July 7th, 2008

OpenLaszlo 4.1 relased with DHTML support

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:35 am

Categories: OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: DHTML, AJAX, Scripting Languages, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Web 2.0, Ryan Stewart

I completely missed this but it looks like OpenLaszlo 4.1 has been released and it includes full support for DHTML/Ajax as well as SWF/Flash. In addition there are a number of bug fixes and overhauled documentation.

Back when OpenLaszlo started showing being able to create either DHML/Ajax or Flash content with the same codebase it got a lot of people talking about bridging the gap between Ajax and Flash. I’m not quite sure it does that, but it does provide developers with a more nimble way to deploy applications. You can now write OpenLaszlo and then choose which platform to compile to. And you can change it up as you go if you need to take advantages of one platform or the other. I was also always a fan of OpenLaszlo UIs and so having those effects available in DHTML/Ajax makes this a pretty compelling way to create those applications.

In addition to DHTML support they’ve also added early support for SWF 9 features in this release. If you’re interested in participating you can head over to the Wiki, the JIRA bug tracking system, or the mailing lists and forums.

February 20th, 2008

The importance of tools in rich Internet application platforms

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:01 pm

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Eclipse, Expression Studio, JavaFX, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Development Platform, Tooling, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

The RIA space is white hot. Microsoft, Adobe, the vast number of Ajax frameworks out there and companies like Laszlo Systems, Curl, and Appcelerator are all focused on creating great platforms and applications for rich Internet applications. We might even see JavaFX this year. Back when I did my predictions for this year I said that some of these smaller RIA players would have less than stellar years this year. I stand by that but I wanted to flesh it out a little bit because I think the main reason is tools. And all of these companies can adjust/enhance their offerings by changing the tooling strategy.

Tools are a big part of any job but they aren’t everything. A great carpenter with great tools will create a great piece of furniture. A great carpenter without great tools will probably still build something amazing. But a good carpenter with great tools can transcend his or her ability in some ways to create something very special. Development platforms are no different. The better your tools are the easier it will be for more people to create great things on top of your platform. The only problem in today’s RIA landscape is that there are really only two companies with great tooling stories. Not coincidentally, they’re also the biggest players: Adobe and Microsoft.

The tooling is also one of the big reasons that the rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft is so interesting. To paint a broad brush, Adobe has great design tools and Microsoft has great developer tools. Adobe has made a lot of inroads with Flex Builder and because we based it on a pretty good existing toolset,we got some instant credibility in the developer space. Microsoft made a big splash when they rolled out their Expression Suite as a competitor to Adobe’s design tools. One of the unique things about rich Internet application platforms is that you need both great design tools as well as great developer tools. That’s one area where smaller companies are going to struggle. Microsoft and Adobe both have the resources and the know how around tools which they can build on as they cross over into each others territory.

So what’s the solution and what’s my prediction? First, I realize I say this with a lot of bias, but that’s not the intent. If I were smaller companies I would build off of the bigger companies tools. I started thinking about this when Coté and I were on the podcast talking about JavaFx possibly hooking into Adobe’s design tools. If other RIA companies can take advantage of the Microsoft/Adobe toolchain, then they don’t have to worry about building from scratch (hard). They can simply plugin to the existing market and focus on the interoperability between those tools and their own platforms. In the Ajax world, which still hasn’t quite nailed the tooling yet, this could be a huge differentiator.

There are still risks. Microsoft and Adobe are obviously looking to make their tools play best with their platforms so being an addon is kind of a tricky situation. But I think the importance that everyone has started to place on experience means that both the design and development tools are going to be a very key part of the story. How those tools evolve, and especially in the realm between designer and developer, will be a important subplot to the adoption of RIAs.

January 10th, 2008

Rich Internet application predictions for 2008

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:31 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Apple, BuzzWord, Curl, Devigner Workflow, Expression Studio, Flash, Flex, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Online Video, OpenLaszlo, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Google Inc., AJAX, Microsoft Silverlight, Rich Internet Application, Apple Inc., AIR, Ryan Stewart

2007 was a great year for rich Internet applications. The combination of Microsoft and Adobe in the space took it to the next level. More bloggers started talking about it and the definition of what an RIA even started to expand with things like AIR and Prism bringing RIAs to the desktop. We also saw a lot of traction in the enterprise space with companies like Oracle and SAP looking to augment their user experience with rich Internet applications. 2008 is going to be even better and here’s why (hopefully I’ll do better than my 2007 predictions):

1. Silverlight will get to 200 million installs by the end of June, but it won’t be for 2.0. The stated penetration goal of Silverlight is to get 200 million installs by June. I think they’ll hit that number. Partnerships like Netflix, the Olympics and Jackass are great moves and will push them over the edge. On the downside I think you’ll see a 60-40 split on those installs with 60% of them being the better Silverlight 2.0 runtime and the other 40% being stuck in 1.0 land.

