The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language support - and then the way you speak that language changes. Compare how enum support evolved in Java over the years - starting with patterns - and you would think of language as of evolving environment. I was coming to Java in '97 from C++ and I thought of it as a very poor language. 10 years made it almost tolerable - but I still miss ability to redefine operators - does it really matter to anyone who never did it in first place?

Nexaweb announced it has received The Product of the Year award in the RIA/Composite Application Assembly category from SearchSOA.com. Winners were selected according to their performance in the following areas: innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality, value, and how well they enable service orientation.

Curl announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member-supported corporation that helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. In conjunction with joining the Foundation as an Add-In Member, Curl released details of its plans to base the next phase of its enterprise Rich Internet Application (RIA) development tools on the Eclipse framework.

Rumor has it that in the next few weeks Adobe is going to 'reorganize' its Mobile and Device business unit where its Jobs-criticized Flash Lite lives and send the engineers to go work with the larger platform effort and Flash proper, which Jobs has also criticized. Presumably, Adobe is going to do what it takes to appease Jobs. It does want to be on the iPhone and needs Apple's help.

This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

Zimbra announced the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Users of any Java-enabled mobile phone will have access to the industry's most complete collaboration solution. The ZimbraME client provides Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source and Network Edition users worldwide with free access to the Zimbra experience with e-mail and calendar on mass-market Java-enabled mobile phones. This extends Zimbra's reach of services to the broadest range of devices available in the market and builds on Yahoo!'s e-mail and mobile Web services and as a key starting point for consumers.

Adobe has put an alpha pre-release of AIR for Linux up in hopes, it says, of getting feedback from the community, not to mention winning adherents. It's English-only. The company also joined the Linux Foundation to encourage the growth of RIA technologies on Linux, it said. The company says Linux developers can use HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

According to Brandon Badger, Product Manager at search engine, Google, the main goal of its AJAX APIs team is to provide developers with the tools needed to create the next generation of great web applications. The API helps developers translate content in their applications. Users on these sites will have an easier time communicating across lingual boundaries. The Language API provides both translation and language detection. It is also possible to experiment with the language detection capabilities.

Mobyko has announced the launch of its web 2.0 online photo, video and text galleries, providing a way for mobile users to manage their social media. The galleries provide a desktop application experience on the web. The implementation and depth of functionality provides a seamless user experience. The galleries feature AJAX to provide the smooth transitions and special effects that have traditionally only been available in flash applications. Mobyko users are able to store, manage and share their mobile content for free.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

The Web is one of the most important technological as well as social/cultural developments in our life. Its global impact is rooted in its openness and its capability to evolve on a democratic basis. However, I have concerns. I'm concerned about the significant corporate interests driving towards 'unweb'. Not to pick on video, but to use video as an example. Video, the most recent hotspot on the web, largely relies on Adobe's Flash technology. Not that Flash is not good. On the contrast, it is well designed and implemented as a technology. It enabled the possibility of Internet Video Selling-En tertainment-Online Jan-08 and we should be thankful. However, it is a platform controlled by a single entity (Adobe). We should trust our future in the collective will of the society instead of the goodwill of a benevolent dictator. Another example, the area that I've dedicated ten years of my life to, Rich Internet Application, is causing some great concern to me. Adobe is pushing Flex (Adobe's markup, Adobe's runtime platform), Microsoft is pushing Sliverlight (Microsoft's markup and Microsoft's runtime platform)and Sun is pushing for JavaFX (yet another scripting language invented from scratch - why?). Will Rich Internet become 'rich man's Internet'? Will Rich Internet become the onset of 'unweb'?

For centuries, the encyclopedia was viewed as the single most reliable reference source for just about everything. Encyclopedia articles were written, edited, vetted, edited some more, until finally an article appeared that was as close to absolute truth as humans could make it. Then came the Internet, and shortly thereafter sites such as Wikipedia.

If you design an application that runs on Windows but doesn't look exactly like Windows, so the old argument goes, the effect will be unsettling for users. But sticking to the native look and feel (L&F) should not be the end-goal of designers.

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an AJAX industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki for this initiative. The main purpose of the initiative is to inform the browser vendors about what future features are most important to the AJAX community and why. So far, the alliance has interviewed roughly a dozen industry leaders, including representatives from the ASP.NET AJAX, Dojo, Ext JS, Douglas Crockford of JSON fame, jQuery, Spry, and XAP, and recently held a townhall discussion on the feature request list among its members. The members have concluded that the wishlist (~25 items) is ready for public comments.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Within the past few years, Web 2.0 has become a major technology trend, dramatically impacting the way consumers interact with information and applications. This consumer trend is now extending into the enterprise; however, businesses have been more reluctant than consumers to adopt these new technologies. The Business tools of the '90s have not kept pace with the Web revolution. For Web 2.0 technologies to garner adoption in the enterprise, new requirements must be met.

