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"XML doesn't have the monopoly it used to have," Bray said. "It used to be that if you wanted to send messages back and forth across the wire, XML was the only game in town." "Clearly, there is going to more heterogeneity for wire formats, too," he added. "Increasingly, given that the future will have more than two programming languages, there will be a lot more messages being passed around."

Bray comes to the issue from a unique perspective. As a co-author of the original XML specifications, he helped create a language that at one point had been intended to become the lingua franca for all Web communications. He now admits that he wasn't entirely accurate in his original vision of where XML would end up.

"I was so completely wrong on everything," Bray admitted. "We thought we were going to replace HTML and that turned out to be a silly idea. It turned out be used for syndication feeds and purchase orders and a million other things, and that's fine. Things find their own level." However, in today's world of language proliferation, Bray has another favorite approach for exchanging information. "I am a strong partisan of the REST (define) approach, which provides a Web-based approach for integration of anything to anything," Bray said. "REST isn't tied to XML or JSON but it makes it easy to use either."

W3C today announced new standards that will make it easier for people to browse the Web on mobile devices. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, published as a W3C Recommendation, condenses the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into practical advice on creating mobile-friendly content.

Until today, content developers faced an additional challenge: a variety of mobile markup languages to choose from. With the publication of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today, the preferred format specification of the Best Practices, there is now a full convergence in mobile markup languages, including those developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). The W3C mobileOK checker (beta), when used with the familiar W3C validator, helps developers test mobile-friendly Web content.

W3C is also developing resources to help authors understand how to create content that is both mobile-friendly and accessible to people with disabilities. A draft of Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is jointly published by the The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and WAI's Education & Outreach Working Group (EOWG).

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users.

"We have a system inside of Kablink that allows developers to create business objects and these business objects model data," McConnell explained. "Then with the model of the data you can pass it views for forms and displaying the business model. So you can model a business object and then add collaboration items for that object." With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process -- be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.

"We think our offering is unique; there are point solutions that have workflow embedded in them but the kind of social networking collaboration that we do, I don't know anyone that has a workflow component that can do the things that we can," McConnell claimed. "There are customers that have designed ISO 9000 processes with this, so it's a nifty thing to have, especially in an open source project."

WSO2 is releasing on Monday WSO Mashup Server Version 1.5, an open-source product for deploying mashup services featuring Google Gadgets support and interfaces to relational databases and other data sources.

The mashup server uses JavaScript to describe logic for acquiring information, combining data, and exposing it to a user. Information can be acquired from sources such as Web services and scraped pages and published as a new Web service, feeds, Web pages, or notifications. Version 1.5 features stubs and templates for Google Gadgets, which can be hosted within Mashup Server or externally such as in an iGoogle page. A beta dashboard add-in is featured for hosting Google Gadgets within Mashup Server. Google Gadgets enable dynamic content to be placed on a Web page. Data services enhancements provide Web services interfaces to relational databases and other data sources such as Excel spreadsheets and comma-separated values.

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments in new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

The CIOs indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) -- less than 2% of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.

Apple’s Trojan horse in multi-platform, multimedia runtime is a piece of open source technology that’s already on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Adobe Flex/AIR, iPhone, iPod touch, Nokia S60 smartphones and Google’s new Android/Open Handset Alliance, with 30+ partners around the globe: WebKit 3.0.

Two areas where Flash can offer real value is in displaying and packaging video on the web, and in serving as a Java replacement for developing applets. Here's a look at how Adobe is working to defend its strengths in the face of competition, and how its efforts to open the Flash specification in the Open Screen Project play into these efforts.

proprietary FLV video container format

more advanced and open H.264 video codec

Ellinides said in an interview arranged by a spokeswoman for Commissioner Siim Callas, who oversees procurement, that studies showed the costs of moving to open source outweighed the benefits. He said it may be time for a new study.

