RedMonk Podcasts (riaweekly)

Episode 17 - Curls' Richard Monson-Haefel, RIA Middleware, Search for Flash

comments@riaweekly.com — Thu, 3 Jul 2008 23:40:00 GMT

Download the episode directly or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher.

New Sponsor: RIAjobs.org - Listener Deals

As mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we have a new sponsor: RIAjobs.org. And, even better, we have two specials for you, dear RIA Weekly listeners. Go over to http://RIAjobs.org/riaweekly/ and you can get discounts for listing a job and posting ads. If you're looking for an RIA job or looking to hire someone, go check it out ;>

We're Joined by RMH

In this episode, we're joined by Curl's Richard Monson-Haefel. As you would expect, we open up the episode talking about Curl in detail. We go over some recent news, then delve into Curl's history, and then finally end up taking about the enterprise and business applications for Curl and features that help there.

Also, we spend sometime comparing the Japanese vs the American IT market, I topic I always enjoy dipping into. Richard and I have a bit of a Java Good Ol' Boys chit-chat as we compare the days of EJBs and JSF to RIA-land.

Launching into the news, we talk about Adobe providing Yahoo! and Google a special version of the Flash Player that "plays" SWF files, helping those search engines pull out more searchable text. We briefly touch on WordPress using Gears to boost their admin interface.

And, if you're interested in the free webinar on RIA, cloud, and data integration I mention at the end, check out more details here.

Disclaimer: Adobe and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

RIA Weekly #016 - RIA in the EU, SproutCore, Mobile in China, Silverlight and NBC, Deep Zoom, Google Gears, and Beyond Open Sou

comments@riaweekly.com — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Download the episode directly or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher.

This week, Ryan and I finally get back together for a brief but packed episode. The title pretty much covers the topics. We don't spend a lot of time detailing news - as there's not a whole lot of it - spending most of time talking about geographic concerns and getting back to a discussion from episode 14, we talk about Google Gear's aspirations to be the new web standards work-horse, supplanting the W3C or any other standards body.

Disclaimer: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft. See the RedMonk clients list for other clients mentioned.

RIA Weekly #015 - JavaFX and JavaOne 2008 Wrap-up

comments@riaweekly.com — Sat, 10 May 2008 02:30:00 GMT

RIA Weekly #014 - RIA Weekly 014 - Google Gears, Web 2.0 Expo, RIA Back-ends, Curl

comments@riaweekly.com — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:44:00 GMT

Download the episode directly or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher.

Coté and Ryan start off with some bumpy introductions and then Dion Almaer, our special guest for the week, introduces himself. Dion and Ryan were at Web 2.0 Expo and gave a combined talk about Google Gears and Adobe AIR (slides).

The conversation starts with Web 2.0 Expo. Dion says that the highlight of the event was Fake Steve Jobs. Dion notes that there haven't been any really standout applications and Ryan concurs saying he thought it was "regular Web 2.0 stuff". Ryan asks Dion what his favorite session is and Dion correctly responds that it was the combined session they did. Dion gives an overview of the session and talking about how he and Ryan covered some of the APIs and where the browser is going. Dion says his goal is to get more people involved in advancing the browser.

Coté asks about whether Google Gears is open source (it is) and then asks about external contributers and Dion says that they have started getting external people in on the project. We get into the topic of open source and Coté says he'd like to see a diagram that makes it very obvious what is open source and what isn't from a variety of companies.

One of the things that comes up is offline access and what that means even when you have an internet connection. Dion gives the example of Buxfer which uses Google Gears to store banking information on the hard drive of the user in the SQLite database and none of it is ever stored on the startups servers. Dion describes Gears as an "open source way to teach browsers to do new tricks". Dion follows up by saying that if HTML5 implemented all the new features and Gears was no longer needed, it would be a win. The group discusses the evolution of HTML 5 and where Gears will eventually fit.

Coté asks Dion "What's the deal with WebKit" because there's been a ton of interest around WebKit. Dion says the biggest thing with WebKit is that the code is cleaner than Gecko (Firefox) and that entices more people to jump into the WebKit community. The clean code also helps people iterate faster and add important features.

We then get into what's coming down the pipe at JavaOne. Dion brings up the point that Java has had a lot of really cool stuff for a long time and if they could bring their pieces together to do things like Mesh and EC2, Sun could have been doing this a while ago.