2. AIR changes how people think of the web. Big claim, and obviously as an Adobe evangelist I’m biased, but I love AIR. The 1.0 release of AIR will be cool, people are already starting to check it out and I think people are thinking differently about how to create applications. But I’m most excited about two things on the AIR platform; Linux and version 2.0. If 2008 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop then AIR is going to help. With a 2.0 release of AIR (I doubt this will be before the end of the year) we should start having things like being able to leverage native code and access devices. Those are going to take the platform to the next level.

3. The browser rides tall with the help of plugins. I talk a lot about the desktop but the browser world continues to innovate. Silverlight and Flash Player in a heated competition is only going to move that forward. We’ll release Flex 3 this year and Silverlight 2.0 should ship this year which means browsers everywhere have the runtimes and programming models people need to create great rich Internet applications. I think this is the year we see browser vendors (even Mozilla) work closely with the creator of runtimes to take advantage of the new features so they can focus on making browsers faster and more stable instead of full of new features.

4. Collaboration becomes a big battle in the RIA space. The battle for creating the best collaboration experience is going to be fought by a number of big companies including Google, Microsoft, Adobe and a number of smaller but important players like Zoho. Web workers are going to be more important this year and they want solutions that help them work. We’re seeing some of that with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, we’ve got Adobe Connect as well as Share and Buzzword and Microsoft’s Office Live. That’s a great first step but this year companies are going to focus more on audio, video, real time data, exchanging smart documents and data visualization. That will help drive both adoption of RIA technologies and the features of RIA platforms.

5. Ajax gets closer to the rich Internet application platforms. I think a lot of people in the Ajax community didn’t see the value of incorporating things like Flash or Silverlight into their applications other than for a small video or for charts. Towards the end of this year I think that attitude changed. RIA companies are going to make it easier for Ajax developers to take bits and pieces of their platforms and Ajax developers are going to respond. We’ll see a lot more “hybrid-RIAs” where developers use a combination of technologies. That will be another reason for the browser vendors to play nicely with plugins.

6. The designer/developer workflow gets a quality overhaul. Helping designers and developers work together on the same project is a hard problem. But this year we’ll make big strides. The interactive designer community will get involved and help hash out some of the biggest problems. Thermo will be a huge step forward and will push Microsoft to do more with Blend. We won’t be perfect by the end but we’ll be engaging new communities and we’ll have a lot of material to draw from to help really solve the problem in 2009.

7. The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered. I hate to say it but I think technologies like OpenLaszlo and Curl will continue to gain traction in some niches but won’t see widespread adoption. Those companies will still bring revenue but Microsoft and Adobe are pushing too hard and putting too many features into their runtimes for the smaller companies to keep up.

8. Apple makes a land grab for rich Internet applications but no one realizes it. This may have already happened but by the end of the year people will be talking about Apple’s RIA strategy. They’ve got Safari/WebKit, they’ve got the iPhone and they’ve set the bar when it comes to experience. They don’t have as many developers but that’s starting to change so the only thing they need is an RIA tool that competes with Flash. I think that tool has to be coming this year and when it does people will start to talk about Apple and RIAs. They already have a great platform they just need to let people create on top of it.

9. Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs. I really hope this is the year of real time. I mentioned the collaboration angle above but I also think that the entire web is going to move in a more real time direction. Instead of sites that use the polling method to get data we’ll see them start to use messaging to send data to the clients. This will have an impact on social networking, gaming, collaboration, finance, and every Web 2.0 startup. It’s going to be a competitive advantage by the end of the year and if you don’t have it you’ll be out of luck. We’ve got BlazeDS an open source project that enables some of that functionality, LiveCycle DS, our big suite and Microsoft has Windows Communication Foundation which is one of the top selling O’Reilly books of last year. We’re close.

10. There will be a fight for HD video on the web. Online video exploded last year and with the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight looking like there will be a winner people will turn towards the next generation of distributing media - the web. The web won’t overtake those mediums overnight but the groundwork will be laid this year. I think penetration and runtime quality will be big factors as people want flexibility in how they consume media. Both Adobe and Microsoft will make an HD push with their runtimes as consumer demand goes up. You’ll also see these technologies more easily incorporated downloaded files so they won’t be used only online. Both have been able to do that for a while but recently with AMP we’ve seen more focus in that direction.

