Blog Posts

John Sviokla in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post highlights the benefits of good visualization in understanding data.  His post is appropriately titled "Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization" The three benefits he explains are as follows.

• Efficiency - good visualizations let you understand the data much more quickly.  This is something I have pointed out as a prime ROI benefit
• New Insight - By combining different data into a single visualization we can gain additional insight.  This is convincingly demonstrated with Curl's EyeDecide demo
• Answering Key Questions - Good visualizations let you see answers to complex questions easily and quickly

Recently PaloAlto Networks published a survey Social Networking Usage Explodes In Businesses Worldwide that found 27 different social networking applications in use across 95% of the participating organizations.  The survey findings are based on actual analysis of application traffic, not survey questions. The following chart from the report shows that the most prominent use is Instant Messaging at 50%.

The survey makes the point that applications are not threats ? yet they carry risks.

"The adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications is being driven by users, not by IT. The ease with which they can be accessed, combined with the fact that newer (younger) employees are accustomed to using them, points toward a continuation of this trend. The somewhat disconcerting fact is that users do not take into account the business and security risks that these applications present. Looking at the 202 Enterprise 2.0 applications found, 70% can transfer files, 28% are known to propagate malware, and 64% have known vulnerabilities."

All this points to increased security risks as more enterprise 2.0 applications see more pervasive adoption.  As we have previously pointed out it is important that developers and IT operations both understand best practices with regard to security.  Jeffrey Hammond points out in his paper on Securing Rich Internet Applications that is is important to understand the 3 Attack Surfaces: Server-side, Communication-stream and Client-side.  In this post I'll focus on the client-side. 

RIA frameworks use a Sandbox model the protect clients from malicious code.  It is important to realize however that not all sand boxes are created equal.  While Ajax, browser based applications use the browser's sandbox, RIA frameworks like AIR, Silverlight and Curl use their own security model and permit access to the local machine.  It's natural that developers want to take advantage of the broader capabilities at RIA frameworks offer over the browser based sandbox but they need to be aware of how their decisions effect the vulnerabilities that these frameworks introduce.

To give administrators and application developers the most control over security for creating and deploying Enterprise 2.0 applications Curl supports both un-privileged and privileged modes executing in the browser and on the desktop.  This is in contrast to AIR that allows only un-privileged in the browser and only privileged on the desktop.  The follow table shows the differences between Curl and AIR privilege options.

Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the year. The Mary Meeker: Facebook Is Eating Your Lunch And Dinner post at All Facebook singles out the statistic from her presentation at Web2.0 that Facebook is the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years.  Indeed at over 300M users, if Facebook were a country it would be the forth largest behind only China, India and the US.

With all the hype on social networking I thought it would be interesting to highlight again our own CurlGraph.  The CurlGraph is a fun application that shows how your Facebook friends are related to each other.  If you are on Facebook I urge you to give it a try and to suggest it to your friends.

I made a brief demo video you can post to Facebook and you'll find the Curl website has instructions on installation.

Yesterday Dion Hinchcliffe lists 22 Power Laws of the Emerging Economy.  It's an interesting post worth a read but I think he omitted one of the most important "The Power Law of Social Networks"  Social Networks themselves are defined by a power curve. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrates this in his book "Linked, The New Science of Networks." This interconnectivity drives the information age where popular nodes can rise up quickly. Like all social networks the Internet has a few nodes with millions of connections and millions of nodes with very few connections. Increasingly 6 degrees of separation is becoming 3 degrees of separation.

Last week we presented a review of the implementation of the Curl eyeDecide application to Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester.  I have posted the presentation here.

Presenting were Doug Mcrae and John Chisholm (Cheese) from Curl and Juhan Sonin from Involution Studios.

As a developer himself, I think Jeffery enjoyed hearing from the people who actually did the work.  I'm sure most of his days as an analyst are filled with discussion of trends and features rather actual design and coding techniques.