Dion and Ryan both stopped by the Curl booth and chatted with them so Ryan picks Dion's brain on Curl. Dion noted that the demos were kind of ugly and suggested that if you're competing against Adobe and Microsoft you've got to have good looking demos. We all agree that the technology is great but that the web has a certain way to develop things and it's better to fit with that model. Coté wonders out loud about getting involved in the middleware side of RIAs instead of focusing on the client plugin.

Coté brings up OpenLaszlo and we talk about what they're up to. Dion says he really likes them because they went "meta" and did a combination of Flash and Ajax. We also talk about Intuit's QuickBase and get into the development platforms as a service.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk client list for a clients mentioned.

RIA Weekly #013 - JavaFX with Joshua Marinacci, Widgets, Curl, DRM, and the Adobe Media Player

comments@riaweekly.com — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:02:00 GMT

RIA Weekly #12 - Curl, AIR on Linux, Word as RIA, JavaFX 1.0

comments@riaweekly.com — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 20:28:00 GMT

See detailed show notes.

RIA Weekly #011 - WaveMaker

comments@riaweekly.com — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:57:00 GMT

RIA Weekly #10 - SXSW Wrap-up, Knocking Out Google's Lights, Micro-ISVs

comments@riaweekly.com — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:54:00 GMT

RIA Weekly Special 001: Adobe Engage 2008

comments@riaweekly.com — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:28:00 GMT

Included in the feed is the audio of the video:

RIA Weekly #009b - MIX '08 Day 2, guest Andi Gutmans

comments@riaweekly.com — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 23:42:00 GMT

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have them automatically downloaded.

In the second part of our MIX '08 coverage, Ryan and I talk with Zend's Andi Gutmans about the role of PHP in the RIA world, his involvement in two panels (one on Microsoft and open source, the other on mashups), and then we talk about what you might call "enterprise RIA" using the recent iPhone SDK and enterprise hookups announcement as a spring-board.

Disclaimer: Adobe and Microsoft are clients, as is Sun. See the RedMonk client list for other RedMonk clients mentioned.

RIA Weekly #009a - MIX08 Day 1 Re-cap, Apple Poo-Poos Flash, and SXSWi

comments@riaweekly.com — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the podcast feed to have it downloaded automatically in iTunes or other podcatcher.

In this special edition of RIA Weekly, I talk with co-host Ryan Stewart who's at MIX08. We recap the announcements of the first day, discuss Apple's recent comments that Flash doesn't cut it for the iPhone, and then get all giddy for this weekend's SXSW.

See Ryan's writeup and TechCrunch's live blogging for more on today's MIX08 keynote.

Disclaimer: Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other RedMonk clients mentions.

RIA Weekly #008 - Appcelerator, MIX08, SXSW, DRM in Flash

comments@riaweekly.com — Tue, 4 Mar 2008 01:23:00 GMT

Download the episode directly, or subscribe to the feed to have episodes auto-magically downloaded in iTunes or other podcasther.

This week, Ryan and myself talk with Appcelerator's Nolan Wright and Matt Quinlan.

I'll type up more detail notes later, but here's the summary.

We talk about Appcelerator's offering, drilling down into the middleware, or "glass bus" like functionality it provides. Being open source - and GPLv3 at that! - I ask Nolan and Matt why this matters both for their internal development and for their users.

We then jump into some news talk:

MIX '08 rumors about Silverlight 2.0 and Silverlight on the desktop.
SXSWi coming up - while I say it'll mostly be the round-corner cool kids, there'll be plenty of RIA stuff sprinkled through-out.
Adobe Engage 2008 - both Ryan and I were there so we give a little sum-up.
Chumby's are now available to the public.
DRM in Flash
...and more

Disclaimer: Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are clients. See the RedMonk client list for more clients that are mentioned.

RIA Weekly #007: Ajax with Jazz, Web-native Interfaces, Power Users in RIA, Blu-ray, iPhone Rumors

comments@riaweekly.com — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:47:00 GMT

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed to have episodes auto-magically downloaded in iTunes or other podcasther.

