In-the-Clouds-with-SOA-XML-and-the-Open-Web

The W3C today publicly announced that they are restarting an HTML specification effort.

In the meantime, apparently anyone can actually join the W3C effort. The instructions to join the group are as follows:

Brewin define the composition of Project Hydrazine as "...a network environment, a data center and other infrastructure components such as Sun's JavaFX rich Internet application technology, Sun's GlassFish application server, the Sun enterprise service bus, the Sun directory server, MySQL, 'cheap storage' and Sun hardware." In addition, two repositories will be part of the package. These will enable the storage of services that run on the cloud and of metadata to be used and reused in creating applications. Furthermore, Sun will include Project Insight, an analytics capability, that will enable developers to monitor the users of their projects and to monetize them, according to Brewin.

Taft sees Project Hydrazine as pitting Sun against Microsoft's Live Mesh strategy, another cloud computing and sync mechanism solution, as well as in the areas of developer and design tools space and in the concept of developer-designer workflow. Brewin sees the JavaFX Transformer technology as having a significant role in this area. Java FX Script will do for the Sun solution what XAML does for Microsoft's product.

Brewin added that Project Hydrazine would also support such clouds as Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and services from such vendors as eBay and PayPal. Sun plans to deliver an early access release of its JavaFX SDK (software development kit) in July, Taft concludes.

Let’s just now hope that Microsoft won’t try to play games anymore. Besides their rather poor track record at delivering on the ongoing chain of announcements about becoming open and caring about interoperability (as opposed to intraoperability), there are other reasons one might want to take today’s announcement with caution. One trick they could try and pull for instance would be to put just enough support for ODF to claim that they support it but not enough for people to really use it systematically. They could then tell customers who complain something isn’t working that it’s because ODF isn’t powerful enough, and if they want the full power of Office they need to use OOXML.

A new version of xfy Basic Edition, containing new generation xfy technology, is out!xfy Basic Edition 1.6 uses the same core technology with the one used with xfy Enterprise Basis 2.1. Along with the supprt of Java SE 6, xfy Basic Edition 1.6 has gained a lot of improved features compared to the previous version. Experience the latest xfy technology!

Comes v. Microsoft

CEO Shantanu Narayan described AIR as Adobe's "fourth platform," positioning it as the next link in the chain that includes PostScript, Acrobat's PDF (Portable Document Format) and Flash. The first three created disruptive paradigm shifts in their respective fields -- typesetting and document printing, electronic document interchange and web interactivity -- and all have generated significant revenue for Adobe. Adobe hopes AIR will follow suit

Experience datacenter availability Excel That Scales offers greater resiliency and reliability over desktop-based solutions. GigaSpaces IMDG instances are replicated such that every partition has one or more backups, and these backups do not reside on the same physical server as the primary partition. If a system fails, the processing logic can be transparently routed to an identical instance on the backup partition without experiencing an interruption in service. Furthermore, the GigaSpaces technology provides a self-healing environment. When the primary partition fails, the backup becomes the primary partition, and another identical partition instance is automatically spawned, thus helping to ensure that a backup is always available. Excel That Scales is unique in that it co-locates logic and data in the same process. Excel decouples the computational logic from the presentation layer and GigaSpaces completes the solution by recoupling the logic with the associated data and executing them in the same process.

Unlike some architectures that increase in complexity as they scale, GigaSpaces, running on Sun platforms, delivers limitless scalability and low-latency performance for highly demanding applications and environments. Excel That Scales is optimized to run on the Solaris 10 OS and benefits from its innovative virtualization technology. The combination of GigaSpaces and Solaris OS helps financial firms cope with the exponential growth of market data and transaction volumes by providing the ability to run separate Excel-based applications in individual Solaris Containers. This integration of technologies enables IT managers to reap the benefits of virtualization while helping to manage growth and control complexity.

As these technologies mature, a new kind of browser is likely to emerge, one that combines the current Web experience with new capabilities based on emerging tools. The key to that evolution will be to integrate today's cutting-edge features with tomorrow's Web standards -- a process that Adobe and Google are both actively pursuing.

Adobe is similarly involved in the standardization process -- in particular, extending ECMAScript, the standard on which JavaScript is based,

Despite differences in approach between AIR and Gears, Adobe and Google actually share a common vision. Both companies aim to extend the current Web browsing experience with new features that allow developers to deliver RIAs more easily. And, because Web developers, too, have diverse goals and methods, the traditional browser is unlikely to disappear as an application-delivery platform, even as desktop-based Web apps proliferate.

VMware unveiled a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform for remote users who want to use VDI with Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients. The new integrated desktop solution is ideal for wide area networks (WANs) and uses Sun's Appliance Link Protocol (ALP), which VMware and Sun report outperforms other display protocols in delivering virtual desktops in a WAN deployment with high latency and in delivering consistently better performance than competing display protocols. With a VDI setup, virtual machines hold end users' PC environments; those virtual machines are hosted on servers in the datacenter.

