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

Microsoft is leading the tech industry's charge up Capitol Hill, according to statistics released Monday. The world's largest software company spent $9 million on lobbyists to make its case in issues including taxes and trade, according to statistics compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

(Use page search) Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices. ... The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions. For example, the Chief Technology Officer will oversee the development of a national, interoperable wireless network for local, state and federal first responders as the 9/11 commission recommended. This will ensure that fire officials, police officers and EMTs from different jurisdictions have the ability to communicate with each other during a crisis and we do not have a repeat of the failure to deliver critical public services that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. ...

As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.

But Sun CTO Bob Brewin emphasized in an interview that JavaFX Script features a new set of capabilities such as allowing development of applications that can be moved outside the browser. JavaFX Script also is designed for content authors, not necessarily developers alone. ... With JavaFX and the Java 6 Update 10 release, also called Consumer JRE (Java Runtime Environment), developers can deploy applications to browsers and have applets dragged out onto the desktop. Brewin also filled in details about Sun's cloud services effort, called Project Hydrazine. It is to feature an infrastructure enabling developers to run services on the Web such as mapping, location, calendaring, and e-mail services. Due next year, Hydrazine is to be part of Sun's network.com grid infrastructure. Also part of Hydrazine is Project Insight, which will measure who is visiting Web sites. Developers will be able to find who is using their service and perhaps could deliver targeted advertising. Hydrazine combines attributes offered in Microsoft's Live Mesh data folder-sharing service, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Web-based service and Google Analytics, Brewin said.

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda". While he conceded that Flash was currently necessary for consistently displaying content such as video, he suggested that the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology.

"JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license." But note that Schwartz stretches the truth mightily here. E.g., Solaris is under the CDDL license, OpenOffice.org was just changed to LGPLv3 from LGPLv2, on and on.

""The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft. ... As part of its announcements Tuesday, the Mac BU also said it intends to bring VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac, but offered no timeframe for the update." According to the article, sales for MS Office 2008 for the Mac have tripled what MS Office 2004 accomplished. There's a bit of a wookie hidden in the claim because new Mac sales have far more than tripled since the comparable period following the release of Office 2004. So even though Microsoft Office gross sales on the Mac have increased from the period compared, there is a strong appearance that Microsoft is losing market share on the Mac, something I would be concerned about were I Steve Ballmer, not something to celebrate. Also note that the lack of VBA support in Office 2008 plus a few other Microsoft moves dealt Office for the Mac out of the Micrsooft cloud. Why Redmond might suddenly have a change of heart and deal Apple into the MS Cloud afer all is something not explained. But it is somewhat plausible that Microsoft feels the need to change its mind on VBA because it is losing market share on the Mac. My assessment? The VBA announcement is vaporware until proved otherwise, designed to slow the adoption of competing office software on the Mac, which makes the rapidly expanding OS X stack, e.g., now able to run Linux apps, a bigger threat to Windows. Microsoft is obviously losing Office market share on the Mac platform and OS X is eating Windows market share. Time for vaporware.

The eMail Bill Gates sent out to his executive staff warning of the Internet Tidal wave certain to wash out the "Road Ahead" unless they came up with a plan. Gaining control over web formats and rpotocols by holding onto MSOffice desktop formats and client/server protocols was key. Link to Combs Anti Trust eMail from Gates in 1998

The MS Cloud has arrived!!!! Grab your ankles and kiss your ever lovin Open Web good-bye. This is a video describing how Microsoft Online Services can add value to your organization. Interestingly, the software-plus-service offerings from Microsoft are being marketed as a way for corporate IT to break free; reducing systems management cost and operation overhead while leveraging existing "rich client" systems. Meaning, MSOffice is now connected to the MS Cloud. The transition of legacy client/server systems to MS Cloud hosted client/Web-Stack /server systems can now begin. No doubt the recent ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML played no small part in this announcement!

IT Service Desk with SAP CRM 7.0: With this blog I would like to make you familiar with the new IT service desk solution we offer with the latest SAP CRM release, SAP CRM 7.0.

Keep SOA as simple as possible!

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda".

Recent musings in the blogosphere on the demise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) have prompted many of you to ask me for my views on this topic. While I don't want to address any specific article, I do want share a few of my thoughts on the future of SOA.

Service Component Architecture (SCA), an SOA specification for transforming IT assets into reusable services, was hailed Tuesday as a way to build services with lower barriers to adoption and link SOA to Web 2.0. ... SCA provides an executable model for assembling services and supports multiple languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Java and PHP scripts, said Edwards. "It's simplified because it has this principle of removing middleware APIs," said Edwards. ... There are multiple implementations of SCO and SDO, said Edwards. Official 1.0 versions of SDO and SCA from OASIS are expected by the end of the year.

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon. "The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh. "The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available," Singh said. Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

Very large collection of links to Groklaw articles dealing with Sun and Solaris, with article titles and dates, arranged chronologically. With the Microsoft cloud running atop Solaris, this is likely to be a useful research tool to access relevant historical information.