Curl eyeDecide was a team effort between Curl and Involution Studios, a top application UI design firm.  The complete team included Juhan from Involution and Doug and Cheese from Curl. It took 6 months from conception to press release that included 4 months of implementation.  That amounted to 30 work weeks and resulted in 20K lines of code.

The development cycle was collaborative and iterative and featured Curl's ability to code and deploy with a total of 50 distinct releases. The development started with connectivity to the data and the UI design was driven by the actual user experience of the testers at each release.

Some key learnings were that design and development should occur over the life of the project in an iterative cycle.  Additionally professional graphic and UI design matters and having Juhan involved in developing not only the looks but the user experience from the beginning was paramount.   Another important lesson is to clearly understand the data, its values and what people will want to do early in the process.

You can get the complete eyeDecide application in source form here.

Dion Hinchcliffe recently pointed out in his post "Eight Ways Cloud Computing Will Effect Your Business"  that we are in a delicate balance between risk and benefit when it comes to cloud computing.  There is no doubt that interest in Cloud Computing has risen dramatically in the last year as shown in the Google Trends graph above.  With cloud interoperability advancing and more dependable services becoming available, enterprise computing architectures are evolving to take advantage of the improved scale and cost Cloud Computing promises.

The trend to Cloud Computing represents a real opportunity for Enterprise RIA technologies to be the "User Interface" into the cloud based services. With the emergence of the "RIA Fit Client" that installs web-based applications on the desktop and allows off-line operation it is possible to see an "RIA - Cloud Computing" model is a viable alternative to the more expensive client-server.   Indeed in our customer engagements we are seeing client-server applications (mostly VB) convert to RIA to get the benefits of  web delivery without sacrificing the quality of user experience.

I was surprised to learn in a recent strategy session with Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester that 47% of new development is still client-server.  Those efforts should seriously consider an RIA based approach.  Today's Enterprise RIA platforms, like Curl meet all the requirements of communicating efficiently and securely with data services in the cloud or the enterprise and should be considered a viable alternative to client-server.

Every programming language used for enterprise RIA tends to face the same need: provide a sophisticated grid widget.

Applications which involve any detail on business workflow, logistics or other detailed management tasks inevitably involve a grid widget.

The demand on the widget can be considerable: if the data to be displayed results from SQL's LEFT OUTER JOIN the y-axis of the widget may have to present a tree structure.

Very often even ISV's find themselves purchasing not just a license for a third-party widget but the source-code so as to alter or fine-tune the widget.

Curl has very powerful grid facilities but also has a Curl ISV providing a grid widget: the Qualitech FastGrid from q-tec.com

From the QualiTech information at aboutus.org you can obtain more information in English about this Japanese Curl ISV.

Some of the API is revealed at fullsource.net and might be a candidate for an API entry at programmableweb.com

It might be interesting to note that the code example is copyrighted by both QualiTech and the Korean firm QTI.

Interesting question coming from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet.

"With news that 92% of Windows PCs are vulnerable to a zero-day attack that Adobe won?t patch until Thursday, is it time to dump Adobe?s Flash player?

And this from Computer World.

"More than 9 out of every 10 Windows users are vulnerable to the Flash zero-day vulnerability that Adobe won't patch until Thursday, a Danish security company said today.

According to Secunia, 92% of the 900,000 users who have recently run the company's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) utility have Flash Player 10 on their PCs, while 31% have Flash Player 9. (The total exceeds 100% because some users have installed both.)"

Adobe admitted to the vulnerability on July 21st in this short blog entry.

Curl and Silverlight are not suseptible to such security holes as both run in secure sand boxed areas.

From the ensuing discussion there is a growing segment for whom the answer is YES.

In a previous article I discussed three areas of business savings to examine when making the Business case for Entperise RIA. This article will examine how Panasonic realized those business savings with their RIA implementation.

