Group items tagged

Gundotra said Google “believes in the vision of software as a service.” But the barrier to enabling enterprises to use cloud computing on an even greater scale is that the browsers have to become more powerful to have the full client computing capability of the PC platform. He noted that this is already starting to happen. Google, he said, is “thrilled” with the new features built into the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 browsers. Google said this is a sign that the next generation of browsers, including Internet Explorer, “will have very significant improvements” that will give the features they need for cloud computing.

AbstractXForms for HTML provides a set of attributes and script methods that can be used by the tags or elements of an HTML or XHTML web page to simplify the integration of data-intensive interactive processing capabilities from XForms. The semantics of the attributes are mapped to the rich XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture, thereby allowing web application authors a smoother, selective migration path to the higher-order behaviors available from the full element markup available in modules of XForms.

This document describes XForms for HTML, which provides a set of attributes and script methods encompassing a useful subset of XForms functionality and mapping that functionality to syntactic constructs that are familiar to authors of HTML and XHTML web pages. The intent of this module is to simplify the means by which web page authors gain access to the rich functionality available from the hybrid execution model of XForms, which combines declarative constructs with event-driven imperative processing. These attributes and script methods increase the initial consumability of XForms by allowing injection of rich semantics directly into the host language markup. In turn, the behaviors of the attributes and script methods are mapped to the XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture so that applications manifest behaviors consistent with having used XForms markup elements. This allows authors to gradually address greater application complexity as it arises in the software lifecycle by opportunistically, i.e. as the need arises, switching from the attributes and script methods of this specification to the corresponding XForms markup elements. This gradual adoption strategy is being further supported by the modularization of XForms into components that can be consumed incrementally by authors and implementers.

Open source is the very thing that has crippled Sun, yet Sun is looking to open source, to hobble its competitors and revive its future. We often talk in the technology industry about the need to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it to you. Sun may be a little late off the starting blocks, but it's fascinating to watch its race against time.

Having open-sourced its own Solaris operating system, Sun has now tried to corner the market in open source databases with its $1bn purchase of MySQL, the database management system. It now also has its eyes set on the storage market, with a plan to inflict the same pain on incumbents there that it has itself felt from the rise of Linux. It's a hugely gutsy move. It remains to be seen whether it will work, but with Sun's OpenStorage business growing dramatically faster than the rest of the storage industry, it just might work.

Microsoft has set up a repository in which government agencies may upload and store their public-facing datasets so that they can be reused by other parties. Agency developers can upload their data to this repository, called the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), through Microsoft's Azure, the company's cloud-computing offering.

Since taking the role of federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra has urged agencies to make more of their data open to the public in easy-to-use formats. To this end, the General Services Administration, on behalf of Kundra, is setting up a repository of government feeds, to be called Data.gov. Data.gov will both serve as a repository for data and as an index for government data located elsewhere, Kundra told GCN. OGDI came about as a way to introduce Azure to the federal information technology community, said Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal chief technology officer. "The government wants to store all this data, what with Kundra talking about Data.gov. We asked if you were to use Azure as data source, [what would you need to do]?"

In addition to Microsoft's effort, at least one other company has volunteered to rehost government data for wider use. Amazon is offering to store public-domain datasets for users of its Elastic Compute Cloud service.

The need for openness led major players in the virtualization market to jointly create a proposed standard, the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). Members of the team were XenSource, which is owned by Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, HP, IBM and Dell. The OVF was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), which develops management standards and promotes interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments. The DMTF accepted the proposed standard in September. The OVF will package all VMs with an XML wrapper that will let them run on any virtualization platform. It will also incorporate a security check to ensure that the VM has not been tampered with; metadata about what hardware or hypervisor the VM can run on; and a license check. The DMTF said the OVF will be rolled out this year.

The real culprit This may seem like a forgone conclusion to many of you after seeing the W3C’s development timetables, but the real reason Flash and Silverlight exist is because the “open-web” people dropped the ball. HTML simply can handle what Flash and Silverlight can do. It has become increasingly stale for modern web development needs. Here is some perspective, HTML5 has finally added a tag for handling video. Flash 6 came out in 2002 with video support! Where is the HTML version of Line Rider? It is in Flash and Silverlight now. If you want to see something really interesting check out Hard Rock Cafe’s memorabilia page (Silverlight 2 required) and tell me if you’ve ever seen something like that with HTML

The Time to Pounce Has Come I agree with DonnieBoy. Microsoft will try to leverage their MSOffice monopoly to dominate the newly emerging marketplace of Web-Stack and Cloud Computing solutions. I also believe that for Microsoft, the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place on March 29th, 2008 with ISO approval of the MSOffice-OOXML document format. For most businesses, Microsoft is the "client" in "client/server". The great transition from client/server to client/ Web-Stack /server has been slow because Microsoft was uncertain as to how they could control this transition. Some light was shed on the nature of this "uncertainty" when the Combs vs. Microsoft antitrust case brought forth a 1998 eMail from Chairman Bill to the MSOffice development team. The issue for the good Chairman was that of controlling the formats and protocols used to connect MSOffice to a Web centric world. MSOffice support for Open Web formats and protocols like (X)HTML, CSS, and WebDAV were out of the question. Microsoft needed to figure out how pull off this transition with proprietary formats and protocols. And avoid the wrath of antitrust in the process!

The world's largest software and search companies Wednesday announced the formation of the White Spaces Database Group with PC and broadcasting hardware and services specialists Dell, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, Comsearch, and NeuStar.

The White Spaces Database Group comes after months of concerted lobbying of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by Microsoft, Google, and the other companies to make unused TV frequencies - white spaces - available for internet access by PCs and other devices.

The FCC last November ruled against broadcasters and said it would open up white spaces, but in a concession to their concerns, it stipulated the need for an online database that devices accessing the spectrum must read in order to find out what channels they are allowed to use. The database should be built and run by a third party and will be selected through a "public process."

he architecture of the Widget engine divides the client technology into two parts, the engine and the widgets. The widget engine is usually a pretty large download.

The widget engine is really a wonderful architecture that gives you the power of the desktop (via the widget engine) and the management of the Web (via widget downloads).  Widget engines can out-perform RIA solutions and they can store larger data sets. 

Fit Client applications can be centrally managed, yet remain resident on the desktop. They can offer access to standard web content (e.g. HTML) without the need of a browser. Fit Clients can leverage the processing power and disc space of the client machine, but they can also offer more restrictive and secure environments than client/server platforms.