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 cover the RIA news items of the week and discuss the discussion around the word "workflow" in the phrase "design/developer workflow." Before getting to the second item, we cover and comment on the news:

• A short review of Bruce Eckel's and James Ward's First Steps in Flex (which I think we incorrectly referred to as Thinking in Flex).
• AIR 1.5 was released for Linux, but there's an annoying hiccup.
• Seadragon Mobile - use Deep Zoom on your iPhone. Coté thinks it's pretty cool: check out the screenshots.
• Ryan asks if there's been any JavaFX news since it's been out, which there hasn't been, but putting on the apologist hat, hey, it's the holidays. He also points out a nice piece briefly summarizing the RIA landscape at the moment from Redmond Developer.

Finally, we end up talking about a point James Governor has been making: that word "workflow" is pretty terrible, it's more like "designer/developer collaboration." This leads to a discussion of user experience in RIAs (or the lack thereof).

Happy holidays!

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, Microsoft, and Sun are clients. Adobe sponsored this podcast. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

(Warning: we manage to let slip 2 or 3 four letter words in this episode, so be warned if that offends.)

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:

For this special episode of the IT Management podcast, we go over our whacky predictions for 2009. John and I lucky to be joined by Dave Rosenberg (see also his Open Sources podcast with Matt Asay), self described "man about town," and IT Management Podcast regular Matt Ray, community manager at Zenoss.

Very quickly, we first review the 2008 whacky predictions (from our first show, how cute!), all of which were, indeed, whacky save one, which was a sort of timid prediction.

And then it gets into the whack-job free-for-all with all four of throwing out our tech world predictions and discussing each. Sprinkled throughout the truly whacky predictions (Apple buys Sun), we have some pretty rational ones (Eucalyptus and Cloudera becoming big deals).

Here's an incomplete preview, whacky and sane:

• Apple launches its own cloud
• A net-celeberty lives off their iPhone for a year
• US government web-sites get APIs
• Amazon starts a marketplace for virtual goods
• A major cloud data break occurs
• Google buys Yahoo! Or maybe Viacom
• Open source startups begin to consolidate as they miss numbers
• The return of paying for software, even at low cost. App Store!
• Amazon buys DHL
• Netbooks become low-cost thin clients

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Cloudera, and Zenoss are clients, as was Dave's former employer, MuleSource. 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:

 

We join Amazon EU, launching AWS in Europe. This gets us into a discussion about the geographic importance of cloud computing when it comes to performance and regulation.

This gets us into a recent conversation I had where a vendor had been trying to convince a customer to get into way over-priced cloud computing. Sometimes, on-premise will be just fine, not to mention cheaper.

I bring up a recent write-up by Dave Rosenberg about using cloud and SaaS at one of his past companies, and then John tells us about listening in to the recent Oracle on AWS call. We re-cap the Zoho CloudSQL news as well.

As I was at Cisco C-Scape this week, I go over the cloud and IT related content and impressions I gathered over in San Jose.

Mixed in somewhere here we talk about counter-intutive interview tips like: something they want you tell them the question is confusing because that's what your job is going to be like.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for 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:

In this episode, Ryan and I are joined by Sun's Danny "The Janitor" Coward to follow-up on last week's JavaFX news (be sure to check out Danny's excellent The Planetarium for fine Java client news).

As you can imagine, we talk about JavaFX for the first part of the show. As Danny is at Devoxx (née Javapolis) we ask him about the RIA talk going on there as well. We then briefly talk about what's going in on Java 7, the next major version of Java.

In this context, I talk again about one of my favorite emerging RIAs, Bluray add-ons and networked applications, like those found on Disney's Sleeping Beauty Bluray release which I saw a talk about at this week's Cisco C-Scape.