Panasonic Voice of the Engineer (VOE)

Aiming to become the number one company worldwide in customer satisfaction, Panasonic is one of the world's most-recognized brand names, largely on the basis of its highly successful Panasonic AVC Networks business segment.

The division manufactures and markets the majority of the company's consumer products, including plasma TVs and LCD monitors, Blu-ray and DVD players, digital cameras, video recorders, home theater systems and many other products. But while Panasonic welcomes strong sales, the reality is that the more diverse and successful its product lines become, the greater the challenge for its service department becomes.

Panasonic AVC's service division has simple objectives: discover and respond to potential quality and safety issues as early as possible in the product lifecycle. And, from the standpoint of safety, ensure absolutely safe operation of all electrical products over the long term. Sounds simple enough, but with an evolving product line that gets ever more complex, Panasonic service technicians have to continually educate themselves on new technologies and new repair techniques. But while it is critical that Panasonic technicians stay up to date with the latest technology improvements and developments, how do you make that happen for a huge global workforce that is responsible for thousands of products and product parts?

Panasonic AVC approaches this challenge through what it calls the Voice Of Engineering (VOE). An enterprise-wide program, VOE encompasses all the initiatives and activities geared toward discovering potential critical issues in product quality by sharing and analyzing information and trends. This includes an ongoing dialog between service technicians in the field and company management to uncover potential quality issues, and nurture and advance repair and servicing capabilities in the field. The company's technological approach to its service challenges was to create an automated system built on the Curl platform to provide its service and support staff with up-to-date repair manuals, parts diagrams, specification sheets, and other kinds of documentation.

Originally launched in 2005, the Service Information Sharing System also allows support technicians and engineers to:

• Use forums and comment areas to share their knowledge of new repair techniques, describe repair cases and support a higher level of customer service across the entire organization
• Through Curl, view information using a variety of methods: graphs, tables, charts with multi-layout format, etc.
• Integrate external document and data formats - Excel, PDF, etc.
• Easily operate system functions using drag-and-drop features, data filtering and graph combining

High Performance and Data Visualization

Panasonic AVC Networks chose Curl as the development platform for its Service Information Sharing System because it provides the ideal environment for live documentation and interactive education. Initially Panasonic AVC used a database application as its service support information system.

Another advantage of the Curl-powered Service Information Sharing System is that it enabled Panasonic AVC to retain the comprehensive information storage capabilities of its existing database system, yet enhance the capabilities of that system with a powerful and flexible front end. Curl makes complicated screen controls possible, surpassing ordinary Web browser capabilities, so Panasonic developers built in the kind of advanced features and functions typically found only in client-server type applications. For instance, the Panasonic system enables users to view documents and related information in a single view. To access documents and files, users browse indexes or use keyword search.

In practice, field engineers and service technicians simply type in keywords, and then narrow down their selections out of the returned list screen. This powerful search tool provides Panasonic field engineers with instant access to the vast amount of repair documentation and related information across the company. VOE Search structures information using syntactic analysis, morphologic analysis and a dictionary tool (tautology or synonym), and displays the associated information ranked against the keyword. The application draws on documents, files and associated information from several databases. The interface supports analytic tools that allow the support engineer to drag a device and drop it into a chart to render an instant analysis of part failures over time giving him an immediate view into likely problems. This level of performance and data visualization saves considerable time and contributes to greatly improved productivity.

Main functionality includes search for repair parts or technical documents, as well as bulletin boards to share the information and analysis views of repair processes. These discussion boards enable users to ask questions and get answers from colleagues and associates around the world. All correspondences on the bulletin board are searchable so it can be listed by the search. As engineers use the application, know-how or information are accumulated organically to speed the maintenance of information.