Ryan was kind enough to edit this episode write up these notes - yuh! - so the "I" refers to him ;>

Coté and I introduce ourselves and Bill Higgins, a front end developer for Jazz. Bill starts by explaining what Jazz is and says it started a couple of years ago with the goal being to create a collaborative development platform. Since the idea is focused around collaboration so one of the main parts is being able to support multiple interfaces. It was primarily done in Eclipse and when Bill came on he started to work on the web interface for Jazz. Coté contrasts the current quick development process with larger cycle projects and Bill says that Jazz is actually on a pretty quick turnaround time.

Coté asks if when they were building Jazz in Ajax if they looked at other technologies. At first they started with a Java server side application according to Bill and after 3-4 months it wasn't going to work. They got permission to choose whatever technology they wanted and it was right around the time Ajax was starting to take off. Bill reminisces about a Joel Spolsky talking about the Google auto suggest app from before Ajax really took off. Bill says that one of the biggest barriers initially was that there weren't a lot of resources. They looked at a lot of the original platforms and eventually chose Dojo. He says that currently it's about 40% Dojo and 60% custom code. Coté asks if it was a good idea to turn Ajax based on the info they had now and Bill thinks it is. Ryan asks what the other options were and Bill talks about some of the other server side technologies they looked at. Ryan asks about the Eclipse RAP project and whether or not they looked at that since the project's rich client is based on Eclipse. Bill responds that since it was very early they looked at it but didn't go with it.

Coté wonders how big a deal it is to have two separate interfaces for things and what the challenges have been to keep up. Bill says that one of the things they wanted to do was make the back end sophisticated so that they could specialize on each and make both interfaces high quality. Bill talks about it being difficult to have good UIs on every level if you try to reuse code and methodologies. Bill talks about their server side and how they started with EMF but eventually moved to REST because it made it much easier for both clients to talk to the back end. Reuse of the services made it easy to reuse code and one of the benefits of REST is that you can easily use it within multiple clients. Coté asks Ryan about BlazeDS and whether or not BlazeDS could be used as a REST layer. Ryan isn't really sure how that would work and wonders if you could use BlazeDS on a rich client like Eclipse.

Ryan mentions Bill's Uncanny Valley post and asks Bill how he thinks about the converging of a web interface and a desktop interface and how you plan for that. He talks about his experience on Jazz and how it's not a good idea to steal user interface elements from other platforms. It looks out of place. Ryan asks about how a platform can build user interfaces that look great everywhere and notes that some AIR interfaces look out of place on some platforms. Coté calls it the "WinAmp" problem because you could re-skin the application and the user interface was always so out of place and bad. Bill says the cool design shouldn't stand out, the content should be front and center. Bill brings up the example of Cloverfield as using visual effects in a background way to enhance the experience.

Coté asks the question is it better to have really good functionality and a crappy UI or a really good UI or crappy functionality. Bill says it depends on what you're trying to do and gives the example of an application that you'll be using in your jobs for a very long time and says capabilities are very important. We come up with the idea of the "F8 people" and discuss when those simple, low-fidelity interfaces are beneficial. Coté notes that we don't have a "civilian user" and a "power user" in the RIA world. Ryan agrees and says that he believes it's just because RIAs don't have power users. Bill notes that those interfaces are perfect and people know them so you don't want to mess with that. Ryan says that he thinks there might be a UI that could make them more productive but Bill notes that people don't want to learn new things and change can be bad.

Coté mentions that he and Ryan have switched from Google Reader to using NetNewsWire and what that means for interfaces. Bill still uses Google Reader and Ryan noted that his big requirement was that he could get access to the feeds from anywhere. We compare feeds and talk about the Newsgator guys.

We dive into a talk about the Blu-Ray and HDDVD wars as Coté informs us that part of the Bu-Ray spec requires Java to be on every player. He says it's a JavaME implementation. Since most of the players are supposed to be networked enabled, that opens up some interesting possibilities for building applications. As an example he gives the Alien v. Predator movie which has a Java game on the Blu-Ray disc and you can create a character which then might move around based on where you're watching the movie. It's a cool idea for RIAs on non-traditional devices.

Finally we talk about the differences between the web and the rich client space and how the functionality is starting to converge. Coté brings up the HTML5 spec and the new features that have been added to the spec but haven't been implemented quite yet. Bill talks about the fact that a lot of the standards innovation comes from other companies creating proprietary system that pushes the boundaries. He mentions Alex Russell's post about innovation as a good read.

