2006 November | Open Parenthesis

Archive for November, 2006:

November 29, 2006

What is it you do, again?

Tagged with: AJAX, NGI, RSS, SOA, Web 2.0 — John @ 9:26 am

I’m often asked to give a brief definition of Next Generation Internet, since it is in my job title. Unfortunately, that can be a bit challenging, because it’s really a combination of a number of different fundamental changes all occuring in parallel:

The architecture of participation, and the increased user expectations it is driving,
The rich interfaces provided by Ajax and related technologies,
The composition of applications from services, whether as full-blown SOA or simple Mashup

These three major trends fit together very well with Optaros’ overall mission of helping enterprisesÃ‚Â meet business needs by leveraging open source software and an assembly-based methodology.

Recently a few very good presentations / articles have appeared that should help make this easier for me to explain and for all of us to understand.

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November 28, 2006

Making Edgy Eft less Edgy

Tagged with: Linux, Open Source, Ubuntu — John @ 3:42 pm

Ever since I upgraded my (K)ubuntu install from Dapper Drake (6.06) to Edgy Eft (6.10) I’ve had a few rough edges. This morning I finally sorted them out.

The first was related to my Dell Lattitude D810’s touchpad – an Alps Glide touchpad. Ever since the upgrade it has been fundamentally unusable, moving the cursor so slowly I’d have to drag across the trackpad itself two dozen times to get the cursor halfway across the screen.

The second was related to using XGL and Beryl – hitting the keyboard combination Shift-Backspace would terminate and restart XGL, making me lose whatever unsaved work I had in that session. (I never knew how many times I hit Shift-Backspace until this).

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November 21, 2006

AjaxWorld Expo

Tagged with: AJAX, Development, NGI, Open Source, Web 2.0 — John @ 4:36 pm

Ajax World Conference and Expo

Theme: Rich Internet Applications

Begins: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 at 8:00 AM

Ends: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 at 5:00 PM

Location:

Roosevelt Hotel

New York, NY 10017

USA

Registration fee: $1695

Last date for registration: Wed, 21 Mar 2007

Last date for paper submission: Mon, 19 Mar 2007

Speaker: John Eckman

Link: AjaxWorld Expo

Experience AJAX, RIA, and Web 2.0 Knowledge and Best Practices at AJAXWorld Conference and Expo 2007

In March 19-21, 2007 over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe will be converging in New York City to attend the East coast AJAXWorld Conference & Expo — the most comprehensive meeting on the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Web 2.0.

Delegates will hear first-hand from the creators, innovators, leaders and early adopters of AJAX, and a slew of leading vendors will provide sneak-peeks of the very latest frameworks, tools, products and applications during the conference, which will have over 100 sessions and presentations given by 125 different speakers – the largest AJAX-focused speaker faculty ever assembled in one place at one time.

Conference & Expo 2007 East will be jump-started with a full one-day “AJAX University Boot Camp,” personally led by Web 2.0 and AJAX guru Dion Hinchcliffe, followed by the Main Conference and Expo over the following 2 days.

Topics include:

Enterprise AJAX | Mobile AJAX | AJAX with Java

Toolkits/Frameworks: TIBCO GI | JackBe | Spry |

Extending AJAX (Flash | Flex | Laszlo | Atlas | XUL)

Real-World AJAX and Web 2.0: Case Studies

Lesser AJAX, Greater AJAX

Microsoft Atlas for ASP.NET

AJAX, Web Services and SOAs

Security in the AJAX/Web 2.0 Era

How Java, AJAX, and Web 2.0 Work Together

AJAX Offline (LAJAX)

The Present and Future of JavaScript

The State of the DOM

Integrating CSS Into AJAX/Web 2.0 Apps

Comprehensive XMLHttpRequestObject

A Venture Capitalist View of Web 2.0

AJAX and Comet

AJAX and the Browser

Mashing AJAX

Enterprise Blogs Could Be Sweet, Too

Tagged with: Collaboration, Content Management, Development, NGI, Open Source, RSS, Web 2.0 — John @ 8:43 am

Interesting exchange last week about Intel’s new SuiteTwo product, announced at the Web 2.0 summit, which is an appliance (hardware) bundled with solutions from:

SixApart’s Movable Type (blog)
SocialText (wiki)
NewsGator (rss feed management)
SimpleFeed (rss publishing)
SpikeSource (integration, support)

Josh Bancroft, an Intel employee, and self-described “Technology Evangelist and Geek Blogger,” was fairly critical of the launch announcement. Josh critiques the product for being proprietary and expensive, pointing out that free, open source tools are available to accomplish the same goals. In essence, he criticized Intel for operating in a traditional product development mode rather than the new Web 2.0 paradigm: offering a web 2.0 product wrapped in web 1.0 clothing:

Do you know what all of that feels like to those of us who actually get excited about arcane, geeky ideas like having company-wide blogs and wikis? It feels like a big company trying to embed their marketing axe in our heads, and manipulate us into convincing our bosses to spend the money on these tools. Thanks, but no thanks.

Josh’s post is well worth reading on its own, as a critique of companies trying to continue to operate in traditional proprietary software models, but it’s especially worth reading given that Anil Dash (from SixApart) responded in the comments.

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November 20, 2006

The Intranet is Dead – Long Live the Intranet!

Tagged with: Collaboration, Content Management, NGI, Open Source, RSS, Web 2.0 — John @ 9:19 am

What’s your corporate intranet look like?

Some recent blog posts confirm my impression that the old command-and-control, edited-by-someone-in-HR intranet is being quietly replaced by a combination of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking type applications.

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