Nicholas Thomas, co-founder and COO of Finicity, believes that Flex + AIR via any desktop + Mobile (in one or more technical forms) can take us a step towards the vision that Mark Weiser presented in his original works on ubiquitous computing. As the primary client for a consumer web-based SaaS product, Flex has both advantages and disadvantages, according to Thomas.

The OpenAjax Alliance has recently published two new white papers, one on Mobile AJAX and one on recent browser advances. The first white paper, Introduction to Mobile AJAX for Developers, provides an overview of AJAX application development for mobile devices. The second white paper, Good News for AJAX - The Browser Wars Are Back, highlights the major changes in the browser world that are manifesting themselves in this year's browser releases (i.e., IE8, Firefox3, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.x).

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

One of the welcome developments in GWT 1.5 was the inclusion of some decent looking CSS themes -- standard. chrome and dark. How can you use them in your GWT app? Just include one of the following lines in your apps .xml file. You can see them in action in the ShowCase application. For those of you without the patience to kick start the app, here are some screenshots of the new themes.

With over 150 bug fixes, Java 5 language support, new compiler optimizations, default visual themes, an entirely new DOM API and JavaScript overlay types, the release candidate of Google Web Toolkit 1.5 has gotten very positive feedback from early adopters, reports Google's Kelly Norton.

Curl is executing on the next phase in its Eclipse strategy with the availability of the beta versions of the new Eclipse-based Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) development tools. The first release of the Curl Development tools for Eclipse (CDE) and newest release of the Curl Runtime Environment (RTE), Version 6.0.4, provide enterprise developers with the tools to build and deploy their mission-critical, enterprise-class RIAs within the increasingly popular Eclipse environment.

'I'm looking forward to helping Appcelerator shake up the rich Internet application market,' said Bearden. 'Companies are struggling with how to take advantage of all the money and time they've poured into SOA. Appcelerator answers the question once and for all by enabling them to build rich applications on top of that SOA infrastructure.'

'Should CFML developers switch to Java?' asks Andrew Powell in an article this week at SYS-CON.com. 'No,' he answers. ColdFusion is the fastest way to get data to AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, and even JavaFX, according to Powell, who adds: 'ColdFusion also provides complex services easier than Java, .NET, Ruby or whatever wishes they could.'

The move from native, OS-specific applications to web applications continues to be one of the biggest 'disruptions' in the software industry today, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch recently in an interview with the Wharton Business School. 'We're a leader in enabling that transition to happen with things like AIR,' Lynch noted, adding: 'We're focused on taking advantage of that shift, not only with our enabling technologies, but also our applications like Premiere Express, Photoshop Express and BuzzWord.'

Cooperating applications, such as mashups, must be able to exchange objects with robust interfaces. An object must be able to encapsulate its state such that the state can be modified only as permitted by its own methods. JavaScript?s objects are soft and currently the language does not include any means to harden them, so an attacker can easily access the fields directly and replace the methods with his own.

Nexaweb announced it has contributed new software to the Dojo Foundation that will further advance the use of open source AJAX within a company's critical business applications. The software, dubbed 'dojo.E,' will allow users to more easily create enterprise Web applications based on the Dojo Toolkit, one of the industry's most advanced sets of open source AJAX tools.

Cynergy Systems announced it has been selected as a finalist for the 2008 Helios Apollo Awards. In conjunction with the Washington, D.C. metropolitan chapters for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and SmartCEO magazine, Helios HR, a provider of outsourced human resources and HR consulting, has chosen to honor Cynergy as a local company dedicated to promoting employee development.

Curl announced the general availability of the Curl Run Time Environment (RTE) for Macintosh. The Curl RTE is the engine of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform that executes Curl applications and renders code, content and graphics on client machines. As a result of this release, Macintosh users can now take advantage of the same enterprise-class features of the Curl RTE that are already offered to Windows and Linux users.

SplendidCRM announced the launch of Version 2.1 of its flagship platform SplendidCRM. The new Silverlight graphs provide SplendidCRM developers with the ability to create and customize graphs. Extended AJAX support provides the CRM user with a more natural experience.

The YUI development team has released version 2.5.2; you can download the new release from SourceForge or configure your implementation using the YUI Configurator. This is a focused release that addresses several key bugs while providing support for Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5, both of which are expected to reach GA this summer.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

Adobe has put out three free public betas: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth, all of which will be part of the next-generation Creative Suite when it arrives. Its delivery date is still a big secret. The betas are only good for 48 hours once they're downloaded unless you're a Creative Suite 3 customer. Dreamweaver is for web design and development, Fireworks for prototyping and Soundbooth for audio creating and editing. Adobe describes the early release software as 'a taste of the radical workflow enhancements that we have in store as we redefine how designers and developers collaborate to deliver stand-out digital experiences.'

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers. Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company's two-day developer event in San Francisco, will take down the barricade. Google also disclosed what it's going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

The OpenAjax Alliance is requesting industry feedback on two companion initiatives, OpenAjax Conformance and the OpenAjax Registry, which have been under development for the past year. These two technologies have now entered a public review phase that ends on June 30, 2008.