This is a community for anyone interested in High Performance Computing (HPC) on OpenSolaris. Its purpose is to: Provide a home for the OpenSolaris HPC distro, Highlight existing features and future enhancements relevant for high-performance computing, Provide a forum to discuss issues and possible solutions to problems faced by HPC developers, and Provide pointers to pertinent resources and tools currently available

With Acrobat.com people will not have to sacrifice the quality of their documents or the quality of the user experience in order to work together more efficiently online. The documents look great. They are truly ‘what you see is what you get’ no matter who you are or what computer you are using, including the text, the graphics, and the pages. Finally, the user experience or design of the applications is beautiful, easy to use and getting better all the time. Acrobat.com takes the meaning of rich internet application to the next level by using the Adobe technology platform of Flash, PDF and AIR to create distinctive and compelling software. You can access Acrobat.com while online from almost any browser thanks to the Flash Player or from your desktop via Acrobat.com on AIR. And soon you will be able to access your work via the AIR version of Acrobat.com even while off-line.

When Windows has a real rival, Microsoft has real problems. As Blodget notes, there are caveats: The unofficial Office monopoly should give Microsoft breathing room for a few more years. But even that could be threatened as Google's more-affordable Web applications improve. This storm has been gathering for years. In 2005, we wrote a piece at News.com about Google's longterm threat to Microsoft. The impetus was a major management shuffle at MSN, but we had fun pulling out some old Microsoft memos about now-defunct Netscape in the early days of the World Wide Web. My favorite was a note written in 1995 by Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka describing a "nightmare" scenario for his company. "The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote. Microsoft didn't pay too much attention to the warning. Ten years later, another internal memo put a name to that nightmare--Google. Now Blodget has advanced that nightmare scenario a few more steps with his analysis.

Watching the grand convergence of the desktop, the server, devices, and the Web. Topics addressed include events and emerging trends in universal interoperability, standards development, SOA, Clouds, Web-Stacks, RIA run-times, etc.

Watching the grand convergence of the desktop, the server, devices, and the Web. Topics addressed include events and emerging trends in universal interoperability, standards development, SOA, Clouds, Web-Stacks, RIA run-times, etc.

Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years: GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICEQuarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008 Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office. And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember: Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.

The "Windows monopoly+Office monopoly=Microsoft" story was absolutely true 10 years ago, but less so now. 1. It looks as if the "Office" revenue figures are coming from MSFT's reported revenues in the Business segment. That's not all Office. Based on what they've said at the last few Financial Analyst Meetings, Exchange is approaching $2B/year, SharePoint is about $1B/year, and Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) is more than $1B per year. I also know that Project has been a $1B/year business for a long time (believe it or not), and products such as Comms Server and Visio contribute around $500m/year. Margins on all these products are lower than on Office, but most (not Comms Server) are profitable. 2. In addition to all the non-Office products that compose its Business segment as mentioned above, the Server and Tools business (Windows Server, SQL Server) is profitable (30% margins) and growing revenues average of 15% for the last six years. Not monopoly, but a good business. Look at all these stats together, and seems like they should get out of search and advertising and sell off (or scale back to maintenance mode) most of the consumer online sites, focusing instead on hosted business apps--they're already doing it with Exchange and SharePoint, why not Office? If somebody's going to canniblize their "real" business, it might as well be them.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0. It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML's place in the fabric of the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon for network applications.

The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist. At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1. Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.

Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.

Cloud providers and mainstay enterprise software vendors could make sweeter WOA plus SOA music together. They may not have a choice. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, there will be a huge push for Microsoft Oriented Architecture that will double-down on “software plus services.” And MSFT combined with Yahoo would have an awful lot in place to work from — from the device and PC client, to the server farm, business applications, developer tools and communities, and ramp-up of global cloud/content/user metadata resources. I think Microsoft already understands the power of WOA plus SOA.

The cloud that can manage data in way that allows both user-level and process-level access, with granular permissioning — and allows CXOs to feel good about it all — gets the gold ring. The cloud business is a 50-year business.

TCG Advisors envisions a new computing model for when the inter-enterprise becomes the basis of all IT infrastructure. Where can we expect the most change? All the action is going to be in the middle [layer] in preparation for a significant change at the top in about five years. We are all [preparing] for a new business model: the inter-enterprise network value chain. For the inter-enterprise network value chain, traditional business applications need to be re-architected so they can cross company boundaries. When people look at this re-architecting, they see two huge barriers: the middleware, because our software doesn't work this way, and the business process layer, because people don't have a lot of experience [with it]. There will be a fair amount of trial and error before we figure this out. Even thought leaders are struggling.

The goal has been managing information. We're shifting from managing information to managing processes. Information is an important attribute in process management, but it's not the goal. So trying to turn data into information is the wrong way to look at the problem. What we are trying now is to manage processes across multiple states, where any portion of the process can be in multiple states. So you have to keep state - which is a computing idea - and you have to coordinate actions among self-managing logic. That's the service-oriented architecture paradigm.

What service-oriented architectures let you do is recombine - they are like Legos - to make all kinds of innovations out of the existing components of the world. This is very productive. If you're stuck in a client/server system you can't participate in that.