Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

Your results: You are Iron Man Iron Man 75% The Flash 65% Green Lantern 65% Batman 65% Catwoman 65% Hulk 65% Supergirl 57% Spider-Man 50% Superman 50% Wonder Woman 42% Robin 32% Inventor. Businessman. Genius. Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

There is a new Facebook group ' Rich Enterprise Applications '. Advancing the discusion of the next wave of Rich Enterprise Web 2.0 Applications that leverage Ajax, SOA, Web Services, and SaaS to create desktop like functionality through a browser.

Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who spent his last years in captivity after his ruthless regime was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign. My new year's wish is for both counties and the world to now move forward productively to end the violence and establish a new self-serving government infrustructure in Iraq.

Ajax Muscles Up by Steve Smith, December 2006 issue For many marketers, the overused "Web 2.0" moniker is synonymous with the network effect, be it the social search of Yahoo's Del.icio.us, the ersatz village of MySpace, or the content-sharing of YouTube. But the stealth trend to watch in the Web 2.0 model involves a radical rethinking of Web interfaces that moves the solitary desktop computing experience online and into a collaborative space. Online communities and offerings like Google's Gmail, Yahoo's Flickr, and Zoho.com, a suite of business productivity tools, represent only the beginning of a trend that offers individuals and businesses the applications they need to craft and build their own communities. Dubbed "Ajax" programming by Jesse James Garrett, the president of Adaptive Path, a user experience consultancy, this collection of technologies is rapidly transforming the way we interact with the Web. "In a lot of ways it is the point at whi...

Follows the Me, me , me construct of enterprise mashups and situational applications. Users create the web apps they need, when they want it. From the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine -- The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year. To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s. But look at...

This happened to one of my best friends who just so happens to be of Pakistany origen. By the way he actually was born and grew up in OHIO. Way to go Metro and DC Police. "Last week I entered the metro with my wife. As usual, we were in haste and wanted to just board the train by making our way through the crowded gates. I have a Smart-card and replenish it once every 2 weeks. As i walked through the gate, i had -$0.30 on my card. If anyone has a Smartcard, they know that the card lets you be negative to a certain amount, but when you refill the card you have to make up the difference. That is a benefit of the Smart Card. But Officer BF Johnson didn't think so. He stopped me in my tracks, ordered me to approach him. He then ordered me to hand over my license and called the station to check for any suspicious (Obviously terror-related) activity from my end. He was telling me "you are riding on a negative balance, you are stealing from the metro". Yeah, lets call th...

Like any new web technology there is sometimes the misconception that it can be used and implemented within the enterprise the same as with public consumer web applications. This is natural because these consumer-facing applications often are constrained the way enterprises are and can act on new technologies and approaches faster. This is true with Ajax. Think of a car analogy. If you put a fancy Ferrari body on top of a Pinto frame and engine what do you have? From a distance you can say you have a Ferrari but to those who have to get up-close, interact with, and maybe even drive it; its still run’s like a Pinto. Now consider enterprise web applications. With the coming out party of open-source Ajax widgets enterprises believe that by ‘bolting’ some of these free snippets (little Ajax eye candy pieces to make a site look and feel better to the user) onto existing apps is all that is needed to say “Yes, we’re doing Ajax.” But think about it. All that is being done is similar to the sc...

Get an overview of the next frontier of AJAX development: the enterprise, where AJAX components can be the Web 2.0 front end of a SOA. Consumer Web sites such as Google Maps and Yahoo Mail generally come to mind first when one thinks of AJAX-enabled applications. On those sites, millions of users experience the results of dynamic AJAX interaction between the browser and server. Less known, however, are the benefits AJAX can deliver to application development inside the enterprise. So vendors in the burgeoning enterprise AJAX space, many of whom are watching the recent AJAX and rich Internet application (RIA) buzz define a technology category they have been working in for years, must educate the market. How do enterprise developers who are loath to delve into JavaScript code incorporate the technology quickly? Which applications make sense for AJAX solutions? How can internal, non-consumer AJAX Web applications benefit business? DevX spoke with six of these vendors to get an overview of...

Read the full story here Infoworld

The Onion PLANO, TX—With the recent trend of wholesome snack foods reaching "truly ridiculous proportions," Frito-Lay announced Monday that it would, against its better judgment, roll out a new line of healthy fruit-and-vegetable-based chips next February. Frito Lay R "Here," said Frito-Lay CEO Al Carey as he disgustedly tossed a bag of the company's new Flat Earth-brand snack crisps onto the lectern during a meeting with shareholders and members of the press. "Here's some shit that's made from beets. I hope you're all happy now that you have your precious beet chips with the recommended daily serving of fruit, or vegetables, or whatever the hell a 'beet' is." "Mmm, dehydrated bulb things," Carey added. "Sounds delicious." Carey appeared visibly appalled as Frito-Lay employees distributed Flat Earth snack samples to the audience. "God help us all, would you look at these flavors," said Carey, gesturing ...

