May 2008 Archives

Google launched its largest and first paid-admission developer conference, Google I/O, yesterday in San Francisco with a 90-minute keynote session to show off a number of its web development products and initiatives. The message of the presentation, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" and led by Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra, was nothing new; much of it echoed O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" conception, Salesforce.com's and BungeeLabs' platform as a service (PaaS), and the Sun Microsystems corporate motto, "The Network Is the Computer."

Gundotra explained Google's high-level goal as moving the web forward by enabling web developers to:

1. Access the cloud more easily (with Google App Engine);
2. Leverage more power from the browser (with Google Web Toolkit); and
3. Maintain pervasive connectivity in their applications (with Android and Gears).

Google App Engine
The PaaS pitch for developers was Google App Engine: Google will host their applications on its servers for free and charge only when the applications exceed either 500MB of persistent storage or the bandwidth and CPU necessary for 5 million monthly page views. Although the pricing model won't be finalized until the end of the year and App Engine is still in preview, Google announced open signup for all interested developers. Developers need only sign up, develop the web applications on their local machines, and deploy them to Google. Launching the application then is just a matter of serving the application's URL to your end users. However, the App Engine runtime environment currently uses only Python. Google is considering other languages and runtime configurations for future releases. So if you're not a Python developer, you'll have to learn the language or wait.

Google Web Toolkit
The announcement of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate (GWT 1.5 RC) was Google's effort to make the browser more powerful. GWT uses an optimizing cross-compiler to convert Java code input, written in the IDE of your choice, into compiled JavaScript output for target browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). GWT 1.5 RC adds full Java 5 language support—the most requested feature from GWT users, according to Bruce Johnson, Google's GWT engineering manager.

During his demo, Johnson explained that when developers write an application directly in pure JavaScript, they're responsible for optimizing and maintaining that code themselves.  But with GWT, developers write applications in maintainable Java code, and the cross-compiler produces the fastest JavaScript possible for that application—with no concessions to maintainability.

If you like the GWT functionality but code in C#, check out Script# as an alternative. 

Android and Gears
The Android and Gears demos filled the pervasive connectivity role. Android Engineering Director Steve Horowitz demonstrated the much-talked-about mobile development stack on a mobile device. The home screen featured the typical items you'd expect (e-mail, Internet, contacts, etc.), and Horowitz's touch-screen navigation would've had more appeal if the iPhone hadn't already been on the scene. But things got interesting when he pointed the WebKit browser to Google Maps. Horowitz set the device to Compass mode while viewing a Google Maps Street View of the San Francisco waterfront. Holding the device at arms length, he turned around 180 degrees in either direction and the Street View moved in relation to him, providing a sweep of the waterfront image. That trick drew applause.

MySpace's Senior VP of Engineering, Allen Hurff, conducted the Gears demo. A browser plug-in, Gears (formerly Google Gears) uses a local server, database, and worker pool to enable users to interact with web applications while they're offline. Hurff showed this capability by doing a full text search of his 300-plus MySpace Mail messages without calling back to the MySpace servers. Each search term he entered dynamically narrowed his messages to only the matching results, and the search was powered completely by his local machine.

The keynote's message of "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" was nothing I hadn't heard before. But what made it compelling was that it came from a child of the Web era (you could say the poster child—in the canon of web-based services alongside Amazon, eBay, and now MySpace). Google itself was born of open standards/open source software, the Internet as the platform, and the proverbial web company founder story: two computer whiz kids in their college dorm room with a brilliant idea and no money. What's possible for those kids—and whiz grownups—today? Google believes it has the tools to help them find out.

I’ve been stewing over this one for over a week now. I can’t believe it’s even necessary to write a post on this topic. What am I even talking about? Well, there are folks out there that want to control content on the web. I’m not talking about editors checking for grammar or typos. I’m not talking about YouTube checking for copyright violations. I’m talking about this consultant I met who wants to track the folks that take content off a site, use it for their own purpose, and then continue to track that content to see how it’s used. On the face of it, that does sound interesting to see who does what to your stuff.

The part I’m stewing over is that this consultant wants to be paid for what you do with their stuff. Yeah, it’s financial gain this consultant wants for himself and his clients. No, they don’t care about collaboration, education, and the free-spirit of the Internet. What they care about is getting paid. They want to post their music (or whatever) online and get paid for you listening to it. They want to get paid if you take it. They want to get paid if you change it. They want to get paid if you republish it somewhere else. They want to get paid, paid, paid. And paid some more. It is just greedy behavior.

