All posts by onlyconnect

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.

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John Resig makes the case for standards-based Rich Internet Applications

John Resig is a brilliant developer who is the creator of JQuery, a fast and lightweight JavaScript library. He is also JavaScript evangelist at the Mozilla Corporation. He spoke here at The Future of Web Apps on the future of FireFox and JavaScript.

It was a fascinating presentation which demonstrated that it is not just Adobe (Flash, AIR), Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) who are in the Rich Internet Application game. Resig began with a tour of new features in JavaScript 2.0, most of which was familiar to me as it seems to be essentially ECMAScript 4.0 a.k.a ActionScript 3.0. In short, JavaScript is becoming more like Java, complete with full object orientation, optional strict typing, and a Just-in-time (JIT) compiler. Adobe has donated much of its code for the ActionScript runtime, in the form of the Tamarin project, which will eventually be part of FireFox 4.0.

My interest perked up when Resig started talking about three monkeys. These are:

  • Action Monkey – Tamarin in FireFox 4.0
  • Screaming Monkey – Tamarin in IE, via the Flash runtime, enabling developers to use it cross-browser
  • Iron Monkey – Python and Ruby for Tamarin

This was new to me. Resig continued by showing some of the work Mozilla is doing to support advanced graphics and multimedia. The Canvas element in HTML 5 interacts with OpenGL to support 3D effects. There is even the possibility of embedding C code in the browser for raw performance, though the security implications mean this is unlikely to be used for general Web pages. Resig also showed generic audio and video support built into the browser. This will integrate with SVG, and we saw how live video can be played back in SVG elements even while they are being dragged around a canvas. Just like Microsoft demonstrates for Silverlight, as it happens.

After showing us how Mozilla might make Flash and Silverlight unnecessary, Resig went on to tackle offline applications. He told us that Mozilla is working to “converge” the three popular offline APIs – Mozilla’s own, Google Gears, and WHATWG. “A final amalgam will be in FireFox 3”, he said.

Resig also described plans for offline applications. This includes Webrunner, a desktop host for XUL applications, and Prism, which lets you install a web application as a desktop application. XUL is Mozilla’s XML user interface language – analogous to Microsoft’s XAML and Adobe’s MXML.

None of this is coming out soon. By the time it does, won’t Adobe and perhaps Microsoft have wrapped up the market for rich multimedia in web applications? And isn’t Mozilla on collision course with Adobe, despite the Tamarin collaboration, since much of what Resig demonstrated competes with Flash, Flex and AIR? After all, Adobe ceased supporting SVG after its acquisition of Macromedia and thereby Flash.

I asked a question about this, and Resig answered tactfully:

Adobe and Mozilla are two separate beasts. They sometimes have very similar goals, like getting the Tamarin virtual machine out. Sometimes the goals differ a bit. We have a pretty good vision of the open web as a viable platform for anyone to develop on. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This is the core that people should be developing with.

It would be great to see Mozilla disrupting the progress of these two proprietary internet plug-ins, Flash and Silverlight, by providing an open alternative, but it does look as if it will all come too late.

Update: Resig has posted his slides here. He has also clarified the timing:

Of the features mentioned in the presentation, the ones that are coming in Firefox 3 are: SVG Foreign Object, Offline Web Apps, Webrunner/Prism, and JavaScript 1.6-1.8.

internet, web authoring

90% of web sites are illegal

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That’s according to Robin Christopher of AbilityNet, who is speaking on accessibility here at FOWA. He is referring to UK legislation that is 8 years old, requiring web sites to meet certain accessibility standards. The bonus for developers is that accessible web sites are also generally better for all users, not just those with disabilities – Christopher quotes a 35% improvement, though I’m not sure how you measure ease of use in percentages.

Why don’t developers make their sites accessible? The problem I suspect is two-fold. First, lack of resources; many sites are thrown up quickly and it seems that some developers don’t go beyond testing that it looks kind of OK in Internet Explorer. Second, a lot depends on what the standard tools and libraries produce by default. I know Adobe has done significant work on this in Dreamweaver and in Flash. Is a typical WordPress blog accessible? A good question for Matt Mullenweg, whom I will be meeting shortly.

internet, software development, web authoring

Web identity, Facebook, iPhone debated at Future of Web Apps conference

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I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Ryan Carson is interviewing Om Malik and Mike Arrington about – you guessed – the future of web applications.

Organizers Carson Systems seem to be testing the size of the market for their conference. This one follows another in London earlier this year, at a smaller venue. I suspect it is reaching its limit, though Carson consistently attracts high quality speakers. The conference aims to be an incubator for startups, though it attracts a wider audience than that implies.

As for the debate on stage, it is all pretty inconclusive as you would expect, but I’m interested in how the discussion keeps coming back to web identity issues. “Google pushing its identity mechanism, so is Yahoo, and so on,” says Malik. Carson asks how the problem of multiple identities will be fixed? Malik immediately turns pragmatist.  Developers should “support them all, what do you care? Let them fight it out”.

