OpenWeb 06/21/2012 (a.m.)

• HTML5, Cloud and Mobile Create 'Perfect Storm' for Major App Dev Shift - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com

  Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) The HTML5-Cloud Computing-SOA phenom had been cooking, but needed that financial collapse fuse lit before it could take off.  Needed the mobility too. The other factor is that of tagged PDF standardization and the explosion of the Visual Document productivity phenom that followed.  The key here is that Windows "compound documents" were the primary fuel of the client/server computing era.  The transition to cloud-computing could not take place until these legacy business systems could continue operation with a more effective compound document model.  Tagged PDF blasted open the entire transition model for compound documents functioning as cloud effective "Visual Documents".  Think through the DropBox "sync-share-store" methodology and you'll get this.  Keep in mind, we are at the earliest stages of this great transition from client/server to cloud-computing.  The Visual Document model is transition phase only, but that will last a good twenty years. And that's my two cents! summary: The advent of HTML5 along with the move to mobile and cloud computing are conspiring to cause a major shift in the application development landscape akin to when Java displaced C++ as the major enterprise programming language 15 years ago, according to a top Oracle development executive.

  Tags: Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, mobility, Visual-Documents, Visual-Productivity

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 06/20/2012 (a.m.)

• Open Source, Android Push Evolution of Mobile Cloud Apps | Linux.com

  Nice OpenMobster graphic!  Good explanation of the Android notification advantage over iOS and Windows 7 too.  Note the exception that iOS-5 finally introduces support for JSON. excerpt: Why Android Rocks the Cloud Most open source mobile-cloud projects are still in the early stages. These include the fledgling cloud-to-mobile push notifications app, SimplePush , and the pre-alpha Mirage  "cloud operating system" which enables the creation of secure network applications across any Xen-ready cloud platform. The 2cloud Project , meanwhile, has the more ambitious goal of enabling complete mobile cloud platforms. All of the above apps support Android, and many support iOS. Among mobile OSes, Android is best equipped to support cloud applications, said Shah. Android supports sockets to help connect to remote services, and supplies a capable SQlite-based local database. It also offers a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) interchange stack to help parse incoming cloud data -- something missing in iOS. Unlike iOS and Windows Phone 7, Android provides background processing, which is useful for building a robust push infrastructure, said Shah. Without it, he added, users need to configure the app to work with a third-party push service. Most importantly, Android is the only major mobile OS to support inter-application communications. "Mobile apps are focused, and tend to do one thing only," said Shah. "When they cannot communicate with each other, you lose innovation." Comment from Sohil Shah, CEO OpenMobster: "I spoke too soon. iOS 5 now supports JSON out of the box. I am still working with a third party library which was needed in iOS 4 and earlier, and to stay backward compatible with those versions.  Anyways, it should have been supported a lot earlier considering the fact that AFAIK, Android has had it since the very beginning. "

  Tags: OpenMobster, Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, mobility

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 06/14/2012 (a.m.)

• Free CloudOn app puts your iPad to work | How To - CNET

  The free CloudON app for iPAD provides a very nice ribbon interface for viewing and editing MSOffice XML documents.  Supports important workgroup features like "change tracking", show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions.  Very cool. Lacks support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness.  Time to do some testing.  Hope Florian catches this post :) excerpt: Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot ...... Speculation continues as to whether -- most say when -- Microsoft will release a version of Office for the iPad. (CNET blogger Zack Whittaker cites sources predicting a November arrival.) It's not like you have to wait months to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Last June I described how to use Google Docs and Google Cloud Connect to edit Word and Excel files on an iPad for free. The end of that story noted the likely arrival of iPad apps supporting Office file formats. One of the most popular of these is the $15 Quickoffice, a program that was recently acquired by Google. But before you shell out for an Office alternative, check out the free CloudOn app, which now connects to Google Drive and Box accounts as well as Dropbox accounts. Other new features in the latest release let you send files as e-mail attachments and open PDFs. (See Lance Whitney's post on the Internet & Media blog for more on the program's PDF features.) CloudOn's ribbon is a big departure from the Quickoffice interface, which look nothing like Office. (Of course, many people will prefer the clean, clutter-free look of Quickoffice.) None of the Office extras, but all the essentials: In a group setting CloudOn's lack of support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness. Still, the word processor lets you track and accept changes, show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions. ..................

  Tags: MSOffice, Cloud-Productivity, CloudON, QuickOffice

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 06/06/2012 (a.m.)

• Internet powers flip the IPv6 switch (FAQ) | Business Tech - CNET News

  Tags: IPv6, ISP, OpenWeb

  • What began as a 24-hour test a year ago will become business as usual on Wednesday as a range of big-name Internet companies permanently switch on the next-generation IPv6 networking technology.

    And now there's no turning back.

    "IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.