11. (Bonus!) Google. I have no clue what Google will do. They’re going to be under more pressure to incorporate some aspects of RIAs such as richer collaboration, real time data and multimedia experiences. Do they push HTML 5 harder? Do they partner with Adobe or Microsoft? Apple? Google Gears will continue to get traction but I don’t think we’ll see widespread adoption even when they finally incorporate it into GMail. They’ve also got the Google Desktop which could play in their strategy at some point. Google is a big question mark for me.

December 17th, 2007

My rich Internet application predictions for 2007. How did I do?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:04 am

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Apollo, Apple, Curl, Devigner Workflow, Flex, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo, Prism, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WFP/E, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, XUL, XULRunner

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Verdict, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Windows Vista, Rich Internet Application, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Ryan Stewart

2007 was a pretty good year and it saw me end up with a lot of changes including starting work for Adobe in June. I’ve got some thoughts on what’s in store for 2008 and also a summary of 2007 planned but I think it’s best to first go back and look at my rich Internet application predictions for 2007 to see how I did. I made 10 predictions and I’ll score either a yes or no for each one.

1. Vista is going to raise the bar for experiences across the board.
Well I thought Vista changed a lot of things but unfortunately Vista itself just didn’t do well at all. In order for it to raise the bar I think it has to have sold a lot of copies and gotten people talking about new kinds of user interfaces.

Verdict: No (0 - 1)

2. Adobe’s Apollo is going to be much better than expected.
It’s hard to quantify “much” better but I do think that Apollo (now AIR) has had a successful year. A lot of developers have created applications and over 3 betas we’ve got a strong developer base. I thought it would go without saying that we’d have a 1.0 release by now, but I didn’t make that prediction.

Verdict: Yes (1-1)

3. Microsoft is going to make inroads into the design market.
Tough call. Expression Studio has done well as part of the designer/developer workflow in the .NET stack. Does that count as the design market? Then again is Expression Studio even targeted directly at the design market? Maybe to rephrase the question a year later I’d ask “are designers using Expression Studio” and they are.

Verdict: Yes (ish) (2-1)

4. The Designer/Developer workflow will get some mainstream press.
We saw a TON of attention to the designer/developer workflow with Blend getting a new version and Thermo coming out but the mainstream designers still aren’t talking about it. Maybe this is one to revisit for next year.

Verdict: No (2-2)

5. Apple is going to make a play in Rich Internet Applications
Oh Apple, when are you going to step up and show us your RIA strategy? This year Apple did a lot and there is still a lot of energy and excitement around WebKit. The new CSS features and the video tag have moved WebKit closer to an RIA platform but Apple still hasn’t made the play I thought they would.

Verdict: No (2-3)

6. Competition for technology in the online video space will heat up.
This is probably the one I got the most right. Silverlight was released, Flash and even Move networks all started competing for online video. The price of Flash Media Server dropped, Flash got H.264 support, and the content delivery networks started focusing on HD quality. It was a great year for online video.

Verdict: Yes (3-3)

7. Flex becomes the primary technology for building Rich Internet Applications.
Flex had a great year but is it the primary technology for building RIAs? I think at this stage of the game it’s the most mature but primary is a strong word. One thing that’s happened over this year is that the field of RIAs has really blown up. We’ve got Curl, Ajax getting more advanced and Silverlight/WPF applications in the wild. It’s too tough to call Flex the primary technology.

Verdict: No (3-4)

8. “WPF/E” will have a higher penetration than Apollo.
I’d forgotten I predicted this and it actually gave me pause for thought. Would I make this prediction again now that I work for Adobe? Yup, I would. I have no idea what the actual numbers are but AIR isn’t out yet while Silverlight shipped a 1.0 version. Combine that with the fact that Silverlight has gotten some attention on the Microsoft homepage and lined up some good partners and I think it probably wins the penetration game.

Verdict: Yes (4-4)

9. The Mozilla platform and Apollo will fight for the cutting edge Ajax developers.
Another tough one. AIR has done really well with Ajax developers for the most part and Mozilla has been very true to its browser mission. , the desktop runtime they released this year, speaks to that browser mentality and encourages Ajax developers to keep building for the browser. But in the prediction I used XUL as engine by which Mozilla would try to get the cutting edge developers. It didn’t really materialize that way and I’m not sure the cutting edge Ajax developers have gone to AIR either.