"For the moment we are working in a Microsoft environment," said Christos Ellinides, director of corporate IT solutions and services, who recommends software for the Commission.

Cloud computing will give rise to the 'power collaborator', who will "connect with people and find dispersed information across an organization and make it relevant," said speaking in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference continuing through Thursday. The concept of cloud computing and Enterprise 2.0 Web-based applications and interactivity has apparently struck a positive chord with a fair number of businesses. Up to 69% cite collaboration as a key reason for the appeal of such environments, according to a survey released this week by AIIM, a non-profit group that tackles issues involving document management, content, records, and business processes. Other factors include: Improved agility and responsiveness (56%), faster communications (55%); increased innovation (39%); and a reduction in IT costs (36%).

What sort of cloud computer(s) should we be building or expecting from vendors? Are there issues of lock-in that should concern customers of either SaaS clouds or PaaS clouds? I’ve been thinking about this problem as the CEO of a PaaS cloud computing company for some time. Clouds should be open. They shouldn’t be proprietary. More broadly, I believe no vendor currently does everything that’s required to serve customers well. What’s required for such a cloud? I think an ideal PaaS cloud would have the following nine features:

1. Virtualization Layer Network Stability

2. API for Creation, Deletion, Cloning of Instances

All of them have in common powerful, modern rendering engines, which make it possible for the browsers to display Web sites that look like those you see with a desktop browser. Safari and the Nokia browser use the same rendering engine: the open source WebKit. All Firefox projects use the same rendering engine, Gecko. Opera has over a decade invested in its core engine.

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that currently has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a round-up of some recent attempts to bring welcome precision where there risks being unnecessary vagueness. Enjoy!

This is Draft 2.0 of The Open Group's SOA ontology. This draft is being exposed for comment outside The Open Group prior to formal Open Group company review. Interested parties are invited to sent comments, and those comments will be addressed in the version submitted to formal review by The Open Group.

Service orientation addresses these challenges by centering on rapidly evolving XML and Web services standards that are revolutionizing how developers compose systems and integrate them over distributed networks. No longer are developers forced to make do with rigid and proprietary languages and object models that used to be the norm before service orientation came into play. The emergence of this new methodology is helping to develop new approaches specifically for Web-based distributed computing. This revolution is transforming the business by integrating disparate systems to establish a real-time enterprise. Making information available where it is needed to simplify merchandising processes requires a methodology that is based on loosely coupled integration between various in-store and back-end applications. This demand makes it critical for an architecture that is based on service orientation for integration between disparate applications. In addition, surfacing information at the right place requires the ability to compose dynamic applications using an array of underlying services. The Office Business Applications platform provides this ability to create composite applications, such as dashboards for the store, regional, and corporate managers.

Because vendors host applications in their own datacenters, companies don't have to concern themselves with hardware provisioning and software maintenance. By living in the Internet "cloud," these hosted applications simplify sharing and collaboration among employees. However, the experience of users living through the recent Google Apps outages could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers.

15 years of workgroup oriented business process automation based on the MSOffice productivity environment has had an impact. Microsoft pretty much owns the "client" in "client/server" because so many of these day-to-day business processes are bound to the MSOffice productivity environment in some way.

The good news is that there is a great transition underway. The world is slowly but inexorably moving from "client/server" systems to an emerging architecture one might describe as "client/ WebStack-Cloud-Ria /server. The reason for the great transition is simple; the productivity advantages of putting the Web in the center of information systems and workflows are extraordinary.

Now the bad news. Microsoft fully understands this and has spent years preparing for a very controlled transition. They are ready. The pieces are finally falling into place for a controlled transition connecting legacy MSOffice bound business processes to the Microsoft WebStack-Cloud-RiA model (Exchange-SharePoint-SQL Server-Mesh-Silverlight).

W3C Working Draft 12 February 2009

HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. This document may not provide accurate information as the HTML 5 specification is still actively in development. When in doubt, always check the HTML 5 specification itself. [HTML5]