Low Support Costs - Web Delivery

Despite delivering native client performance and visualization the VOE application is delivered over the web. Curl supports client side data store, which allows the application high performance search without costly round trips to the server. Furthermore, through web delivery application support, costs are considerably lower. With Curl's flexible file-handling properties and standard APIs for external applications, documents can be viewed right within the system interface - there's no need to open new applications such as Excel or Acrobat. In addition, Curl's elastic technology allows users to adjust the size of documents as appropriate. Operations for changing chart type, targeting parts on and off, displaying above or below a certain point, were all designed and implemented to make the interface intuitive and convenient. Further, the application provides a "Repair Trend" view, primarily used by management, which enables them to track service activity by product, product category and date (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.) to better understand service issues and uncover potential problems.

I have a couple of new examples of using our Embedded Browser Graphic in my Curl pages at logiquewerks.com

There is now an internet search browser, an e-mail browser and an on-line movies browser.

Another is for an "eyes-only" browser for text on confidential web pages using Windows and Internet Explorer.

Use the Move Controller button first and drag the controller dialog to one side.

Then click Show Document.

Suggestions welcome.  One way of defeating the "controller" was overcome today.

And it keeps an eye on the Windows clipboard ;-)

Technorati Profile

The Curl Developer Utilities have not yet moved up to Curl 7, but if you want to install the docs in your Curl 7.0 Documentation Viewer, the step to follow are easy.

Start by making a copy of the CDU code folder in one of your curl8 working directories. Then make a copy of the manifest. Use the Curl IDE to create a new EMPTY project in that code directory. Paste back in the contents of the old manifest (the IDE will warn that the manifest.mcurl is being over-written) but edit the resulting manifest.mcurl file to flip up to 7.0 and maybe set the version metadata to 0.3.

Now the IDE should show a project with 3 packages. Dbl-click on each package and use the editor to flip the version number in the package expression up from 6.0 to 7.0. Usually you also would have to repeat the same for any .curl or .dcurl file with an applet expression as its header.

Right-click on the top pkg and set the component target settings to generate documentation and apply to all packages. Now hit F7 to deploy.. Next use the IDE to select Help | Install Docs. Click the install button on the dialog pane which opens and then navigate to the directory named deploy-default under this new project. Select the manifest.mcurl file. And you now have CurlUnit documentation back in your Curl 7.0 Documentation Viewer.

Installing the BlazeDS, SQLite and XML package documentation from sourceforge is just as easy as unzip, then use the IDE F1 | Help | Install Docs and then a click on the install button with navigation to folders named docs-install for each package. Packages usually include example code which is still zipped within the unzipped documentation folders. To try out the BlazeDS examples you are going to want a running Apache application server such as Tomcat.

With the release of[ Curl Version 7|http://www.curl.com/company_news050709.php] we have created a fun RIA Desktop application called the CurlGraph.

One of Curl’s unique features is that it supports web applications that run outside the browser, installed on the desktop as is the case with this application.

Click here to see a demo video of CurlGraph that gives you an idea of how it works and how to get it.   Check it out and have some fun seeing how your Facebook friends are interelated.

You can also get he source code here:  Curl Version 7 Sample Application: CurlGraph.

The last year has seen considerable excitement in a new breed of web applications based on Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies. Most of that excitement has been focused on consumer facing applications like Google Maps and Mail and much of that innovation has been driven by the hundreds of Ajax frameworks. However, as enterprises begin to examine how RIA technology can factor into their efforts to modernize legacy applications they are realizing that the Ajax approach has serious performance and security shortcomings. A category of RIA technologies that offer enterprise performance, scalability and security is emerging. We call this category Enterprise RIA and it includes products like Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun JavaFXand Curl.

RIA as a category

RIA has emerged as a category and analyst groups such as Forrester have been conducting various surveys and studies to quantify their benefits. What they are finding is that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that satisfy a range of needs from simple B2C to complex B2B applications. RIA for the enterprise differs significantly from RIA for consumer-centric applications. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement. Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980s and 1990s building client-server applications but now need to modernize those legacy applications taking advantage of web delivery.

