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, while Ryan was living in the future (or, "down under" if you prefer), I had on a guest co-host, Charles Lowell. You may know him from one of my other podcasts, DrunkAndRetired.com. I had Charles on because he's something of a UI specialist and has done much work with Swing, Ajax, and dabbled plenty in Flex and JavaFX. I wanted to take this chance to get one developer's perspective on building rich user interfaces and, as you'll see, some specific RIA frameworks and issues as well. Here's roughly what we discussed:

• Charles tells us his development history, esp. with respect to to UI's, like Swing and Ajax
• He tells us how his passion for ruby was translated into his current passion for JavaScript and the different UI glue-work he's been doing over the recent users.
• I ask Charles to detail the work he did at is company, The Front Side, with Freestyle, the Ajax UI->web server protocols and state sharing. We discuss the problems with the framework they developed, particularly with storing state on both the client and server side and how that makes garbage collecting a pain.
• Now an indie-programmer, Charles works with several different clients developing UI's. Recently, he tried to pitch using JavaFX to a client and he tells us how that went - not too well.
• This gets us into a discussion of JavaFX and the technical and business reasons to use or not use it. He likes focusing on JavaFX as a way to do Swing better.
• More generally, we talk about The Market's desires when it comes to RIAs and rich-UI functionality. Charles is see a lot of pull for UI functionality that's difficult to deliver in Ajax, but easier in more traditional desktop GUIs or, we hope, RIAs.
• Getting to the only, major, even slightly-related RIA news of the week, I ask Charles how Oracle buying Sun purchase effects his view of JavaFX.

One items we didn't cover was Adobe's "Strobe" project. If you're interested, I gave a small amount of commentary in this week's Numbers post. Ryan has a small write-up as well.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Sun and Microsoft are clients as well.

Kicking off our Agile Executive podcast series, I talk with Clarke Ching. We start out discussing two of Clarke's books Rocks Into Gold and a longer version he's working on. We then discuss the relation of Goldratt's The Goal.

I ask Clarke to talk to his point that breaking things into smaller chunks end ups costing less. He says:

• In bigger projects (vs. smaller ones), we end up building more low-priority things, thus "wasting" time
• With a focus on delivering small chunks that work we get higher quality, rather then wiring up lower quality stuff

After this, I ask Clarke how he's sorted out the boot-strapping problem of getting Agile started in organizations. He recommends:

• The Weetabix Sell - selling the benefits, not the ingredients or "process"
• Set expectations that it's going to be hard work
• find quick wins, preferably "without doing anything"

Finally, I ask Clarke to give us a report on the Agile scene across the pond, which he does nicely.

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 got over lots of mobile related news, sprinkled with some social networking items:

• Adobe/Facebook deal - somehow I missed the MySpace Silverlight SDK - Cf. Tim Anderson's commentary.
• Silverlight Mobile talk over at Silverlight Hack - Good round-up of the history of Silverlight Mobile from TechEd 2007. Sounds like release is a year away. Speculation about it taking longer. Nice discussion in the comments.
• Also, .Net Services demo from MIX09 up. See also the Steven Martin overview.
• CrunchGear Palm Pre Demos - several nice videos demo'ing applications like Pandora. Notice the background running, notifications bar, etc.
• PhoneGap wins a Web 2.0 Launchpad award.
  
• RIM App World - Blackberry app store - I have no Blackberry, so I have no idea. "RIM expects about 1,000 applications to be available this week, with more in the future. App World is initially available for BlackBerry users in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. Users have to first download a smartphone application to connect to the App World Web site, via cellular or Wi-Fi links."
• RIA Download sizes from Mike Chambers - how much does this matter? Ryan says that Adobe does studies on completed downloads, and there is a significant drop-off at some point.
• Any Korea RIA action in Seoul? Ryan says that Korea is way ahead of everyone else.
  
• Ryan's last post on ZDNet.

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 sponsors this podcast and is a client, Microsoft is a client as well, as is Sun.

