There is a roundup of QCon by David Norfolk that was forwarded to me by JulesLt that brings up some interesting questions. In the article he mentions what he saw from eBay:

I mostly attended the SOA track and Dan Pritchett, an eBay Technical Fellow, provided some interesting insights here, including the worrying possibility of deadlock between SOA services. Remember “deadly embrace”? And, for instance, “scalability is just a design problem” (it helps if you design for manageability and monitoring, of course) – but what really keeps him awake at night is large scale testing and large scale software and content deployment (if it does go wrong, how on earth do you roll back). Again, it’s a cultural thing, eBay rather makes a fetish of “no single point of failure”. He also pointed out that power consumption and cooling are now a primary constraint to growth at eBay.

Tariq Ahmed and I have chatted about this before, but for large companies like eBay, something like the Apollo desktop application can save them a lot of money. They can offload a lot of CPU intensive activities off to the client. Done on a large scale, this could have implications for the cooling and power problems.

It isn’t limited to Rich Desktop Applications either, any client side technology means less work for the server and more pushed off to the client. If you’re using technologies like LiveCycle Data Services, the server is pushing out information so it doesn’t have to be bothered with clients continually requesting. In large batches, that’s significant savings.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Enterprise, Flex, LiveCycle Data Services[/tags]

It’s fun when I come across random posts about the technologies I cover. Sometimes they’re critical, which always helps me learn, but sometimes, as with Ryan Norris, they show that people are totally getting it:

The move towards rich Internet applications certainly pushes us in the direction where this is no longer simply something on a list of things we’d love to have; it’s fast becoming requisite. Web UI is more complicated than ever, and given the business solutions that are fast searching out so-called “Web 2.0″ for solutions for, the time that is wasted ensuring that proprietary solutions to problems of the old web is simply that – a waste. There is no room on the modern Internet for such a myriad of the same low-level integration issues we were dealing with in 2001. I want my UI people to be worrying about how to make interactive, expressive, and low-complexity UI that appeals to all users on the basis of who those users are, not which browser or operating system they use. This is a huge reason why I’ve pushed Flex so hard at the Lab – not only for it’s ability to do things that the web simply is incapable of doing today (true Pub/Sub messaging, for instance) – but because Flex offers our team a single UI framework that is lightweight and distributable across all environments. We aren’t wasting any time figuring out browser quirks or deciding which browsers our complex application needs to support.

That’s what Rich Internet Applications are all about; a better user experience on the web. The goal is to make the experience better for users, with more intuitive interfaces and rich media, but also to make it better for developers so they don’t have to worry about browser hacks or poor development environments.

[tags]Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Experience[/tags]

Not to court controversy……….but here’s some controversy . At the Microsoft Technology Summit, Chris Anderson and Don Box (former architects of Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation, respectively) talked about their Rich Internet Application strategy and specifically a lot about Flash. Ben Galbraith has the full rundown but here are a few choice quotes:

Q: How does your WPF stack compare to Adobe’s Flash/Flex stack?

Chris: Three aspects — the graphics visualization engine, the run-time platform, and the application frameworks.

App platform: We’re kinda sucking in that space. We’re pushing out samples, etc. You can see hints as to our direction, but we don’t even have an MFC-style system inside of WPF. We have a lot of work to do in this area. This is top of the mind and my #1 thing as to what is missing and is needed to make WPF a compelling app platform.

Run-time platform: The CLR crushes the Flash runtime, but IE is weak compared to Flash.

Graphics viz: We have a much better story here as far as actually having a full-scale platform that goes from the client with WPF/E all the way to the OS with WPF.

Don: “The decisions we make are often test constrained.” On one team we have three testers for every one developer.

Chris: The decision to do all rendering in WPF/E in software was an engineering decision, not an evil decision to force you to WPF for perf.

Chris: To make it clear, I think we are going to win in this space.

Q: “Why do you say that Flash is evil but somehow WPF/E is good?”