Requirements of Enterprise RIA

The key requirements for enterprise RIA are as follows:

• Complex graphics and reports The platform should have many built-in User Interface and graphic report objects that support building visually appealing, effective applications without a lot of complex programming.

• Large Data Sets  Enterprise applications deal with large volumes of data that must be processed efficiently at the client. In the financial sector, the size of data sets can be hundreds of thousand of records.

• Offline-Online Enterprises need their applications to continue to operate even if connectivity is lost. When connectivity is restored the data gathered and modified at the client can be synchronized with the server.

• Very high scalability The number of concurrent users can grow fast, especially in a B2B environment, as partners, suppliers, and buyers get added to the system.

• SOA & Standards RIA must follow the basic fundamentals of Service Oriented Architecture. Although SOA discussions mostly refer to server-side application construction, the front-end must have the same attributes. Use of standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and REST must be followed for easy server-side interoperability.

• Migration tools from legacy applications To make the migration of old client-server applications, some tools should be provided to lower the cost of conversion.

• +Platform independence RIA must be able to run on any client operating system and any browser environment.

• Rich development tools  A rich IDE must be provided with appropriate plug-in to standard IDE's such as Eclipse, deployed at many large enterprises.

• Very high performance Latencies must be minimal (sub-second) for most business-critical applications. High throughput and fast performance are the two critical metrics for transactional systems. The division of work between the client and the server must be carefully evaluated to minimize the round-trips. The client-side must perform much of the user interaction and caching of data.

• Security Enterprises have strict security requirements for business-critical data. An enterprise RIA platform has to address data and application protection via various technologies such as encryption and careful use of client privilege.

• Manageability Applications must provide functions for performance monitoring and tuning. Dynamic configurability is also a requirement for changing needs.

Solutions for Enterprise RIA

The industry offers only a few solutions to the above requirements as Ajax fails in key areas such as offline operation and high scalability. While evaluating an Enterprise-scale RIA it is important to consider several metrics. These should include development time, lines of code, functionality, transaction speed, round-trip cycles, usability, and number of clicks to complete a transaction. Additionally the breadth and sophistication of the supporting libraries should be evaluated. An ideal RIA must follow the principles of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which advocates invocable services and assembly of such services forming an application. Most of the SOA discussion centers on server-side component assembly. An enterprise RIA should act as the front-end to the server side SOA.

It has been a busy week for RIA Technologies as the market continues to heat up.  The Twitter streams were all a buzz with #SXSWand RIA featured prominently.  Gartner's Market Scope on RIA was picked up by SD Times,  ZDnet highlighted Forrester's research on Saas and the New York Times discussed Silverlight Version 3.  Here are this week's noteworthy posts and articles.

The RIA Triumvirate at SXSW 2009

Red Monk

By Michael Cote, March 17, 2009

Thankfully for them each member of the RIA Triumvirate were in attendance. There been budget cut backs, hiring freezes, and other Financial Abyss freak out tactics from each of them, but SXSW is a conference not be missed by the three with that all important three letter strategy: RIA.

Data Watch: Rating RIA platforms

SD Times

By Staff Writer, March 15, 2009

March 15, 2009.  Adobe received the highest rating among companies with RIA platforms in Gartner's MarketScope for AJAX Technology and RIA Platforms" survey, scoring the only Strong Positive rating. The companies, which included Google, Microsoft and Oracle, were rated based on market adoption and platform  features, among other

criteria....

RIA Opinion: Why Criminal Hackers Will Love Adobe AIR

Sys-Con Media

By Bert Halstead, March 13, 2009

Adobe has released their new AIR product with much fanfare about letting developers "use proven Web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems." The grand vision that's being promoted is that AIR is pioneering the application development model of the future,  where cross platform applications will be developed using a platform independent tool such as AIR, and then deployed across the Web as downloadable gadgets that can be installed on any computer...