Verdict: No (4-5)

10. OpenLaszlo is going to be a beacon for open source developers looking to build Rich Internet Applications.
Interestingly enough it wasn’t OpenLaszlo that made the big open source splash but Flex. OpenLaszlo had a decent year but it was tough to rally the open source troops when 1) they didn’t seem that interested in RIAs in general and 2) your biggest competitor also goes open source. OpenLaszlo did a lot to move closer to Ajax though, so they’ve broadened their appeal this year.

Verdict: No (4-6)

Ouch! only 4 out of 10 last year. Despite my abysmal record, it really was a good year for RIAs. Stay tuned this week for my yearly roundup. Expect the 2008 predictions next year after everyone gets back from vacation. How do you think I did in 2007?

November 28th, 2007

Forrester details RIA use in the enterprise for Information Workplaces

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:20 pm

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Flex, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, User Interface

Tags: Workplace, Rich Internet Application, Forrester Research Inc., Ryan Stewart

Yesterday Richard MacManus had a blog post about a report out of Forrester regarding the use of RIAs in “Information Workplaces”. I got a copy of the report and it’s a good read. As far as I can tell, Information Workplaces are kind of advanced data dashboard applications. According to the Forrester report these kinds of interfaces were typically built as enterprise portals in HTML or were set up as very Microsoft Office oriented user interfaces. The report indicates that RIAs are being used more and more for these enterprise, employee facing applications. As Richard notes in his post, the data was collected from a number of RIA firms including Curl, Adobe, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo and Nexaweb. But the report also got data/information from SAP, Oracle, and IBM, so it hit a decent side of the enterprise market.

The reason for the move to RIAs in employee facing apps were things we’ve been talking about for a while. One big reason was the design aspect of RIA technologies. These are applications that people will be spending a lot of time in and are sometimes the first things employees look at when they get to work. Being able to design a customized, malleable interface that looks good is important. The interactivity of RIA technologies was mentioned as a significant factor. Being able to move data around and change the way it’s displayed is a valuable feature. Instead of moving between screens, the employees can adjust the interfaces and the data so that it fits their task at the time.

One benefit I hadn’t really considered until reading the report was using RIAs to get better workers. The report describes the appeal:

Engaging next-generation, technology-savvy workers. Better Information Workplaces don’t just make customers happier, they improve the quality of work life for employees because processes are simplified and people aren’t doing pointless, redundant work. Plus, when service employees are better equipped to provide accurate answers to client queries, quickly turn around completed loan applications, or process an insurance claim in a timely fashion, it reduces the stress that irate customers can create. All of this leads to a better work environment where it’s possible to retain top talent.

We are starting to see a lot of traction in the enterprise when it comes to but customer facing and internal applications. That follows a natural trend of adoption but in some cases I think the enterprise is finding RIAs even more valuable than the consumer space. There is a lot of money to be made as older systems are upgraded with RIA solutions. That also means there could be room for more RIA technologies than most people think.

September 17th, 2007

Rich Internet application job trends and salaries

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:42 pm

Categories: Ajax, Flash, Flex, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Job, AJAX, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Rich Internet Application, Salary, Indeed.com, Adobe Flex, Ryan Stewart

Indeed.com has a pretty cool job trends feature as well salary lookup which Mike Potter uses a lot to track Flex. Mike got me thinking about the trends in the overall RIA space. After throwing the various rich internet application technologies together I came up with a decent picture of the job and overall market for RIAs.

For the first exercise I trended “Adobe Flex”, Silverlight, JavaFX and OpenLaszlo:

The graph is pretty much what you’d expect. Flex has a big head start and as a result has more traction. The growth rate for Silverlight is pretty impressive and OpenLaszlo has been up and down. JavaFX (as you’d imagine for an unreleased product) doesn’t make much of a blip. After this I decided to throw in WPF:

Read the rest of this entry »

September 11th, 2007

Laszlo Systems gets customer win with Verizon

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:39 am

Categories: OpenLaszlo

Tags: Verizon Communications Inc., Broadband, Laszlo Systems Inc., Ryan Stewart

Laszlo Systems will be rolling out a version of their webtop to Verizon customers. Last week after the RIA panel at the Office 2.0 conference I talked with David Temkin, the CTO of Laszlo Systems about what the company is up to. The Verizon win is significant for the company especially as they move to get more traction for their webtop suite.

The WebOS market has become a crowded affair, but Laszlo has been quietly adding customers and functionality to their webtop. Because the underlying technology is all OpenLaszlo, the company can roll out features quickly and their developer community can use the APIs to build in functionality. They offer it as a licensed product that can be branded and modified to suit the customer’s needs.

