The Web is a mess; it's an unsound and broken hodgepodge of standards, tools and browsers that all kinda work together, except of course when they don't.
This isn't an uncommon position. Everyone from major software vendors to government figures to standards bodies has at one time or another held this opinion. In Daryl Taft's interview with Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Eich makes pretty much this exact point about the Web being a mess.
So we can all agree that the Web is a broken mess, to which I think we should all also add that this is also a good thing, because if the Web weren't such a mess, it probably wouldn't exist in anything like the powerful and disruptive form that it has today.
Think about it. When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web he broke many of the classic rules of scripting and development. The Web is supremely flexible (aka messy), highly forgiving of bad links, lousy code and incompatible applications (aka broken), and compatible with a wide variety of browsers, operating systems and applications (formally unsound). And this is why the Web succeeded where similar efforts had failed.
Small Web applications, or widgets, have become a kind of gateway tool for Web content creators who want to add simple graphical applications to their Web sites, blogs or social network pages. These tools let regular users with no or limited developer skills build mashup applications that combine rich media and popular Web-based services such as Google Apps and Twitter.
For a relatively new field, and one that normally doesn't charge users a fee, the competitive landscape in widget and mashup creation tools is getting pretty crowded and already includes options from major players, such as Microsoft's Popfly.
And with the recent beta release of Sprout, it just got a bit more crowded. Sprout's Sprout Builder tool offers a completely Web-based development environment for building simple media widgets and mashups.
Click here to see screenshots Expression Studio is Microsoft's competitor to Adobe's Creative Suite, but in terms of features, functionality and maturity of tool sets, there's really no competition: Adobe trounces the Microsoft design and Web development suite across the board.
But just because Microsoft Expression Studio can't currently take down the reigning of king of design and Web development suites doesn't mean it's without merit. While I've found some of the tools in Expression Studio to be very basic and lacking in advanced functionality, I've also found some very well-implemented tools for building rich Web sites and applications.
And with the recent release of Expression Studio 2, Microsoft has slowly but steadily improved the core tools of its suite. These tools are Expression Web 2, designed for the authoring and editing of Web sites and a direct competitor of Adobe Dreamweaver; Expression Blend 2, a development tool for creating Web animations and rich Internet applications including those based on Silverlight 1.0; Expression Design 2, a graphics and image design tool; Expression Media 2, a simple but well-designed personal digital asset management tool; and Expression Encoder 2, a newcomer to the suite used for encoding media files for use in Web sites and rich Internet applications.
You have sales and customer management systems, advanced project management tools, extensive network and system security infrastructures, collaboration tools, and a heavily customized enterprise content management system.
What's not so typical now--but will be in the near future--is that none of these applications is run in-house. All of these core applications are delivered over the Web in a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model. As such, the applications are accessed via a Web browser that is basically acting as the operating system. There's nothing wrong with that. Right? Right?!
The idea of the browser as the operating system has been around since the early days of the Web. In fact, it is generally accepted that Microsoft went after Netscape so hard because it feared that the Netscape browser would become more important than the operating system it ran on.
That fear may have been unfounded at the time, but we are much closer now to being able to access everything--from e-mail to office applications to image editing to essential enterprise business applications--from the confines of the humble Web browser.
This means that businesses should start to take a much closer look at the Web browsers on which they standardize, especially in the areas of compatibility, adaptability and security.
Click here to see screenshots There's a war brewing on the Web today--a war to decide how Web applications and content will be developed and how users will consume the content of the future Web.
But this isn't the latest round in the browser wars. No, the war I'm talking about is over the RIA (rich Internet application), a type of Web application that can run independently of browsers, can run on any operating system and, in many ways, works like a traditional desktop application.
Of course, RIAs aren't new. They can be traced back to earlier efforts such as Macromedia's Shockwave, Java applets and the ubiquitous Flash format.
But recent developments--including the growth of powerful Web development technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and improved standards support in the latest Web browsers--have boosted RIAs' potential reach and capabilities.
