You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, I go it solo and cover the highlights of last week's Adobe MAX. As usual, more than just the announcements themselves, I get into plenty of commentary and "analysis," if you will of the different offerings. For example, there's an interesting cloud/SaaS under-current running through several MAX items, notable Adobe Wave, CoCoMo, and MeerMeer.

First, I talk about the "Flash Platform" brand round-up, product level announcements ("Thermo" to Catalyst, FlexBuilder Gumbo, AIR 1.5, CoCoMo, and Flash Player 10). Then I get into my development releated highlight from the Sneaks, MeerMeer: a nice looking service for testing cross-browser compatibility problems. Finally, using Alchemy (which allows running/using C/C++ in the Flash Player) as a pivot, I think out-loud about allowing plugins to the Flash Player: is there even a reason to do that?

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsors this podcast.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

While Adobe MAX was this week, Ryan and I have yet to figure out the magic of schedule alignment to sit down and give MAX it's due coverage. We'll get that figured out for next week - there's a lot to talk about. In the meantime, this week's episode is an interview with Andre Charland of Nitobi.

Not only are Andre and the rest of the Nitobi guys are regulars in the RIA scene, they actually make a good business in the RIA space by developing and sells RIA components and related services, so I take the chance to not only get the info on the company itself, but a get a sense for the types of customers they sell to. That is, we try to get to the idea of who's using RIAs now, even behind the firewall.

We wrap-up by talking about Nitobi's hometown, Vancoover, as I try to ferret out what the tech-scene is like there.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Late on a Friday after a week of somewhat thin IT Management news, John and I still manage to pull out some interesting topics:

• John's experience with change management in the enterprise. Though we don't mention it, check out Niel Nickolaisen's piece on ITIL vs. MOF.
• CA's announcements about Amazon, SaaS offerings, and general cloudage.
• Amazon and CapGemini. John mentions moving SharePoint to the cloud, which also brings up the Microsoft Online Services Suite news.
• We talk about Rivermuse at length, me having spent some time looking at it more this week. John seems more informed and articulate on the topic than I do.
• I cover the cloud/SaaS related news from Adobe MAX, the conference I was at earlier this week. Also see the Adobe SaaS round-up from last year that I mention.
• My time at the IBM Software Analyst Summit this week: it was less about products and more about how IBM goes about doing the business side of things. Namely, the agenda was about IBM's Industry Solution Frameworks, that map various types of businesses to the software that can help them, and the way that software is put together and used. That said, there's some Tivoli stuff mixed in when it comes to entering new markets via Maximo and Micromuse.
• The Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform management pack for Suse Linux, which I incorrectly say is GA'ed: instead it's slated for release in early 2009.

Also, I forgot to mention an endorsement for John's Cloud Droplets podcast be sure to check those out. I've been behind on my Debriefing podcast, and it looks like John has picked up the slack in a fantastic way.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Hyperic, and Zenoss are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

While I was at Sun's Menlo Park campus, I had the chance to talk with Sun's Jeet Kaul and Ken Russell. In part one, Jeet talked about spreading client-side Java across non-traditional devices. In this second part, Ken tells us about the Java applet re-write in Java 6 Update 10 and how that helps lay the foundation for JavaFX.

I get asked a lot about this aspect of Java, namely, "have they fixed applets yet?" so it was great to get the skinny from Ken. If you're interested in this, you'd probably also like the recent interview with Danny Coward.

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored this episode.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

While I was at Sun's Menlo Park campus, I had the chance to talk with Sun's Jeet Kaul and Ken Russell. I started out taking with Jeet about the evolution of client-side Java, namely, Sun's plans to firm up client-side Java after a long run paying primarily attention to server-side Java. Jeet tells us about the spread of software in all sorts of new systems - like your car dashboard - and speaks to spreading Java into those deployment scenarios.

The RIA angle here, of course, is that JavaFX is a large part of this re-doubled client-side effort. As we've discussed on RIA Weekly several times, it's common to see things that feel like RIAs on non-standard devices, be they the obvious of phones or the more esoteric like Chumbys.

Also, check out the second part where Ken tells us about changes to the Java applet plugin that help lay the foundation for JavaFX.

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored this episode.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Not having recorded for a couple of weeks, we had a huge crop of IT related news to go over:

• John starts out talking about encountering iTricity folks in Europe (they partner with IBM for cloud computing) and his recent cloud-talk while in Europe.
• We go over the VMWare tooling released by Hyperic, Zenoss, PacketTrap, and then the GroundWork releases.
• In talking about VMWare, I talk about a recent briefing with recently un-stealthed Replicate.
• I re-cap some interesting items from Spiceworld, Spicework's first user conference.
• John tries to pry some information about recently signed up RedMonk client Cloudera from me, but we instead talk about Hadoop in general.< ;/li>
• John then re-caps a conversation he had with the openQRM gang. This gets us into a discussion of the disconnect between monitoring, management, and provisioning: you rarely find those features under the same vendor-roof.
• Finally, we go over the Microsoft BizSpark offering and how it could relate to IT management startups.

And, there's more of course - like why companies might actually benefit from being in stealth mode rather than "flailing" about in public. We also spend time talking about pulling in Web 2.0 IT management innovations (and IT in general) into the enterprise.

Disclosure: IBM, Hyperic, Zenoss, GroundWork, Spiceworks, Cloudera, and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I lucky to be joined by Mozilla's Dion Almaer. As such, we start out talking about his recent move to Mozilla to work on open web developer tools.

I ask Dion to tell us what he means by "open web," which gets us into a fun way of defining that term: not so much technologically bound, but more in the ease of use for such technologies by developers. This mind-set is more expansive than "web development" and you can start to imagine that open, non-traditional web-UI layers like RIA technologies could be cajoled into this pool.

Dion then tells us his impressions of Microsoft's PDC conference this week, which he was lucky enough to attend. As usual, conversations around Microsoft revolve around Microsoft's challenge of expanding beyond their current base; we discuss the great appeal of the "the blue pill."

We then talk about one of Ryan's recent "finds," that (of course, being open source) Flex 4 source code changes are available to the public. Thus, you can watch the development of Flex 4, teasing out new features and fixes.

From there, we have a slight diversion into Java threaded programming, and then discuss the release of the G1/Android phone of which both Ryan and Dion have had the chance to play around with.

Some items we didn't cover, but are worth checking on are: Netflix using Silverlight for it's on-demand video and the popular RIA application SlideRocket opening up to the public.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Adobe are clients, as is Sun. Adobe sponsored this episode, as noted above.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Being in Brussels for Tivoli training (see waffles above), I ask John to give us his usual take on the character of the IT Management people he's encountering on the road. We both agree that the European IT Management folks he tends to deal with tend to be extremely straight-forward, at least compared to the sugar-coating goodie nice-guys we're both used to in America.

While there isn't a lot of news to cover for this episode, I ask John to walk us through troubled economic times he's been through in the past. More so than just targeting the effect on IT - and how IT can survive bad money times - I ask him how it effect IT Management.

After discussing that topic for the bulk of the episode, John gives us his take on the Novell plans to acquire Managed Objects and I reprise my analysis of as well. We also talk about the virtualization numbers out on Microsoft's market share in that space, and John tells us about the uptick in PowerShell he's seen, at least in one study. Somewhere along the way we end up talking about BMC's IT Masters acquisition of a few years ago as well.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as are Microsoft, ManagedObjects and BMC.

Today's debriefing - download it here, click play above to listen, or subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes - covers:

• NetBeans is 10.
• Java SE 6 Update 10 - I've talked with several reporters today on Update 10. The key thing here is fixing and improving the bad reputation that client-side Java has, laying the necessary foundation for JavaFX to be competitive. There's nothing too interesting about foundations, but the house they build on-top should be fun to watch. Also, check out the interview with Danny Coward I did on the topic.
• I end up giving a mini-strategy overview for RIA adoption for Adobe, Sun, and Microsoft. You can expect Microsoft and Sun to sell to their existing developer pools, as Microsoft's Scott Guthrie spoke to at AJAXWorld. Adobe, on the other hand, must go after everyone: .Net, Java, PHP, "open web," hell, why not green screen?
• Sun came out with Identity Compliance Manager which proves an nice place to talk about selling software by selling water to put out fires instead of lecturing about the virtues of flossing. See this short podcast from Sun overviewing ICM.
• I talked with Cassatt last week and give a brief overview of their automation platform. Their "shut down un-utilized servers to save energy" is a good example of selling water instead of dental-floss. Check out the capacity management piece by Ken Oestreich that I mentioned.
• I had some good pizza with Phurnace last week, the Austin-based startup that has tools for migrating configuration between different application servers.
• Also, Rogue Wave has a multi-core, parallel processing framework called Hydra that I talked with them about last week.
• While I didn't get to very many sessions at last week's InnoTech here in Austin, I did go to one with an old friend of mine, Mumboe's Scott Diedrick, on rails, which was interesting, if only to get the current explanations of why rails is nice.
• Rackspace has an upcoming cloud announcement this week in Austin. Is it something about Mosso? (Probably, since Rackspace is using their Twitter account to take questions.) Some EC2 competitor? We'll see this Wednesday. There's a lice web-cast as well.
• Next, I got over the astonishing numbers from IDC on Microsoft's take of the virtualization market: 23% of the x86 market they say. Over at virtualization.info they have a good post discussing the numbers.
• I briefly mention TopCoder Direct.

