January 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft to strong arm Silverlight adoption
Miffed perhaps by the dearth of Web sites buying into its Silverlight proposition, Microsoft has its sights on a Web site redesign centered around showing the world that not only is it capable of eating its own dog food but that it can force you, www.microsoft.com visitor, into eating it, too.
According to a post on The NeoSmart Files blog, Microsoft is immersed in a beta trial of a new Microsoft Web site built around Silverlight, Redmond's last-year-launched salvo vs. Adobe's near-ubiquitous Flash. Soon, anyone looking to download, say, Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool to rid their system of infectious software they don't want will just have to download some noninfectious software they might not want (read: Silverlight) to get to it.
No HTML muss. No HTML fuss.
Although the thought of Microsoft requiring visitors to wear a Silverlight suit to enter its cyberhouse does bring to mind certain William Trevor stories in which awaiting never-to-arrive dinner guests provides the kind of quiet melancholy that can linger for days, the forced-Silverlight-uptake gambit is likely to boost Microsoft's Silverlight adoption rate, if only because the company's Web site serves an estimated 60 million unique visitors per month, according to Compete Search Analytics (nod to NeoSmart on the stat tip).
That's a lot of systems to infect, er, penetrate.
For a look at some screenshots, check out the NeoSmart gallery. Or, dare the beta yourself.
In the meantime, let's just hope that Microsoft remains sensible about access to the product support area of its site. After all, requiring users to download an "under-adopted" Microsoft product in order to figure out why an, um, "over-adopted" Microsoft product isn't working would be the kind of torture Microsoft should be above.
Or maybe not.
In fact, perhaps this is part of Microsoft's greater "frustration-detecting help system" plans.
Of course, as far as technologies go, Silverlight isn't a dog, as Martin Heller finds out in his comprehensive Test Center Review "Microsoft Silverlight rivals Flash, AJAX."
Additional resources
Review: Microsoft Silverlight rivals Flash, AJAX
Strategic Developer Silverlight archives
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 3, 2008 03:01 PM
October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Atom publishing protocol published
The Atom Publishing Protocol, an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources, has been published, according to Sun Microsystems.
Based on HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations, the Atom format is documented in the Atom Syndication Format.
Atom development was motivated by the presence of many incompatible versions of the RSS syndication format, which had poor interoperability for XML-RPC-based publishing protocols. Published as an Internet Engineering Task Force proposed standard as RFC (Request for Comment) 4287, it was published as RFC 5023.
Atom is important because it will make it easier to post to the Web, said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun, who co-chaired the standard. He discussed it in his blog.
"Here at Sun, in a blogging-friendly tech-savvy culture, maybe 5 percent of the people post regularly. So I look at the number of people using the Net and I wonder, why aren’t there 50 million, instead of five million, people contributing every week? The answer: because it’s too hard. We can fix that," Bray said.
"Here’s the Atom dream: a "publish' button on everything," Bray said. "On every word processor and email reader and Web browser and cell phone and PDA and spreadsheet and photo-editor and digicam and outliner and sales-force tracker. Really, everywhere. If it doesn’t have a 'Publish' button, it’s broken."
The AtomPub WG was chartered to work on the syndication format in RFC 4287 and the publishing protocol in RFC 5023. Implementations of these specifications work together and interoperate well to support publishing and syndication of text content and media resources, according to Sun. Both documents are now classified as Proposed Standards by the IETF.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 24, 2007 09:11 AM
October 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Adobe: Apollo an offline RIA oracle
The upcoming Adobe Max conference in Las Vegas could have profound effects on shaping the future of the enterprise, as details regarding Adode Apollo's ability to run RIAs offline will be prophesized. The cross-OS runtime allows developers to incorporate PDF, Flash, and AJAX technologies under one roof. Now it promises to free RIAs of their Web-based chains.
The ability to run Adobe-based RIAs offline could very well prove a significant thorn in Microsoft's side. And not only in terms of developer mindshare -- the battle lines for which were opened for debate on yesterday's Scobleizer. The Web dependency of today's RIAs are holding many enterprises back. Offline versions, however, could prove fruitful in not only overcoming Web-constrained limitations but also winning over widespread adoption.
And yet it's true that viable alternatives must exist before any enterprise would consider relying on them. And here's where Adobe's potentially powerful Flex/Apollo allure could lure the kind and numbers of developers necessary to build a competitive set of worthwhile applications to chose from.