The consultant claims that the artist’s hard work is stolen off the web and others are gaining from it. Well, then don’t post it on the web if you don’t want others to use it. The web needs to be a source for collaboration, to be open, and free to share and be shared. People should be happy that their content is found and that someone else likes it enough to use it for something else.

So, if you’re a developer and a consultant approaches you to develop applications that track the movement of content, please ask them what their end goal is. And if that end goal has anything to do with getting paid because someone uses something they found online to do another thing with it, then Just Say No.

The 2008 Semantic Technologies conference wrapped up this week and I walked away with a feeling of (yawn) nothing much going on here. True, the conference did have a record-breaking 1000 attendees, and Oracle was a major sponsor, but where was IBM, where was Google? Yahoo was there in strength and had a few sessions. But from what I saw on the registration list, Google only sent a couple of scientists and IBM sent a small handful of researchers. This tells me that the majority of big players are keeping an eye on things but are not committing their front-line grunts to anything, at least not yet, and the conference is going on four years running now. In tech years, that’s like a 100 years.

I don’t think I’m the only one not getting it…

To paraphrase a few conversations I overheard in the hall, “They’re trying to link this language with this technology, but I don’t see why when you can do it easier with something else.”

To paraphrase a lunch conversation, “RDF is way too complicated. Only top scientists and A+ students are really working with it right now. There’s far too steep a learning curve for the average developer to pick this up and run with it.”

Even with a lack of Big Names and a reputation of being complex, the folks who did attend are calling for semantic technologies to reach critical mass. That’s putting the horse behind the cart. The industry needs to show functional applications that are easy to implement. If they can do that, then critical mass will follow. If you have to ask for critical mass, it won’t come, it has to come to you.

I heard a few challenges put out there for companies to start releasing applications, not just in theory, but in functionality. Hopefully, Radar Networks will do that with Twine in the Fall, and maybe MySpace might actually make some real announcements. But the real challenges, as I understand them, is to lower the learning curve and bring front-line developers into the fold.

Business computing today works largely on a flawed vision of reality. For example, consider an inventory-management application. The system holds a list of items in a database, such that:

• When items arrive at the store, the item counts are incremented with the number of items that get stocked.
• When an item gets sold, the system decrements the count for that item.
• When an item count falls to a specific pre-set level, the system marks that item for ordering, or possibly even orders more stock automatically.

But the system doesn't really know how many items the store has. It can't, because the items themselves have no connection to the computer. For example, the system can't—by itself—account for misplaced items or stolen items. The system is forced to rely on a human to give it that type of information.

All that's going to change, because one of the next big advances in computing is location-based computing, which uses one or more methods to let the computer know and track the exact location of objects or people.

Location-based computing, so far, has been primarily concerned with GPS information: geographic locations—positions—of roads, buildings, trucks, and, in some cases, people. Trucking companies, for example can attach a GPS system to their trucks, which can then wirelessly send their location back to company headquarters every second or so, letting the company track the actual position of the truck. If it stops, the company will know. If it gets lost, the company will know. If the driver speeds, or drives too slowly, or takes a detour to visit his family, the company will know.

Similar applications let you track individuals via their GPS-enabled cell phones, or indeed, any cell phone, because software can triangulate the position of a cell phone by the relative speed with which it responds to various cell phone tower signals. That's how the 911 emergency service can locate a cell phone caller.

GPS tracking is fine for large objects that move large distances outdoors, but it's not cheap. A GPS receiver is relatively large, and it's not well-suited for tracking objects that are indoors, where they don't have clear access to satellite signals or objects that move only small distances, such as items in a store, books in a library, or children in a school. Another technology, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), is better suited for tracking small objects. Several years ago, Walmart, in a rare lucid action that might actually benefit employees, customers, and the corporation, announced it would require all its Sam's Club suppliers to tag shipping pallets with RFID tags by 2010. At that time, RFID technology was in its infancy, tags were battery-powered, relatively large, and expensive.