Disclosure: Sun, Microsoft, Adobe, and Phurnace are clients.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I discuss the major news item of the week, namely:

• Silverlight 2.0's release and the Eclipse/Java tie-in. We'll have more for you next week when with a special edition of RIA Weekly with Microsoft's Brad Beckler.
• Adobe's release of Creative Suite 4, including Flash Player 10 and support for Linux out of the gate.
• Sun's release of Java SE 6 Update 10 which does much to lay the foundation for JavaFX.
• Mozilla's Open Web Labs.
• Android should have shiped today.

Sponsorship

As mentioned at the end, this Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this episode. Sun is a client as well, as is Microsoft. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

John was occupied for this podcast, so I rounded up two stand-ins: Tarus Balog and Brandon Whichard, both returning guests.

Among other topics, we discuss the recent finding in the wild of OpenNMS, maps and dashboards in IT Management platforms, Novell putting in plans to buy Managed Objects, CMDBf being demo'ed, and we get general updates on OpenNMS and Zenoss from Tarus and Brandon.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as are Managed Objects and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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

When I was in his neck of the woods last, I got the chance to talk with Sun's Danny Coward, the Chief Architect of Sun's Client Software (that is, Java SE, Java ME, JavaFX and JavaCard), about Java 6 Update 10. That seems like kind of a narrow topic to speak to, but as Danny and I discuss, it's a big release for Sun's RIA and client-side (re-)push.

Along those lines, we spend a lot of time detailing the re-written plugin that's used for Java applets and JavaFX, the improved installer and update experience, and other client side features like one of the new GUI look-n-feels, Nimbus.

Update 10 is available now. Also, check out Danny's The Planetarium, his daily, but fantastically concise news-link blog.

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored this podcast.

Today's debriefing (download directly here or subscribe to the feed for auto-download) covers:

• Silverlight 2.0 is out! We'll cover this is more depth in this week's RIA Weekly, but I skim the specifics and comment on the Eclipse Silverlight plugin project.
• Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith joined Mozilla to start the developer tools department (or "labs," or whatever). Congrats to them, this will be fun to watch.
• I cover three briefings I've had since the last debriefing: xkoto, Service-now.com (getting in the enterprise; looking good), and a PERFMAN demo.
• People have been asking me how the crappy money-times will effect software, while I don't really have answers, one place to cut back is on upgrades. You've already for the previous version that "works," so do you need to spend to get new stuff. Potential hits here could come for Windows Vista (already under fire) and Adobe's CS4 release.
• InnoTech is tomorrow. I should be there, along with other Austin-ites. Check out Mumboe booth! If you can't spring the $35, whurley has a code for free passes for you. Also, as I noted yesterday, there are two other Austin conferences coming up: Spiceworld and the IBM Telelogic User Group conference.
• Novell announced their plans to buy Managed Objects yesterday. I give a re-cap of my write-up: Novell looks to be building out it's IT Management portfolio, and I'd expect them to buy more.
• Google's Android (on T-Mobile) should be in people's hands Friday.
• A beta of Firefox 3.1 is out. It's got fancy tab switching and "open web" friendly standards support aplenty. Check out the Hardware 2.0 blog post on the topic for some speed tests and more details.
• Finally, I followed up with Surgient this morning. Check out the short interview I did with their CTO.

Disclosure: Microsoft, Adobe, BMC, IBM, Spiceworks, and Managed Objects are clients. See the RedMonk clients list for other clients mentioned.

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

Over the past few months, I've seen an up-tick in announcements and mentions around Austin-based Surgient. I visited with them a little over a year ago to hear about their virtual lab management and hosting services. In the mean time, as we learn in the podcast, they've extended their product line to on-premise installs to help IT departments deliver self-service developer, QA, and other virtual labs.

Their motto, "Self-Service Virtualization Automation and Lab Management" is pretty damn descriptive.

If you're interested in the overall virtualization market, it's worth listening to Dave Malcolm, their CTO and Senior VP of Product Development.

Disclosure: While Surgient is a client, we talk about several companies who are, like IBM and Microsoft. See the RedMonk client list for others mentioned.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

While the big-time news was light this week, Ryan and I found plenty to talk about. We spend a fair amount of time talking about ZoHo mail and the ZoHo marketplace, the curious case of the missing RIA email client, Pandora on the Chumby, Google ads in Flash games, conferences (like PDC), and then close out by pointing out two RIA-based (or at least using) enterprise applications I recently did screencasts for, myCMDB and ZipTie.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft, Managed Objects, and AlterPoint.

This episode is in two parts: part 1 and part 2. Also, you can just subscribe to the RedMonk podcast feed to have them automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher.

Recently, I recorded a podcast with Luke Kanies and Abe Ingresoll (of Shopzilla) about Shopzilla's use of Puppet for server configuration management. Abe walks us through the decision to start using Puppet and then the roll outs the initial did as they added new data-centers.

Also, in part two of this episode, Abe asks Luke for about upcoming features and gives Luke a wish-list of features: top among them integrating with asset management systems. Luke, of course, tells Abe (and us) about what we can expect to see along those lines in upcoming Puppet releases.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and sponsored this podcast.

This episode is in two parts: part 1 and part 2. Also, you can just subscribe to the RedMonk podcast feed to have them automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher.

Recently, I recorded a podcast with Luke Kanies and Abe Ingresoll (of Shopzilla) about Shopzilla's use of Puppet for server configuration management. Abe walks us through the decision to start using Puppet and then the roll outs the initial did as they added new data-centers.

Also, in part two of this episode, Abe asks Luke for about upcoming features and gives Luke a wish-list of features: top among them integrating with asset management systems. Luke, of course, tells Abe (and us) about what we can expect to see along those lines in upcoming Puppet releases.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and sponsored this podcast.

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

This week, John and I manage to balance out time between traditional IT Management and cloud talk. While we discuss IBM's cloud announcements of earlier this week, we also talk about the idea of predictive analytics (from Tivoli, BMC, and others). Also, we talk about "virtual reality" (Second Life and friends) and how that might not be such a crock of...crock. For the fun-bunch out there, we give a short take on the IT Skeptic's book, Real ITSM, which is well worth checking out.

Disclosure: IBM and BMC are clients, as is Sun. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Today's debriefing (download directly here or subscribe to the feed for auto-downloads) goes over:

• Pandora free, streaming music is now available on Chumby (see pic above). I rarely get the amount of use I should from the Chumby - it's a shelf-gadget - but I've liked Pandora on it so far, today.
• Mono 2.0 - I've gotten several press inquires about Mono 2.0. It's an interesting language because you've got multi-platform support on both developer and deployment side with C#. People like MindTouch use this, and we'll see how Moonlight helps out with Silverlight in the RIA-wars.
• Follow-up on the Splunk customer numbers of yesterday: Splunk confirms that, yes, it is 750 paying customers and they have 250,000 downloads/users of the free stuff as well.
• Bouncing off an IBM Tivoli Predictive Analytics analyst teleconference earlier this week I talk cover what that is exactly, compare it to BMC's ProactiveNet, and have a happy coincidental connection to an interview on capacity planning for web-ops people.
• Finally, after fiddling around with the FriendFeed-like features in Facebook, I ask if anyone (in this audience) uses Facebook.

Also, thanks to John for pointing out the Debriefing podcasts: I'm glad he likes them ;)

Disclosure: Adobe, Splunk, Microsoft, IBM, BMC, and MindTouch are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Today's debriefing catches up on the debriefing items from the past few (work) days. My excuse: I was busy at the Adobe MAX judging event in San Jose last week.