• Cloud Pricing: Amazon, Microsoft Keep Cutting - Cloud-computing - Infrastructure as a Service - Informationweek

  It's game on between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.  Interesting price configurations indicate that Cloud Computing is now a commodity.  One point in the article worth noting is that Cloud applications and services begin as "Cloud" apps - not desktop or client/server.  Bad news for Microsoft..... Excerpt: Microsoft, with its flagship operating system and rich line of related tools and applications, is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but often not to its Azure cloud. AWS and Rackspace have offered cheaper raw online computing power. VMware-backed Cloud Foundry offers a development platform to build apps that can deploy on a number of vendors' clouds, and VMware recently made Cloud Foundry more Windows-friendly. Hewlett-Packard, which is just entering the cloud infrastructure market, is emphasizing its own development platform. To keep cloud app developers engaged, Microsoft must put the right resources on Azure's platform-as-a-service--developer tools, database services, and messaging services--but also make it affordable. Today's most creative new software projects often begin in a cloud, and a big reason is to keep startup costs low. Cloud computing is critical to the future of the Windows franchise.

  Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, amazon, Microsoft-Cloud

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 06/05/2012 (a.m.)

• Asus shows off ARM-based Windows 8 tablet - Computerworld

  Is Intel right?  Is there a "compatibility-interoperability" problem between Windows RT Office (ARM) and legacy (x86) Windows MS Office productivity environments?  It seems to me that the entire reason iPAD, Android and other ARM based tablet systems want MSOffice and MSOffice Visual Document Viewers is exactly because they want and expect a high level of compat-interop with legacy Windows productivity workgroups and client/server systems. What's the truth?  And is there anything x86 providers like Intel and AMD can do about compat-interop and the unstoppable cloud-mobility revolution? excerpt: The Asus tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia. Windows RT comes preloaded with Office 15, a group of widely used productivity applications. Microsoft has said it had to re-engineer Windows RT to deal with expectations for ARM based devices, which include all-day connectivity and low power consumption. The tablet also has an 8-megapixel camera at the rear with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel camera at the front. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Intel has already started the war of words against ARM around Windows 8, with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying that ARM devices will be incompatible with existing Windows applications and drivers. But analysts have said that Windows RT devices will likely be attractive to users who have few ties with legacy Windows PCs. Low prices could also attract users to Windows on ARM devices.

  Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Visual-Productivity, MS-Business-Productivity-Platform, Compat-Interop

  • - By Gary Edwards

• Asus Windows RT Tablet Video Demo- Business Insider

  Good video walk through demonstrating Windows RT running on an Asus ARM-NVIDIA Tegra tablet.  Very cool.  One thing that caught my attention though was the comment that the entire MSOffice Suite will be included with every Windows RT OS when it ships in November of 2012.  Wow.  Doesn't answer the compat-interop issue Intel (x86) is raising.  But certainly the stakes are very high here. excerpt: The annual Computex show is happening in Taiwan this week, and we're finally getting a look at some real Windows 8 devices. Below is a video from NVIDIA and Asus, demonstrating a new tablet running Windows RT. It's called the Windows RT Tablet 600. (Windows RT is the version of Windows 8 that will only run on tablets.)  The Tablet 600 looks a lot like Asus's excellent Android tablet, the Transformer Prime, thanks to an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a laptop.

  Tags: Windows-RT, nvidia, asus, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, video

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 06/03/2012 (a.m.)

• Government Market Drags Microsoft Deeper into the Cloud

  Nice article from Scott M. Fulton describing Microsoft's iron fisted lock on government desktop productivity systems and the great transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform.  Keep in mind that in 2005, Massachusetts tried to do the same thing with their SOA effort.  Then Governor Romney put over $1 M into a beta test that produced the now infamous 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.  The details of this test resulted in the even more infamous da Vinci ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office desktops.   The lessons of Massachusetts are simple enough; it's not the formats or office suite applications.  It's the business process!  Conversion of documents not only breaks the document.  It also breaks the embedded "business process". The mystery here is that Microsoft owns the client side of client/server computing.  Compound documents, loaded with intertwined OLE, ODBC, ActiveX, and other embedded protocols and interface dependencies connecting data sources with work flow, are the fuel of these client/server business productivity systems.  Break a compound document and you break the business process.   Even though Massachusetts workers were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of an SOA based infrastructure that would include Linux servers and desktops as well as OSS productivity applications, at the end of the day it's all about getting the work done.  Breaking the business process turned out to be a show stopper. Cloud Computing changes all that.  The reason is that the Cloud is rapidly replacing client/server as the target architecture for new productivity developments; including data centers and transaction processing systems.  There are many reasons for the great transition, but IMHO the most important is that the Web combines communications with content, data, and collaborative computing.   Anyone who ever worked with the Microsoft desktop productivity environment knows that the desktop sucks as a communication device.  There was no way to integrate communications with desktop office automation systems where the productivity results were worth the effort.   Cloud computing systems have an incredible productivity advantage here.  Put aside for the moment the amazing efficiency quotient of Cloud Computing, and stop worrying about bandwidth and connectivity issues.  Productivity gains with Cloud Computing are going to go through the roof, making investment decisions in newly written business systems very much worth the effort.   Another lesson from Massachusetts is that the effort to integrate Linux desktops and Open Source office suites into working Windows productivity environments was not worth the cost of having to re write and reinvent existing business processes and systems.  That too changes with the extraordinary productivity dynamics of Cloud Computing. Funny.  Here we are again.  Still wondering if Microsoft's iron grip on business systems can be broken.  The great transition can't be stopped, but will Microsoft swallow hard, bear down and take the lead?  Or will they become road kill on the highway towards awesome productivity?

  Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Microsoft, Great-Transition, desktop-productivity

  • - By Gary Edwards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.