Tagging pallets to trackmerchandise uses RFID at the macro level, but still doesn't help computers track individual objects—the goods after they're removed from the pallet. But we're about to see an explosion in location-based computing at the micro level. Newer generations of RFID tags are far smaller, have (mostly) dropped the battery and draw power from the tag reader's electrical signal, can hold more data, and are more reliable. You can easily buy tags today that are about the size of a grain of rice—but much smaller tags are in development; some are the size of a dust particle, almost invisible to the naked eye. 
RFID tags do cost money, but the price is coming down rapidly. Costs vary depending on the type of tag (powered or unpowered), how close a reader must be to read the tag, the amount of information the tag will hold, the tag's frequency, the tag's size, and of course, volume. Common unpowered tags currently cost between 7 and 15 cents per tag. They're already being used on some big-ticket items, particularly those that are small and easy to misplace or steal. Readers cost money as well, running from $100 to $750 or so, with the average reader probably running around $300. At these prices, the tags obviously aren't ready to be used to track inexpensive items. However, they're already reaching the price point where they're useful for tracking more expensive items, where keeping the item's location in sync with software is critical.

If you're already working with location-based computing technologies, let me know. If you're not, but you have ideas about how you plan to use location-based computing in your business or your applications, let me know that as well.

This morning, Yahoo announced a new search platform, called "SearchMonkey," which allows developers to change Yahoo's plain-vanilla search results into attractive customized results that can display information differently (or even different information) than what appears by default in Yahoo search hit lists. This new capability means different things to different people:

• For users: One way SearchMonkey would do this is by using data collected by Yahoo, attached to your Yahoo UserID, to predict what results you'd prefer. For instance, suppose I hate Amazon. I never go to Amazon to buy anything. Yahoo has gathered this from my search history. So it deliberately de-privileges Amazon results for any search I do, which is one thing I don't understand. Is it really that much of a hardship for people to look at the URLs in any given search result and skip the ones that don't interest them? I actually like knowing what URLs contain info about my search--even if I have no intention of clicking on them.
• For web publishers/businesses: SearchMonkey will also allow web publishers and businesses to customize their site's search results. So, suppose you are searching "Pearl Art Supplies San Francisco." SearchMonkey allows the Pearl people to customize their results so the search result returns the address, phone number, and a picture of the front of the store.

As developers, you'll be able to customize search results in two different ways: you can customize the regular search result format ("Enhanced Results"), or you can create what Yahoo is calling Infobars, which expand below the primary search result and contain metadata about the result.  

For the desktop, this seems to me like customization for customization's sake. How lazy and spoiled do we want to be?

The only way I can see this being anything but superfluously useful is when it comes to mobile device users with limited screen space and concerns about network time. Taking the previous example of searching for Pearl Art Supplies: the new customized results with the address, phone #, and storefront pic are not that much more useful to me at my desktop than standard search results. Maybe saves me a couple of clicks. But if I’m wandering around San Francisco’s Market Street trying to find the store? Those customized results are extremely helpful. My results fit on my device's screen, they're exactly what I need, and I'm not using valuable network time clicking on link after link to find the info I need.  

Perhaps what this really landmarks is the first major step towards tailoring search permanently towards mobile devices.

Dean Allemang gave an extremely informative talk at JavaOne today in the session, “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.” I walked away thinking the term Semantic Web is misnamed. And that alone can sum up the major issues surrounding the Semantic Web. Using the term ‘Semantic Web’ implies that the technologies and the concepts can work on the public web. Think for a quick second on how large the web is—it might not be as large as the universe we live in—but it might as well be. Think of all the different ways words are used, think of all the different languages, think of all the misuse of words, think of the general destruction language itself suffers through and then try and build technologies that rely on using language and words to compile information and present it in a usable fashion. You might as well re-invent language itself, teach the entire web-using world how to speak that language, and then insist that everyone uses that language consistently. Then you would have a workable Semantic Web. I don’t easily say that something is impossible, but the very idea of a Semantic Web makes me come very close to saying, this is impossible.

Semantic technologies, on the other hand, are something very different. Forget about compiling public information from all corners of the web into a centralized location. Instead, think about a closed database in which a controlled ontology exists. For semantic technologies to work you need terms clearly defined and used consistently. And when that happens you do have the power to create mash ups and applications that use databases in effective manners. This idea of revitalizing the usage of databases is itself remarkable with what can be accomplished.

If you place these semantic applications on the web, I guess you could call it the Semantic Web, it does sound a little more official that way. But is that accurate? And doesn’t that sum up, once again, the problem with the term, Semantic Web?

Such was Sun developer Terrence Barr's lament Tuesday night when he asked his Birds of a Feather session participants if they agreed with his portrayal of the arduous and frustrating road mobile developers traverse when trying to get their apps to the market.

