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Must read interview. Marc Andreessen explains his five big ideas, taking us from the beginning of the Web, into the Cloud and beyond. Great stuff! ... (1) 1992 - Everyone Will Have the Web ... (2) 1995 - The Browser will the Operating System ... (3) 1999 - Web business will live in the Cloud ... (4) 2004 - Everything will be Social ... (5) 2009 - Software will Eat the World excerpt: Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use-not only text or media but processing power too-will be located remotely. People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application. Once you start thinking in terms of networks, it just doesn't make much sense to prefer local apps, with downloadable, installable code that needs to be constantly updated.

"We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity."
Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Andreessen: That's the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we're not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that's why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That's why there are still Xbox games on discs. That's why everything isn't in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.

Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.

Andreessen: We knew that you would need some pro

CloudStack Manifesto Before getting into the framework specifics, it would be worthwhile to cover some of the design principles we had in mind while we were building CloudStack: CloudStack brings together the best of the web and the desktop: We strongly believe in the convergence of the desktop and the web and will continually strive to expose more services that bring out the best from both. CloudStack enables rapid application development and deployment: Out of the box, CloudStack provides a fully brand able and deployable shell application that can be used as a starting point to jumpstart application development. CloudStack also provides a scalable deployment environment for hosting your applications. CloudStack leverages existing web technologies: We built the CloudStack P2WebServer container over the J2EE compliant Jetty web server. As a result, CloudStack applications are built using standard web technologies like AJAX, HTML, JavaScript, Flash, Flex, etc. CloudStack does not reinvent the wheel: We strive to reuse as much as possible from other open source projects and standards. By creatively stringing together seemingly disparate pieces, like P2P and HTTP, it?fs amazing to create something that's really much greater than the sum of the parts. CloudStack does aim to simplify existing technologies: We will abstract and simplify existing interfaces if needed. For example, we built simpler abstractions for JXTA (P2P) and Jena (RDF Store). CloudStack encourages HTML-based interfaces: We believe that the web browser is the most portable desktop application container with HTML being the lingua franca of the web. Rather than writing a native widget interface for the local desktop application and another web-based interface for the remote view, we encourage writing a single interface that can be reused across both local and remote views. HTML based interfaces are inherently cross-platform and provide good decoupling of design from code (versus having the UI as compiled

Wow.  Google has re-purposed IE for the Open Web! excerpts: A number of modern Web features cannot be used pervasively on the Internet because Microsoft's dominant browser, Internet Explorer, often fails to support current and emerging standards. Google has a plan to drag IE into the world of modern browsing by building a plugin that will allow it to use Chrome's HTML renderer and high-performance JavaScript engine. Google hopes that delivering Chrome's rendering engine in an IE plugin will provide a pragmatic compromise for users who can't upgrade. Web developers will be able to use an X-UA-Compatible meta tag to specify that their page should be displayed with the Chrome renderer plugin instead of using Internet Explorer's Trident engine. This approach will ensure that the Chrome engine is only used when it is supposed to and that it won't disrupt the browser's handling of legacy Web applications that require IE6 compatibility. Google is opening the source code now to get feedback and assistance with testing. The plugin will include Google's speedy V8 JavaScript engine, support for Canvas, SVG, and all of the other features that users enjoy today in Chrome. That also includes the next-generation CSS rendering features of WebKit such as rounded corners. The pages will look just like they would if they were rendered in Chrome. Google is going much further [than Mozilla] by providing the entire renderer. If the plugin is adopted by a sufficiently broad number of users, then Web developers will never again have to contend with IE's limitations. It could also open the door for adoption of HTML 5 and other important emerging standards.

Interesting strategy. Now if we could just get da Vinci/HTML+ to market ...

Lengthy article written by Tim Berners-Lee describes his concerns for the future of the Open Web.  Tim details the history of the Web, describing the principles that made the Web an Open Platform of universal access, exchange and collaborative computing.   excerpt: Universality Is the Foundation Several principles are key to assuring that the Web becomes ever more valuable. The primary design principle underlying the Web's usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality-from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.

This commentary concerns the Microsoft Office Productivity Environment and the opportunity presented as Microsoft tries to move that environment to the MS-Web stack of servers and services. The MS-Web is comprised of many server side applications, but the center is that of the Exchange/SharePoint/MOSS juggernaut. With the 2010 series of product and services release, Microsoft will be accelerating this great transition of the Microsoft monopoly base. While there are many Open Web alternatives to specific applications and services found in the 2010 MS-Web stack, few competitors are in position to put their arms around the whole thing. This is after all an ecosystem that has been put in transition. Replacing parts of the MSOffice ecosystem will break the continuity of existing business processes bound to that productivity environment. This is a disruption few businesses are willing to tolerate. Because of the disruptive cost and the difficulty of cracking into existing bound business systems without breaking things, Microsoft is in position to charge a premium for comparatively featureless MS-Web products and services. Given time, this will no doubt change. And because of the impossible barriers to entry, Microsoft has had lots of time. Still, i'm betting on the Open Web. This commentary attempts to explain why...... I also had some fun with Google Docs templates. What a mess :)

