Direct from Web 2.0

Dojo 0.9 Released

August 21, 2007 – 5:10 pm by coachwei

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 to 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. I did some study of Dojo 0.4 a while ago and posted my thoughts here Dojo Footprint and Ajax Performance Recommendation. I'll try to find some time to do a similar study on Dojo 0.9 to see whether/how much improvement 0.9 is bringing us. more »

Posted in WebDev | 1 Comment »

Is W3C’s Widget Work Going The Wrong Way?

August 10, 2007 – 6:36 pm by coachwei

I have been involved with W3C's Web Application Format (WAF) Working Group(WG). WAF has been working on "widget" for about one year. Marcos Caceres, a smart recent PhD graduate from Australia, has been doing some good work here. A year ago, I was neutral about WAF's widget effort, even supportive primarily due to technical merits of some of the work Marcos did. I do have my own share of guilt though. Like most WAF working group members, I didn't pay enough attention to it. However, during the last many months, the market has evolved and my understanding of widget has evolved as well. As I started to pay more attention to "mashup" and "widget",WAF seems to be going the wrong way to me. My opinion could be wrong, but it is a good idea to write it up to stimulate some conversation. 1. WAF does its work around ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 2 Comments »

Enterprise Web 2.0: IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and SAP

June 19, 2007 – 7:01 pm by coachwei

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. Enterprise 2.0 is a term initially coined by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee just about one year ago. His definition was much more around things like wikis, blogs and social networking. I personally think Enterprise 2.0 is more fundamentally about user interaction – the interaction among users, data, and media in a business context. Blogs and wikis are only a part of such interactions. There are other more significant and powerful ones, such as the interaction between business users and enterprise data. As a result, I personally prefer the term “Enterprise Web 2.0”, referring to the adoption of web 2.0 technologies and paradigms for enterprises. (Not surprising, Nexaweb is all about enabling the interaction between users and enterprise data by leveraging web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax, Java, ...more »

Posted in conference, software business model, web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

OpenAjax CommunicationHub Problem Definition

May 29, 2007 – 5:38 pm by coachwei

Introduction OpenAjax Alliance has been growing well with over 70 members. The initial OpenAjaxHub received immediate community response - most are positive and a few responses were negative but turned out to be very helpful. Over ten Ajax offerings demonstrated support for OpenAjaxHub already (such as Apache XAP, Dojo, Nexaweb AjaxClient, Tibco, etc). Addressing the feedback received so far, the upcoming release of OpenAjaxHub 1.0 in the next few months is going to be really good - tiny footprint (under 5KB), focused on interoperability and event propagation between Ajax widgets and highly functional . CommunicationHub is another 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. The CommunicationHub Task Force consists of 19 members currently(Dojo, LightStreamer, SAP, IBM, Nexaweb, WebTide, OpenSpot, ...more »

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Situational Application@MIT CIO Symposium

May 17, 2007 – 4:12 pm by coachwei

Today is the fourth annual MIT CIO Symposium. The weather could have been better and parking could have been much better (my house is within 25 minutes walking distance from MIT. I drove instead and spent 30 minutes looking for parking) - but the conference is fairly well attended. My JavaOne style outfit stands out a little bit among the business attire crowd at CIO Symposium - but, hey, CIOs need developers, in particular, a developer who just came back from JavaOne and just learned about JavaFX, right? Right before JavaOne, I was at IBM Mashup Summit (see Jeff Nolan's blog coverage) organized by Rod Smith and David Boloker at IBM. At Mashup Summit, "Situational Application" was the pop phrase of the day. Interesting enough, the concept of "Situational Application" seems to be fairly popular here at CIO symposium as well. Jo Hoppe (CIO of Pega Systems) talked about her orgnanization ...more »

Posted in WebDev, conference, web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

JavaFx and Rich Internet Application

May 8, 2007 – 5:22 pm by coachwei

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 :-) It is quite amazing that rich internet application is suddenly getting so much attention. Adobe has been pushing Flash as a platform. Microsoft is pushing .NET via Silverlight , and now Sun is positioning the Java Platform for RIA via this JavaFX announcement. Of course, we all know the Ajax Wildfire . All of these establish that RIA is the next generation application paradigm. Over the last 20 months, press has been dominated by Ajax and Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight announcement tells the world not to ignore .NET. Java pioneered rich web applications years ago, ...more »

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Adobe to Open Source Flex?

April 26, 2007 – 7:31 pm by coachwei

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 ...Is that so? 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 source(side note: nothing wrong with this, but just thought it would be helpful to have it clarified). More in detail: The part of Flex that is open sourced (this is what was called as "Flex SDK" as part of Flex on Adobe's website): Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers the ActionScript command line debugger the ActionScript libraries that make up the client side Flex components The part of Flex that ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 2 Comments »

Internet Messaging Bus – Web 2.0 Communication Layer

April 15, 2007 – 7:18 pm by coachwei

In my previous post, “Web 2.0 Re-examined: the Paradigm Shift, Technology Stack and Business Value “, I described a “Web 2.0 Technology Stack ” that contains three building blocks: Application Client Container, Internet Messaging Bus and Enterprise Mashup Server. In this post, I’ll explain more in detail of what an Internet Messaging Bus is. What is Internet Messaging Bus (IMB)? 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. IMB Features and Functionality Built on top of HTTP (and HTTPS), Internet Messaging Bus is an enhanced communication layer that delivers reliability and two-way communications in addition to HTTP’s request/response processing. Though highly desirable for JavaScript/Ajax based web applications, IMB implementation is not limited to JavaScript/Ajax. As a web ...more »

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Dojo Footprint and Ajax Performance Recommendation

April 4, 2007 – 3:31 pm by coachwei

Introduction 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 require hundreds of kilobytes of download, sometime even over megabytes. Dylan Schiemann from Dojo Foundation /SitePen wrote a fairly good blog entry in response to clarify questions related to download size and performance etc. Dojo is one of the most well known and respected Ajax toolkits. On the other side, I have also heard complains that “Dojo is too big…Dojo is bloat-ware”. So I decided to study Dojo footprint. Further, I was hoping to gain some insight about the general Ajax toolkit footprint concern from the study of Dojo, and hope to offer some recommendations to footprint relatd performance issues for Ajax development in general. Context and Background I personally have also been playing ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 13 Comments »

“Web 2.0 Over and Out” - What Are You Smoking?