Here are the items covered:

• Everyone has Windows in the cloud: Amazon, Microsoft, and 3Tera. As I've said before, the short-term deployments to look for are Exchange and SharePoint instance.
• Spring Source released dm Server, their application server based on OSGi. I mentioned the general desire for application server simplicity last week, and here's the release.
• Alex Miller noted that JDK 1.4 is End-of-Lifing (EOL), which makes me wistful for the good old days being exciting about regex in Java and JMX. (Or maybe that was in 1.3?) Also, be sure to check out Danny Coward's The Planetarium, a nice, short wrap-up of daily Java news.
• Microsoft released the free version of it's virtualization engine, Hyper-V last week, It's free! Related, but not mentioned, is IBM's all you can eat guest-instance Blade release from last week.
• This reminds me of a post on virtualization.info about the gloom and doom tone-change in virtualization coverage of late. No longer is virtualization the cure to polio, but it causes problems that need more software to help out - virtualization management! While I agree with this general sentiment, it's also clear that "create a mess, sell cleaning up the mess" marketing messaging of IT management companies is working. Congrats to them!
• Next, I mention IBM's cloud announcements today, mostly centered around Blue Cloud (the SaaS-offered document/IM collaborative site) but also nuance on their partner programs. (Ashlee Vance and his old friends at The Register> have good write-ups.)
• Pulling from a recent press release from Splunk, I note that Splunk now says it has 750 customers, with 60 in EMEA. Also, I point out how weird it is that "EMEA" is considered a single marketing entity.
• CA launched an automation, of DCA strategy/product this week.
• Finally, I point out that I've been sharing a lot of things in Google Reader, in addition to del.icio.us bookmarks. So, check out that page/feed if you like links.
• And then, finally, finally, we hear the rest of the little talk I had with Matt Ray, of Zenoss, last week. This time, on the python unconference he went to last weekend and the python scene in Austin.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, BMC, Zenoss, Splunk, SpringSource, and Sun are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

While at the Adobe MAX judging pow-wow this week, I pulled fellow judge Andre Charland (of Nitobi) aside to see what was going on his neck of the RIA woods.

We start out discussing the Ajax conference scene where there seems to be a division between tech-focused conference and business-focused conferences. Then we discuss PhoneGap: an iPhone App framework for writing native iPhone apps with JavaScript and HTML, that is, Ajax. As Andre says, they're working on Blackberry and Android versions as well.

On that note, I ask Andre what he thinks about Google Android's future. As we both say, we'd lust after something as great as the iPhone that was more open. We spend sometime bemoaning the non-open nature of the iPhone when it comes to app selection.

Andre rounds out by commenting on Microsoft's addition of jQuery in Visual Studio.

And, keep your eyes peeled for a short video I did with Andre on Nitobi.

(We recorded on a tarrace at Adobe HQ, so you can hear the street in the background and planes from time to time: how nice is it be outside, though?)

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Sun's Jacob Lehrbaum. We start out discussing the larger context that RIA technologies are finding themselves in and then narrow down to JavaFX in particular.

On that topic I ask Jacob to clear up the what and how questions around JavaFX and open source, we discuss how the JavaFX Preview release has been fairing, and then get into some of the future road-map for JavaFX.

If you're interested in more about JavaFX, be sure to check out the two videos I also did on the topic with Sun's Nandini Ramani.

Disclosure: this episode of RIA Weekly is sponsored by Sun, who's also a client.

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

This week, John "The Cloud to Everyone's Silver-lining" Willis and I start out talking about the recent spate of cloud-bashing, from Messieurs Larry and Stallman. Partly in response, I point out a nice piece from Savio Rodrigues in reply to all this trough of disillusionment talk. Bouncing off some Gnip gnews, I ask John about the revenue for things like Amazon EC2: can you really survive off $0.40/month/customer? We also discuss the implications of Windows running in the cloud, on Amazon EC2.

Mid-way through, we're joined by Zenoss's Brandon Whichard. We start out discussing the idea of "market-places" that I've been seeing getting attention of late (see yesterday's debriefing that mentioned Zoho marketplace). Brandon points out the common theme here: the return of making money off software.

Having worked with Brandon over the years, I ask him for his take on IT Management (he having departed into Identity Management for 4 years and recently come back). After John asks about the next part of the enterprise stack to be commoditized, we get into a lengthy discussion of reporting in IT Management: it never seems to do perfectly what users want, why is it that?

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as are Microsoft and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Today's debriefing (download here or subscribe to the feed) deals with two Z's primarily: a brief commentary on ZoHo Marketplace and a short update I recorded with Matt Ray, community manager for Zenoss, an IT Management platform. See the Zenoss 2.2.4 release notes for more details on the release Matt Ray talks about.

I also briefly mention the latest Flash maybe could be on the iPhone news that Ryan and I tragically missed in our RIA Weekly recording today. And, here's the cloud computing/capacity management article I mention.

Next time, I'll include the second part of the short discussion I had with Matt Ray: we talk about the python community in Austin.

As an admin note, I've included these debriefings in the main RedMonk Radio feed in addition to the PeopleOverProcess.com feed.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Zenoss.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

In this episode Ryan joins from his tour of Asia (see above), calling in from Korea. We start out talking about Ryan's observations of Japanese and Korean RIA developers and then move into a discussion of the recent announcements around jQuery.

Recapping some news of the past month, we talk about the after-glow usage of Google Chrome: while there was large initial interest, of course, we've just anecdotally seen people (like Managed Objects) suggesting its use for speed increases in using web applications.

After a few more news items - like Silverlight 2.0 -- Ryan asks me how RIAs fit into the cloud computing hype that's been going on: the answer revolves around RIAs trying to make this round of client/server computing better.

As an admin note, you've probably noticed that I've moved the podcast to it's own URL at http://www.RIAWeekly.com. The feed is the same, so you shouldn't have to change anything on the subscription front.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft and Managed Objects.

Today's debriefing podcast (download here or subscribe to the feed)mentioned: my quick take on Microsoft and Nokia using jQuery, a brief note on seeing LogLogic's new community portal and some basic tips on boot-strapping such sites, Hyperic's HQ 4.0 Beta (with lengthy commentary on IT management agents behind the firewall and JMX browsing and monitoring), cubicles vs. offices, and then a brief mention of a piece on capacity management for cloud computing that I sent off to SearchDataCenter.com today.

(There's a weird skip in the audio right at the beginning: don't worry, you didn't miss anything.)

Disclosure: Hyperic and Loglogic are clients.

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

This week John and I return to our laxidasical agenda, covering a disparate range of topics:

• I start out asking John about The IT Skeptic's recent book and new website, since John mentioned it to me the other day.
• The myCMDB screencast I recorded this week leads us to start talking about CMDBs in general. Keep your eyes peels for that screencast here soon.
• Having met with a local Planview-ite, I talk about project and portfolio management in IT Management; namely, that it ain't too sexy in IT Management but sure seems valuable as far as tracking cash. Also, this reminds me of BMC's recent ITM buy.
• John asks me my opinion of when you should and shouldn't virtualize, which launches me off into a long soliloquy on the topic. The primary suggestion is for IT departments to focus on operation efficiencies over anything else: vendors are going to figure out how to make the same amount, if not more, money, so cost savings will be temporary from that front - don't fall into Moore's Law fantasy on that front. The real benefits have to come from people saving time and being more effective.
• Having attended the IBM zSummit analyst event, I give a short update on how IBM is talking about it's cloud engagements. John and I still agree that IBM needs a cloud product, but from my perspective they've improved greatly since the "don't call it a come-back, I've been here for years" messaging at Pulse.
• Finally, I give my brief take on PacketTrap's newly released Perspective product: what I call a "general IT Management Platform," something that monitors and manages anything with an IP address, including applications and middleware.

And, there's of course more, including an opening discussion of U.B. Funkeys and kidrobot figurines at the Austin branch of the hipster bookstore Domy.

And, check out the sponsor for this episode:

At ITKnowledgeExchange.com, engage in a community of IT peers like yourself, asking and answering their toughest IT questions. Visit ITKnowledgeExchange.com today.

Disclosure: Managed Objects, BMC, and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Today's debriefing podcast (download here or subscribe to the feed) goes over a couple briefings I had - with PERFMAN and Etelos - some interesting news items from Adobe and Microsoft-land I came across, the recent Apple iPhone App Store hubbub (and get off on a long tear about open source and making money off software), and closes out with a short note on the cloud computing book I'm looking to start-up with the cloud to everyone's silver-lining.

As I noted yesterday, I'm curious to hear if you like this format or if it's terrible for you. Thanks to Mark for chiming in and the NetQoS folks for the notice'ing on yesterday's.

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

Since I haven't had the chance to blog in text form much of late, I thought I'd try a different medium: a short audio update. Download it directly here; you should also be able to subscribe to this blog's feed to download it as a podcast. In this "Debriefing" I primarily go over the conversations I had today with NetQoS, PacketTrap, and SpringSource. I also mention the rise in Surgient spottings I've been having of late.

Tell me if you like this format or think it's a waste of time.

Disclosure: SpringSource is a client.

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

As promised last week, we get back to topical news and commentary this week. John starts out talking about super computers briefly, then we discuss super computers. We then discuss Citrix (whose Santa Clara building is pictured above), 3Tera, and VMWare's recent cloud talk. I ask John how 3rd party cloud suppliers are tackling licensing for elastic deployments, we bump up against cloud standards, and we close out with me mentioning VDI stuff and asking how it "feels" to folks, like you, dear listeners.