Here it comes - the "rich" Web experience based on integrated but proprietary 2010 technologies from Microsoft.  Note the comparative "advantages" listed in this article describing Microsoft SkyDrive, and comparing to Google Docs. excerpt:  Do you use Microsoft Office programs for creating documents and then use Google Docs to edit these documents online or as an offsite backup? Well, now that Office 2010 and Office Web Apps are available under public beta for free, here are some reasons why you should consider uploading documents, presentations and spreadsheets into Office Web Apps via Windows Live SkyDrive in addition to your Google Docs account. 1. Windows Live SkyDrive supports larger files 2. Document formatting is preserved 3. Native OpenXML file formats 4. Public Documents are in the Lifestream 5. Content is not 'lost in translation'  ....... When you upload a document in Office Web Apps, the application will automatically preserve all the data in that document even if a particular feature is not currently supported by the online applications. For instance, if your PowerPoint presentation contains a slide transition (e.g., Vortex) that is not supported in the online version of Office, the feature will be preserved in your presentation even if you upload it on to Office Web Apps via Windows Live SkyDrive. Later, when you download and open that presentation inside PowerPoint, it would be just like the original version. The content is not 'lost in translation' with Office Web Apps. Are you using Google Docs as a Document Backup Service?  Office Web Apps won't just preserve all the original features of your documents but you can also download entire directories of Office documents as a ZIP file with a simple click.

Google releases JavaScript alternative Web application programming language.  Release includes Cloud SQL, a cloud computing database to write Web apps against - using either JavaScript or DART. excerpt: Google on Monday introduced a preview version of Dart, its new programming language for Web applications. The introduction was widely expected, not only because the announcement was listed on the GOTO developer conference schedule, but because a Google engineer described the language and its reason for being in a message sent to a developer mailing list late last year. "The goal of the Dash [Dart's former name] effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development on the open Web platform," said Google engineer Mark S. Miller in his post last year. More Insights White Papers The Dodd-Frank Act: Impact on Derivatives Technology Infrastructure Simple is Better: Overcoming the complexity that robs financial data of its potential Analytics Mobility's Next Challenge: 8 Steps to a Secure Environment SaaS 2011: Adoption Soars, Yet Deployment Concerns Linger Webcasts Effective IT Inventory and Asset Management: From Quagmire to Quick Fix Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know Videos In an interview at Interop New York, Cisco's Justin Griffin shows how their wireless products can physically map radio sources by analyzing the spectrum. This allows you to detect rogue devices and sources of interference. Lars Bak, a Google engineer who helped develop Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine and one of the creators of Dart, said in a phone interview that Google works regularly on large Web applications and that the company's engineers feel they need a new programming language to describe large, complex Web applications.

.... "While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment anytime soon, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. As for the future, that battle for desktop productivity will take place, just not with ChromeOS, Linux, or, the MacOS. What has to happen before the assault on the Microsoft's productivity empire can begin is that the business systems bound to the MSOffice productivity environment must transition to the Open Web, via SaaS or some other replacement. Or, the productivity environment itself must be re-purposed to the Open Web. The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. ..... ~ge~

excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible. The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server). comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment. What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings. Note th

While trying to help a friend understand the issues involved with exchanging MSOffice documnets between the many different versions of MSOffice, I stumbled on this oldy but goody ......... "A group of software developers have created a program to make Microsoft Office work with files in the OpenDocument format, a move that would bridge currently incompatible desktop applications. Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice.org project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw. The new program, which has been under development for about year and finished initial testing last week, is designed to let Microsoft Office manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, Edwards said. "The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the 'open,' 'save,' and 'save as' sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF Plugin renders ODF documents as if (they) were native to MS Office," according to Edwards. If the software, which is not yet available, works as described, it will be a significant twist to an ongoing contest between Microsoft and the backers of OpenDocument, a document format gaining more interest lately, particularly among governments. Microsoft will not natively support OpenDocument in Office 2007, which will come out later this year. Company executives have said that there is not sufficient demand and OpenDocument is less functional that its own Office formats. Having a third-party product to save OpenDocument files from Office could give OpenDocument-based products a bump in the marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, a RedMonk analyst. OpenDocument is the native format for the OpenOffice open-source desktop productivity suite and is supported in others, including KOffice, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and IBM's Workplace. "To the extent that you get people authoring documents in a format that is natively compatible with

