Testdriving Musestorm’s Awesome Widget Machine June 28, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Lite Computing, Web 2.0, Widgets, WordPress.2 comments
If you’re among the millions of people who belong to the curious-but-not-all-that-geeky crowd, the folks at MuseStorm have put together a fabulous AJAX Desktop Tutorial that will give you a hands-on, step-by-step demonstration of how to build an AJAX desktop or homepage in ten minutes or so. I went there last night intending to spend about five minutes kicking the tires and wound up killing a couple of hours moving boxes around and happily turning feeds into merry little widgets.
In addition to the terrific tutorials, MuseStorm also has a collection of customizable forms that allow you to easily create widgets for RSS feeds, Google Search, News and Definition, Technorati, YouTube, Amazon Books, eBay Auctions, Flickr photos and del.icio.us tags. Create a feed, push a button, and MuseStorm generates code that you can drop into your blog or web page. I would have liked to drop some in here to show you but, alas, the WordPress folks are a little paranoid about javascript they haven’t pre-approved.
Once you play with widgets for a few minutes, you begin to realize that this really could be the future of the desktop. What is likely to make the little devils ultimately appealing to enterprises is their simplicity of use and their ability to eliminate a lot of wasted and unnecessary tech fat from the way office work is currently performed.
Imagine going into the office in the morning and instead of firing up the old PC with its cranky, mostly Microsoft office applications (so overloaded that you actually use perhaps 2% of their features), you flip on a networked thin client, which opens your personalized homepage with the lightweight applications you use most often, i.e., a calendar, e-mail, and maybe a collaborative teamspace. If you need something special–a spreadsheet, for example–you go to the widget closet and pull one out and drop it on your desktop. As you work, your output is automatically saved and stored–not on your PC–but on a giant server farm in Montana or somewhere.
This won’t happen overnight, of course. Too many Western companies have too much money invested in huge operating systems designed to run needlessly complex applications. As was the case with telecommunications industry’s shift from landlines to wireless, the countries and companies that will benefit first and most from thin computing will be those who have the least investment in existing infrastructure. China, for example, managed to leapfrog directly from a 19th century economy into the digital age by leveraging Western advances in telecommunications and computing. You can bet they (and many others) will do the same with the new lite computing paradigm.
If you want to experience Web 2.0 firsthand, give MuseStorm’s AJAX Desktop tutorial a test drive. You’ll understand what all the excitement is about.
What Business is Google In Anyway? June 22, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Google, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
If you think the Evil Empire of Redmond works in paranoid ways, consider the case of Google, the undisputed heavyweight champ of next generation web technologies. Seldom has a company become so big and so powerful without explaining to investors exactly why it does what it does and how it plans to make money in the future.
The $64-billion question is: Will Google continue to focus on its core search and keyword-based advertising business or is it gearing up to try to replace Microsoft as the main provider of productivity applications to enterprises and average computer users?
Company executives deny or deflect such speculation but you have to think that it didn't introduce an online word processor, calendar, e-mail manager, instant-messaging program, photo manager, web page creator and, most recently, a spreadsheet just for the heck of it.
The reality is that Google is the only company big enough and Web-dominent enough to challenge Microsoft, not only in the office tool space, but also in the larger goal of transforming the web into a universal OS. Nobody ever bought a Windows machine because they loved the Windows operating system. Most users go with Windows because that is what you need to run Outlook and MS Office and most of the other most-widely used desktop software. Its dominance in office productivity applications made the Windows OS standard and gave Microsoft its so-called network effect.
Perhaps, as a result of being the unchallenged market leader for a very long time Microsoft has become bloated and risk-adverse and its products seem more dated and clunky by the day. We have now reached the point where the quality of office tools available as online applications is approaching parity with Microsoft's Office line. The long-predicted concept that the network is the computer is finally coming true. Google is the company best-positioned to benefit from this profound shift.
And let's face it; an all-out innovation slugfest between Microsoft and its homies and the Google gang would be good for the industry, good for web users, and great fun to watch. It might also save Microsoft from a long and nasty slide into irrelevance.
But, before all this can happen, Google has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
Software AG Pushes Ajax Enhancements June 21, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Mashups.add a comment
One of the most positive signs that Web 2.0 technologies are going mainstream enterprise is that the big software developers are beginning to rally around Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, (Ajax) as the core framework for building next-generation web applications. The German-giant Software AG announced this morning several enhancements its crossvision Application Designer, a design-time and run-time environment that uses Ajax to create sophisticated Web-browser interfaces as part of a Service Oriented Architecture. Version 2.1 of the company's Application Designer includes Generic Web Service support, WYSIWYG layout capabilities and a new, friendlier HTML editor/word processor through Software AG's recent alliance with pintexx.
With the crossvision Application Designer, developers can use Ajax to design and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that enable desktop-like capabilities without having to code complex JavaScript, HTML or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
Software AG has been well ahead of the pack on the Ajax front. Last year Application Designer was announced as the first Ajax-based product to include a user interface control for Google maps–just one of more than 80 Ajax graphical controls shipped with Application Designer.
"Thanks to the rapid popularization of Ajax, people are able to create highly functional applications in completely new and simple ways," said Dr. Peter Kuerpick, Member of the Board, Software AG and responsible for the development of crossvision. "The combination of our crossvision Application Designer and Application Composer sets a straight course directly from a Service-Oriented Architecture to the hands and eyes of the individual employee with a vital job to accomplish."
Software AG recently joined the OpenAJAX Alliance, whose mission is to advance the adoption of Ajax.