We also squeek in talk of multi-core coding (see the Grady Booch video I mention) and how identity and IT management will, no doubt, find a lot of work all the buying up going on in the financial sector at the moment.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

In addition to talking with Zend's Andi Gutmans about the PHP/Flex announcement this morning at ZendCon, I had the chance to talk with Mike Potter of Adobe to hear their side of the story. In addition to going over the basics of the announcements - see the episode with Andi for a quick wrap-up - as you can guess, we spend more time talking about what AMF is and how it fits into the overall Flex and AIR world. Mike also gives us more detail on the tooling integration.

Additionally, we talk about new uses of Flex Mike has seen of late and talk about how appeal to the PHP community relates to the Java community relations Adobe has been doing for sometime.

Finally, having discovered that Mike is a big curling fan, I ask him to explain the game and some of the culture around it: you'll be pretty up to speed on the basics of curling once you're through with this episode ;>

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Zend.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

Andi Gutmans tells us about the RIA related announcements at ZendCon this morning. First, he goes through the announcements:

• making the Zend Studio and Flex Builder work together in the present and targeting better integration, like debugging in the future
• Adobe's work and contribution to link up AMF to Zend-land
• And then ongoing education and evangelizing around PHP and Flex

Check out Andi's write-up on his blog as well.

We then discuss how PHP is primarily used in the RIA world, namely, as a gateway to the back-end for the UI layer. Along those lines, we discuss the existing use of PHP by Flex developers - Andi says Adobe told him 25% of Flex users are using PHP.

I ask Andi to talk about the types of applications that might benefit from this Adobe/Zend partnership: he cites intranet business applications, those that include multi-media interfaces, and also the Automotive Computer Services customer example cited in the press release around the announcement.

Finally, Andi being a self-proclaimed open source person, I ask him how he resolves the closed nature of Flex, namely, the Flash player. As we discus, while Adobe has opened up so much more of Flex, there's still that closed core. Bouncing of the idea of "if it works for you use it" we talk about other UI technologies, like Silverlight, that Zend may be interested in partnering more closely with if interests arises in the PHP community.

And, the previous episode we reference at the begining was indeed, from Microsoft MIX, episode #009b to be exact.

Disclosure: Zend and Adobe are clients, as are Microsoft and IBM.

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

In this fantastically rich episode, we talk with Jane Curry, of Skills 1st, about her recent evaluation of Nagios, OpenNMS, and Zenoss. This evaluation resulted in a 148 page draft paper, "Open Source Management Options," which we glide through in this episode, hitting on the pluses and minuses of each platform from the stand-point of looking for a network management platform.

Book-ending the discussion of Jane's paper, we first discuss some early history of Tivoli and network management in general. On the other end, we briefly talk about the recent spate of virtualization news (which we'll get to next week) and talk about my recent trip to Finland, pictured above.

Also, as you'll hear at the start, this episode is sponsored by ITKnowledgeExchange.com, so go check them out for getting answers to your toughest IT questions.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as is IBM.

While I was away on vacation, James was good enough to record an RIA Weekly episode with SAP's Craig Cmehil.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

James and Craig start out talking about the upcoming SAP TechEd RIA hacker night (sponsored by RedMonk, among others). They then discuss Google Chrome and Craig's down-beat view on it, along with App Engine. James asks Craig about Silverlight uses he's seen in the field, and then they get into talking about wikis used as development platforms. Finally, they wrap-up talking about how RIAs have been used to make applications feel more human and collaborative.

Disclosure: SAP is a client, as are Adobe and Microsoft. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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

John Willis and I kick off another episode talking about the Tivoli Agent Builder training he's currently doing. This scoots me down memory lane to where I once worked on a similar hunk of software for BMC.

We then talk about the telneting and other remote command-shell applications available for the iPhone - seemingly no SSH, though. Tracking back into IBM land John asks briefly about the iLog acquisition, and we talk about a new open source event management startup in the works.

Finally, we wrap-up with me amazed at the explosion in cloud-hype chatter out there and we spend a pretty large chunk of time talking about thin desktops right before I wrap up by plugging my recent piece on collaborative IT management.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is Adobe. Check out the RedMonk client list for more RedMonk clients mentioned.

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

JavaFX Preview SDK

In this week's episode, Ryan and I got to talk with Sun's Josh Marinacci about the JavaFX Preview SDK release today. We went over the basics in the SDK and Josh gave us his view of the workflows and different features in the JavaFX SDK. See here for the interview and demo videos I mention in the podcast.

RIA News

After wrapping up the JavaFX portion of the show, we get on to talking about the patent mine-field of video encoding, SVG vs. FXD, the next Flex SDK version ("Gumbo"), and then my theory that we'll eventually see desktop web servers to better work with desktop RIAs.

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 ;>

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

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

In this episode, we're joined by Tarus Balog of OpenNMS and also Matt Ray of Zenoss. John Willis gets on half-way though after a Skype-blow-out.

We start out talking about OpenNMS, of course, and then get into some other topics:

• What "network management" means.
• Using Perl for scripting in IT Management.
• Using ZipTie for asset management.
• John's 10 enterprises using cloud computing.
• And figuring out the division of work-loads between cloud and on-premise applications.

Them's the highlights I jotted down while we talked. There's more locked up in there, like Tarus' take on cloud computing.

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client, as is AlterPoint and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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

In this episode, John and I start out talking about training for IT departments.

We then get into a discussion of Managed Objects' myCMDB for which James Governor and I had a briefing earlier this week. The first question people have been asking me - John included - is "was the IT Skeptic right?" Also, see this guest post over in McClure-land.

After this, we pull up our favorite topic clouds, briefily mentioning the "WHAO, COWBOY! SECURITY FREAK-OUT! CODE-BROWN! CODE-BROWN!" piece on the need for more security think in cloud land.

Finally, we wrap up with the idea of "Grounded Clouds," or making sure to connect up your cloud stuff with all the on-premise software that exists out there. We get into commenting that most cloud providers probably have little idea about what "enterprise workloads" are (listener challenge: how many can you name?) and thus would be hard-pressed to figure out what to even migrate to the cloud. Less cynically, we talk about the interesting write-up of Cybernet moving its payroll system to EC2. This is the kind of think we need to see more of.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as is BMC. For other RedMonk clients mentioned, see the RedMonk client list.

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.

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

In this episode, John and I use my past week of cloud conferences to - largely - explore more of the question of what monitoring and managing cloud computing would look like. We start with a brief mention of Microsoft's Hyper-V being released (congrats to them!), then get into a discussion of Hyperic's CloudStatus.

Lacing into the tail-end of that, we move to a sort of spastic run-thru of the Force.com, Velocity, CloudCamp, and Structure conference I attended this week.

Finally, John starts walking through some of the monitoring metrics he's been thinking about for cloud computing.

As ever, our recording was cursed, so pardon the technical scattle towards the end.

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

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After a long abcense, John "johnmwillis.com" Willis and I return for this episodes. We do some "admin" house cleaning at first, for example, figuring out what happened to the Zenoss jacket in the No Country for Old IT Guys series. The answer is pretty simple, turns out.

Next, I mention the iTricity/Blue Cloud announcement iTricity of this week, which gets John on a commentary about trying to figure out what the Blue Cloud stuff actually is and what it's made up of, comparing to other cloud management systems out there like RightScale, Elastra, 3Tera, the use of Puppet and others.

After getting cursed by the echo effect, I pull in Matt Ray, Community Manager for Zenoss, to join us. He gives us an update on the recently released Zenoss 2.2 Enterprise. John and I then of course ask Matt Ray a bunch of Zenoss related questions, esp. around ways people are using Zenoss and developments in the Zenoss community.

We also decide to life the ban on cloud talk after a multi-episode hiatus, so we get in all sorts of discussion around that. I note that the conversations I get into now-a-days around "The Cloud" are largely definitional ones: that is, "what exactly is this cloud stuff?" We get into what we think that answer is, but more importantly we discuss what's left untouched in IT management by all the current cloud talk. I also ask the question, are enterprise applications ready to run on these clouds?

I close out by briefly covering the recent Spiceworks 3.0 release and their new number of users: 350,000.

Thanks to Matt Ray for being Johnny on the spot and jumping in ;>

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client, as are Spiceworks, IBM, and Reductive Labs. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have this and other episodes downloaded automatically for you.

I recently talked with Reductive Lab's Luke Kaines and Google's Nigel Kersten on the topic of Puppet. First, we go through a quick overview of what Puppet does - establishing the desired configuration of machines by modeling services and then enforcing that model.

As I note in introducing Nigel, while Puppet is well known for managing servers, I haven't heard about it being used too much to manage desktops, making his expierience that much more interesting. On this note, later in the conversation, Luke paints out the many different scenarios that Puppet is used in: from servers, desktops, to new situations like virtualized installs, even on Amazon EC2.

Using Puppet at Google

Nigel has been using Puppet to manage "many, many thousands" of Mac desktops used at Google by developers and others. He tells us how he got involved in using Puppet last year during WWDC last year and quickly applied its use to managing Google Mac desktops.

