JavaScript can save your day or it can cause you nightmares. JavaScript and XHR (XmlHttpRequest) enable what the industry considers to be Web 2.0 – meaning highly interactive web sites where some application logic is pushed down to the client into the browsers JavaScript engine. As with any application code – regardless of the language and runtime environment – it is easy to not follow Best Practices which ultimately negatively impact the end-user experience with the site.

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Had an interesting conversation the other day with Adam, our lead interface developer at Enomaly. He's been our key AJAX and API developer on the Enomaly ECP platform for several years. During our random afternoon chat he basically said that AJAX is quite possibly the worst way to consume a RESTful API. He pointed out the purpose of a RESTful approach to API development & implementation is in its similarities to HTTP and more generally uri/urls -- each of which is easily viewable both programmatic as well as visually. The problem is AJAX is kind of the opposite. Most of the things that make the web great, such as urls, hyperlinks and bookmarking are not easily done or seen in a AJAX application. All the benefits to a RESTful architecture are hidden by the AJAX itself making development longer, more difficult to debug and often harder to scale.

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In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1-4, 2010) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem.

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It was a rout. The Swiss Post’s fancy lawyers looked at RPost’s patents and told their client to throw in the towel – and so, without going to court, Swiss Post and its Swiss Post Solutions subsidiary have agreed to abandon the American registered e-mail market to RPost after RPost sued Swiss Post for infringing its patents and treading on its “Registered E-Mail” trademark. The whole process didn’t take very long. RPost only lodged suit three months ago. It remarked at the time that “a suit against a foreign government agency for infringing a U.S. patent is a legal first.” So, therefore, is a victory.

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The RichFaces team has made a major step toward RichFaces 4 by releasing Alpha 2 version. I'm hoping to see GA in September. Keep in mind that not all components have been migrated to version 4 yet. The components that are available right now are listed below. Some highlights in RichFaces 4 Alpha 2[...]

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The Federal Trade Commission is going to investigate Apple for anti-competitive practices because it’s shut Adobe Flash out its mobile ecosystem and is now trying to keep Google ads off of IPad and iPhone applications. Bloomberg says the Justice Department and the FTC have been debating which one should take the case for weeks. Apparently the FTC won the coin toss though the DOJ is already investigating Apple and other Silicon Valley types over a possible illegal agreement not to poach each others’ employees. The Wall Street Journal says the DOJ has also started looking at Apple’s practices in its dominant music business.

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With more than 3 million downloads, Selenium is the world’s most popular functional testing framework. It allows web developers and QA professionals to automatically test how an application functions on multiple browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome and across operating systems, such as different versions of Windows and Mac OS. The FREE dynaTrace AJAX Edition on the other side is probably the best web site performance analysis tool for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. Here is what John Resig, Creator of jQuery has to say about it: “I’m very impressed with dynaTrace AJAX Edition’s ability ...

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There are four components in the a4j: tag library which enable you to send an Ajax request. They are a4j:commandButton, a4j:commandLink, a4j:support, and a4j:poll. All provide rather specific functionality. For example, a4j:commandButton will generate an HTML button that fires an Ajax request. a4j;commandLink will do the same but generates a link. a4j:support is always attached to another JSF component to enable sending an Ajax request based on some event supported by the parent component. a4j:poll which allows sending Ajax requests periodically. There is one more tag called a4j:jsFunction. This tags gives you a lot of power and flexibility. a4j:jsFunction lets you send an Ajax request from any user-defined JavaScript function. It can be a custom function or from any component-event as well. The good news is that it works just like any other tags I listed above, it has all the same attributes such as reRender, action, actionListener, bypassUpdates, ajaxSingle and so on.

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Microsoft last Friday hung price tags on its Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), which has been in preview since November and therefore free. The CDN service, which caches Azure blobs closer to the user to accelerate content delivery, is currently available at 19 locations globally. Any storage account can be CDN-enabled. Microsoft says the CDN charges do not include the fees for transferring data from Azure Storage to CDN. Those will be charged separately at the normal Azure Storage rates.