Forrester Research: SaaS gains enterprise adoption, expands beyond 'vanilla' offerings

ZDNet

By Dana Gardner, March 17, 2009

Software as a service (SaaS) is coming into its own, as interest and adoption continue to grow among enterprises  and SaaS itself expands to meet the challenge...

Groovy and Grails Updated

Dr. Dobb's  Journal

By Staff Writer, March 17, 2009

SpringSource has announced the availability of Grails 1.1, a rapid web application development framework based on Groovy and Spring. The company also released Groovy 1.6, the dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine(JVM), that provides seamless integration with Java.

Microsoft to highlight Silverlight 3 technology

New York Times

By Paul Krill, March 17, 2009

Microsoft will tout at the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas this week its planned Silverlight 3 rich Internet application technology along with a host of other developer‑related offerings, according to the conference Web site.

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 16

Inside RIA.com

By David Tucker, March 16, 2009

This week we look forward to SXSW and Mix '09 and look back on Facebook coming to the desktop, a preview  of Pro JavaFX, a tool to help designers get started with Silverlight, more information on Mozilla Bespin, and  new AIR features in Aptana Studio. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Presentation: Rich Internet Applications with Flex and AIR

InfoQ

By Abel Avram, March 11, 2009

In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets presents Flex and AIR, two technologies from Adobe used to create, deploy and run Rich Internet Applications. After a brief introduction to each technology, Coenraets showed some applications built with them.

Adobe's Progress Report

Sys‑Con Media

By Staff Writer, March 17, 2009

This week Microsoft will make a number of announcements in the RIA space. The rumor has it that Silverlight 3 is going to be out. The rumor has it that it'll start competing with Adobe AIR. Let's take a quick look at the Adobe's progress report in the RIA space.

New Poll: ActionScript is now among the most popular languages. Which of these other languages do you use the most?

Inside RIA.com

By Rich Tretola, March 16, 2009

Recently O'Reilly's quarterly State of the Computer Book Market analysis, PartIV, Languages was released. If book sales are any indication, ActionScript is now among the most popular languages. So, with our new poll question we would like to know which other language you use the most. I realize that you may use many of the  languages on our list, so please leave comments as well. To take part in our poll, please click here.

It's not new that computers have been going through mutation - from mainframes to minis to PC to hand-held devices and smart phones now. With each step, the architecture has become more distributed. Now we are back to "centralized"  computing, as more activities move to the data centers, which are becoming  factories for computer services on an

industrial scale. Software is supposed to be delivered as "services" from such data centers. But wasn't this the theme of  SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings such as SugarCRM and SalesForce.com?

The answer is yes. SaaS, computing grids, multi-tenancy, and cloud services such as Google mail, are all precursors to  "cloud computing". As per the Economist magazine, 69% of Americans are connected to the web and use some kind of cloud service such as web-based mail and online data storage. Google has been pushing this model via Gmail, spreadsheet, and documents. These services will come in 3 layers - infrastructure, applications, and periphery (where they will meet the real world). I read somewhere that there are 70,000 data centers in the US, out of which 30% are no longer in use. Also, only 6% of the server capacity is used. This excess unused capacity is also pushing for the cloud model.

Amazon is considered the pioneer in this movement, with their S3 (Simple Shared Storage, storage rented from the cloud at cheap cost), and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud, processing cycles are available as and when needed). So the other players like Microsoft and Google are building huge data centers. Microsoft is adding 35000 servers a month, while Google has 36 data centers with about 2 million servers. The new data centers are being located in states like Washington and Oregon with low-cost electric power.

Cloud computing seems like a logical post-SaaS step, where measured, monitored, business process can be made available to clients. The current economic climate is also pushing the theme of "more with less" and cost savings as key principles. The days of under-used inhouse data centers are over. The new mantra -  web as the platform architecture, application modernization with web-based dynamic UI, and software available as cloud services. With the proliferation of hand-held devices and smart phones, the cloud computing model makes sense.