"The playing field is heavily tilted towards the established players and companies," says Barr. "Many decisions were made by individual companies with their own business plans, etc. but they didn't think about the effect on the larger ecosystem. And now they need the "interesting content" and they need developers, who need a foot in the door."

Barr and mobile consultant Sean Sheedy have had enough and they think it's time to get organized.

Tuesday night, Barr (a Sun developer) and Sheedy (an independent wireless consultant) scheduled their Birds of a Feather session to gauge community interest in the formation of a Mobile Developer's Alliance. Their intention is for the alliance to be a mitigating influence on the sometimes short-sighted industry decisions made by carriers, manufacturers, etc. that are primarily based on business interests rather than technical efficacy.   

As throughout history, whenever rabble-rousers ply their trade, their idea(s) are met with agreement in principle, but with less enthusiasm when it comes to actual commitment. Most of the participants' comments seemed to focus that hesitancy on concerns about strategy.

However, because Barr and Sheedy seem committed to making their alliance a community effort, they were unwilling to lay out any but the most basic steps: gauging interest, compiling a list of grievances, and planning action items.

Do you think developers need a collective voice in the mobile ecosystem? Check out their nacsent web site nascent website for more information: https://mobiledeveloperalliance.dev.java.net

The “Developing Semantic Web Application on the Java Platform” session just wrapped up at the Moscone Center. Did the panel discuss Java to the audience of Java developers in attendance? No, not really. Did it matter? No, not really. The nearly full room remained nearly full through the hour-long session. And that was a good sign.

The panel discussed real-life applications and four out of five panelists related Semantic Web technologies to social networking. MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and iTunes were all mentioned (and Amazon as well) in regards to how the Semantic Web can take full advantage of the data on those sites. To paraphrase a panelist, ‘The data is out there and Semantic Web technologies will serve it up to you.’

There was an announcement of sorts, which I thought was rather old news, that Yahoo! will begin officially supporting Semantic Technologies (they have always supported Semantic Technologies) on May 15. I guess the date of May 15 is the new news. The excitement behind this is that Yahoo! should begin creating API’s with the  Semantic Web in mind. It was touted that with Yahoo's support, this should be the year for the Semantic Web to take off.

Using the well-established notion of social networking on the web as a foundation for the Semantic Web was a key point from the panelists. The formula for using Semantic Web technologies was, ‘where is the data, how do we process it, and how do we bring it in?’ GRDDL, RDF, and database technologies appear to be the answers for, ‘how do we bring it in.’

The hard part—which was quickly discussed at the very end of the session—was the necessity of logical links that can be accessed. All of the sample applications the panel discussed were basically the same thing: one-stop shop access to all of your friend’s data, no matter where on the web the data originated. This one-stop shop allows for single sign on access and eliminates the need to visit several different sites to catch up with your friends and family. The Semantic Web technologies use URL’s to gather the data. What is needed are logical links that can be accessed to compile the data. The data is out there—the technologies to compile the data exist—the tough part is putting the two together. Is it possible and will it work?

Yesterday at JavaOne, Sun Microsystems announced support for the BDLive.com Developer’s disc. So, what is BD Live? It consists of software and network services that allow the quick creation of user-friendly DVD-like experiences. You can find a link to the free developer disc on www.apifinder.com (supplies are limited).

The developer disc includes sample code, definition of available API’s, and allows for collaboration. This includes the ability for developers to download each other’s applications to their home theater.

If I didn't know better, I would've thought I was at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Vegas yesterday morning instead of the opening keynote at the JavaOne 2008 Conference in San Francisco. Demos featured handheld book readers and graphics-rich "eye candy" applications on mobile devices, desktops, and the web; video presentations featured young hipsters immersed in the pop culture content and communication features of their mobile devices; and much of the talk from Sun Software EVP Rich Green centered on the consumer's digital life and rich experiences on various devices. So what's all that stuff have to do with Java? The devices all run Java, and the JavaFX Runtime that Sun announced during the session attempts to allow seamless portability of Java SE and ME applications among all devices through the Java platform.

Enter the theme for JavaOne this year: Java + You (if you're reading this, you're probably a Java developer and that "You" likely is closer to the 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year than to you in particular); it refers to consumers, graphic and web designers, and scripting language programmers who use PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, and others. Sun continues to court designers and scripters by making the Java platform more accessible to them, largely because their numbers are much larger than those of core Java developers. With enterprise Java entrenched in data centers all over the world, Sun can—and has—turned its attention to higher levels of the software stack—focusing sharply on RIAs (rich Internet applications) for desktops,  mobile devices, and the web, and their ability to leverage features of the underlying Java platform. JavaFX is another step in that direction.

