Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

http://www.codefutures.com/weblog/ The three hottest topics at JavaOne seemed to be AJAX, SOA, and data persistence. Almost everyone I met at the conference was interested in at least one of those three technologies. So I went to the panel discussion on "Java Technology, AJAX, Web 2.0 and SOA". There were many sessions on AJAX, but the speakers at this included Deepak Alur and Dan Malks, who wrote the Core J2EE Design Patterns book on which FireStorm/DAO is based. Dan Malks did a straw pole of attendees about why they came to the discussion that produced some interesting results. About half the developers were there were interested in AJAX and about half were interested in SOA. There seemed to be a bit of confusion around the term Web 2.0, perhaps given the developer-centric nature of this crowd and the term's marketing roots. Since I did not know too much about AJAX before JavaOne, I decided to take a tour of the vendor pavilion to look at all the AJAX products available...

Where Do the Benefits of Ajax Come From? Measuring the Benefits of Ajax By Alexei White Often, in business, decision makers are interested mainly in how information technology can reduce costs, or make better use of information assets. The benefits of Ajax seem to come more out of the cost-containment arena than the latter. The question becomes "Where do these cost savings come from and how can we quantify them?" 1. Potentially Measurable Benefits These are benefits that can be measured and expressed in terms of dollars and cents without much difficulty. Regardless of the quality of your Ajax UI, you will look to these metrics to estimate value. They include: 1. Time spent waiting for data to be transmitted: Time is money. Over many repetitions, the time employees spend waiting for the page to load can add up to significant costs. 2. Time spent completing a particular task: Increased efficiency in the user interface can often mean that time is saved at the task level, o...

By Rich Seeley, News Writer 22 May 2006 | SearchWebServices.com SOUND OFF!Post your comments San Francisco - Since Java is part of Ajax's middle name, it was not surprising that the rich user interface was a hot topic, perhaps even the hot topic at JavaOne in San Francisco this past week. Ajax does give you the power to develop very bad user interfaces. Tim Bray Director of Web Technologies, Sun All the major Java platform vendors at the show, Sun Microsystems Inc., BEA Systems Inc., IBM, JBoss Inc. and Oracle Corp., were touting new found Ajax capabilities. Three smaller Ajax tool vendors -- BackBase B.V., ICEsoft Technology Inc. and JackBe Corp. -- were hawking their wares on the show floor. Some of the big vendors may partner or, in the Darwinian world of software, swallow up the little Ajax companies. Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, said his company has been impressed with the Ajax development framework from BackBase. He said...

By Jason Bloomberg Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200653 | Document Type: ZapFlash Back in 2003, when ZapThink wrote our SOA Tools and Best Practices report, we first encountered a problem that we hadn't seen when we wrote our Web Services Security, Service-Oriented Management, and XML Appliances reports. The problem we ran into with our SOA Tools report was that the market was so immature that there weren't any tools specific to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) available yet. In that report, we explored a number of related tools markets, to be sure, including modeling tools, rapid application development tools, integrated development environments (IDEs), business process modeling/management (BPM) suites, and more -- but no vendor had yet developed a tool specific to the tasks inherent in implementing SOA. In the intervening three years, SOA tools have matured significantly. Tool vendors have made substantial progress building SOA-specific products, to be sure, but even now the SOA t...

The Onion, April 7, 2004 | Issue 40•14 SUNNYVALE, CA—Hoping it will push them to the top of an increasingly competitive market, Internet portal Yahoo has added soul-search capabilities to its expanding line of search tools, company executives announced Monday. "Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what's deep inside them quickly and easily," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. "All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past." Yahoo's main competitor recently introduced two new advanced search functions: Google Local, which highlights search results from a specific geographic area, and Google Personalized Search, which allows users to create a profile of their interests to influence search results. But Semel called Yahoo's new search function "vastly more precise." "As the amount of in...

In my view, AJAX will likely not replace desktop applications; but it will give birth to a new breed of enterprise AJAX grade software applications as services or better know as (SaaS). Most will be productivity tools, collaboration and business portals. Some will no longer be seen on the desktop at all. I think this next evolutionary phase in software will be less of an all-out exodus from the desktop than a moderate realignment, with applications thriving in the environments that best suit their purpose. AJAX-faced web applications can follow you, like all web applications can. Most of us have at least one friend who traveled around the world and kept in touch via email with hotmail or yahoo e-mail accounts. In fact, these browser-based email interfaces helped drive the adoption of email for personal use. These days, using a more traditional html interface for business class e-mail use isn't really practical anymore. Outlook Web Access (OWA) (although it had a great AJAX interfa...