As someone who mainly goes to technology conferences focused on traditional software and hardware, I found going to the recent CTIA show was a good reminder of how different the mobile world is from the PC and server world, especially when it comes to applications.
For example, say I go to a traditional PC software show, such as LinuxWorld or Macworld. At the conference, I meet with some application vendors. They show me their cool new product and then they say, "Try it out," handing me a disk or USB drive or giving me a URL from which I can download their app. The whole time I have full confidence that their application will run on my systems and software.
Now compare this with some of the meetings I had with mobile application vendors at CTIA. At the show, I met with some vendors who had some very interesting applications. But if I wanted to try them out myself I was out of luck.
Because instead of just saying, "Here you go, it runs on Linux or Mac OSX, have fun testing it," the mobile application vendor says, "Well, to start off our application will only be available on these two carriers, and it will only be offered on new phones and the only way to get it from these initial carriers will be within a special business application package that they are putting together."
So instead of being able to test or use the vendor's application, I, and most potential users and customers of the application, find that the odds are we will never be able to use that specific application.
Click here to watch the video SOA, or Service Oriented Architectures, have changed the way that businesses build enterprise applications, connect to partners and integrate their many IT systems. But now, an emerging technology could change the way that businesses build and deploy their SOA platforms. This technology is the semantic web, which is essentially the next phase of the web, one in which all content on the web becomes data aware.
In this eWEEK Video, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza about how the semantic Web will enable enterprises to build new "data aware" application.
Click here to see screenshots With the release this week of the first beta of Internet Explorer 8, we are finally getting a good look at the next step in Microsoft's Web strategy. And we also can finally start to put the next generation of the Browser Wars into focus with a new version of IE to compare with the recent betas of Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3.
Of course, this release of Internet Explorer 8 is a very early beta and one that Microsoft accurately describes as a developer beta, meaning that regular users should probably stay away from it.
However, while Beta 1 of IE 8 is definitely developer-oriented, it does include more in the way of actual new features than I'm used to seeing in developer releases, which are typically focused on helping Web developers code to the new HTML engine in the browser.
Among some of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 are WebSlices and Activities. While I didn't find either of these features revolutionary in their design, they do offer some interesting tweaks to how users access Web content and carry out everyday Web browsing activities.
It's impossible to underestimate the impact that SOA, or Service Oriented Architectures, has had on enterprises and business integration. Whether or not a business has implemented a full-fledged SOA platform, there is still a very good chance that a large portion of their business and partner integration is based on core SOA technologies such as XML.
The funny thing about SOA is that despite its importance, its origins were in many ways a surprise to many of the pundits and experts who followed technology at the time of its infancy.
Back then, most of the focus on web services was on the consumer and individual side of the Web. Anyone who sat through early web services demos most likely saw a sample application designed to help an individual book travel, or buy online goods.
But while all of the pundits were focused on consumer side web services (and often predicting the failure of web services due to the lack of consumer web services) much of the real work in web services happened in the nuts and bolts of enterprise back office integration.
Click the image to see the slideshow
In the world of technology, hype is like the sun. A little bit of hype can be a good thing, especially for emerging technologies, by bringing attention and light to unknown technologies and products and helping them grow. But like the sun too much hype can be a bad thing, crushing bad products unworthy of hype and even making good technologies seem less worthy or even appear to be failures.
When this happens technologies become overhyped, and this new century has seen more than its fair share of products, technologies, and technology trends that received way more adulation and praise then they deserved. And many of these technologies aren't failures or flops, but instead received so much hype that it was impossible for them to ever live up to early expectations.
The Web is a mess; it's an unsound and broken hodgepodge of standards, tools and browsers that all kinda work together, except of course when they don't.
This isn't an uncommon position. Everyone from major software vendors to government figures to standards bodies has at one time or another held this opinion. In Daryl Taft's interview with Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Eich makes pretty much this exact point about the Web being a mess.
It's impossible to underestimate the impact that SOA, or Service Oriented Architectures, has had on enterprises and business integration. Whether or not a business has implemented a full-fledged SOA platform, there is still a very good chance that a large portion of their business and partner integration is based on core SOA technologies such as XML.