How Puppet Works

I then ask Luke and Nigel to tell us how people usually get started with Puppet. Both recommend starting with a very small service to get started quickly, for example, managing sudo or SSH. As Luke explains, sudo is the command that allows users to execute other commands with administrative privileges, and managing it means ensuring that sudo itself is permissioned and configured correctly for use. Nigel says that, indeed, this is exactly the service they started with.

We then dip into the details of Puppet by talking about the modeling language that it uses. While Puppet is written in Ruby, the modeling language isn't, being more like "the psuedo-code you write down when you're planning what a program should look like," as Nigel says. On the topic of the modeling language, Nigel comments on new user's common reaction to the language, namely looking for something more script-ish. The point of the language is to simply model resources rather than describing in detail how to go about configuring those resources. As such, there's more giving up control on how configuration desires are fulfilled - focusing on the what and ignoring the how, as Luke says.

Deploying Puppet and Ongoing Use

At this point, I get curious about how Puppet itself is configured and deployed. Each machine to be managed needs the Puppet agent installed that works with the main Puppet server. Nigel also tells us how his team tracked down the unmanaged desktops in Google.

Here, we get into the ongoing use of Puppet once the initial setup is done. Luke talks about his ideas that admins and operations people would benefit from thinking more like developers - using the term "infrastructure developer." For example, Nigel talks about using a version control system to keep track of the configuration models used by Puppet and Luke talks about work that he and Andrew Shafer (at Reductive Labs as well) are doing around brining unit testing to operations.

Expanding Puppets Use in Google

Finally, while wrapping up, Nigel tells us that his group has convinced the people using CF Engine to manage Linux work-stations to start switching over to Puppet. More than just cause for Luke to do a little dance, this is interesting because, as Nigel says, it's encouraging the Mac and Linux operations groups to collaborate more which, one would hope, would increase their overall effectiveness both in human terms (reducing repetitive work across the two groups) and work-product quality (making sure both actually have the exact same effect when desired across both platforms).

Disclaimer: Reductive Labs is a client and sponsored this podcast.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatchers to have RedMonk podcasts downloaded automatically, including this one.

During RedMonk's Unconference at JavaOne this year, I had the change pull aside Mik Kersten and Ian Skerrett for a little conversation about what it's like to be a commercial company (TaskTop) operating in the Eclipse ecosystem. A large part of Eclipse's mission is to build out the open source foundation for a commercial ecosystem and I'm always curios how that works out - for example, I ask how projects draw the line between what's part of Eclipse proper and what's commercial. Also, I ask Ian how the Eclipse Equinox stuff has been going (though it's only 6 weeks since announcing, as he points out): check out his post on p2 as well. Finally, we talk about OSGi in Glassfish.

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client, as is Sun.

In this episode of RedMonk Radio, Stephen O'Grady and I talk with SnapLogic's Chris Marino and John Bennett.

Really Simple Integration

We start out with an overview of what SnapLogic is and does. As Chris says, "SnapLogic is an open source data integration framework that allows people to very quickly build data integrations that replaces the hand-coded, point to point integrations they're using today." The idea that SnapLogic bills itself under is "Really Simple Integration," which drives the choice to be a highly web-influenced architecture. Put simply, SnapLogic lets you pull data from various sources, transform them, and then provide them as a simple URL with RESTful features.

We discuss SnapLogic's choice of python as the base language which I found interesting when I first heard about it. Chris comments that the language is keyed in nicely to enabling data integrations and transformations.

Using SnapLogic

I then ask Chris to walk us through a scenario of using SnapLogic to combine two data streams together - to make a mash-up, as it were. Building on the idea that SnapLogic is very web architecture centric, Chris explains how you would define "resources," for example, reading out of a database, a file, or another source of data. If needed, there are transformation resources if needed. The two are combined together into pipe-lines that eventually spit out in the RESTful interface. As I note and then we discuss each of these components are then available to be re-used and re-combined if that makes sense.

Though SnapLogic Chris and John don't cover it in depth here - this being an audio only podcast - the Flex-based SnapLogic IDE is worth checking out a screencast of SnapLogic in action.

Getting Started with SnapLogic

Stephen then asks how developers can get started with SnapLogic. As Chris notes, SnapLogic is GPLv2'ed so you're free to go download it and start using it. He gives us another scenario for pulling data from a database and then using the SnapLogic tool to assign the results of the query to a URL, something like http://theurl/cote/database_query. Again, the idea being that your end-goal is get a URL that returns the desired data in formats like XML, CSV, plain-text, or other representations.

John adds to this the idea of building up a library of these resources to re-use with different people who're interested in consuming the data. This segways into a discussion of the meta-data features that SnapLogic has. They expose meta-data about services in a web page, describing the data service, listing related services, and then allowing you to cross-launch into the web-based design tool.

Enterprise Features

I then ask about SnapLogic's enterprise-grade features. Ostensibly, you can compare what SnapLogic does to Yahoo! Pipes, but, being targeted at businesses and on-premise use, there are, no doubt, additional management and security options. Chris notes that part of the benefit of using a web-based architecture is that SnapLogic can use the same security and access management as other web-based applications.

After discussing some cross-organizational scenarios they've seen people using SnapLogic for, I ask Chris and John to compare the way SnapLogic does data integration with the traditional methods. We then get into a mini-discussion of FTP, EDI, CSV, and other exciting data formats and data extract scheduling.

SnapLogic and WaveMaker

Pulling back to more modern times, Chris talks about working with WaveMaker at Web 2.0 Expo last week - also, some brief video here. As I'm always painting out the need for RIA layer people to get a back-end - that is content and data - this topic is interesting.

Cloud Computing

Stephen then brings up the topic of cloud computing, asking how developers who're doing cloud work could use SnapLogic. This gets to an interesting discussion about using SnapLogic not only for data integration, but also as a sort of URL-accessible "stateless compute resource": that is, submitting asynchronous or synchronous jobs to a SnapLogic layer for processing.

John adds in that the web-centric nature of SnapLogic makes it a good fit for the cross-platform nature of most cloud architectures: since everything is accessible by a URL, there aren't exactly the same cross-platform problems and re-combing two different parts of a system together is, hopefully, easier to do with URLs than direct connections over traditional APIs.

SnapLogic 2.0

Rounding up the general overview of what SnapLogic does, I ask Chris and John to go over the SnapLogic 2.0 release. John starts by saying they "completely re-engineered the product" with an eye towards performance and delivering on the really simple integration idea, for example, with the meta-data directories. Also, while being in python, they've now added a Java library and are targeted to add more languages. They've also improved the designer tool. Finally, in addition to the community edition, they've introduced different commercial packaging options: developer and enterprise editions. Chris adds that they've added several different representations that data can find itself in as well as new sources of data, such as screen-scraping web pages.

When then talk about how SnapLogic fits in as a sort of data-access middleware layer for ISVs who'd want to bundle SnapLogic into their own product. The idea here being that SnapLogic can sort out the data access issues, allowing the ISV to focus on the use of that data, for example for dashboards, business intelligence, and other ways of looking through and using data.

Since Chris was at Web 2.0 Expo last week, before wrapping up, he gives us a brief overview of his thoughts. He was suprised at the amount of enterprise people there, though he heard some carping that there was perhaps too much enterprise. As I say, it sounds like there was plenty of "2.0" there, but a mix of "Web" and "Enterprise" in front of it.

Disclaimer: SnapLogic is a client and sponsored this podcast.

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.

See detailed show notes.

Included in the feed is the audio of the video:

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While at BarCampAustin3, John Willis and I talk with Mark Hinkle, of Zenoss. Mark being the guest, we spend most of the time talking about Zenoss and the roll of open source in IT Management. We also discuss the marketing benefits of Zenoss had at barcampESM.

We then touch briefing on the OpenNMS/Cittio hoopla.

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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.

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

In the second episode, Stephen and I talk with Mozilla's Christopher Blizzard. We discuss his history in the open source world, and then get moving onto discussion of The Mozilla Foundation, in particular, Firefox. Stephen and I ask him several question to figure out what it's like working at Mozilla and then get into a conversation about mobile browser work Mozilla is doing. We end with a discussion of Firefox 3 and talk through the performance enhancements of recent betas.

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

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.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed for auto-magic downloads in iTunes or other podcatcher.

As ever, I plan on getting around to a more detailed description soon.

This week, we had to do a quick recording while I was leaving the Austin airport.

Getting a little out of the realm of IT Management, but still touching base as needed, John tells us about a visit to the Technology of Georgia Tech Summit, namely, about wikinomics.

In doing so, we get to an interesting discusion of how lowering barriers to entry helps all sorts of fun things out.

We then discuss a recent teaser post of John's, Seven Core Competencies for Enterprise Innovation.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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.

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As with last week's episode, I'l write a very brief summary for now and insert in a longer write-up later.