April 2, 2007 – 1:50 am by coachwei

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, 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?”. It is certainly true that the consumer web 2.0 space has engaged our sustained attention through a continuous stream of excitements for the last few years. As Peter Rip puts well in his blog: “We now know the fourth quarter of 2006 witnessed the mainstreaming of Web 2.0.  It began with the YouTube acquisition, followed by a rather incumbent-centered Web 2.0 conference, culminating with the coronation of user-generated media as Time’s Person of the Year. “However, as pointed out by Peter, “Many ...more »

Posted in software business model, web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Dojo Custom Widget Tutorial

March 28, 2007 – 3:27 pm by coachwei

In my effort to evaluate Dojo performance, I am going to build a custom Dojo widget and create my own build profile so that only the absolutely required files for my application are packaged into the initial download. However, considering the real world best practice, I would create my own directory structure and my own JavaScript package – all separate from Dojo code so that I can easily maintain my own code without being intermixed with Dojo. The entire process looks like a good end to end tutorial on how to build custom Dojo widgets with some important real world considerations. So I thought of writing it up and hope it is helpful for folks who are interested in using Dojo. In the next post, I’ll go into some analysis of Dojo performance. The Dojo custom widget I am building is very simple – it is largely based on the “Memo widget” ...more »

Posted in WebDev | 2 Comments »

Scratching My Head at AjaxWorld

March 20, 2007 – 6:36 pm by coachwei

AjaxWorld is a great conference that hundrends of people gathered here at RooseVelt Hotel in NYC. You can see and hear the excitement around this new paradigm of computing. But once in while, there are things that are quite amusing. Java vs. Microsoft WPF : It was great to catch up with Richard Monson-Haefel here at AjaxWorld. Richard is one of the leading analysts that I have a lot of respect for. Richard told me that Douglas Crockford mentioned in his morning keynote session that Ajax, Flash and WPF are three leading technologies for client applications. When someone asked him about Java, Douglas said “Java is a little too late”. This makes people scratch their heads: Java has been on the client side for more than ten years. WPF is not even here yet. And you are saying “Java is a little too late”? Flash vs. ActiveX : I heard some ...more »

Posted in conference | 3 Comments »

Apache XAP Release

March 7, 2007 – 3:39 am by coachwei

Bob Buffone sent out this annoucement to Apache mailing list related to XAP: The Apache XAP Team (XAP is an open source Ajax project at Apache Incubator) is pleased to announce the release of the 0.3.0 of its Declarative Ajax toolkit. Downloads of the project can be found at http://incubator.apache.org/xap/download.html Project Overview XAP provides Ajax developers with an extensible declarative toolkit for developing applications. Developers can define user interface, event handling and data-binding in a simple to use Markup Language reducing the amount of code needed to create an application. By concentrating the developers coding effort to their application business logic, XAP reduces application complexity considerably. The Dojo Toolkit is used to as the underlying widget and building system for the XAP project. The inclusion of Dojo means that developers using XAP have full access to all of functionality provided in the Dojo Toolkit. XAP feature highlights Declarative User Interface Design Advanced Ajax Widgets (Sortable ...more »

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Web 2.0 Song

March 5, 2007 – 11:07 pm by coachwei

I wrote a while ago about the confusion of web 2.0 and some of my thoughts in various posts: Web 2.0: The Confusion (http://www.coachwei.com/blog/_archives/2006/12/7/2556717.html); What is Web 2.0?( http://www.coachwei.com/blog/_archives/2006/12/7/2556746.html)... Michael Turyn sent this to me today - after listening to this web 2.0 song, I am compelled to respond to the call "are you blogging this" to put this post on my blog. The song may be mediocre as pointed out by Michael, but sometimes the mediocre gives a better portrait of average perceptions... My picture is flickring around technorati And I just discovered I am such a newbie, I'm on YouTubeAre you blogging this?Delicious myspace then tell me with meebo Drop my feed into bloglines, I'm so web 2.0Are you blogging this?Blogger blummy skobee ditto seekum suckingfish Auctionmapper frappr zoomr feedwhip blish Rollyo seekum previewseek swicki wink Flickr scanr talkr cheapr soonr kitchen sinkAll Ourmedia's confusing meMaybe I need to read a Wikipedia ...more »

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Mobile Ajax for Workers on the Edge

February 23, 2007 – 9:40 pm by coachwei

This is an interesting article by Rich Seeley on 2/22/06: URL: http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1244843,00.html The number of mobile workers globally will soon be more than double the total U.S. population, according to predictions by another analyst firm, IDC Corp. IDC has predicted that in two years there will be 878 million mobile workers linked to their corporate headquarters by notebook PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the already ubiquitous cell phone. In a recent report on the rich Internet application (RIA) strategy of Nexaweb Technologies Inc., Anne MacFarland, director of data strategies and information solutions for The Clipper Group, describes these mobile workers as being on the "active edges of business." Asked for an example, she said, "The typical example is mobile sales and service force where increasingly these days people who are out there facing customers are asked to supply more in depth information and be able to participate more closely with the rest ...more »

Posted in mobile 2.0 | No Comments »