In the news we talk about Flash on the iPhone, and the some of the new browsers that are coming out including Firefox 3 Beta 3 and the new WebKit versions.

Disclaimer: Both Adobe and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk clients list for other RedMonk clients mentioned.

RIA Weekly #06 - What's Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions

comments@riaweekly.com — Sat, 9 Feb 2008 21:48:00 GMT

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes and other podcatchers for auto-magic delivery.

Ryan Stewart and I start by reviewing the fun of the RedMonk 5th birthday party, but then jump right into a brief discussion of Kevin Lynch getting promoted to the new Adobe CTO. Kevin Lynch came from the Macromedia effort and had been heading the "platform group" at Adobe, Flash, Flex, and AIR. As I note, this is a nice signaling from Adobe about the importance of RIA's in their future: rather than promoting someone from the Creative or PDF side, the Flash family was given an executive role. As Ryan says, the Flash family of products are core to Adobe's future.

Then we jump into a JavaFX update. I was at the Sun Analyst Event this past week. But, the interesting news of JavaFX was mentioned by The Register and picked up by the Java Posse: the JavaFX folks are going to use, or integrate with, the Adobe toolchain. As we discuss, I don't know what this means and the Sun Java client folks wouldn't tell me. But the intention is to work with the Adobe creative tools rather than build up the equivilent in the NetBeans world.

Ryan, of course, likes this idea being an Adobe person. He notes that Adobe has been trying to figure out and refine the designer/developer tool-flow themselves, coming out with Thermo in response to Microsoft's Blend and Expression. On this topic, I mention a post by Jesse Warden on how much he hates "code-behind" in Microsoft world. I wasn't sure what this code-behind stuff was, so Ryan explains that it's a way of separating out code from the UI layer. This sounds like the kind of thing a more purely developer mindsetted person would love, but a quick-and-fast designer would think was overly complicated. If you're never going to progress beyond "1.0" of a project, why worry about keeping your project "clean."

Our further discussing gets to an interesting point of a potential conflict between developers and designers: developers assume there's a lot more stability in your code base, putting out dependencies to all sorts of parts of the project. Designers, perhaps, are a bit looser with keeping things stable.

Ryan asks for more details from the Sun Analyst Event, and it turns out I don't have much but happy talk to give him: they've got a team of high paid people working on JavaFX, so it's not just a last minute after thought to compete in the RIA world.

Pulling one of the points from my Sun Gambling on Utopia post, I note that part of the overall Sun for success is an opening of the American telcos to have less locked-down handsets. Obviously, JavaFX fits into this scenario as a money-maker, as it does for Adobe who's recently into mobile as a growth platform. Until that time, though, we've just got the web.

While on the topic of handsets, Ryan throws in a Google Android mention, raising the clarification question from me "does Android have a UI layer?" The answer is no. Both of us aren't sure if you could, for example, port the Flash Player to Android, or if the platform is locked down like the iPhone to such options. This raises a review of the seeming opening up of Apple's mind about an "iPhone SDK": the message started as "web applications are all you need, why would you need an SDK" and slowly evolved to promises for something else...which we haven't seen yet.

Ryan than asks for my thoughts on the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. As I warn, I give terrible answers to questions like this because I tend to think optimistically. That said, I paint the negative scenario first: Microsoft buys Yahoo! and kills the potential goodness by converting Yahoo! "from PHP to ASP." That is, Microsoft imposes their technology platform on Yahoo!, the assumption there being that Yahoo! is everything buy a Microsoft shop.

This is the natural - bad - thing you'd expect from Microsoft as an "Elder Company." They've built up their own software stack and their core-belief, along with the promises they make to customers, is that this Microsoft stack is best possible way to do software. So, naturally, they'd want to convert people over to The Best Stack.

As the more positive track, I note that we've all been waiting for Microsoft to deliver on the whole Ray Ozzie vision of SaaS. Though Microsoft never uses that term, they led us on to believe via Ozzie's memos and notes that something more web-native was coming. So far, not much there, at least that's stuck. So, buying Yahoo! is perhaps delivering on that strategy.

See this week's The Gang for more on the "Microhoo" topic. Also, RedMonk's own James Governor hit up the developer angle quite well when it comes to Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I then try to hit Ryan back by asking what he thinks about Oracle buying BEA. But, being a front-end guy, he rightly doesn't get too excited about middleware. That said, as we've discussed in previous episodes, Oracle has been using Flex a lot recently. Ryan asks me what BEA gets Oracle.