This week John and I start by talking about having the flu - I know, exciting. We very quickly move onto this episodes John's Tales from IT Management Past with an overview of the Tivoli Framework. I start by asking John what the deal is with people having that "ask me to tell you why it sucks" twinkle in their eye when they bring the topic up. The story is much more complex than just that, as always.

We then get into an extended, vendor name-check laden, discusion of John's recent Level 2 Cloud Provider Matrix, focusing on Mosso, Amazon, and RightScale.

I ask him about people like Bungee Labs who are working at the top, application layer of cloud computing.

Finally, we wrap up with a discussion about enterprise IT folks' perceptions that Amazon, Google, and others are running on the Post-it Note IT Process.

As always, check out the ITManagementGuys tag in del.icio.us for additional IT Management things we noticed this week but may have missed talking about.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client. Check the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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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.

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In this episode, we have special guest William Vambenepe, IT Management blogger and "architect in the application and middleware management part of Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division" as he puts it.

I'm going to try a new tact here for timelessness and write-up the lengthy description later in favor of posting the actual audio quickly. I figure this will be fine as the lengthy text is mostly for archival purposes and those subscribed to the feed will get their episode sooner rather than later without blocking on text they may or may not read. With that said, here is a brief summary:

We talk with William about what Oracle is up to in IT Management, and then, launching off a recent post of his on Microsoft and SML, get off into the tasty weeds of SML, CML, and friends. As it turns out, William was on the spec for SML, so he's a great source of info.

We then get into our usual cloud discussion, going over some companies John and I talked with this week, the need for SLAs for things like S3 going down, and other cloud management topics.

William introduces the fun topic of "the Hollywood model," except applies to IT Management rather just software development in general. I note that this seems like an interesting way to theorize about what the cloud work-culture would look like.

Thanks again to William for guesting, he was great fun and hopefully we can get him back again ;>

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

Stephen O'Grady and I finally embrace out podcasting destiny: to start a (more or less) weekly podcast on the topic of open source. While I note it's Valentine's day, Steve notes the much important occurrence that this date marks: the start of baseball.

On more open source topics, we start out discussing Sun's acquisition this week of VirtualBox. We both agree that we haven't heard an incredible amount about VirtualBox until now, but that the overall RedMonk community has told us to check it out, evidencing their interest, in the recent past. On the overall note of virtualization, we speculate that there's an interesting "family tree" of virtualization to be ferreted out: did all this PC virtualization start from the same original clutch of people?

As a to do item for ourselves, we note that we're not too clear on the proprietary vs. open source license that VirtualBox is available under.

This launches us into a discussion of Sun's dual-license (I incorrectly start out by calling it "dual source") approach to open source as account to us at the Sun Analyst Summit last week. Stephen points out that this "Fedora model" of delivering open source software is something that we'll probably see more and more of. He uses Sun's Project Indiana as an example of this model in action and an example of the difficulties it can cause with existing communities, such as the OpenSolaris community. In doing so, Steve gives a pretty nice overview of the stink-up around Sun creating an OpenSolaris distro.

Relevant to this, Steve points out that the influence of the MySQL model will probably bleed into Sun. Even more so, I note that it's my hope that the MySQL folks put together a sort of "The MySQL Way" manual to pass out to all of Sun.

Steve notes that Sun clearly has an affinity for the GPL license, MySQL being so, as well as Java, and the GPLv3's Sun Open xVM.

I then see if Steve has a snappy phrase for what Tarus Balog have called "shareware open source." In this model, a company offers a "purely" open source version of their software, but then offers a closed, proprietary "extensions" and features on-top of the open source version as a for-pay only distribution. Steve says that he would just call this the Fedora model.

Moving onto - we hope - non-Sun talk, I ask Steve to go off on what he sees happening the open source acquisition scene. Though we try to avoid Sun-talk, this topic is of course driven by Sun spending $1 billion on MySQL. When it comes to that valuation in question, Steve notes and I agree that if we knew the valuations that other potential MySQL acquires placed on the company, we might better appreciate why Sun ended up paying $1B. That is, we speculate, there must have been several other potential buyers, and Sun offered the highest price, driven by the offers that other put.

Steve then recounts a recent posting on the topic where he outlines the idea that large tech companies like to acquire innovation rather than do it themselves (my phrasing, here, for the idea). That is, better to acquire a company that's moved he ball forward, innovation wise, than rely on internal innovation at large companies.

We also get into a discussion of open source companies providing network enabled services on-top of their open source stacks as a route to monetization. On that note, Steve prompts me to discuss the Spiceworks model of making money while giving away software. The key to the general idea is to get a huge amount of volume when it comes to your install base and then focus on monetizing a relatively low amount of that large volume. The large the overall number, the more money there is in even "small" conversion rates. Spiceworks follows this model by giving away a free software stack to a very targeted demographic - IT admins at small companies - and then selling that channel of attention to advertisers.

Google, of course, is another version of this high volume, low conversion model in that Google gives away it's services (largely) for free and collects money through ads on a small percentage of all of the transactions between Google and it's user-base.

Sun's model is, as I call it, "the pink dot" model wherein Sun's looking to get as wide a distribution of Sun IP across the world as possible, and then focus on turning some profitable percentage of those dots "green": getting cash for them.

In noting another open source "volume embedded platform," Sleepycat (acquired by Oracle several years ago), we mention that Mike Olson (former CEO of Sleepycat, and then Oracle VP) has recently left Oracle, hoping to take some time off to ski. After the skiing, we both hope to see what exciting adventure Mike's up to next.

On the note of this volume/pink dot strategy, I note that I've often worried about the sustainability of an open source model for smaller companies. Reflecting on discussing I've had with people recently, including Tarus of The OpenNMS Group, I note that as long as you're fine with working a fair amount, it seems like a profit can be squeezed out from that model.

As we note at the end, we'll hopefully be back next week, shooting for weekly episodes. More importantly, we'll try to hustle up some guests for you, dear readers.

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

Hosted by John Willis and myself, as always.

Download the episode directly, or subscribe the podcast feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to auto-magically get each episode.

The itmanagementguys Tag

First, we throw out a little pro-top for you: if you want to see a good idea of what we'll talk about each week, check out the del.icio.us tag "itmanagementguys". Also, if you want to stick something on our radar, feel free to tag it with itmanagementguys yourself and we'll consider it.

Acquia, Drupal, and CMS

John then jumps into a post from Acquia's Jeff Whatcott on the continuing quest of Acquia to shake off the category of CMS from Drupal. On the topic of open source, I mention this year's funny statement from Gartner on open source: by 2012, 80% of software will use open source. As I summarize, if you're not using open source by now, make sure your boss doesn't know 'cause you should be fired.

We get back to the topic of Drupal being a CMS or not. In summary, there is some truth to the idea that platforms like Drupal, django, and Apache Cocoon aren't "CMS" systems in the classic sense, but are used for largely the same goals: making public web sites, if not with richer "write" abilities.

What up with VCs Hating Services?

And then we launch into an extended discussion of the VC/Open Source services paradox/lie. As I note, I've discussed this idea with several people. What is it? In summary, the train of thought is that telling a VC that you're going to base your business on providing services and support is VC poison. If you're an open source company, VCs don't want your money-pipe to be based on humans doing things.

And yet! It seems that most cash-outs of VC funded open source companies are based primarily on the acquiring company wanting to provide services around the open source project. For example, Sun buying MySQL for $1 billion dollars. Not to mention the billions of dollars of revenue that companies like IBM, Sun, Accenture, and others make from services. More pertinent to the topic at hand, a huge amount of IT Management sales are around services: getting a legal copy of the software is a tiny part of the monetized elements up getting an IT Management suite up and running.

In short: it doesn't seem to make sense that services, which can generate billions in revenue, are VC poison. The paradox/lie here, though, is that most open source companies base their business models on services and support. What exactly do VCs think is going on otherwise? But what do we know?

Applications in the Cloud

Next, we jump into the "what and how are applications going to be run in the cloud" bucket on the topic of Google Team Edition. Team Edition allows people to create Google Apps installs around email addresses instead of domains, like how you identify your company and school affiliations in Facebook. I get all excited about this being a way to subvert IT, but John reminds me that he who controls the network controls the cloud: the IT department can just block access to google.com or whatever. Darn!

John's Cloud Layers

With our foots in the door of our cloud-crazy talk, we jump into the cloud portion of our show. John mentions and we discuss his 0-3 level analysis of what cloud computing is. Without summarize the entire post here (just go read it!) the point is that there's virtualization at the bottom, some smattering of "grid" through-out, then a total un-caring of your IT's physical layout - topology even! - towards the top, with a very service oriented (vs. systems/software) perspective on things at the top. Or "SaaS" as we used to call it a scant 60-90 days ago.