The Verizon deal focuses on email and includes a branded webtop that the company will be first rolling out to their FIOS customers and then later to their other broadband subscribers. The company is offering 4 GB of storage with the webtop in addition to the richer interface. I think it’s good to see a company like Verizon offering a much richer experience for their broadband customers and using it as a differentiator between the competition.

Sarah Allen has more information on her blog.

July 16th, 2007

Laszlo raking in customers, developers, and application visibility

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:04 pm

Categories: OpenLaszlo

Tags: Developer, AJAX, Internet Application, Ryan Stewart

Laszlo Systems announced today that they’ve been seeing a lot of traction with OpenLaszlo. I don’t have numbers that I can compare these announcements to, but I think it’s clear that OpenLaszlo is doing quite well in a crowded RIA market. In the first half of this year, OpenLaszlo applications have been served to an average of 40 million people per month. That includes applications deployed to high profile clients like WalMart.com, Monster.com and H&R Block. Other companies have come on board and started using OpenLaszlo technology in the first half of this year. T Rowe Price, Barclays Global, Renaissance Learning, United States Air Force, Coghead, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology all rolled out an OpenLaszlo solution this year.

In addition to the increase in customers and visibility, the developer numbers for OpenLaszlo seem to be increasing. According to statistics based on a number of metrics that OpenLaszlo tracks, they estimate the developer community currently sits at 75,000 which is a great foundation for the company. OpenLaszlo continues to be a technology that I think people should watch. With their OpenLaszlo 4 release earlier this year, they added Ajax support so that rich internet application developers can build something in OpenLaszlo and deploy it as either Ajax or Flash. With the increase in RIA platforms, OpenLaszlo could provide developers a way to hit a number of them. If OpenLaszlo could add reliable support for Silverlight and JavaFX, I think a lot of people would stand up and take notice. That would be a huge engineering feat, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

July 11th, 2007

Building Rich Internet Applications for the iPhone

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:14 pm

Categories: Ajax, OpenLaszlo, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, Internet, Internet Application, Ryan Stewart

So we don’t have Flash or Java but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of cool ways to build Rich Internet Applications for the iPhone. The fact that we have a full implementation of Safari means that there is a lot of browser power on the iPhone. As I’ve gotten deeper into AIR and done things like training session with the team from Ext, I’ve gotten a lot more respect for what Ajax is capable of and how fast Safari is. The success of iPhoneDevCamp showed that there is a ton of interest and a lot of smart people already working on apps. So what can you do to build RIAs on your iPhone?

Right now a lot of people seem to be using Joe Hewitt’siUI JavaScript framework that is pretty cool. From what I heard it was used to build a lot of the apps at iPhoneDevCamp and it was behind the recently released Digg iPhone version.

OpenLaszlo, which has been around the RIA world for a long time, added support for DHTML/JavaScript in OpenLaszlo 4. That meant that the iPhone was a logical jump and they demoed an OpenLaszlo application that ran on the iPhone. So with OpenLaszlo you can build Flash applications, DHTML applications and now iPhone applications all from the same basic code base. That’s pretty compelling.

Thanks to Jason for the image

June 4th, 2007

openmeetings - Open source video conferencing and collaboration with OpenLaszlo

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:35 am

Categories: OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Collaboration, Open Source, Whiteboard, Ryan Stewart

According to his blog, Sebastian Wagner has released an open source project called openmeetings. openmeetings is billed as a “video conferencing and group collaboration application” much like Adobe Connect. This one is built on top of OpenLaszlo with the new streaming media support and Red5, and open source media sever.

The source for the project is being hosted on Google Code. There’s also a mailing list if you’re interested in getting more information. It’s really, really cool to see something like this from the OpenLaszlo community, which seems to be thriving. And the project seems to be moving along quickly with support for a lot of features that the big players have:

It has a lot of features you usually know from Conferencing Desktop Clients. You can import various File Formats and share the with your Conference Members or drag n drop them to the whiteboard. Whiteboard Items can be dragNDroped, some may editable (TextBoxes) or resizable, you can store and reloaded/edit/restore the hole *painting* the next time you have a meeting. You can go into 4×4 meetings (4 users everybody see’s/speak’s to everybody) or a 1xn meeting (one big screen and unlimited users watching). For the whiteboard there is a moderating system to change the *virtual pencil* between all participant of a meeting.

And it’s all open source, so as he says, you can download and add to it at will. Cool stuff Sebastian.