Today, December 9th., 2007, our friend and colleague Marc Orchant passed away at 2:56pm Pacific time, after fighting a massive heart attack just seven days ago. He never regained consciousness during this period. Our mutual friend Oliver Starr reported this sad news at his blog: http://owstarr.com/marc-orchant-updates-and-information/

I met Marc two years ago at Enterprise 2.0 conference, when both of us were helping Foldera. Since then he became a great friend. I introduced him to Curl earlier this year after our launch at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He showed a lot of interest and excitement on Curl's potential as a major technology disruptor. Subsequently, Richard and I coaxed him to help us as the VP of Developer Programs. He played a great role in creating the new developer community site with help from The Last Mile Group. Everyone who met Marc loved him. He educated us with his myriad gadgets - from Nokia devices to the iPhone. His voice is there welcoming the first-time visitors to our developer site.

Marc was a famous blogger with ZDnet followed by his new role at BlogNation. We spent many moments together at Office 2.0 and Web 2.0 Summit. He visited Cambridge site and impressed everyone there with his eloquence and knowledge.

The technology community is flooded with blogposts on this sad news. His fragrant personality and enthusiasm will remain in our hearts as we say goodbye to a dear friend. Let his soul rest in peace.

Sayonara dear friend Marc Orchant.

Jnan

I listened to Billy Hollis from Microsoft describing Silverlight for business applications this morning. He started with an interesting statement - I am here to help you defect to client-side development.

He spent first few minutes talking about the decoupling of business logic from the UI. He showed a client stack with multiple UI (Forms-based, browser-based and mobile interface) and multi-transport bindings. Then he explained state-based architecture (primarily to the HTML developers deep in statelessness). He was making the case for "why Silverlight". He emphasized that Silverlight is a miniature version of CLR (Common Language Runtime). It is a highly productive development framework with multi-language support and rich class library of functionality. The programming model is different than the scripting world, with classes, objects. He suggested development with Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

He showed a demo of a chess game, where JavaScript was the opposing player to Silverlight, and it always lost, due to lack of speed (compiled vs interpretive). Silverlight 1.0 was very basic and lacked many functions, such as a text boxes. Even the new Silverlight 2.0, scheduled for beta in 1Q08 will be termed "immature" with many limitations. In the area of controls, panels, security, 3D, it is behind. It did mention that Adobe Flex is the only competition and gave it higher marks in "maturity", but lower marks on programming model. Hence Flex is unsuitable for business applications, he said.

We have so much functionality in Curl, but no one knows us. I spoke with Billy and suggested to look at Curl. We have at least a six months advantage over Silverlight 2.0 assuming its out by mid-2008. But Microsoft gets away with so little because of its enormous brand name.

To the next session.

Jnan

I am here with Richard at WebBuilder 2.0 in Las Vegas. Monday was the first day. There are about 200 people, mostly developers and this is the second year of this conference. The first keynote was given by Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra (now part of Yahoo). According to Scott, RIA only stands for Ajax and imporvements. Zimbra is one of the largest Ajax applications (over 200K Lines of Code). It's all Javascript, CSS, DOM. It's funny to hear about new trends in bringing "offline Ajax" and better security. The dreaded word in security is memory leaks in browser-land. He demonstrated the key mash-up features in Zimbra. Now the question is what would Yahoo do with Zimbra in future, which is an alternative to Microsoft Outlook (Open source, Web 2.0, and SaaS are its claims). Time will tell. Scott said Rich Internet Application is Javascript and Ajax and big players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have backed this big time. Ajax challenges include - browser incompatibilities, tooling, security, performance, and offline - all relevant to Enterprise scale RIA.

The afternoon keynote was by Mark Lucovsky, director of engineering at Google. Mark spent his time describing the Interactive Search Application and gave several examples of how Google's news, map, video, etc are deployed by many sites (via Google API) such as Time magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times. He lowered the bar by saying anyone who provides an RSS feed is a conetnt publisher and anyone who reads a page is contents consumer. So he is addressing a vast audience. He also mentioned the need for a Universal API for Web 2.0 (Scott also mentioned that).

There was an interesting talk by Coach Wei, CTO at Nexaweb ( a Boston company). He described the basics of RIA technologies. His positioning on simple browser-based approach to a full desktop approach was similar to our positioning.

My talk was rescheduled to Monday from Tuesday. So instead of the last talk in the last day, mine was the last talk on the first day. Because of the timing, the attendance was disappointing. But I did talk about our theme of enterprise scale RIA and Curl's positioning. I also described the results of our benchmark study between Curl, Ajax, and Flex.

More later.