Well, if you haven't heard of it yet, Google launched something called "Google App Engine", a highly available, highly scalable, complete stack for deploying and hosting web applications. It "sorta" competes against Amazon's EC2.   more »

This is a little premature, but the deal is done. Following the core tenets that I believe this venture fund should operate, I'm "un-announcing" a $50K fund with Microsoft here in a web 2.0 way. The official PR/press will follow in the next month or so, pending the clearance of a few regulatory matters.   more »

The Web is one of the most important technological as well as social/cultural developments in our life. Its global impact is rooted in its openness and its capability to evolve on a democratic basis. However, I have concerns. I'm concerned about the signficant corporate interests driving towards "unweb". In particular, the area that I've dedicated ten years of my life to, Rich Internet Application, is causing some great concern to me. Will Rich Internet become "rich man's Internet"? Will Rich Internet become the onset of "unweb"?   more »

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. The discussions around Ajax Runtime wish list (http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki/Main_Page) were fantastic. It looks to me that we are seeing some good momentum towards building a better web. I personally have built some faith in browser vendors over the next couple of years in giving us better browsers. Hope my faith is grounded in reality!   more »

Security is a big issue that needs a lot of attention from the industry: cross site scripting, lack of security sandbox, cross site request forgery, mashup security, etc. are all major challenges facing us. In the Web 2.0 world, these issues are just getting more important than ever. In this document, a summary of the major security issues are presented along side with possible solutions.   more »

There are various concerns about Ajax performance. Some people blame JavaScript and some people blame the browsers. What is the reality? This article presents a study and analysis of the various Ajax performance issues. For example, what are the common performance issues on all browsers? What are the unique performance issues for a specific browser? How do DOM operations perform? Finally, where to go from here?   more »

What is the reason for this Obama phenomenon? Why is it happening now, not ten years ago or four years ago, but at this particular moment of history? Likewise, similar questions can be asked: What is the reason for this “Web 2.0” phenomenon? Why now? On the surface, they seem to be unrelated. However, deep down, they are both results of something deeper in our current culture and society. Our civilization and society have evolved into an era that is distinctly different from anything that the human kind has had before. This era is best characterized by its culture, “the iGen Culture”.    more »

Programmatic DOM node manipulation is actually not straightforward, given that Internet Explorer has so many unique DOM behaviors. I ran into quite a few issues recently when I was playing with Dojo Toolkit. I didn’t find a thorough answer to my questions when going through Dojo source code (Pardon my ignorance here. I am very sure that Dojo folks have run into these issues before and have solved them. It is just my stupidity of not being able to find the answers via source code reading). Further, I was surprised that I couldn’t find a lot of information about this on the web either. Hence this blog entry is created as a note to whoever is interested in programmatic DOM on Internet Explorer.   more »

In this high tech industry, one of the most misunderstood and potentially misleading conventional wisdom about startups is the separation of "business side" and "technical side" and "technical people should listen to the business people". Such teachings are in fact misleading, especially since that nobody is taking about the other side of the argument. In particular, the evolution of this high tech industry is making such teachings more and more dangerous.   more »

Prototype.js is a popular Ajax toolkit for web developers. I have enjoyed using it despite the complains I heard from people about how Prototype.js does too much JavaScript hacking that breaks other people's code. I tend to brush such complains aside - "well, there is nothing wrong per se by adding some methods to JavaScript objects via standard permitted means". But this recent incident with my adoption of the latest and greatest Prototype.js 1.6 really made me wonder: is Prototype.js doing a little too much hack? Or is it just bad coding practice?.   more »

People say Ajax is hard...and this may be why. I spent some time playing with Bob Buffone's newest work on ...The strange thing is that the same code works fine on IE, further, works fine on FireFox if FireBug is enabled. In a typical development environment where FireBug is enabled, the problem is never exposed. And then, in a production environment where FireBug is disabled, you get an error. But the error is very esoteric...   more »

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. what is the ideal architecture for building a highly scalable, sophisticated (potentially. Your site will become sophisticated if your site is very successful), easy to build and easy to maintain website, while using Java?   more »

OpenAjax Alliance has made substantial progress in the last 12 months since its inception. The cornerstone is OpenAjaxHub 1.0 (OaaHub 1.0). OaaHub 1.0, an open source project under Apache V2 license, focuses on interoperability - it enables different Ajax components to inter-operate with each other using a "pub/sub" mechanism while these Ajax components may have no knowledge of each other at all. The power and the adoption of OaaHub 1.0 are both demonstrated at OpenAjax InteropFest, to be hosted alongside the coming AjaxWorld Conference. At the time of writing this post, there are 17 Ajax toolkits participating the InteropFest.    more »