I wasn't overly impressed when Sun first announced JavaFX at last year's JavaOne, but this year, the demos (more to come on those) showed that Sun has worked to close the gap between a JavaFX vision and real JavaFX technology.

Stay tuned to the DevXtra Editors' Blog for more details from JavaOne...

If you've been living under a rock for the last month, you may not have heard about the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. As I'm the Mistress of All That Is Mobile around here, I spent my time at Web 2.0 in sessions about Mobile 2.0. On the last day of last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, Marc Davis, Yahoo Deep Thinker (his title is actually "Social Media Guru”), gave one of the most interesting talks, titled "Understanding Mobile: From Web 2.0 to World 2.0." Marc spoke about how your mobile device "mediates between the web and the world." Quoting a prediction that soon your mobile device will replace both your keys and your wallet, Davis further predicted that your device will track how you move through space, time, and social situations. Pictures taken with your device will not only have date and time stamps, but also other contextual information such as the GPS coordinates of your location when you took the picture. This type of  contextual information increases the possibilities for machine intelligence by a significant percentage. 

To describe the kind of context-based data your device will be collecting, Davis urged attendees to imagine that they had, of an evening, gone out drinking with buddies, gotten really drunk, and then woken up—face in the gutter—in a foreign country, with no idea how they'd arrived there. In the Web 2.0 world, your device would be able to provide you with context in such a situation: your LBS would tell you location, the clock would tell you the time, and, after getting your bearings, looking up your credit card account might even begin to help you piece together the rest of the evening that you don't remember, including charges from the last bar you were at, and maybe your airline and flight time. Cool, fine. But now that you know where you are and you've got a pretty good idea of what you did last night, who else knows? Now's the time that the TGIFriday's in Hong Kong texts you with a two-for-one deal on Bloody Marys.

It seems that our fears about the compelling nature of the Internet creating a generation of worm-pale, agoraphobic, socially-stunted hermits have given way to fears of a generation of 1440 minute-a-day consumers. "Where are you paying your attention?" Davis asked. This is not only what advertisers want to know, but what other speakers in a different session insisted developers need to know, to create applications that advertisers will want to sponsor. And according to Davis, Web 2.0 devices will collect it for them. So now that "they" know where you're "paying your attention," you're liable to have someone in your face selling you something at every turn. Unlikely, you say? No one would send you unwanted messages? Well, we haven't been able to stop spam, have we? I know I spent about 25 minutes this morning deleting it.

However, for the purposes of this blog, I'm not really that worried about advertisers and their spam. I'm worried about what I’m calling the “politics of access.” How much of a choice will we have about what information is recorded and who sees it? Will we be able to turn off some of these data-collecting functions? Hopefully.

Davis also mentioned the recent attempts to aggregate our social networking profiles (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). Really? Do I really want to be contaminating my Facebook high school contacts with my professional LinkedIn contacts? I don’t know about you, but I freaked out when I received a MySpace friend request from my mother. My MySpace page is for friends my age. Cool as she is, my mother doesn’t really need to see, or know, what kinds of things I’m sharing with people my age.

What’s really at issue here is the boundary collapse between our private selves and our professional selves. How much access do we want to allow people in our professional lives to our personal and vice versa? Are we really looking forward to this "social mobile ecosystem"? If college kids can be denied jobs because of what's on their Facebook pages, can a prospective Microsoft employee get fired for working on a Ubuntu release in his spare time? What if you're in a death metal band and your boss thinks this is amoral? In reverse, what if some mentally unstable former romantic interest finds your MySpace page and, because you've got it hooked up with your LinkedIn, starts harassing people in your deparment? 

I suppose it's natural that in such a self-obsessed culture, where many willingly broadcast all kinds of personal information into the ether, we're going to have to get used to people knowing (or expecting to know) where you are and even perhaps what you are doing, 24-7. And while the melding of private time and work time theoretically leads to a more holistic, less compartmentalized life (re: a good thing), my hunch is that it will probably only go one way. Areas that were once "private" territory will continue to be exposed as public--this accessibility is leading to the colonization of our private selves. Our "private lives" as we knew them, will cease to exist. Nothing will "stay in Vegas."