Curl announced the results from a recent performance benchmark test of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, Version 6.0, and Adobe Flex 3. The test aimed to compare the performance of these two RIA platforms and found the Curl language to outperform ActionScript 3, the programming language of the Adobe Flash Player runtime, by a factor of 8 to 10. This finding is particularly significant for developers seeking highly productive ways to build mission-critical, enterprise-class RIAs that require high performance capabilities.

Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be available later this week. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, and enjoy significant performance and productivity gains.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.

Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.

The popular code generator Clear Data Builder will become available free of charge. Originally, Clear Data Builder was released as a command-line open source code generator a.k.a. DaoFlex. We've submitted it to Adobe Flex component exchange about two years ago, and it quickly became one of the most downloadable components.

National Instruments announced Measurement Studio 8.5 to add test and measurement functionality to the latest Microsoft development environment with a complete set of .NET class libraries, tools and NI data acquisition driver support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Measurement Studio 8.5 includes ASP.NET AJAX-compatible user interface controls and advanced network variable communication functions for creating highly responsive remote monitoring Web applications.

Nearly four years after its initial release, Ruby on Rails is edging ever closer to version 2.1. Rails 0.5 was released June 24 of 2004, and its creator David Heinemeier Hansson hopes that v2.1, currently in release candidate state, will be out any moment. 'We've been adding a ton of extra deliciously nice goodies in preparation of its release,' blogged Heinemeier Hansson just last month.

From AIR to ZK, this is an alphabetical round-up of the fast moving-world of application development tools and frameworks spawned ever since the appearance of Google Maps, the canonical early RIA. The list includes AIR, Appcelerator, ATF, Curl, Dojo, Echo, Eclipse RCP, Ext JS, Flex, Grails, GWT, JavaFX, Kabuki, Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 platform, Novulu, OpenLaszlo, Prototype, Rico, Ruby on Rails, Seam, Silverlight, ThinWire, TIBCO GI, ULC, WaveMaker, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Zend Framework, and ZK.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

In SYS-CON's annual round-up of technology predictions earlier this year, Brad Abrams, a Group Program Manager at Microsoft, highlighted the likelihood of what he called 'the UX meme of the consumer facing world [leaking] into the enterprise' and noted: 'The days of the battleship gray, forms of data application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected data. While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of the corporate landscape.'

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it's with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you've got Apex!?). Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

It's what you don't see about the emerging Web that has everyone excited these days. Namely, it's the powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are nothing new and have been traditionally cryptic and difficult to use. However, the advent of Web services along with the notion of mashups has changed the way we consider and leverage APIs going forward.

After years of dominance by a single browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), and few advances within IE, the world has changed. There is now healthy competition among multiple browsers over standards compliance, AJAX features, AJAX performance and trustworthy computing. The competition is reaching beyond the desktop to include the emerging world of mobile browsing. This healthy competition will result in important new capabilities within AJAX toolkits and will help accelerate the adoption of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

'Businesses today are looking to build on the success of their existing technology investments with a future-proof architecture that will support continued enhancements to their enterprise applications,' said Jeremy Chone, newly-appointed CTO of Nexaweb. 'Jeremy brings a great balance of Web 2.0 and enterprise application software management and leadership experience to our team,' said Chris Heidelberger, chief executive officer, Nexaweb.

SOA has come a long way from a concept to wide-scale adoption by the enterprise at multiple layers of IT. SOA implementation at the UI layer is the latest in SOA adoption trends. SOA has manifested itself in a number of flavors such as the creation of a rich user experience by using technology like AJAX, provisioning value-added services by mashing up data from multiple sources, community-based peer-to-peer interactions, creating collective intelligence, creating collaborative platforms often catering to a trusted community, and creating modular content-based sites.

Have you ever wished you could run ASP.NET applications on Linux, without having to rewrite your code or leave the Visual Studio development environment? In this article, I show you how to port Steve Clements' AJAX ASP.NET RSS Reader to native Java and deploy it to Apache Tomcat on Linux. I also show you how to add an AnimationExtender and a HoverMenu from the AJAX Control Toolkit in Visual Studio, while targeting Java.

One of the hottest buzzwords you hear these days at conferences and read in blogs and forums is REST. It is often promoted as a way of building Web Services and as a lightweight alternative to SOAP and other Web Services frameworks, but in fact it's much more. REST is an architectural style that has a collection of best practices with solid scientific backing that describes how to build scalable Web applications that meet the requirements of their technical environment, namely the Web with its Web servers, Web browsers, and the HTTP protocol

Backbase introduced Enterprise AJAX 4.2 for Java, a new Java version of the AJAX framework. This new release offers a complete AJAX solution for Java developers, with support for all popular Java frameworks, including Struts, Spring MVC and Java Server Faces (JSF). Backbase Enterprise AJAX for Java is an AJAX framework that actively supports multiple server-side Java Frameworks. Global 2000 companies can therefore standardize on a single AJAX platform, rather than use a patchwork of various open source AJAX libraries.

Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

AJAX Push has always been an integral capability of the ICEfaces framework, but for the longest time it was not a primary consideration of the average technology evaluator. We always found this surprising, because the impact that push can have on a web application is far more profound than AJAX's primary claim to fame - eliminating the full page refresh. In recent months, however, we have seen a marked change in demand for push technology within the ICEfaces community, and we are now involved with a large number of projects where AJAX Push is front and center on the requirements list. So when people are evaluating their options for achieving web-based push, what makes them decide on ICEfaces?