I say that Oracle is quick moving into being a middleware holding company, and BEA brings some assets that are worth holding: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and their whole SOA/Portal screed. While RedMonk hasn't figured out "an in" at Oracle - though, we've tried, we keep hitting a brick wall of un-interest - from our experience with a former client who was acquired by Oracle, Sleepycat, they seem to acquire companies and at the very least just keep that company going with minimal "mucking around" with the company. There was that whole Fusion Middleware vs. Fusion Architecture hoopla which seems to have been deftly swept under the rung in favor of keeping the PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle Financials people happy rather than re-writing - Fusing, if you will - those three mega-products into one stack.

Getting back to Microsoft and Yahoo!, we note that Microsoft buying Yahoo! would be kind of awkward for Silverlight: Yahoo! is one of the high-posting users of Flash and friends, so owning one of the primary successful customers cases for a Silverlight competitor would be, you know, weird. Once again, the negative path is to assume that Microsoft would go through the pain of converting Yahoo! over to Silverlight. As I noted in a recent FiveRuns TakeFive interview, I have a dim view of re-write success.

We wrap up with a review of future guests we're working on: Alex Russell from Dojo, Alex Barnett from Bungee Labs, and Bill Higgins, the Ajax man from IBM Rational Jazz.

Disclaimer: Sun, Adobe, IBM, and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk clients list for other RedMonk clients mentioned.

Episode 005 - Silverlight

comments@riaweekly.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:29:00 GMT

This week, Ryan and I have "Silverlight/WPF Rock-star" Robby Ingebretsen, Director of Interactive Development, at IdentityMine.

RIA Weekly 004 - Ribbit Phone Fun, Embedded RIA, Silverlight + NBC, CDN Rumors

comments@riaweekly.com — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:52:00 GMT

In the fourth episode of RIA Weekly we have two guests: Chuck Freedman from Ribbit and Tony MacDonell of Teknision. We talk about Ribbit, "Silicon Valley's first phone company" and then dive into some of the RIA-related CES talk with Tony.

Ribbit

Ribbit is billed as Silicon Valley's first phone company and it allows developers to make and receive phone calls right from the browser in their applications. We discuss a little bit about Grand Central and innovation and how it relates to voice on the internet. Chuck explains how Ribbit works. Developers can download a component and drop it into their applications. That component connects to the Ribbit back end to make or receive the call based on the API call. We then talk about how audio/video capabilities tie into RIAs. Chuck says that right now a lot of people are using Ribbit in the enterprise with big applications like adding email to voice. On the consumer side they're seeing it in widgets and some smaller browser applications.

Coté mentions how something like Ribbit and treating voice like text is light years ahead of what the phone companies offer right now. He also asks Chuck about how Ribbit is playing the larger space. Chuck responds that their goal right now is to build the developer community and they are looking at hooking into a number of services like IM, Twitter, and Facebook. One application they're working on is an application for disabled veterans who have trouble picking up the phone to dial when they do fund drives. The veterans can use Ribbit to make the call from an application.

Coté asks what the ultimate business model is and how Ribbit makes money. Chuck says there are some things in the works around notification services and transcription services. On the topic of voicemail Coté wonders if things like Ribbit makes it easier to "switch mediums" between voice and IM and email. We talk to Tony about the value of voice on the web. He really likes the idea of being able to use Ribbit to do things your phone doesn't normally do. Being able to leave voice messages on Web 2.0 sites; using the phone as an input. Tony says it would be great to incorporate the Finetune service and these new web based voice applications.

Coté asks Chuck about whether or not Ribbit will have a Silverlight version and expand outside of Flash. Chuck says that right now Flash is the only technology that can handle the voice as well as they need it to. But he adds that they're hoping they can incorporate it better into Ajax and other RIA technologies as they add features.

Teknision and CES

Tony tells us about some of the applications they were involved with at CES. They worked on an application with Intel on ultra mobile computers (UMPCs). Tony said a lot of these UMPCs run Windows or Linux, so they're meant to be full blown operating systems. Intel approached Teknision to create an application that would be intuitive and fun on those small form factors. They took Finetune and the AIR runtime to create a UMPC application on the new Intel devices.

