Open Web

Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a lengthy discussion on the future of Open Data and the Open Web.  He identifies three Open Web methods for accessing and working with Open Data; WOA, API's and Linked Data.  These methods are discussed in the context of SOA and the re-engineering of enterprise business systems.  Great stuff.  Dion also provides an excellent chart describing his vision of how these things fit together. Excerpt: "Open data holds up the promise of instant connectivity between arbitrary numbers of ad hoc partners while at the same time reducing integration costs, improving transparency, harnessing external innovation, and even (perhaps especially) creating entirely new and significant business models. I sometimes refer to these as "open supply chains", and the term is highly descriptive when it comes to the potential for open data models to make cloud computing safe and interoperable, help journalists to do their jobs better, or create multi-million dollar new lines of business, such as Amazon's well-known Web Services division."

HuffingtonPost CTO to speak on Enterprise MySQL: Heavy-Traffic Management on Aug. 11 at the NYC MySQL Group http://www.meetup.com/mysqlnyc/calendar/10930810/

Microsoft's proposed undertaking for resolving the ECIS complaint to the European Commission regarding its office productivity software can be downloaded from this linked web page. I've given it a quick skim. Didn't see anything in it for anyone but competing big vendors. E.g., no profiling of data formats for interop of less and more featureful implementations, no round-tripping provisions. Still, some major concessions offered.

You need an HTML5 ready browser to visit this demonstration.  Amazing stuff though.  The latest Chrome beta 3.0.196.2 works well.  Ajaxian has a review of this at:  http://ajaxian.com/archives/audio-canvas Lots of Webkit tweets in the demo!

This one's for Florian. He's been wondering about mobile computing and that creeping sense of being left out of something big. The desktop is so not happening. It's day has come and gone. Now there is a study out from ABI Research, connecting mobile computing to the future of the Web. Good stuff: Intro Excerpt:The term "cloud computing" is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the "future of the web." But cloud computing's potential doesn't begin and end with the personal computer's transformation into a thin client - the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well. At least that's the analysis being put forth by ABI Research. Their recent report, Mobile Cloud Computing, theorizes that the cloud will soon become a disruptive force in the mobile world, eventually becoming the dominant way in which mobile applications operate.

There is a never ending debate about which platform is best: Android, iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or Symbian. But what if the correct answer is … JavaScript? Is this a joke? Not according to an open source project named PhoneGap.

Overview: Aspose.Word is a powerful .NET component that allows any .NET application to work with Microsoft Word documents without utilizing Microsoft Word and Office Automation. Aspose.Word supports a wide array of features including new document creation, document manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, exporting to multiple formats (DOC, PDF & HTML) and much, much more. Aspose.Word is truly the most affordable, fastest, feature rich Word component on the market. Aspose.Word application programming interface (API) is powerful and easy to use at the same time. Classes, properties and method names are easy to remember and understand: for example, Document represents a Word document, DocumentBuilder is responsible for building a document dynamically, and so on. Although this guilde provides many code samples, intuitively understandable interface allows you create working document producing applications having minimal knowledge of C# or VB.NET and Microsoft Word features. $899

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.

OpenNebula is a Virtual Infrastructure Manager that orchestrates storage, network and virtualization technologies to enable the dynamic placement of multi-tier services (groups of interconnected virtual machines) on distributed infrastructures, combining both data center resources and remote cloud resources, according to allocation policies. OpenNebula provides internal and Cloud administration and user interfaces for the full management of the Cloud platform.

Web technologies are increasingly being used on the desktop to bring richer user interfaces to conventional applications. In this tutorial we will show you how to use the WebKit HTML renderer alongside native GTK+ widgets to make a desktop WYSIWYG editor with Python.

http://www.manageit.me ---The greatest minds in IT in 50+ presentations : top industry-leaders: Creator of MySQL Michael "Monty" Widenius, Internet Celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-Creator of PHP & Zend CTO Zeev Suraski, Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations & Pioneer of Agile eXtreme Programmi...

Custom Document Format Interoperability You may have heard that Office 2007 SP2 will now support editing files in the OpenDocument 1.1 (ODF) format. This document format was added to Office's long list of supported documents formats to give customers more choices for the format they use to save their documents. In addition to allowing you to edit the ODF 1.1 format within Office 2007, SP2 also supports a new External File Format API that can be used to edit other document formats as well. With this API, users can choose to save their documents in any format they want. In this post we will explore how to use the API to enable Office 2007 to edit our own custom document format. We will then use Office 2007 to save our custom format as DOCX, ODT and HTML. Our Custom Document Format For the purpose of this article, we have a company who needs to manage their sales pipeline information. The data is available as XML, but they do not want to spend the money to build a custom editor. They just want to let their users edit the pipeline data in Word, as a table. They give these files an extension of SPLX (i.e. Sales PipeLine Xml) The sales pipeline information is made up of a series of SalesItem tags, each with a unique id that represents the index of the item. They track the name of the customer (CustomerName), how much the deal represents (DealValue) and a percent that represents how confident they are that the sales opportunity will close (ConfidencePercent).

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 :)

This is a really good descriptive "story" about Google Wave, and why it' revolutionary.