At the high level of cloud computing - a new way of running IT - I add more color to the tragic tale of the "Little 4" phrase, namely why I put openQRM/Qlusters in there originally. Part of my thinking was that the openQRM method of managing IT seemed new at the time and thus, while not a platform for IT Management as we know it, it was something new and different at a platform layer. But, as I admit, I was probably also just charmed by whurley.

We then get into a discussion of how provisioning plays into managing a cloud/grid. John recalls promises of cloud-by-provisioning from Tivoli years ago. Then I launch into a painful metaphor of pass-by-value and pass-by-reference for two different ways of managing clouds: sort of provisioning vs. federation. Even I have no idea what I was talking about.

John then tells us about checking out Cassett in reference to his cloud-craziness. Both them and 3Tera, he says, promise a way to deliver "utility computing." They both seem to be promising the same results. While John doesn't quite know which one is better, or whatever, his guy tells him that more closed systems - perhaps the pass-by-reference metaphor - would work better as there's less moving parts.

Supercomputers

At this point, I segway into "the Parade section of the newspaper" and bring up some Cray talk I had recently. First, I was astonished that there were still Crays around - who uses the term "super-computer" anymore, right? Second, I learned that Crays being built today are massive: several sizes bigger than my house. Just one computer, bigger than my house! And, there is no more sexy phrase in systems than "vector processing."

John then tells us about his time at Exxon where they purchased the first Cray for commercial use. Apparently, there was no I/O system on the Cray, so Exxon couldn't load up all of their seismic data from tape. He recalls a call with Cray, including Seymour Cray, where the Cray folks were confused as to why they wanted to load data from tapes.

Hadoop, MapReduce, and IT/Business Alignment

What with super-computers out of the way, I admit to John that I have no idea why he cares about all this Hadoop stuff. How does this apply to IT Management?

The summary is that all the fancy greek talk of Hadoop reduces - HELLO! - down to being able to quickly search over massive data sets. What's important here is that previously un-usuable information streams are (potentially) usable if you "index" them with Hadoop. The point here is that IT can provide the business side of the house with new sources of information to make decisions: "how are our sales doing for widget X world-wide, right now?" and so on.

John tells us about how Rackspace is using Hadoop to look over mega-sized mail-logs. The connection here is to start thinking about how this stuff gets you new ways of doing IT Management, if not the holy grail of "IT/Business Alignment" - never mind the blinky lights, give me the data!

As early examples, you can look towards Splunk, Paglo, LogLogic, Prism Microsystems, and others. See James Governor's coverage of Log Management as a category for more thinking.

When it comes to being able to do something with stupid amounts of data, more high-powered, direct advertising comes to mind. For example, as I say, most of the reason money-hogs are interested in Facebook is the huge amount of data about people available. People are expressing interests and passions, group affiliations and friendships. For a money-hog, this means an easier way to find reasons to get cash from these people. Do you like summer sausage? Does your boyfriend like summer sausage? Why not buy some! All that Gillmorian Attention/Gesture stuff just might be onto something, if, you know, spam-y.

Sun openxVM

Getting towards the end of the show, I give a review of Sun's openxVM platform and strategy. I was most recently PowerPoint-stuffed at the Sun Analyst Event last week, so I brain-dump on the Sun IT Management plans.

Whatever Happened to Chargebacks?

We round out the show with another arcane topic from the past: chargebacks. Chargebacks are essentially internal billing between the IT department and "the business." As I note, it seems like charge-backs aren't as precise as they used to be probably, as John points out, because we no longer have the accounting ease that centralized mainframes bring.

Disclaimer: Sun is a client, as are LogLogic and Prism. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned above and in the podcast.

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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.

This week we starts out with a review of John's monitoring panel at barcampESM. As he's said in other forums, he was pleased with the result. I then mention announcements and whitepapers around the Common Model Library (CML), which is a further evolution of the SML family of IT Management data models. There's a large cross-vendor effort, similar to the CMDBf, but there doesn't seem to be any open source folks - who knows if they weren't invited, or weren't interested.

We move into out cloud talk episode of the episode, with me mentioning that I'm seeing the emergence of a bunch of "EC2 Juniors" sprouting up, like Rackspace's recent virtualization announcement. John tells us he's been digging into cloud talk quite a lot - into Mosso, Rackspce, and 3Tera.

We touch on 3Tera briefly, who John talked with recently. Recalling a past briefing with them, I explain that they're basically cloud-in-a-box software that allows you to build your own grid, or build it out somewhere else. John then clarified that Rackspace's offering is just to run your VMWare server, not quite the same as running a cloud for you. Mosso, on the other hand, has a more virtualized, grid-driven setup.

I ask John what he seems people running in the cloud - what type of applications. So far it seems like public web site applications like WordPress, drupal, and web servers. Before digging too much more into that discussion - which we pick up later - we dig into 3Tera more. 3Tera creates and sells the software to run a grid along with the management console for setting up and tying together components in the grid. You buy the software, and either install it in your own data center, or one of the data center providers that 3Tera works with. There's lots of drag-n-dropping to combine together load-balancers, databases, and web services.

After John's detailed discussion of what 3Tera does, I jump back to the discussion of what people will run on these grids - what "work-loads" people can move to it. I re-cap the briefing Stephen O'Grady and I had a while ago with 3Tera and the frustrating we had around this question. We were thinking, sure, this grid stuff sounds great, fantastic. But, let's say we run an SAP install on-top of it, something goes wrong, we call up SAP support, and the first thing they ask us is "what operating system are you running it on?" If we tell them it's some grid technology they've never heard of, we'll probably get the support boot.

The point is, when it comes to enterprise, business software, there's a lot of work to be done now to get existing business software to run, supported on all this new cloud stuff. Currently it seems to me we've got great technologies for running web site stacks and infrastructure for ISVs building out their own software. But for business users, for "enterprises" running other people's software, there's a huge gap in the glue-tooling between existing business software and being able to run it "in the cloud." We don't have any idea what this would look like, whether it's one of "the children of the VNC" type applications of what, but there doesn't seem to be anyone working on the problem.

My suggestion, of course, is that this is a chance for a business or two: a framework that retrofits existing software to run in the cloud. Sure, the "real" solution is for software companies to write their new software "grid native," but that'll take a long time. Check out EnterpriseDB's cloud edition as well.

John points out that this retooling could accelerate if Wall Street finally gets wise to the cost savings available by running stuff in the cloud. His premise is that there's a waste in the duplication of running data-centers, on-premise things. But, if investors got wind of how much savings were available - if Mad Money Jim Cramer were yelling about it and pressing red bonkers-sound buttons - the IT world would figure it out right quick. We joke that this would be "the ultimate business/IT alignment."

The reward, as we get into, is the promise of cheaper and easier to run IT. On the face of it, this means less people. While good for "business," bad for those people who get laid of. I ask John, "what about the IT guys out of jobs?" and as he points out, technology has always seemingly reduced jobs and at the same time required lots of people to run. That is, it'll probably be all right. More specifically, by way of anecdote, John says there's so much "busy work" in IT now-a-days, that sopping up that busy work - like getting a developer Oracle instance spun up - is the real goal, which would free up people to do more important work, which there's no lack of.

I then ask John what he meant by an earlier comment along he lines of ESM not going anywhere. He clarifies that he means nothing much is going to change in ESM, and then tells us about Doug McClure's idea for a Systems Management Database. Essentially, a unified console and central "brain" that sucks in monitoring data from all sorts of different agents, devices, and everything else - a layer above everything else that creates on place to look. While this sounds like what ESM is supposed to do in the first place, the slight difference that I glen is that the SMDB is supposed to unify the fragmented groups and tools that exist in IT shops. Rather than assume one tool will do away with those different silos, it instead accepts them and provides a new view of them.

We round up the the episode by talking about the recent Hyperic release, touching on performance fixes and Nagios importing. I note that it seems like all of the open source IT management platform folks are gearing up their performance chops to go for the enterprise management space rather than just the mid-market they're ostensibly known for. On Nagios, I paint out that the Nagios importing could enable either replacing or working with Nagios instals.

Finally, John asks about the RedMonk 5th Birthday party next week in SF - come on by for a drink if you like! And then he points out RedMonk's recent award as part of LinuxWorld's 2008 Open Source Business Leaders series.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk clients list for a RedMonk clients mentioned in the podcast.

John Willis moderates this panel from barcampESM '08 in Austin Texas on the topic of monitoring, if it matters, how it connects to "higher level" IT management ideas, and overall discusses the current state of monitoring in the IT management world.

The panelist are a nicely diverse set from Zenoss (Erik Dahl), OpenNMS (Tarus Balog), IBM Tivoli (Heath Newburn), and BMC (Chip Holden).

Disclaimer: IBM, Zenoss, and BMC are clients.

This week, we're lucky enough to bring an episode recorded face-to-face. John came to Austin for barcampESM, so we recorded this up in his hotel room with a mute Doug McClure thumbing through trade-rags in the background and watching the "priceless" moments. As I was leaving the "studio," oddly enough, a hotel dude came by to drop off some cookies. What up with that?

