Daily Archives: October 4, 2007

internet, software development, web authoring

Facebook, Comet, FireEagle at Future of Web Apps

This will be my last post direct from the Future of Web Apps as day two draws to a close.

Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, talked this morning about the site’s remarkable growth and its value as a developer platform. He says its user count is growing at 3% per week, which equates to doubling each 6 months or so. Even more impressive are its activity stats – 50 page views per user per day, according to Morin, with 50% of users logging in at least daily.

So what is the Facebook platform? Morin calls it “A standards-based advanced web service which enables you to access the social graph”, where “social graph” means the connections between people. If you build an application on this platform, you can hook into these connections. An attraction for developers is that applications can achieve rapid adoption through the viral networking that Facebook encourages.

For me, his talk was more notable for what it did not say, than for what it did. Morin referred to the oft-repeated Facebook problem, that developers fear their best ideas will simply get built into Facebook itself, but did not offer any comfort beyond bland reassurance. I’m also interested in the implications of Facebook becoming increasingly important as an identity provider. How does it compare to others such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, when measured against the laws of identity developed by Microsoft’s identity architect Kim Cameron, for example?

Joe Walker spoke on Comet, an API for two-way communication with the web browser. Fascinating session, if only for his description of the hacks required to make it work – web browsers are not designed for this. Interesting comment on IE and how it handles data in iFrames – “it’s not wrong, but all the other browsers do it better.”

Tom Coates from Yahoo spoke on FireEagle, the code name for a project which exposes an API for applications that provide location-based services. If you sign up, it uses a variety of techniques to detect your location. An application could then do things like advising the speed limit in your area, or giving you a weather forecast, or informing you of friends nearby, or any number of other possibilities. Intriguing stuff, but with security and privacy implications that have not been fully worked out. It will be interesting to track what happens once people begin to sign up, which will be possible shortly in the form of an early test release.

linux, microsoft, open source, software development

Great for debugging: Microsoft to release .NET Framework source

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Scott Guthrie has the details. As my title implies, this is great for debugging. There will be benefits for the Framework as well, presuming Microsoft listens when a developer says, “Why does your code do this and not that?”

Is this a big radical step for Microsoft? I don’t think so. Nor does it merit this kind of predictable backlash – Steven J Vaughan-Nichols saying that Microsoft is tempting open source developers to use its code and become vulnerable to lawsuits.

I recall an early .NET briefing in which an IT exec from the Nationwide Building Society (an early adopter) said how grateful he was to Microsoft for sharing the source to the .NET Framework. How come? Well, ever come across Reflector for .NET? If compiled .NET libraries are not obfuscated, you can easily decompile the code. Admittedly you will not see comments, but it is still pretty effective. As far as I know, the .NET Framework has never been obfuscated, so in some ways we already had the code.

I do understand the risks for projects like Mono, which seek to be clean-room implementations, but I doubt they are significantly greater than before. Further, I suspect that if Microsoft wanted to bring legal guns to bear on Mono, it is likely that it already could. Although Mono builds on ECMA standards, it implements plenty of stuff that is not covered by those standards. I have no idea whether it breaches any Microsoft patents; but I would not find it surprising. What stops Microsoft pursuing Mono? Mainly, I imagine, because it is good for .NET and therefore a benefit to the company.

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internet, software development, web authoring

Microsoft Seadragon: smooth scaling for web images, coming to Silverlight

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I mentioned Microsoft’s short presentation yesterday here at the Future of Web Apps conference. The highlight was a single page showing the complete works of Charles Dickens, with every page on view. We then zoomed in to read a page; the performance was great and the type perfectly clear. However I am taking it on trust that it really was all of Dickens works…

The technology behind this is Seadragon, acquired by Microsoft in February this year. I’m told that it will be integrated into Silverlight 1.1, so I guess we will be able to use this cross-platform next year. It is also used in Photosynth.

Is it any different from what you can already do with say Google Maps and related, or Virtual Earth? The answer I guess is that amazing zoom capability is nothing new, but Seadragon looks like an advance in smoothness and probably ease of programming. The goal:

visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.

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Notes on the Future of Web Apps: mobile web, scalability, Zoho, Microsoft

A few notes on the first day at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. These are supplementary to my posts yesterday.

Heidi Pollock of Bluepulse spoke on mobile web apps. This was a depressing session, through no fault of Pollock. She explained how to keep to the compatible set of HTML and CSS markup that works on most mobiles, but acknowledged that even this will not work well for all users. Apparently CSS support is disabled by default on Blackberry devices, for example. She also noted that most mobile web users were either in urgent need of information, or bored. A reminder that the mobile web still falls a long way short of its potential.

Microsoft’s Mark Quirk gave a demo of 10 things developers can do for free on Microsoft’s platform. This is a tough crowd for the company. We were shown the complete works of Charles Dickens on a single page, then zooming in to read the text. Great demo, but no applause. Why? Because it’s Microsoft, and the average attendee here carries a Mac and develops on an open source stack.

Zoho gave a sparsely-attended demo of its online application suite. It seems very capable; yet I get the impression that Zoho is losing the battle for attention. Possibly its products do too much, at the expense of usability. I am reminded of Om Malik’s comment yesterday, on web apps that “don’t address the principle of fixing someone’s pain point… a lot just do too much and it’s not clear who they are for”.

Steve Souders from Yahoo spoke on performance. He says to fix the front-end; in most cases the bottleneck is not in the database or server-side algorithms. He has a great collection of tips for speeding the performance of web pages. The crowd was impressed and I’m told that copies of his book were being snapped up on the bookstall afterwards.

Matt Mullenweg talked about the architecture of WordPress.com. He does a good job of de-mystifying scalability. Apparently his site is now somewhere around the 20th most visited in the USA, but runs on relatively modest hardware. His three “magic tools”: Pound (load balancer), Wackamole (manages IP addresses for a cluster) and Spread (messaging). He also uses MySQL in master/slave configuration. Another point of interest – everything is in Subversion, even kernels. Favourite quote: “Spam is the Achilles heel of Web 2.0.” Slides are here.

I interviewed Mullenweg and will post a link in due course.

Best of show so far? John Resig on the future of FireFox. He’s now posted his slides; see also my comments.