Chris: We’ve made our intentions clear with WPF/E; we’re not pretending [like Adobe is with Flash] that it is some kind of open standard. People are saying that Flash is good and WPF/E is evil, but we actually think our story is better [for the community] here.

It’s interesting to hear them speak so candidly, in fact it may be the first time I’ve heard people from Microsoft directly talk about Flash as a competitor. It’s good to see that they’re fired up, but they have a long way to go. The things that Adobe has been able to pull of with Flash are nothing short of phenomenal. And with Apollo, Adobe is taking Flash right into Microsoft’s domain; the desktop.

I think we’re in for an interesting, and hopefully boundary pushing few years.

[tags]WPF, Flash, WPF/E, Microsoft, Adobe, Chris Anderson, Don Box[/tags]

In what may be the best promotion ever, I’ve been hearing rumors that Adobe is giving away free Flex books. Not just throwing them out on the street or anything, but I’ve heard that people who added Flex books to their Amazon Wish List are suddenly having them appear at their doorstep.

Can anyone confirm that? If it’s true, That is AWESOME. It’s a great way to find the people interested in Flex and give them a little nudge into checking out the platform. Can anyone out there confirm that this is the case? Again, if it’s true, a fantastic guerilla marketing campaign by Adobe.

And if you’re looking for Flex books to add to your wish list….there are a plenty.

[tags]Flex 2, Marketing, Adobe, Books[/tags]

Smilebox was one of the first Web 2.0 sites using Flash, and they’ve since branched out quite a bit. Andy Plesser has a writeup of Smilebox and highlights an interview Robert Scoble did with Andrew Wright, the CEO of Smilebox.

Smilebox started out doing pretty basic greeting cards but used Flash to make them expressive. Since that time, they’ve gone more “Web 2.0″ and have added video, slideshows and scrapbook functionality. What’s interesting about the way they integrate video is that they offer a special desktop technology that compresses the videos locally. As a result, you can take videos directly from your digital video camera onto a Smilebox asset. It’s an interesting model (On2 has more info on their press release) and it’s a good mix of using the power of the desktop to enhance the web.

Smilebox is also a Seattle company, so what’s not to love!?

[tags]Smilebox, PodTech, Flash, On2[/tags]

TechCrunch is running a story tonight about the Zimbra Desktop (Just saw Read/Write Web has some info as well), which allows Zimbra users to access their Zimbra email and the other parts of the office suite offline in the browser. Is this really the best we can do? Offline applications in a browser? Please tell me it isn’t.

I understand the browser is what people know, and with all the development overhead it takes just to get these apps to work in the browser, maybe I’d try to drag it out also. But the browser as a way to deploy applications is terrible. As a development environment, it’s terrible. To deliver rich experiences, it’s terrible; and now we’re going to hack the code some more to create offline experiences? That sounds like a great use of developer time. Things like being able to drag and drop from the desktop onto your application and having your application behave like a native OS app are only going to make browser based web apps seem more rudimentary.

Stop with the browser. Apollo is here, so you can take your web knowledge and actually apply it to a platform that gives you some power. Try it out, try Flex out, I think you’ll find that once you get going, things are MUCH easier and much more intuitive. But if you’re still wedded to Ajax, that’s fine, Apollo supports that as well.

I was hoping that with Apollo people would realize that there are better ways to create software and Rich Internet Applications than Ajax inside a browser. But it seems that they’re just wasting resources trying to make Ajax work. It won’t, and it’s going to get blown away by better solutions.

[tags]Apollo, Zimbra, Offline Desktop, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Two posts that caught my eye today and deserved to be highlighted. I’m finally getting back into the swing of things after AjaxWorld, and the linkblog is all up to date.

First up is a post by Walt Ritscher of WPF Wonderland about WPF/E games and how that might affect adoption of the platform.