C onsulting and SI 2.0: Mining the Sea Change in Software Posted by Susan Scrupski @ 4:47 pm Digg This! Fellow blogger Phil Wainewright attended the SIIA (Software Industry Information Assocation) conference this month. Phil writes: Speaking on a panel at today's SIIA OnDemand Summit in San Jose, Abhijit Dubey of McKinsey revealed that a new survey by his organization has found that the proportion of CIOs considering adopting SaaS applications in the coming year has gone from 38% a year ago to 61% now. "That's a huge jump," he said, and he's not kidding. It's an indication of a sea-change in acceptance of SaaS over the past year. The sea-change Phil is chronicling is spilling over to the consulting and systems integration markets. All IT services providers need to prepare for the oncoming sea change in how enterprise software is bought, delivered, and supported. The days of integrators and consultants as implementors of large enterprise apps are numbere...

Webcast: Ajax for the Enterprise - Nov. 29, 12pm EST. zune JackBe, the leader in Rich Enterprise Application software and services, will host 'Ajax for the Enterprise' on November 29 at 12pm EST. JackBe will share it's experiences in proving enterprise-grade Ajax solutions for over 4 million users in organizations like CitiGroup, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Sears, and Tupperware. To register for this webcast go to http://www.jackbe.com/email/webinar_ajaxforenterprise.php Send inquiries to chris.warner@jackbe.com.

by Rachael King Richard Hababou scouts out technology deals for the corporate venture arm of French banking giant Société Générale. Yet the nine-hour time gap between Hababou's San Francisco office and Société Générale's Paris headquarters can make communicating about multimillion-dollar transactions a big challenge. For years, Hababou and some 1,000 colleagues have used an online portal where they can collaborate, share documents, and track progress on deals. As useful as it was, the portal needed a facelift. Hababou wanted to add several features to the deal-tracking application and ditch others. So, in mid-October, he brought in software company ActiveGrid, which added a host of tools, from Yahoo! (YHOO) news feeds to Google (GOOG) Maps to AltaVista's Babel Fish for on-the-fly English-French translation. Best of all, the upgrade took all of three days, compared with the three months it took to build the application at the outset. "It's all the applications I nee...

Seminar: ‘Ajax for Breakfast: How to Deliver on the Promise of Rich Internet Applications’ 12.13.06 Will you be in the Mid-Atlantic area on December 13? If so, JackBe would like to invite you to attend ‘Ajax for Breakfast’, an interactive discussion about Ajax in the enterprise including live demonstrations of production Ajax applications in the corporate world. To attend, contact Jessica Agunsday at Jessica.agunsday@jackbe.com or (240) 744-1274. Unrelated. For those who wondered, Heidi and I loved Borat.

November 1, 2006 — Have you looked at the code behind AJAX implementations? Forget about spaghetti code. We're talking about shredded wheat. We're talking about heaps of jumbled rubble. I'm a wholehearted believer in AJAX . Many of the user interface examples that I've seen are incredible. While there's no mistaking AJAX apps for true native applications, well-designed UIs are an order of magnitude more responsive and intuitive than classic Web applications. I've seen some, though, that are pretty terrible. Alas, most Web developers simply aren't good UI designers. They're far too used to dealing with the constraints of standard HTML and CSS, and in thinking about postbacks, to know how to use the freedom that AJAX offers. That's one problem with AJAX , but I dare say it's not the biggest. The challenge is that AJAX is being retrofitted to existing Web applications using immature tools, immature libraries and immature runtimes...

At the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Intel plans to announce SuiteTwo , a business-oriented collection of blogging, wiki, and RSS applications from the likes of NewsGator, SimpleFeed, Six Apart, and Socialtext, coordinated by open-source software integrator SpikeSource. Intel Capital, the chipmaker's venture capital organization, helped realize the arrangement. Intel's venture group has investments in each of these companies and aims to be a matchmaker that can add value to the Intel platform, not to mention its portfolio. "Small- and medium-sized businesses purchase software best when it's an integrated suite that's going to be available very easily through an ASP model, through a SaaS [software as a service] model, and that will be supported by a third party," says Lisa Lambert, managing director of the software solutions group at Intel Capital. SaaS accounted for about 5% of business software revenue in 2005, Gartner sa...

Hundreds of technology executives and investors will congregate this week to take the quickening pulse of Internet entrepreneurship. At the third annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco , dozens of industry players will gather to break down topics like Internet infrastructure, Net neutrality, mashups, data protection and the future of video. Among those on hand at the city's Palace Hotel will be Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie; and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. High Impact What's new: At the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco , industry players will take the pulse of the Internet industry as talk of an investment bubble builds. Bottom line: Many start-up companies that fall under the Web 2.0 rubric will die off or prove only modestly successful to their investors. But the current period of active experimentation is solidifying an industrywide shift t...

