarnett — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Good to see Conor O'Neill is pretty excited with the realization that this Event plugin enables WIndows Live Writer to publish hCalendar formatted events. hCalendar is one of the microformats.

"Create your own events or find existing events through intergrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of Live Clipboard copied events and Blog This of events from the Eventful.com website"

Note here that the Eventful.com piece here is not required, you can just publish a microformatted event on your blog post / page. Simply put, the pluin provides a form that when published renders the content in an open standard forma - hCalendar.

He also notes that tagging is supported too - rel-tag is a microformat, you know, the one that has been applied to around 50% of all blog posts. Microformats are everywhere! (Conor, btw, the fact that microformats is now supported by LiveWriter was blogged: see Peter Van Dijck and Don Dodge. :-)

Tom Raftery has been playing and James Corbett seems to be grokking the power of the Live Clipboard + RSS + SSE + microformats (mRc) concept. To quote myself:

"The mRc combo isn't just about copy and pasting static structured data into microformat-aware webpages and clients (though this on its own would pretty powerful stuff). The RSS piece brings with it the magic of 'liveness' to the data - the really simple magic of subscription. The point being that if the original data source changes, it changes at the destination (the subscriber). mRc makes dynamic data links - hence the 'Live' Clipboard name."

If you are wondering what all this microformats business is all about, check out this podcast.

Windows Live Writer Plugins Collection on Codeplex

admin — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:06:00 GMT

Via Jayson Knight and Keyvan Nayyeri, Windows Live Writer Plugins Collection are now on Codeplex.

Infrastructure	Applications
identity	IM
relationships	search
advertising	Spaces
domains	mail/calendar
storage	classifieds (expo)
	mapping