Coté asks about whether these RIA technologies are getting demand on tiny devices. Tony says that there is a lot of interest and that Teknision is doing a lot of mobile. He talks about Flash Lite 3 and some of the Chumby applications that he's seeing. He and Coté talk about different ways to use the accelerometer and integrating it with applications. Tony says that he thinks the Chumby really appeals to a lot of different kinds of people.

Tony talks about Finetune on the Nokia N95 and how people can now play video and audio right from their phones. We then discuss Flash on the iPhone. Tony and Ryan both provide their own antedates of Flash on the iPhone. Coté asks Tony about Teknisions broader RIA technology and what they're doing with Silverlight. Tony says that they don't do "flash code" but that they focus on interface design. He says that Flash is more of a customer driven reqiurement because Flash is everywhere. Ryan mentions that Microsoft has a lot of diverse properties they can use to leverage Silverlight including Xbox, Zune along with all of their servers and media properties. Tony says one problem with Silverlight is that there isn't a lot of incentive for people to use it right now. Coté corroborates that with his analyst experience and how important the designer developer workflow is to RIAs.

Silverlight News

We discuss one of the big news items from last week, that the Olympics will be exclusively stream video online using Silverlight. Tony mentions that TSN.ca showed the World Junior Hockey championships and required Silverlight. He noted that Silverlight worked well and that the streaming was perfect but that there had been some install issues for some people. Coté and Tony also get into Windows Media Format video and how pervasive that is on the internet. We get into how that will affect Silverlight adoption.

Rumor News

Ryan talks about a rumor (since proved false) that Microsoft is buying Limelight technology. We talk about the role CDNs play in rich Internet applications and Coté mentions how data storage companies could be in a great position to capitalize on the surge in heavy media and applications on the web.

Disclaimer: Microsoft and Adobe are RedMonk clients.

RIA Weekly 003 - Special Guest Andre "Captain Ajax" Charland, News Updates, and RIA 2008 Predications

comments@riaweekly.com — Sat, 5 Jan 2008 02:37:00 GMT

This week Ryan Stewart and I talk with AndrÃ Charland of Nitobi. We cover some brief RIA news from the past few weeks and then get into RIA predictions for 2008. Thanks to Kurt Brockett for the predictions suggestion.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

Who's AndrÃ

Well, exciting and stressful are synonyms, right?

AndrÃ starts out telling us about Nitobi's business in Ajax widgets, their hosted web usage service Robot Replay, and then their book Enterprise Ajax along with upcoming training videos.

AndrÃ and friends have been on several past podcasts of mine here, here, here, and here.

Usability, User Experience, and RIAs

After a brief note on the holiday vacations we each had, AndrÃ mentions the recent 60 Minutes piece on software usability which leads into a discussion of what usability and user experience people are or aren't doing in the RIA space. While Microsoft put out a recent white-paper on the topic (sort of), Ryan says he hasn't seen many UX people taking up RIA concerns, for example on the IXDA list. We talk about what might be differences for usability concerns with RIAs: AndrÃ mentions the low switching cost between applications and then we discuss the usability of data portability.

Designer/Developer

We then discuss my old hobby-horse: will this while designer/developer theory really pan out, or will it just be more of the same? The classic problem of the UI designers and the programmers not getting along is the one to get over here, and past attempts like JSPs in J2EE loom as not too successful attempts to harmonize the two. Ryan and AndrÃ point out that this time, the initiative is lead more by designers than developers, and that they're seeing more developers who are actually a merging of the two. (James and Dan McWeeney spoke on this topic on RedMonkTV sometime back.)

BlazeDS

In contrast to the front-end concerns of the designer/developer question, we then talk about Adobe's open sourcing of BlazeDS, a sub-set of their LiveCycle Services. BlazeDS, boiled down, is a messaging framework and protocol between the server and the browser, intended to be used, of course with Flex.

Using Anne Zelenka's new book on web working as a launching point, we talk about the role of collaboration in RIA's in 2008. I ask what this often over-loaded term "collaboration" means in the context of RIAs. The answer is essentially boils down to sharing artifacts (like a document or spreadsheet) in group rather than passing them around in email or other forms. More importantly, as we touch on in much of the rest of the episode, we're looking for "unified collaboration" that better integrates together all the existing tools we use into one place, like IM, document sharing, desktop sharing, etc.