Shortcuts to app development will certainly turn more designers on to the idea of becoming app builders. And Adobe's unimpeachable capital in the design community could prove a significant difference-maker in rallying future developers around its RIA vision, especially as the rigors of effective UI design and the aeshetics of compelling visual presentation continue to show signs of converging.
AJAX appears to be playing a significant role in spurring many developers to bridge that UI/presenation gap. As such, it's true that, as Scoble notes that Ajaxian points out, Google cannot be underestimated in the burgeoning RIA development market.
As for Microsoft's prospects, a recent survey of 5,000 Web professionals, undertaken by Ektron and SitePoint, notes an anticipated uptick in ASP.Net 2.0 development, with 22 percent saying they would take the technology up for the first time in the next year.
Good news for Redmond, and yet, digging a little deeper into the results, Ektron and SitePoint analysts found that "interest in adoptiong ASP.NET 2.0 seems to come mainly from respondents who are already developing for the existing ASP[.NET] base." Perhaps more to the point, the survey's analysts note that "few users of other platforms expect to be moving to ASP[.NET]."
The upshot? Developer lock-in; little conversion hope.
How do you see offline RIAs and competing development environments affecting tomorrow's enterprise?
Posted by Jason Snyder on October 13, 2006 12:04 PM
October 11, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Geared toward those who work directly with business problems, Coghead's Web development environment promises to empower 20 million corporate users to go about their business without nagging IT. The hosted service, which allows less code-savvy business users to build applications or customize pre-built offerings, was unveiled today in beta.
Befitting its name, Coghead automatically generates a Web service interface for each app developed, allowing them to interoperate like cogs in a greater IT-employment-threatening machine. Of course, fears of automating away the need for tech-fluent developers notwithstanding, Coghead's communal approach does figure to affect the SaaS market, as these Web service interfaces will be capable of connecting with, for example, Salesforce.com -- where some said corporate users do in fact live.
The upside of empowering the business masses to develop their own solutions may be a foregone conclusion. Quicker solutions, less strain on IT. And yet what remains to be seen is whether lowering the language barrier will in fact result in effective technologies. Afterall, developing a worthwhile solution still requires conceptual insight as to how a serviceable application is built. Now, about that "20 million" again?
In the meantime, developers themselves may be keen on tapping services such as Coghead for prototyping apps in order to facilitate business users' early stage feedback.
Posted by Jason Snyder on October 11, 2006 03:44 PM
October 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Lowering AJAX's barrier to entry
Chief among the detractors to widespread AJAX adoption is the complexity of the coding necessary to create its seemingly seamless facade. The fledgling paradigm's browser dependence, melange of underlying technologies, and inherent component reliance require a versatile skill set and architectural acumen hard to come by.
And, as Coach Wei, founder of Nexaweb and a member of the OpenAjax Alliance's newly elected steering committee, notes, "While companies like Google and Yahoo can afford to hire the best engineers to build amazing applications using Ajax and have truly opened the eyes of the mass, typical enterprises do not have the capability to do so."
But with upstarts like Zoho -- rumored to be unveiling its newly bundled Zoho Virtual Office tomorrow at Office 2.0 -- leveraging the model to take on industry stalwarts, the potential competitve edge promised by AJAX cannot be ignored. Not to mention the improved end-user experience, responsiveness, and scalability possible in adopting an AJAX-based approach to in-house application problems.
And yet what to do when the mountain comes not to Mohammed? How to gain the in-house expertise necessary to deliver on the promise? Helmi Technologies purports a possible answer in the form of its Open Source RIA Platform, launched today in beta.
By enabling Java developers to create enterprise-class AJAX-based rich Internet applications without requiring expertise in JavaScript, XML, et al, Helmi hopes to capitalize on the au current desire to serve up AJAX solutions, while at the same time doing its part to mitigate the noise effect of overeager, less-fluent enterprise adoptors -- and to do so in a way that fits with companies' current developer rosters.
Although one would hope the OpenAjax Event Hub will go far in resolving the effect of early adoption complexity, companies may soon be leaning heavily on platforms such as Helmi's to facilitate the creation of AJAX-based applications and components. Adobe's Flex 2.0 already provides a formidable proprietary iteration for creating rich Internet apps. Does a comparable open source equivalent for AJAX await? Can such efforts effectively expand the set of developers working with the AJAX model?
More to the point, How will the AJAX paradigm evolve with more, though perhaps less technologically fluent developers at the table?