You can download the episode directly or get it by subscribing to the podcast feed.

As an admin note, for those who'd like to just subscribe to the IT Management podcast, I've created a new feed that will download only those episodes.

Show Notes

My notes this week will be much more clipped than last week - hopefully I'll be responsible enough to fill them out later.

First, we talk about some DevCampTivoli news. Namely, John explains why he thinks they'll be successful in getting the "closed source" people to contribute. More importantly, he points out, they're going to skip all the time to install and setup the software in question by using virtual images.

We then get to a conversation about CIM and other DMTF standards. John says he found a nice looking application modeling standard that appears to have disappeared. I ask John what the deal has been with the industry not widely using DMTF standards, and this launches into a nice tale of old, starting with Tivoli, going through Microsoft, and ending with Dell. As I mention to John, it looks like the DMTF's Winston Bumpus will be at barcampESM, so perhaps we can get some DMTF talk going on. Also, see the interview I did with Winston a little while ago.

We also continue our discussion of cloud computing, talking about 3Tera briefly and then discussing John's use of EC2 in training and for running his website.

Finally, we end up by talking about the biggest open source news of the week, Sun's $1B buy of MySQL. Being the IT Management podcast, we dig around for how this could effect the open source companies in IT Management. In summary: if there's an open source buying frenzy, it'll be good for some of those guys.

More importantly, we reach back to a conversation we had at lunch about how open source IT Management folks respond to the question: "what do you do for BSM?" Most of them, John says, seem to be at the dashboard level of BSM tooling. We then talk about what the open source and closed source folks in IT Management have to offer each other. The open source folks, as they've shown, can move incredibly fast and innovate both when it comes to technology and business. The closed source folks have maturity and stronger BSM folks. Back to the "2008 will be big for open source," both of us say how we hope at least one of The Little 4 and Big 4 get together and see what benefits can be had by combining the best of both worlds.

As we mention in the podcast, we're going to try to do some recordings at barcampESM - hopefully John's panel at least.

The name of the virtualization company in Austin who's name I forgot is Surgient. Also, in the area of names we forgot, thanks to Damon Edwards for the kind words on episode 001.

Disclaimer: Sun and MySQL are clients, as it IBM. Check RedMonk's client list for other clients mentioned in the podcast and above.

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

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.

In this first episode of what I'm planning on being a weekly or semi-weekly podcast, John Willis and I launch the IT Management Podcast. As you know, dear readers, I have an unshakable interest in IT Management. It's always been a pleasure talking with John in the past (RedMonk Radio #42, #44, video 1, and video 2), so I thought we'd cook up a sort of commentary/news round-up show as Ryan and I have done with RIA Weekly.

If you've got things to contribute, topic or guest suggestions, or would like to be on yourself, feel free to drop me a line.

So, enjoy the show. Here are some detailed notes if you'd rather skim:

barcampESM

We open up by taking about barcampESM, an even John has been working on with whurley and Mark Hinkle for sometime. The final dates are the night of Jan 18th and then the day of 19th at J Black's in Austin, on 6th Street. John tells us about a panel discussion he's planning on monitoring; it looks like we got Chip Holden to be the BMC panelist.

Monitoring

Speaking of monitoring, I ask John where he sees monitoring's value in the IT management landscape. As both of us relate, it seems like most people de-value the place of monitoring in favor of the higher level IT management tasks. By "de-value" we mean, of course, spend less time and money. The perception is that monitoring is "done" and that it's largely a commodity. While this may be true, it could also be the case folks have cut too close to the bone.

John points out, of course, that now that we have plenty of higher level IT management functionality, the underlying data becomes even more important. As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out."

"The Cloud"

With the renewed interest in The Cloud from all the discussion of The Big Switch (no little amount from here, dear readers), we spend quite a bit of time talking about what Cloud Computing means for IT Management. As John says, "Cloud computing...what are we supposed to do? You know, what is ESM supposed to do?"

John talks about his attempts to get Google to tell him about their IT Management technology and practices are as sort of an answer to his question of the role of the IT department when everything's behind a URL.

We don't have any definitive answers, but we have plenty of speculation and possibilities to throw out.

While it'd be great to see people like Google and Amazon tell the world more of how they do Cloud IT Management, we both agree that, really, that knowledge is a large part of Cloud Provider's trade-secrets: the "closed" part of their otherwise "open" systems.

Drupal & Acquia

Since I know that John is a nut for Drupal, I lurch out a bit from talking about IT Management o discuss Drupal and the new open source startup, Acquia with him, written up earlier this week.

While Drupal is a bit difficult to get up and running compared to things like WordPress, John says that it's proven incredibly powerful for him. Indeed, he's been looking towards using Drupal as an IT Management knowledge base.

I ask John if there's a good chance for doing Drupal management, and he points out that like FiveRuns, if there's a community of users putting stuff into production, then, sure, there's room - maybe even a good market - in tooling the management for Drupal.

FiveRuns

Related to FiveRuns, I point out a recent announcement from FiveRuns partnering with Atlantic Dominion Solutions (not a UK hosting company, that was another announcement) to help manage rails installs in Amazon EC2. That's the first time I've heard of someone doing management of EC2 instances - though, I'd assume there's others.

Nagios Checkin

I ask John if he's heard anything about how going commercial has gone for Ethan Galstad of Nagios. John just points out the partnership with GroundWork, but says he hasn't heard anything else.

A New Website for the Open Management Consortium

Next we discuss the happenings over at the OMC website, namely a new site with forums and blogs. As I note later in the episode, things seemed to have died down a bit on the OMC mailing list, but there's been a noticeable spike in activity with the new site launch.

Does ITIL Mater?

Spring-boarding off some recent activity in the new OMC around the topic, I ask John to tell us about the continued discussion around his does ITIL matter? discussion in the Tivoli mailing list and elsewhere.

As with most "schools of thought" that include certifications, John says he's found that people who are certified tend to be ITIL supporters, where-as newly exposed people tend to be skeptical of it.

Trying to figure out how much ITIL is actually out there, I ask John if he's ever walked into a client's shop and thought, "ahhh, ITIL!" finding a place that's gotten themselves all ITIL'ed up. Very quickly he says, "no." But, he's seen success with CMDBs and change management. This tends to match with what I hear and see: help desks and CMDBs are what's out there for the most part.

We talk about the long schedule that IT Management standards and practices tend to go on. Unlike web standards where the standards lag behind the in-use reality, IT Management standards tend to be way ahead of their actual implementation.

Spiceworks 2.0

Moving away from the "E" in "ESM," I talk about the recent release of Spiceworks 2.0. Of note is their user base number of 200,000 and the "product pages" they've included. Product pages center around devices, software, and other "IT Assets." Spiceworks attaches reviews, user comments, and trouble-shooting to these product pages, building up a tasty looking database of IT data.

Rumors!

John points out a recently Motley Fool piece on Microsoft buying Yahoo! (re-viving that old story), which makes me recall a recent post from Ryan Shopp outlining a scenario of Cisco buying BMC. As I point out, the "who'll buy BMC" parlor game is a favorite one among IT Management folks.

Predictions

We round out the show with predictions for 2008:

John's Dance Partners

John has been thinking about combinations of people in 2008, like:

• Oracle, EMC, Dell
• HP, Citrix, SAP
• Amazon, RedHat, BMC

As John says, all it takes is one nutty combination like above to kick-start a whole chain of them. Kind of like we saw a BI acquisition spree last year.

Who knows if this whole "Cloud" thing will pay off or if it'll just be blue skies in '08.

He ends saying "Google...everybody," which raises my favorite, perennial topic of "when is Google going to really go nuts for Enterprise stuff." Put another way, John asks, "who's gonna own the cloud for the enterprise." Who's JP Morgan Chase going to go to? John says IBM is the best well positioned at the moment, but we both agree that you (someone like Google or Amazon) can acquire Enterprise feel goods.

The Little 4

I lay out a prediction that some of The Little 4 will either slow down or get acquired by an existing vendor. While I'm not saying that they're in a bad spot, several of them have been around long enough that they're entering the debutant time of their lives.

More, big tech companies like to innovate by acquiring, and the open source IT Management companies have to look pretty attractive for innovation, but more importantly for a leaner, quicker (see Zenoss' recent switch to 30 days cycles) way to deliver monitoring and management.

We spend quite a bit more time talking about acquisition dynamics in the space and John's feel that some folks at large folks still don't "get" paying for "free" software.

Disclaimer: IBM, BMC, Spiceworks, Zenoss, GroundWork, FiveRuns, and SAP are client.

This week Ryan Stewart and I talk with André 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 André

Well, exciting and stressful are synonyms, right?

André 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.

André 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, André 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: André 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 André 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. André 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

André 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. André 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 André 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. André 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, André 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 André for calling in!

Disclaimer: Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are clients.

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.