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:

This week, John and I are back on Skype for That Fine Audio Quality. We spend most of our time talking about all the cloud news this week:

• Manifesto Gate - John gives an overview of the hoopla around the The Open Cloud Manifesto. It's trying to level the playing field and why would people like Amazon who have the high hill want to level down? The Conspiracy Theories fly! Microsoft vs. IBM vs. The Grays!
• This gets into a brief history lesson on cloud standards: OVF virtualization container stuff at the DMTF, Elastra XML markup, 3Tera, the CCIF.
• Would the CCIF transform into some sort of Cloud Foundation? All things aside, John says this was a very productive week. They seem to be putting together a legal entity and a website. Also, you outta sign up for the CCIF Google Groups thing, the Cloud Forum.
• This draws out a comparison from me to the open document world where you get down to subjective arguments about complexity and openness.
• What's the IP for APIs? This gets us into a side-discussion about IP in IT. Principals or profit? We get into a long discussion about the "morally right" thing to do with IP in software. While we do an elephant's load of arm-chair lawyering, we predictably get nowhere but more loads.
• We discuss the IT Skeptic's recent comment on private clouds, namely, his pointing out the need for re-training for the private cloud: "Great: when cloud techs are two a penny, we'll look at it. Not only do we need to retrain our developers to rearchitect our existing core systems, and our testers to test stuff they can't see and which is different every time they run a test, but we also need to retrain our operations staff to manage an environment that isn't even onsite or owned by the same organisation. Now there's a learning curve."
  
• Speaking of, Rob England of the IT Skeptic has much books online. I am liking Owning ITIL.
  
• Enterprises like to customize things. They still regard all the separate layers as things to standardize on: OS, application... and thus don't seem to like appliances where there's many different OS versions running around. We discuss this layer addiction, gold images, and other things.
  
• What the hell is the goal of all this cloud, SaaS stuff in context of IT Management? A simplified IT environment, driving towards SaaS stuff. Compare everyone having a server to SalesForce's mythical 1,000 servers.
• ITSM/BSM quandary preview: how do you manage something that doesn't exist, like an "IT service."
• Quick overview of the HP Cloud Assure stuff: see white-paper. Looks like it uses "80 global points" around the world to scan (public?) cloud stuff - white-paper says it requires "no installation of software or agents on the networks or servers where your applications reside." Also, see the HP Software as a Service stuff they have. It seems like they rolled that in/used it for Cloud Assurance. We need to follow-up more on this, esp. since RedMonker Stephen O'Grady was at their recent analyst day.
• ControlTier and Puppet reference case - this gets me into a long overview of the model-driven approach to IT, or the "developer/operator workflow."
• Preview of living off a Netbook, sponsored by Zenoss!
• It's John's birthday. He's now the "Wised Cloud to everyones silver-lining."

Disclosure: see the list of RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

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

Rise of Community Marketing

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Sara Dornsife, self-professed Community Marketing Geek.

With a title like that, I ask Sara to tell us about a recent blog entry of hers describing the bloating of the marketing role as represented by job postings: doing traditional marketing and comms, community management, open source, events, and everything else. Sara says this is probably due to consolidation in jobs, companies cutting back and combining jobs together.

What Community Marketing Does

Blindly feeling out the elephant more, I ask Sara to tell us about the day-to-day activities of Community Marketing. It centers around "scaling up" community interactions; that is, figuring out moving beyond one-on-one interactions in the community of users for a product, service, etc. We compare these efforts to traditional marketing and advertising tacticts, where broadcast mediums seem to be of lessoning effectiveness.

Open Source Lessons Learned

Earlier that morning, Sara and I had both been on the SXSW panel, "Lessons Learned from Open Source." We discuss what we discussed in that panel: namely, that open source a business model, on it's own, isn't too whiz-bang beyond acquisition exists. Zane asks if and how open source is used for marketing value.

We further discuss open source as a business model: my quip that you make money off open source by selling closed source; the troubling paradox of software quality and selling support; open source driving down costs & commodifying "over-priced" markets.

Doing a barcamp

Switching to conferences and events, since Sara was one of the main organizers for barcampAustin, I ask her what goes into unconferences like barcampAustin. "Not a lot of sleep," she says. To hear Sara tell it, most of the work was done in the 8 days prior to the event, including booking Paradox ("18 and up welcome!"), rounding up sponsors, and more.

Picking the venue drives much of the format: the number of rooms you have in your venue determines how many sessions you can have at once, which, of course, determines how many sessions you have. The costs are low because people volunteer and sponsors donate all sorts of drinks and burritos. Sara estimates that barcampAustin was at about $25,000 for a 24 hour event.

Why do a barcamp?

The question, then, is why do this? For Sara, this is the kind of event she would be arranging in her role as Community Marketer, not to mention that she likes the local barcamp guy, whurley, and simply enjoys putting together and attending the event.

I ask her how she'd sell barcamps to corporations. The pay-back, for the cheap price, is a bucket of whuffie (good will and social capital) and an audience that's more passionate than passive. The lack of "the corporate smell," Sara says, brings higher quality attendees.