The conversation turns to Facebook. The participants flail around. Nobody knows how significant Facebook will prove long-term, or how viable Facebook applications are for developers. There is concern that Facebook itself may just copy all the good ideas. Further, Malik is dismissive of what has been done so far. “It is amateur, preliminary stuff,” says Malik. “If it is such as great web OS, where are the smart applications? I haven’t seen any.” Asked where Facebook will be in a year’s time, Arrington says it will go public; Malik says it will be embroiled in legal issues.

Malik is not altogether negative. He sees the real value of Facebook as an identity system. “”One application which shows the potential of Facebook is Free World Dialup [FWD]. Facebook becomes a directory service. That would be my idea of a disruptive application.” FWD integrated VOIP into Facebook.

Has Google been beaten by Facebook? “I don’t think the game is over with regard to social networking,” says Arrington.

What else? I liked Malik’s comment that “You should be building web-apps that are brain-dead simple.” According to him, many web apps “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”.

Malik also noted that European startups have an advantage over the US, though not necessarily Asia. “Europe has a much better broadband infrastructure. You are seeing the next broadband platform. Second, most European startups have the ability to incorporate mobile into their business plans.

Carson touches on mobile development. Is the iPhone a viable development platform? “Why support a platform where the guys who own it don’t want it to be supported?”, says Malik. What about iPhone vs Google Phone? “Google Phone is tackling the emerging markets. iPhone is the upper end of the market.”

One more quote from Malik. “Please stop doing offlice clones. However you might thing Google docs are great, people are not using them.”

Arrington’s big tip is not to spend much money. The beauty of the web is that bright ideas can be tested cheaply.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Adobe Thermo: Visual programming for designers

Adobe has taken the wraps off Thermo, a new tool aimed at bridging the designer/developer gap by enabling designers to create an interactive user interface without writing code, and making it easier for designers to create components that developers can code against. Graphical components can be converted into MXML objects.

Designers will be able to work with placeholder dynamic data, giving a more accurate idea of what an application will look like at runtime.

An important feature is round-tripping between Thermo and Flex Builder. Yes, this sounds similar to what Microsoft offers with Expression and Visual Studio:

The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.

There’s a blow-by-blow account of the Thermo demo at Max in Jen deHaan’s blog post. It sounds as if it went down well at Max. Don’t get too excited though: this is a sneak preview, so no product before 2008, maybe later than that for the release version.

I’m not at the conference myself; I’ll be attending the European Max in a couple of weeks time, and I’ll find out what I can about Thermo.

Personally I’m not excited by live data at design-time. Borland has had this for years in Delphi, and it never struck me as a huge advantage. Then again I am not a designer. Round-tripping is a big feature though, and the ability to take graphics out of PhotoShop and easily convert them to programmable components sounds great.

It’s also interesting to see the unfolding of another chapter in the Adobe/Microsoft wars. There are even family connections. The Thermo team is led by Mark Anders, one of the inventors of Microsoft’s ASP.NET.

internet, microsoft, windows

Microsoft Office Live Workspace: what’s missing from the FAQ?

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A lot. It seems that Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace is free hosted SharePoint. You will be able to save and open Office documents directly to and from the Internet. A genuinely useful service; but here are a few questions that are not covered in the FAQ:

Can I create or edit documents using just a web browser?

My guess: presumably not. Microsoft will require you to use Office, or whatever offline editor you used to create the document.

What do users not running Windows and/or not running Office see when they access a shared document?

I’m not sure about this one. Presumably they can download documents and open them if they have a compatible editor or viewer. That’s not online collaboration though. Sharepoint also has the ability to render office documents as html, through an HTML viewing server:

The HTML viewing server provides support for users who want to view the content of files on the Windows SharePoint Services Web site, but do not have Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint from Microsoft Office 97, or a later release of Office, installed on their local computer. Even users who only have a Web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) can view content by having the native Office file format converted to HTML automatically.

Will this be part of Office Live Workspace? That’s not yet clear.

How do I access Live Workspace documents offline?

Good question. Mary Jo Foley has the best report on this, and quotes Corporate Vice President Rajesh Jha,:

Groove will be the way you take any Workspace offline, Jha said

Now, a Live Workspace plus synchronized offline store would really get my interest. But when, how, and at what cost?

What files types can be stored (and a few related questions)?

Live Workspace is not just for Office docs; you can store other file types as well. The FAQ says:

For your protection, we don’t allow the uploading of files that could cause security issues such as .exe files.

Does that mean any file type that is not on a security blacklist? Or is there a whitelist of safe file types? If we are saving from a non-Office application, will the Live Workspace appear as a virtual directory in the file system? What about saving from other operating systems?

How much space is available?

Can’t believe it’s not in the FAQ? If it is, I can’t see it. It says:

You can store over 1,000 Office documents in your workspace, based on the average file size and use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by students, work, and home users.

I hate being treated like an idiot. (PS: the consensus is that it is 250MB).

When will Office Live Workspace be available?

That’s not stated.

That will do for starters. Microsoft, how about adding these to your FAQ?