My company, Nexaweb, together with SitePen, Mozilla Foundation, Redfin, etc, joined force in making an important contribution to the open source community. See SitePen, Mozilla Foundation, Nexaweb Technologies, Redfin, & SnapLogic Announce Open Source Contribution of TurboAjax Group’s High-Performance Grid Widget to Dojo Foundation.   more »

This is going to be a very short blog because the story itself is too good to add any comments: Sun Microsystems changes ticker to JAVA August 23 2007: "Sun announced Thursday that it would retire its SUNW moniker on Nasdaq and replace with JAVA effective Monday. The software known as Java has become Sun's best known brand since it was its introduction 12 years ago."   more »

Congratulations to the Dojo team in getting 0.9 out! It is something that I have been looking for. Alex Russell showed me some significant improvements comparing with Dojo 0.4 a while ago (much smaller footprint, 10X performance improvement, etc). Now these guys have delivered it! See the release note for details.   more »

W3C's Web Application Format (WAF) working group has been working on "widget" for about one year. Initially I was neutral about WAF's widget effort, even supportive. However, during the last many months, the market has evolved and my understanding has evolved as well. As I started to pay more attention to "mashup" and "widget", I started to wonder whether WAF is going the wrong way. My opinion would be wrong, but thought it is a good idea to write it up to stimulate some conversation. .   more »

Enterprise 2.0 Conference (http://enterprise2conf.com/) is going on here at Boston Westin Waterfront this week. Nexaweb is showing its Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform here. The conference is better attended than I expected, with a total of about 800 attendees. The audience displayed such genuine interest in Enterprise Web 2.0 that quite a few sessions overgrew what the big conference room can accommodate. I went to keynote sessions given by executives at IBM, Cisco, SAP and Microsoft this morning to get some ideas of how they would talk about Web 2.0 in the enterprise.    more »

CommunicationHub is part of the technical work that OpenAjax Alliance has been working on. The goal of CommunicationHub is to identify and propose solutions for communications related interoperability issues, eventually leading to the formation of a working group around this area. Based on the last few month's discussion, the task force is gradually converging onto a common problem defintion. Here is a draft document that outlines the problems we identified and we should target at. We would appreciate and look forward to feedback from the community.   more »

Today is the fourth annual MIT CIO Symposium. The weather could have been better and parking could have been much ...   more »

Quite a few people are asking me what I think of Sun's JavaFX annoucement. It is funny and we saw this coming - Who wouldn't anticipate Sun to make some big annoucement at JavaOne? People were predicting the annoucement is going to be "open sourcing Java" - Oh, no, that was last year :-). What does it mean to the general RIA market? What does it mean to customers? Finally, what does it mean to Nexaweb?   more »

Adobe sent out a press release this morning titled "Adobe to Open Source Flex". Is that so? Dana Blankenhorn from ZDNet says this is A sign of desperation from Adobe...wah. I don't think it is that bad though. After reading the press release a few times, the title "to Open Source Flex" seems to be misleading a little bit. Adobe is NOT open sourcing Flex. Adobe is only open sourcing a part of Flex, only the part that will help Flex adoption without giving away revenue...    more »

As one of the building blocks of Web 2.0 Technology Stack, Internet Messaging Bus refers to a software architecture construct that sits between a standard web browser and standard web server for providing enhanced web communication functions beyond the typical HTTP request/response processing, such as server push and message reliability, while still leveraging the standard HTTP protocol.    more »

Ajax is flying high and Ajax toolkits are certainly of big help. However, I do hear from people in the community complain about the size of various Ajax toolkits. A lot of Ajax toolkits requires hundreds of kilobytes of download, sometime even over megabytes. In this article, a study of Ajax toolkit download overhead (using Dojo) is presented. Based on the study results, Dojo 0.4 are suitable for a certain use case but not suiable for other use cases. Further, a recommendation is made to dramatically reduce peformance overhead that can make Ajax toolkits like Dojo be more universally applicable.    more »

I am not as familiar with west coast VCs and have not run into Peter Rip, a general partner at Crosslink Capital. In general, looking at his blog EarlyStageVC(http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/), Peter is quite well informed and intelligent – which is why I was highly surprised to see a post from him on March 21 2007 saying “Web 2.0 Over and Out”. My immediate reaction is “what are you smoking?”.   more »