Flash is a great platform for building web-deployed games.  Flash can build other type applications too, don’t get me wrong, but games certainly helped Flash adoptions rates.  I’ve always said that adoption of any platform is aided by the perceived benefit to the customer.  If the consumer wants to play a cool game, or listen to a viral video bad enough, they will think nothing of buying or downloading the software.

He’s got an excellent point, and while you sure can’t build the kind of applications you can right now with Flash, WPF/E doesn’t have to compete with that yet. It’s a version 1.0 product, so they can focus on getting penetration (which is where the “battle” is really won or lost). Two things that can drive penetration are video and games; the fun stuff. Flash nailed them both and that helped them get the 98% penetration that they’re enjoying now. WPF/E has both of those use cases well on the radar, so this could be a big boost for them.

The second post is by Andrew Shebanow who has been doing a great job evangelizing Adobe and Flex. I don’t agree with him 100% of the time, but he’s a good blogger, and in his most recent post he runs down “competitors” to Apollos and nails it.

Apollo really doesn’t have any competition. It’s just such a new way to think about development. Sure, you can take web applications offline with a lot of these technologies, but Apollo does more than that; it’s the combination of the two worlds and it creates a new kind of software. It’s a perfect RIA technology right now.

My only quibble with Andrew is that Firefox 3 is vaporware. It’s in the code baby! I also think XULRunner should be talked about as a “competitor” because it may be the closest of all these to Apollo, but he was going off of the TechCrunch list.

Whew! Sorry for the novel, but it’s good tohave energy again!

[tags]WPF/E, Apollo, Rich Internet Applications, Flash, XULRunner, Firefox 3[/tags]

Thoughtex, by Joseph Cooney, is a really cool mind mapping application built in Windows Presentation Foundation that incorporates Yahoo search and rich text editing with typical mind mapping features to create a pretty cool rich desktop application.

I keep being impressed by how easy WPF applications are to install. I know Adobe focused on this for a long time, and it paid off very well for them. Microsoft has finally gotten it right, and WPF apps are easy to get from the web to your desktop. The Thoughtex UI is solid, if not spectacular. You can see little bits of WPF in parts of the interface and the install size is tiny (less than 2 megs).

When creating new topics, Thoughtex goes out and grabs information about what you’ve just written from Yahoo Web Services. That info shows in the right hand column and you can drag it from there to create a link embedded right in your mind map. You can also embed images and format the text inside the mind map to your liking. I’ve been constantly on the lookout for a good mind mapping application and Web Worker Daily covered a bunch web based apps. Thoughtex, though it isn’t web based, might be the end of my search.

Thanks to Glavs Blog for the info, which I found while perusing items for my linkblog.

[tags]Thoughtex, Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF[/tags]

Scribd is a startup that has been touted the “YouTube of Documents”. TechCrunch covered their launch and Nick recently did a followup of the site. People seem jazzed about it, and the Alexa numbers are tracking nicely. But the most interesting thing to me about Scribd? They’re using FlashPaper to display documents.

 You can do downloads in more robust formats (like PDF), but just as YouTube made embedding video easy with Flash, Scribd figured Flash was the easiest way to embed documents. I’ve been a big fan of Flash Paper for a long time, so it’s great to see people still using it.

[tags]FlashPaper, Scribd, TechCrunch[/tags]

The Dx3 Conference in mid May is one of the conferences I’m most excited about. The speaker list is phenomenal, the topics span pretty much every conceivable RIA technology, and Boston seems like a good venue. So what’s not to love? Microsoft and Adobe courting developers and designers at the same conference while speakers talk about their experience on a lot of platforms. The problem is that I’m not really sure who’s going.

I’ve been bugging people at conferences asking them if they’re planning on going to DX3 but most people haven’t heard of it. In talking to a lot of my contacts over email or IM, they looked at DX3 but decided against going. It’s a shame, because it’s probably the conference I’m looking forward to the most, but I can’t tell what the scene is going to be like.

Are you going to DX3? If not, why didn’t it pique your interest? If you do want to go, you can still register!

[tags]Dx3, Rich Internet Applications, conference[/tags]