Web 2.0 Expo - April 22-25, 2008

jnan — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:31:21 GMT

I had briefly reported from the Web 2.0 Expo last week. Here is an overall summary of the event.

I have been going to all the Web 2.0 events since they started back in 2005. It's quite remarkable how fast the attendance has grown. There used be just one conference in November. Due to its popularity they made it into two events - We 2.0 Expo in April and Web 2.0 Summit in October. The one in the fall tends to be much more technical. The expo is broader and the attendance is much larger. The success of this event has prompted the organizers (O'Reilly & company) to have similar events in New York, Tokyo, and Europe since 2007.

For those who are confused by the term Web 2.0, you are in good company of many. Ambiguity is the name of the game here. The phrase Web 2.0 was coined to explain the evolution of the Web to being a serious platform for the future applications, as opposed to the first phase (Web 1.0) where static pages were delivered and user-interactivity was quite limited. Also it was architecturally poor and slow to perform with all the page refreshes. Web 2.0 deals with asynchronous access to servers, polling data to the client cache for continuous feeding (e.g. Google Maps), hence it feels like a local desktop application. The phrase Ajax was coined 2 years ago to highlight the asynchronous aspects, even though the underlying technology remains the same - HTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM, XML,..

During 2005 and 2006, almost all the attendees at the Web 2.0 events were young kids working on start-ups like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. During last year's Web 2.0 Summit, the first session was with Marc Zuckerberg, the 23 year old who founded Facebook. The same night, the dinner guest was the 73-year old Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation and owner of MySpace. During my first attendance back in 2005 Fall, I felt like a fish out of water. There were no large enterprises including my former employers like IBM or Oracle. I could not recognize anyone from my generation. No gray hair from the client-server era. But it was lots of fun watching the kids re-invent the same issues some of us had worked on years back. Topics like stateful applications, transactional integrity, secure commits to the database, good scalability when numbers rise fast, were all being revisited. I call this "Back to the Future". So all the discussions centered around the "consumer space". It's like the boom-years of 1997-2000 when Jeff Bozos of Amazon said, "profit,? I spell that as Prophet." People started talking about another "bubble" around Web 2.0. No one seemed to care about "monetization" or "business value".

Zimbra got a standing ovation in the fall of 2005 when it displayed its email with pop-ups as you mouse thru the content. Yahoo bought Zimbra for $300m, but its future inside Yahoo is clouded as much as Yahoo's own future. This year, I noticed a remarkable shift. Suddenly large enterprises are everywhere. IBM had a big booth. So did Oracle. Juniper networks, HCL, Nokia, all had large booths. Even the sessions were full of speakers from large corporations. The classic "social-networking-is-the-future" crowd was also there, but they seemed less in number.

This is good for us at Curl, as we position our solution for the enterprise, serious to deploy the business-critical applications on the new web platform. We gave over 120 demos to visitors in our booth. Many of the visitors asked serious questions this time. Some have tried to implement complex visualization apps. via Adobe Flash, or via one of many Ajax frameworks, but were highly disappointed with scalability and functions. Programmer productivity is a key factor. Rapid prototyping is also crucial for creating proof points. Gone are the days of long development cycle. Getting users involved during the design process is key to success. Cul renders itself well to these approaches. We need to continue aggressively with our "awareness campaign" for the enterprise crowd.

In summary, I was not that surprised with the evolution of Web 2.0 towards more "enterprise focus". The same phenomenon was also visible at the AjaxWorld in New York during March. There were more discussions on "building RIA outside Ajax", as people realize the deficiencies of Ajax frameworks.

Seven nice Things about the Curl Platform

mgordon — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:43:54 GMT

What makes Curl such a great programming platform? Here are seven things.

Single Platform: The Curl RTE is the same on every platform, in any browser. No need to work around browser quirks and bugs.

Security: Curl has a security model that prevents unprivileged applets from doing arbitrary things on your computer. For safety's sake, we think that most applets should be unprivileged. For commonly needed but potentially insecure operations, such as reading or writing a file, the RTE will ask the user for permission before allowing the operation. This is better than always preventing it and also better than not allowing it at all. It is of course possible to grant applets full privileges, but it's not a step to be taken lightly.

Speed: The Curl RTE compiles an applet to machine code so execution is fast. As an applet is downloaded from your web site it is compiled and evaluated incrementally. Any expression that produces output is shown immediately in the web browser. Class definitions, procedures, packages, and so on are compiled and cached, so subsequent downloads are faster than the first one.

Software Engineering: Curl is the kind of language you want if you are serious about software engineering. Strong type checking is enforced, though you can declare a variable to be of type "any". The language supports multiple inheritence. It has parameterized types (generic classes), as well user defined macros. It doesn't force you to put everything into a class. Development is fast too, because of the large number of useful APIs provided and because the compile time type checking helps you eliminate errors early. Plus when debugging, you don't have to "build" anything. Just edit and reload in the browser.

Single Language: The Curl language is suitable for all of the things that go into a modern web application: Classes, algorithms, data, expressions, events and handlers, text, graphics, forms, tables, and everything else can be expressed in the same language. You don't need to use a messy combination of XML, JavaScript, HTML, ActionScript, and various other languages and formats.

Server deployed: A Curl applet is distributed simply by putting it on a web server. It is updated by updating the files on the web server. It can be is as easy as updating a static web site.

Service Oriented: A Curl applet is the ideal consumer for web services and API's. Any SOAP endpoint can be turned into a Curl package and called directly. REST API's can also be easily handled. Both synchronous and asynchronous requests are supported.

We'll be talking more about these and other advantages of the Curl platform over the next few weeks. Let us know if any of them is of particular interest.

If you're a web developer, download the free IDE (which also installs the RTE if needed) and give Curl a try. You can use Curl for any programming project, even if you aren't planning to deploy it on the web. If you need to do any kind of computation and user interaction, Curl makes it easy. There are extensive examples in the Developer's Guide to get you started.

Curl Blog

Web 2.0 Expo - April 22-25, 2008

Seven nice Things about the Curl Platform