In the news portion of the show we go over:

• Appcelerator's release of Titanium, an AIR competitor.
• The Adobe/SpringSource partnership around hooking up AMF to the Java would via the Spring Framework.
• Google Native Client of which Ryan and I are a bit perplexed by, but then Danny (I believe) helps us out by pointing out it's just another platform for application deployment.
• Microsoft MIX is tragically scheduled to over-lap over SXSW Music this year. That said, as I advice, you should start working on your justifications to expense a trip to SXSW interactive this year to hang out with - I mean, "network" with - the round-corner cool kids who do all your RIA thought leadership and use. Feel free to contact me if you need some advice - really!

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 sponsored this podcast. Appcelerator and Microsoft are clients as well. See the RedMonk client list for other RedMonk clients.

Photo credit Enigma Photos

My guest on this podcast is Chris Preist. Chris is a principal scientist at HP Labs, based at HPL's European research centre in Bristol, UK. HP Labs and Forum for the Future, together published a report called Climate Futures(6.7MB pdf). This report goes through 5 possible scenarios for how the world will respond to the climate changes we are seeing, or as they say on the Forum for the Future page:

Climate Futures analyses the social, political, economic and psychological consequences of climate change and describes how different global responses to the problem could lead to five very different worlds by 2030.

Chris was one of the authors of the report so I asked him to come on the show to discuss it and what followed was a fascinating discussion.

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:

I finally nab our man Ryan Stewart for this episode. We catch up on all of the Adobe MAX news, getting Ryan's takes and highlights. For example, we spend a lot of time talking about Alchemy and how it should/could be used to extend the Flash Player. I also ask Ryan about companies like Cynergy, Universal Mind, and EffectiveUI - the sort of the third-party consulting shops building up in the Adobe RIA ecosystem.

We then talk about the release/GA of JavaFX 1.0, due out this week sometime. Both of us are actually impressed with the technology itself and potential developer-base that Adobe has.

Finally, we close out talking about Zoho CloudSQL. Interesting in it's own right, I point out how it's a new back-end for RIAs to build on-top of, in addition to all the existing PaaSes of course.

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 sponsor this podcast. Sun is a client as well.

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:

For this special episode, Coté is joined by fellow RedMonker James Governor to talk about James' take on Adobe MAX EU, in Milan, Italy. There weren't any new announcements, but it's good to get James' unique take on what Adobe is up to. For example, we spend the first part of the episode talking about ColdFusion and how Adobe is and could be giving it a second-wind. We also talk about the speech to text functionality in CS4 Premier Pro and pull back to some old software development theory with Conway's Law.

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.

(Photo from Ben Ostrowsky.)

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast.

John and I get together at the beginning of this week to make up for last week's holiday skipage. While there's not a lot of news items & announcements, we manage to pull out a nice 90 minutes of several topics (out of order):

• John is putting together Cloud Camp Atlanta, Jan 20th, 2008.
• Sun is supporting Alice, an educational programming environment that John digs.
• On the topic of Sun, we do the favorite parlor game of playing "what will happen to Sun." See Stephen O'Grady's excellent write-up on that topic, as mentioned, as well.
• The Groundwork Opensource/HP pricing dust-up. We spend a long time analyzing both sides, and generalize on the theory that it's always best to argue against numbers with words.
• Online gambling, possible data-analysis in the cloud, and how that all relates to the cyberpunk, data-haven thriller Islands in the Net.
• A brief comment on my Data Center Automation and Cloud call with CA this morning.
• The forming of a new power-center in the IT department: The Hyper-Visor Police. Just like the feudal kingdom of the DBA, it's clear that there'll be the group that controls virtualization and uses that control for much power in the department. I for one welcome out new IT overlords.
• How virtualization is making operating systems less of a constraint and more of a piece of middle-ware, or, The Big Blog Theory of Virtualization.
• We talk about Doug McClure's recent podcast series (check one here or just subscribe to his feed), which gets us into an extended discussion of what a "transaction" is vs. a "services" and how that all relates to top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to IT management.
• Finally, I mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski's Second Choice is a good, non-IT book for understanding what "thinking strategically" means using the example of American foreign policy.

Also, check out the sweet potato casserole recipe John mentioned, and, as I mentioned, Royer's out in Round Top, Texas - damn good food and pies.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned above and in the podcast.