Posted by Jason Snyder on October 10, 2006 04:46 PM
October 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Opera CTO talks future Web standards
Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, visited the InfoWorld offices last week to discuss the Web, the future of HTML, and the latest features of his company's Opera browser.
Lie, the father of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) specifications for Web page layout, still believes strongly in an open standards-based Web. Though he's not a great fan of the XHTML specifications, which he said tend to "punish the good guys" by being overly pedantic, Lie said that new HTML features being developed by a group called WHAT (Web Hypertext Application Technology) could add capabilities to standards-based browsers that could allow them to compete successfully with proprietary technologies like Flash.
"Some of us call it HTML 5," he said, "but I don't think the W3C particularly likes that."
Among the new capabilities Lie demonstrated were Web pages based on the CANVAS tag, a proposed extension to HTML that allows Web developers to manipulate areas of the screen directly, like a deskop graphics application developer would. He also showed a page that delivered audio via the HTML code itself, something that has previously been difficult to do without third-party plug-ins.
In each case, he noted that Opera was first to support these next-generation capabilities, but that other standards-based browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, were also likely to support them soon (and in some cases they do already).
By comparison, Lie had little complementary to say about Microsoft's handling of the HTML standards. Even Internet Explorer 7, he said, is but an iterative development of an outdated design that offers only poor standards compliance.
"It's a catch-up game that Microsoft is playing, and that's holding everybody back," Lie said. He added that the amount of time Web developers have had to spend "debugging Microsoft's applications" over the years adds up to a tremendous cost to society.
What do you think? Is HTML in need of an overhaul? Is standards compliance important for your Web applications development needs, or do you go with what works?
Posted by Neil McAllister on October 10, 2006 02:40 PM
October 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
A recent SitePoint and Ektron survey of Web professionals suggests AJAX will soon surpass Flash as the predominant Web development model of choice. Increases in expected Microsoft-based endeavors, however, make it difficult to predict a less proprietary-based Web development project pipeline for the future.
SitePoint and Ektron's survey of 5,000 Web developers anticipates a significant surge in AJAX-based projects in the coming year, as 46 percent of respondents said they will tap the AJAX model for a project in the next 12 months, up from 30 percent this year. More intriguing is the suggestion of a tipping point in the Flash vs. AJAX debate. Whereas 40 percent of survey respondents are currently working on Flash-based efforts, only 28 percent anticipate undertaking a Flash development project in the next year. The projection comes on the heels of an AJAXWorld discussion of burgeoning security issues currently plaguing the AJAX model.
On the server side, the survey -- formally known as The State of Web Development 2006/2007, SitePoint Pty Ltd. and Ektron Inc., August 2006 -- projects an uptick in Microsoft-based projects in the coming year, as 22 percent said they plan to take up ASP.Net 2.0 for the first time in the next 12 months. Ruby on Rails will also be leaned on more heavily in the future, as 24 percent of respondents expect to begin programming with it. PHP, however, remains dominant, with 68 percent of respondents currently tapping the language, and another 16 percent expecting to join them in the coming year.
Usability, design, and search engine optimization figure prominently in the minds of surveyed developers, with more than half saying they would like to learn more about these development concerns in the coming year, on par with the to-be-expected No. 1 concern among Web developers: best practices.
Given the aforementioned AJAX/Flash tipping point, not surprisingly, 47 percent of Web developers surveyed wish there was more coverage of AJAX on the Web and in print, with desire for more resources for XHTML/CSS and PHP next in line, at 34 percent and 29 percent, respectively.
As far as the Next Big Thing on the Web, developers' responses ranged from the intentionally absurb to the insightful, with one sneeringly projecting that a "mashed-up Web 2.0 web app oracle" will crop up to tell us "what the next big thing on the Web will be."
Simplicity, elegance, and marketability remain significant concerns. As is the dominance of search engines in delivering users content regardless of source. But camps appear to be somewhat split as to how organizations' Web sites will retain relevance in tomorrow's increasingly search-intensive Web.
On the one hand, there are those who espouse a resurgent "Web 3.0" focus on content rather than functionality, with "sites that are able to provide the easiest access to the most in-depth and useful content [being] the ones [to] bank on." Others, however, see greater emphasis on "pure interaction with the user: giving the user the chance to style a site to his needs, save those preferences and have them ready every time he visits a site."
Not surprisingly, one would expect a hybrid of these philosophies -- better content, delivered how the individual wants it -- will prove the most long-lasting.
How do you see tomorrow's Web developing?
Posted by Jason Snyder on October 6, 2006 12:59 PM
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