Apple's iPhone is a massive hit; the company has sold millions of handsets since the product's launch in June 2007. Within weeks of the iPhone hitting the market, the first of several highly publicized security exploits, a Trojan virus targeting the device, was identified. SMobile Systems has announced that it has ported its signature application suite, Security Shield, to the iPhone, utilizing the recently released Apple Software Development Kit (SDK).

'With the alpha release of Adobe AIR for Linux and the Adobe Flex Builder for Linux alpha update, we're delivering early releases of a first-class application runtime and RIA creation tool to the Linux community,' said David Wadhwani, Adobe's general manager of its Platform business unit, as Adobe today announced that the pre-release alpha version of Adobe AIR software for Linux is available on Adobe Labs.

Two distinct paradigms of AJAX use have emerged in the last few years of AJAX innovation. At one end of the spectrum, we see vast use of AJAX for enriching Web pages - adding some interactive features on top of the basic model of an HTML Web page. At the other end of the spectrum we've seen a growing set of solutions that rival the features and functionality of desktop software - full AJAX software applications.

Douglas Crockford gave a keynote at the AJAXWorld East 2008 conference in New York City last week. As ever, Douglas was pulling no punches - his title: 'Can We Fix the Web?' The browser, Douglas says, was behind the times when it was introduced, and it hasn't aged well. It wasn't designed to do the kinds of things we're trying to make it do; we've exploited most of its potential and we're hitting a natural wall now that we've extracted from the browser about as much as is possible.

This is a good chance to jot down my experiences during AJAXWorld. I had braced myself to stand in front of a large room full of suits that needed to go to the conference rather than wanting to go. Turns out I was wrong. The audience was a mixed crowd of company owners, project managers, designers and developers and everybody was very involved and interested. I met a lot of companies selling developer tools like frameworks and IDEs, a few implementing companies and really surprising edge developers like someone who ran software that controls geostationary satellites!

This is truly the age of the browser interface. Internet Web sites and Web applications increasingly offer rich, dynamic, browser-based user interfaces that deliver everything you expect from an installed desktop application. These applications deliver function and ease-of-use without requiring expensive desktop software installs.

Last week I was attending the AJAXWorld East conference to speak about Apache MyFaces Trinidad and how to integrate it with some other open source projects, such as Facelets, Dojo or Yahoo! UI. I think the talk went very well and I uploaded the slides today. The demo is not downloadable (yet), but you can get the source (via SVN).

Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a grid there, gray background. Their users were happy because they did not see any better. This is about to change...

This year's AJAXWorld was a great success. Seemed like a lot of people there, the rooms were packed. Many sessions were standing room only if you could get in. The folks who were there seemed very keen and were lining up early to register and to get into the rooms.

Last week I was in New York City for AJAXWorld. I filled in for our CEO Hooman Radfar at a talk he was going to give on 'The Social Aggregator - Widgets Reshape the Social Web.' It went really well. We had the room filled with about 40 people. There was a lot of great discussion about how the Web is getting broken into pieces via widgets and about the current state of consumer-facing and enterprise tools that are bringing the pieces of the Web back together.

I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.

Just a quick update from the conference (which is now over). I gave my talk at AJAXWorld East 2008 and got some interesting reactions. Met a lot of cool folks, put some faces to names, got to sit on a panel with Douglas Crockford. Cool beans. More next week.

Desktop widgets have been around for a very long time. The first set of desktop widgets were introduced by Apple back in 1983 with their release of Apple Desktop Accessories. Obviously Apple was way ahead of the curve, but these early widgets were not Internet enabled - the popular Internet, as we know it, didn't exist - so their utility was pretty limited.

Rich text editing is becoming an essential part of Web 2.0 applications that deal with user-generated content, publishing, and collaboration. While text editing is built into modern browsers, harnessing it into a stable usable application isn't always as simple as it should be. Managing cross-browser compatibility, document formats, and integration with other components is critical to a successful implementation.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

ComponentArt is pleased to announce the availability of Web.UI 2008.1, the premium suite of user interface controls for ASP.NET. The Web.UI release in 2008 expands the suite yet again by introducing a highly-demanded file upload control, while further extending the company's lead in the AJAX arena. ComponentArt Web.UI for ASP.NET now features a range of AJAX capabilities, including the new hyper-responsive client-side binding with ASP.NET 3.5 web services. This technique employs ComponentArt's rich client-side controls invoking web services directly, receiving JSON data and automatically updating all UI elements on the client.

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

Sybase iAnywhere announced availability of support for Apple iPhone during the first international iPhone Developer Summit, colocated with AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East. Information Anywhere now enables IT organizations to provide secure delivery of Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange enterprise email to iPhone users, in addition to a broad range of other mobile devices. Sybase iAnywhere?s unique approach to providing enterprise email support for the iPhone reduces potential security concerns while still providing a rich user experience utilizing native iPhone applications.

'The web was not intended to be an application platform,' said Douglas Crockford today as he delivered the Opening Keynote at the 5th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, 'and the biggest problems in the browser is security.' For over ten years attacks have been possible through the loopholes offered by the browser. A text that is benign in one content might be dangerous in another, third-party scripts can be embedded into URLs.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).