Nine ideas for IT managers considering Enterprise 2.0 Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 11:44 pm As browser-based software, SaaS, and Web 2.0 continue to make some inroads in the enterprise, it's the lack of useful pioneer reports that hampers the early adoptors. Sure, many of us witness the often amazing trends taking place out on the Web in the form of mountains of user generated content and communication and collaboration occuring en masse via blogs and spaces. But the big question is still with us: Can the motivations and context that makes the latest generation of software on the Web so compelling, and hence popular, be made just as meaningful in the enterprise? As we get deeper into the second decade of the Web , we've been inundated with the 2.0 generation of everything, hopefully all learning from the mistakes of the 1.0 generation. In addition to Web 2.0 itself however, we have two more important enterprise software trends: Office 2.0 and Enterpris...

JackBe Like any new web technology there is sometimes the misconception that it can be used and implemented within the enterprise the same as with public consumer web applications. This is natural because these consumer-facing applications often are constrained the way enterprises are and can act on new technologies and approaches faster. This is true with Ajax. Think of a car analogy. If you put a fancy Ferrari body on top of a Pinto frame and engine what do you have? From a distance you can say you have a Ferrari but to those who have to get up-close, interact with, and maybe even drive it; its still run’s like a Pinto. Now consider enterprise web applications. With the coming out party of open-source Ajax widgets enterprises believe that by ‘bolting’ some of these free snippets (little Ajax eye candy pieces to make a site look and feel better to the user) onto existing apps is all that is needed to say “Yes, we’re doing Ajax.” But think about it. All that is being done is si...

http://www.jackbe.com/blogs/index.php/2006/10/09/tacit-interactions/ Many have been talking about a recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly that speaks of what they call “Tacit Interactions”. When people consider Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 / Office 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis, they need to consider these tools in the context of these tacit interactions. Tacit being ad hoc or on the fly and this represents 40% of a typical business day time according to McKinsey. Dion Hinchcliffe and Tony DiRomualdo do a good job explaining this in more detail as does the blog Enterprise Web 2.0 . These are not the routine transactional activities but rather the interactions are complex and ambiguous, requiring high levels of judgment and problem-solving. People involved in tacit interactions must often draw on deep experience and combine with available data, and the output of integrated data. Over the years companies have boosted their productivity by improving the efficiency of transformational...

AJAX issues debated Filed under: Application Development Multiple issues around AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) were raised at the AJAXWorld Conference and Expo on Wednesday, including debate over lightweight vs. heavy development frameworks. Lightweight frameworks are those considered to be AJAX-based, while heavy frameworks include those needing desktop-based technologies such as plug-ins, said conference panelists during an evening session. "I would have to say, of course, the end user experience needs to be totally lightweight," said Chris Schalk, a product manager and JavaServer Faces evangelist at Oracle. Lightweight technology is needed for interacting with legacy systems, he said. "AJAX compared to other RIA (rich Internet application) technologies definitely could be defined as lightweight," said Jouk Pleiter, general manager of Backbase. "With AJAX itself, I think there is a little confusion in the market," over the use of JavaS...

Ebizq JackBe, a Rich Enterprise Application (REA) software company, today announced its Presto REA platform, a comprehensive solution for delivering enterprise Ajax applications based on SOA and Web services. ebizQ received the following details: Applications built on the Presto platform gain business-class reliability, scalability, and service governance. The results are highly interactive browser–based applications that help users to optimize both their regular and ad hoc activities. Enterprises are making significant investments to create SOA infrastructures that produce SOA and Web services. The focus is now shifting to “putting a face on SOA” by enabling distributed business units to easily consume these services and thus accelerate SOA benefits and ROI. JackBe’s Presto will enable enterprises to fully realize their SOA vision through Rich Enterprise Applications deployed at the forefront of business. The Presto REA platform offers an enterprise-grade architecture based o...

MikeWagner JackBe coined the term Rich Enterprise Applications (REA) as an evolution of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIA is to Web-grade applications as REA is to Enterprise-grade applications. The side pic. is my personal attempt to illustrate this visually. Some like it; some don’t, so comments are more than welcomed. So What is Enterprise Grade? Enterprises require tighter control, security, and reliability. In short they require a degree of governance that the average user building a Google Maps Mashup while sitting at their kitchen table doesn’t need. This should be no surprise to anyone who has worked for large organizations. People have heard a lot about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 lately. I can see a similarity here that I think might help to distinguish between these two, and REA and RIA. Most of the talk surrounding Web 2.0 has been focused on the social collaborative aspects that it brings to users. I agree with this. Now take all of this (Web 2.0) and enable governan...

http://www.jackbe.com/blogs/ We’re very excited at JackBe to be announcing Presto , our Rich Enterprise Application (REA) Platform. Presto helps organizations optimize business activity, leveraging existing SOA investments and facilitating the development of rich, interactive Ajax-based applications. I blogged recently about some different architectural approaches to combining SOA and Ajax and pointed out that a server-side proxy approach is key to supporting many of the the non-functional requirements so common in today’s Enterprise service infrastructure. Additionally, this approach allows for optimization over the wire between the browser and server (as opposed to focusing on SOAP from the browser) and supporting strong governance of the service infrastructure on the back end. Presto is focused on just this sort of approach, supporting the creation of highly interactive and responsive applications, built on a governed service infrastructure and reliable and scalable web connect...