Although there are many open source CMSes available, we're going to focus on those that are based upon PHP. The following CMSes are thus PHP-based, and use a MySQL database. The advantages of using such a CMS include portability, support and a large developer base with frequent updates and improvements. We will discuss the following four CMSes: Drupal - a free open source content management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License Joomla - an open source content management system platform for publishing content as a Model-view-controller (MVC) web application framework PHPNuke - a web-based automated news publishing and content management system based on PHP and MySQL Wordpress - an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application, and is the most popular blog software in use today

Excellent report on Crocodoc and their ability to convert MANY different document file types to HTML5.  Including all MSOffice formats - OOXML, ODF, and PDF. " Crocodoc, and took on the much larger problem of allowing groups to collaborate on editing a document online, no matter what the document type: PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Photoshop, JPEG, or PNG. In the process, they had to build an embeddable viewer that could take apart any document and reassemble it accurately within a Web browser. And as soon as they'd finished that, they had to tear their own system apart and rebuild it around HTML5 rather than Flash, the Adobe multimedia format that's edging closer and closer to extinction. The result of all that iterating is what's probably the world's most flexible and faithful HTML5-based document viewer: when you open a PDF, PowerPoint, or Word document in Crocodoc, the Web version looks exactly like the native version, even though it's basically been stripped down and re-rendered from scratch. When I talked with Damico in February of 2011, the startup had visions of building on this technology to become a kind of central, Web-based clearinghouse for everyone's documents-a cross between Scribd, Dropbox, and Google Docs, but with a focus on consumers, and with prettier viewing tools. In the last year, though, Crocodoc's direction has changed dramatically. Damico and his colleagues realized that it would be smarter to partner with the fastest growing providers of document-sharing services and social business-tool providers than to try to compete with them. "The massive, seismic change for us is that we had a huge opportunity to partner with Dropbox and LinkedIn and SAP and Yammer, and let them build on top of Crocodoc and make it into a core piece of their own products," Damico says. In other words, every time an office worker opens a document from within a Web app like Dropbox or Yammer, they're activating a white-label version

Today Microsoft announced an open source cloud collaboration that may surprise some people, but not our customers and partners who have relied on our interoperability solutions over the past few years. Today Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V  to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud infrastructure platform. The Hyper-V addition provides enterprise customers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies greater flexibility when using OpenStack. Until today, OpenStack only supported several open source virtualization products. Comment:  Microsoft needs to slow down Google and keep Apple's focus elsewhere.  Contributing a Windows only hypervisor to the OSS Cloud.com OpenStack project is one way Microsoft can hedge their own flailing Azure Cloud effort.  Read the Ray Ozzie good-bye letter.  The combination of Cloud, Web and Mobile Computing is the end of the Windows OS.

Google programmers open source two components of the Google Wave messaging and collaboration prototype. One includes the Operational Transform, which forms the complex center of the Wave model. Google Wave is an example of the Pushbutton Web, where real-time communications rule the roost. Google July 24 said it released to open source the OT (Operational Transform) code, the framework that enables multiple people to edit a single document in real time across a wide-area network, as well as a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to the XMPP core protocol, geared to allow near real-time communication of wave updates between two wave servers.

Today, Strobe Inc. is launching a new platform that helps developers build HTML5-based Web applications for desktops, smartphones and tablets, and centrally manage them from a single interface. The launch is a major leap forward in HTML5 app development. From one interface, teams can manage code (both test code and production code), configure the app's deployment across platforms (Web, Android, iOS, etc.), add additional services (social, push notifications, authentication, etc.), and even track analytics within an easy-to-use dashboard. In short, it's a comprehensive platform that makes building apps with Web technologies, like HTML5 and JavaScript, not just possible, but easy, straightforward and fast. The company was co-founded by Ruby on Rails Core Team member Carl Lerche, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and SproutCore Core team member Yehuda Katz, and Charles Jolley, formerly the JavaScript Frameworks Manager for Apple. At Apple, Jolley worked on Apple's Web products like MobileMe and iCloud. He's also the creator of the open source JavaScript framework, SproutCore, which powered Apple's Web services and is now a key part of the Strobe platform. In addition to SproutCore, Strobe also uses PhoneGap, the popular HTML5 app platform. PhoneGap lets developers author apps using Web technologies then deliver them in a native wrapper to the iTunes App Store, Android Marketplace and other app stores. It also happens to integrate nicely with SproutCore.

OpenStack: The 5-minute Overview What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers. Who it's for: Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.) How it's being used today: Organizations like Rackspace Hosting and NASA are using OpenStack technologies to manage tens of thousands of compute instances and petabytes of storage. Timeline: Openstack was announced July 19th, 2010. While many components of OpenStack have been used in production for years, we are in the very early stages of our efforts to offer these technologies broadly as open source software. Early code is now available on LaunchPad, with an inital release for OpenStack Storage expected in mid-September and an initial release for OpenStack Compute expected in mid-October.