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.

Welcome to the it@cork pre-conference podcasts. In this podcast series, kindly sponsored by GreenMonk the Energy and Sustainability practice of Industry Analyst firm RedMonk, we are talking to some of the speakers in the upcoming it@cork Green IT Conference. In this week's podcast, I interviewed René Wienholtz. René is the CTO of Strato - Strato is one of the largest hosting co.'s in the world and they are completely carbon neutral - without buying any carbon offsets! René will be speaking about how he managed this at the conference and I asked him to come on the podcast to give us a quick preview of his presentation. Download the entire interview here (8.6mb mp3)

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.