2008 RIA Predictions

After talking about ways of coping with inboxes overflowing from vacation, we move on to RIA predictions for 2008.

Silverlight 2.0

Ryan starts out saying that Silverlight 2.0 is going to be a big deal. AndrÃ agrees, saying that once they formalize the generic user interface elements - like buttons - it will indeed be something to watch, not to mention the ability for Microsoft to spread runtimes.

JavaFX?

I mention that 2008 will be the year for JavaFX to get finalized. But then move quickly back to Adobe and layout my hope to see Adobe complete their move to providing applications in the form of a hosted Office contender: they've already got Buzzword, Share, and Connect, just lacking spreadsheets and presentations.

Rails' Effect on RIA-land

On the more industry-wide perspective, I outline the scenario where Zed Shaw's rant kicks off (or is just an early indication of) rails disenchantment, pulling rails developers into the RIA world. Or, on the other hand, if rails gains in popularity, pulling attention from the RIA world.

Integration

AndrÃ returns to the topic of RIA integration, reaching back to the collaboration integration topic and explains how that could become a big deal in 2008.

RIA Code-generation Frameworks

We then talk about frameworks that spit out RIA's for you, like GWT, RAP (see our screencasts on RAP), and the recently announced Microsoft Volta. AndrÃ has seen some interesting anecdotal uptake of these "spits out RIAs" tools.

JavaScript Updates?

As if reading my mind, Ryan then asks about ECMA4 and JavaScript. As I say, I like to ask every year "who's minding the JavaScript store?" It seems like development in JavaScript is more around frameworks and monkey-patch updated rather than aggressively updating the technology itself.

Apple

We raise everyone's favorite RIA dark-horse, Apple. Ryan and AndrÃ seem to share my dim-outlook that they'd do much in the area of RIA as we know it. Instead, and I joke, they'd probably say they already have a good tool-chain for user interfaces: just buy a Mac! On the other hand, as Ryan says, with webkit and QuickTime, it seems like they've gotta be up to something.

Amazon Web Services & Component-services for RIAs

We close out with a question from Ryan about how things like Amazon Web Services will play with RIAs. AndrÃ notes that Nitobi has uses AWS to great success for their Robot Replay site and imagines that RIA people will see much use and good from AWS. I agree, noting that while other companies make claims to have similar capabilities, Amazon is the only one who makes it drop dead simple to use. Pulling up a layer from the infrastructure AWS provides, AndrÃ notes that it'd be great if other services - like Buzzword - were broken up into services and components that could be re-used. For example, why write you're own rich editor when you could use a Buzzword component?

...thanks again to AndrÃ for calling in!

Disclaimer: Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are clients.

RIA Weeky 002 - More on Oracle & Flex, Java/Flex Stacks, ZoHo, Buzzword, and Silverlight 2.0

comments@riaweekly.com — Fri, 7 Dec 2007 02:58:00 GMT

In this episode, Ryan and I talk with James Ward, Adobe Technical Evangelist for Flex with plenty of Java connections. Topics include: a better Oracle OpenWorld update; the Java/Flex stacks James has seen; charts and dashboards as RIA foot-holds in enterprise/business software; whatever happened to the widget-madness of the last year or so?; what's up with ZoHo? ZoHo and Buzzword releases; and Silverlight 2.0.

Disclaimer: Adobe is a RedMonk client, as are Sun and parts of Microsoft.

RIA Weekly 001

comments@riaweekly.com — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:34:00 GMT

In this first episode of RIA Weekly, Ryan Stewart, Charles Lowell, and I talk about a wide swath of topics:

Ryan asks Charles what how his company, The Front Side decided how "dressed up" their UIs should be. Charles says the major limit is time and skill.
We talk about James Ward's Flex sightings at Oracle OpenWorld (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), which moves into Flex in enterprise development
I ask Ryan about the current state of Silverlight and how much video plays into it.
We also talk about the Chumby I recently got and how that fits into the idea of RIAs.

There're probably some things I missed, but that's the gist of it.

If all goes as planned, Ryan and I will be back next week for another episode. Feel free to leave comments below.

To subscribe, add in the plain old RedMonk Radio feed, where RIA Weekly will be posted (for now?) as well.

Disclaimer: Adobe is a client (though they're not involved in the podcast, beyond Ryan's participation), Sun, SAP, and the Microsoft STB unit.