Conference Season begins

As summer winds down in August (vacation month), the conference season begins in September. First there is Office 2.0 just after labor day (September 3-5) in San Francisco, organized by Ismael Ghalimi, for the third year in a row. Ismael does a great job. I have attended and participated in both the earlier conferences in 2006 and 2007. The focus is wider than originally planned. Now it covers three key areas -  Collaboration + Mobility + Productivity.

Then in September also, Web 2.0 Expo happens in New York. This is the east coast version of the larger show in San Francisco last April. The usual suspects will be there singing the glory of Web 2.0, social networking, tagging, and how these things are moving to the enterprise. I will be there discussing Enterprise RIA from our Curl booth.

Comes October  and we have AjaxWorld 2008 in its west coast incarnation at the San Jose convention center, after the New York event last March. You can see how they are marketing this event via speakers such as me. I will be speaking on real world examples of Rich Internet Application deployment by various large companies. While we can discuss the charm and beauty of Web 2.0 or Ajax, the proof is in the pudding of real usage. Curl ‘s RIA platform is used extensively in Asia by many global companies for business-critical applications. This is a switch from old-world client-server architecture (of which Oracle, SAP, etc are based) to a web-based architecture.

And there are many other conferences between September-December.

Which RIA Platform to choose?

This morning I read a very useful and interesting article written by my colleague Richard Monson-Haefel at Curl. He describes which RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform to chose for what purpose. In other words, there is no “one size fits all” solution. You would pick Ajax for simple consumer type applications such as Amazon.com. If you need animation, then Flex or Silverlight can be the right solution. For enterprise RIA applications which are stateful, transactional, with high scalability, security and performance needs, the MIT-Research-based product Curl is the right answer.

Since RIA is an emerging category, there exists a lot of confusion. Flash or Flex was the only choice and everyone thought that is the alternative to the first-generation (Web 1.0) technologies such as Javascript, CSS, DOM (the aggregate being termed Ajax). Ajax suffers from security and scalability issues for enterprise class RIA. Also, the complexity of code development is quite high in Ajax. Now we have choices outside Ajax and we would see these choices being adopted widely in the years to come.

Catalyst Conference 2008, San Diego

I had the opportunity to attend Burton Group’s annual conference called Catalyst 2008 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. There were probably 1200 people from all over the world.

This was my first time attending this conference. I am somewhat skeptical of conferences hosted by analysts firms such as Gartner, Forrester, etc. Having been a vendor writing software for over 25 years, I was always sought by the key analysts to understand what we were building and the future road map for products such as DB2 or Oracle DB. Then you pay to hear the same analyst tell you what you told them. But to be fair, there are good analysts who synthesize lots of information and give some insights. What I get very tired of is hearing the obvious. Tell me something I don’t know, please.

So at the Catalyst conference, I noticed many parallel tracks. One track that must be very good is security or identity management. Because whoever I ran into, mentioned that they are there for the identity management topics. I attended the track for collaboration, Rich Internet Applications, SOA, etc. Again, I was told that REST is the better way than SOAP.  Please!  This is at least 3 years old news. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had done this way back when. Just because the analyst thought it’s new does not make it new news.

Overall, there were many good sessions. Customers presenting real deployment stories were the most valuable. Paisley, a software company in the GRC space (Governance, Risk, Compliance), showed how they have used Curl RIA platform to build very attractive UI for the user. This was a good example of using Web as a platform over client-server to satisfy user demand at a much lower cost.

The evenings were packed with vendors “open house” and I did not even step out of the hotel for 3 days. There was a track on mobile computing and it always drew large audiences Burton Group seems much more technically focused and many attendees are their clients over the years. This was more like their annual user group meeting.

Few words from Japan – June2008

Writing this from Tokyo. I remember my first trip to Japan was 25 years ago, back in 1983 when I worked for IBM. I had come out to make several presentations on the then new technology of Relational Databases. I was part of the DB2 development team at IBM.

Now after many visits, I am here again. Always its amazing to me to see how simple things are so perfect here. Trains run on perfect time (so much so that you can adjust your watch per train departure times), taxi drivers wear white gloves and keep their taxis clean. There is no tipping anywhere. The politeness of the people is very visible and most of all, the work ethics amazes me the most. Everyone, be him a janitor or a construction worker or a systems programmer;  perform with utmost sincerity and efficiency. Everyone stays at the office for at least 10-12 hours a day.

As I met many customers and colleagues, I notice how efficient they are in the mobile technology. Of course my iPhone does not work here  (feel like coming from a third-world country these days). The Japanese use their mobile phone for credit card payment, checking maps and directions, full-function GPS, and much more. The taxi driver politely tells us the traffic ahead is going to be bad and suggests we take the subway instead, sacrificing his taxi fare.

There is much more use of Web 2.0 when it comes to RIA (Rich Internet Application). One customer is replacing all spreadsheet usage via a Curl-implemented web front-end simulatig the spreadsheet UI. Another client built a building security system using Curl, fully deployed on the web. They seem ahead in Enterprise adoption of RIA.

AjaxWorld 2008 – New York City, March 18-20

This was my first time at AjaxWorld conference, its fifth year since inception by Sys-con group. They conduct two of these, spring in the east coast(New York) and fall in the west coast (San Jose). Mostly web development and design folks come to these events. So what did I observe?

- Ajax is just a phrase to enable conversation on a set of technologies which are much older than the phrase, coined only in early 2006. The underlying technologies include the good old Javascript, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), Document Object Model (DOM), and of course the Microsoft-created protocol XHR (XmlHttpRequest) for asynchronous messaging between the web client and the server. The take-off on usage has been great, mostly in the consumer space. Hence such a conference draws a lot of younger web-gen developers.

- However, it was clear from the March conference that RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is moving far beyond Ajax. The security risks of scripting language and browser host is well known and scares the enterprise world.  Plus, building transactional, complex, web applications via Ajax is highly non-trivial. Hence we have seen the newer platforms such as Curl (origin, MIT), Silverlight (Microsoft), and AIR (Adobe). There are hundreds of Ajax-based platforms like Jackbe, Nexaweb, Laszlo, etc., which are not getting the traction in the serious enterprise community which looks for superb performance, high security, scalability, and greater UI functionality.

- Web 1.0 era saw mostly graphic designers and serious programming folks did not participate. Now Adobe is trying to entice developers whereas Microsoft wants designers. A new term was used “devigners”. All new RIA platforms are bringing a two-language  strategy: a declarative GUI language and a serious OO language for business logic.  Adobe, for example has MXML/ActionScript. Microsoft has XAML/C#. Sun has JavaFX/Java. Interestingly Curl is the only platform that has one language that spans both, thanks to the forward-looking research at MIT. As a consequence, programmer productivity is significantly higher with Curl. There are over 300 large enterprise customers who have deployed Curl as the RIA platform. Bert Halstead from Curl presented at the AjaxWorld highlighting the user experience and technical superiority of Curl.

- Microsoft was very visible at the conference. Silverlight just announced their release 2.0 beta a week before. Someone said, if Silveright was like a black and white TV, Silverlight 2.0 will be a 1080P HDTV quality. But it’s too early to see the truth. The marketing machine was in full gear at the show. There was hardly any presence of Adobe.

- Some keynotes were rather hollow in content and tried to push their solution (you got to do some marketing as a sponsor to the event, a barter system).

Overall it was a good show and full of technical contents in this confusing space.

What’s hot in 2008? Web 2.0 for the Enterprise?

As we step into 2008, the decibel level on Web 2.0 has gone very high, but mostly in the consumer space. We have seen remarkable progress in open API’s (e.g. Facebook, Yahoo, Google,..), proliferation of widgets/gadgets, and dynamic interactive web applications. As the pundits of Web 2.0 said, its all about harnessing collective intelligence.  User participation has been the crucial element. Flickr, Youtube, Slide, Twitter, Kyte TV, Podcast, Digg, Slashdot, dzone, Seesmic, wikia,….the list is unending.

But what about the enterprise? – those Fortune 1000 companies with millions of dollars spent every year on IT. Most of them are steeped in 10-15 year old client-server platforms with high cost and lack of flexibility. Most US companies are users of packaged applications, hence they depend upon the software vendors such as Oracle, SAP, etc. We find in Japan, much custom development still exists, and many Japanese companies (the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, Toyota) have endorsed web-based applications to enhance usability and flexibility while reducing cost. Enterprises endorsing Web 2.0 technologies have been very few. What does it mean actually?

Just having blogs, wikis, tags, mash-ups, and social software does not yield obvious benefits to the business. The ROI piece is unclear. Many times, they are “solutions looking for problems”. The US market is more hype-driven and technologies are adopted because they seem cool. This is where one area comes as an obvious entry point for Web 2.0, called RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

RIA’s are all about enhanced user experience. Complex interactive visualization, minimizing clicks to complete a multi-step transaction, making information available with mouse-over, are some examples of improving aesthetics and user experience. This is an obvious area to move existing client-server applications to the “Web as the new platform” (a promise of Web 2.0). Big players like Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (AIR – Adobe Integrated Runtime)  have joined the race for RIA. But they lack the critical dimensions of scalability, performance, and security, very important for large enterprises. Both these products have a multi-media pedigree and they seem to target that market. For example, Bill Gates announced this week at CES (Consumer Electronic Show), Las Vegas, that Silverlight will be used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Another player is significant here – Curl. The Curl RIA platform (origins from MIT Research) is designed for high performance and scalability. There are over 300 customers using Curl for client-side technology for RIA. Curl is agnostic to server-side environment and can work well with J2EE, .Net, Weblogic, Websphere, Oracle, etc. It deploys a JIT compiler on the client and processes complex logic and user interaction very fast. Check the curl website for more info. Also check a recent interview I gave to Dr. Dobb’s journal on this subject.

In summary, the year 2008 will see increased adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. But the door for this entry will be RIA (Rich Internet Applications) rather than mash-ups or blogs or wikis.

A tribute to my friend Marc Orchant

It is with deep sadness I learnt about Marc Orchant’s passing away today. He had suffered a massive heart attack one week ago and never regained consciousness at the hospital in New Mexico.

Marc was my colleague at Foldera first and most recently at Curl since last few months as VP of developer relations. He had a fragrant personality that endeared him to one and all. Full of life, Marc exuded enthusiasm, energy and tremendous integrity. He was a famous blogger at ZDnet and more recently at BlogNations. His work in the collaboration software space, specially the Microsoft technology is well known. He was also very knowledgable in the mobile technology space. He carried all kinds of mobile devices and impressed everyone with his knowledge on the latest technology. His eloquence in writing and speech was legendary.

As they say, great souls leave behind those great qualities and values that everyone remembers. Marc was such a soul. As I say goodbye to my friend Marc, let his soul rest in peace on the other shore. My deepest sympathies to Sue Orchant, Marc’s wife and his children Jason and Rebecca.