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Financial analyst Trip Chowdhry, who’s frankly got a hit-or-miss track record, has put in train the rumor – spread in turn by Barron’s – that Steve Ballmer will turn up at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco June 7 and share the keynote spotlight with Steve Jobs for seven minutes. He’s supposed to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the latest rev of the Microsoft development tools, which is supposed to let developers write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS as well as Windows Phone 7. Maybe Apple needs a surprise considering the highly public loss of two prototypes of its expected iPhone 4G to the blogosphere, but didn’t Jobs just outlaw other people’s development tools or is that just a Flash edict?

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By now most web developers are familiar with Ajax and the benefits that it provides.  In short, Ajax allows you to communicate asynchronously from the browser to a server.  This is usually done using the XMLHttpRequest object which is now supported in all major browsers.  Anyone who has used Ajax extensively is probably also aware [...]

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Symantec, best known as the purveyor of the Norton antivirus software, is buying VeriSign’s identity and authentication business for $1.28 billion cash. That’s the unit that sells the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) services that protect electronic payments and authenticate web sites. It did $410 million last year, representing roughly 40% of VeriSign’s income. The deal, which should close by September, also includes a majority stake in VeriSign Japan. The sale leaves VeriSign with its Internet domain business; it has sold off or shut down some 20 other non-core operations the last few years to focus on registering and managing traffic to more than 100 million domain names that end with .com or .net.

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Google and VMware have never been particularly chummy but now they’re suddenly each other’s new best friend and a little cloud brought them together. As a result Google is going to support some of the Java tools VMware got with its acquisition of SpringSource, enough so users can move relatively painlessly between Google’s cloud, any VMware-based clouds like, say, its VMForce cloud combined with Salesforce, and Amazon’s EC2. It will also make certain adjustments in the Google Web Toolkit to oblige the effort. See, Google is cultivating its yen for the enterprise and claims that its App Engine, its platform for web applications, is now ready to support customers’ internal apps so it announced a version called App Engine for Business that big companies are supposed to use as infrastructure.

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Six billion PC-buyers ‘processor unaware’ says AMD’s Nigel Dessau, despite Intel spending ‘billions’ on advertising. “It’s time marketing executives stop hiding behind meaningless metrics and deliver clear ROI instead…” “Our biggest competitor has spent billions of dollars trying to market to those [who don’t understand these kinds of technologies]. But you know what? I bet if you did the research ten years later you would find the same numbers of people are processor unaware as they were before.” In an exclusive interview with the executive business channel MeetTheBoss.tv, AMD’s Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Dessau explains how marketing trends are changing; and how AMD is rising to the challenge this presents.

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Server application virtualization pioneer, AppZero, on Monday announced the availability of the AppZero Release 4.5 Virtual Application Appliance (VAA) Suite, enabling groups of virtualized server applications to be “scooped and moved” across datacenter and cloud environments without requiring any operating system component. This automates and makes the process of moving multi-application workloads fast, easy and reliable, providing enterprises with an on-demand approach for running server-side apps when and where they want. The AppZero Enterprise Suite is built on AppZero’s patent-pending Cloud Container Isolation Technology that encapsulates a server application and all of its dependencies, but with zero operating system (OS) component. The VAA, freed from any OS encumbrance, can move seamlessly from data center to, and among, clouds and back across both physical and virtual servers.

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London-based private equity house Apax Partners is buying 70% of Sophos, the privately held security ISV that competes with McAfee and Symantec, for about $580 million. The $260-million-a-year British antivirus company had IPO designs but apparently found an easier way to cash out. Some of the money is earmarked for acquisitions.

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Most organizations today continue to view technology as merely a back-office cost center, a viewpoint that diminishes the breadth of Enterprise IT's impact on a firm's competitive profile. To contribute to strategic growth, IT's role has to be understood as far more than a repository of software and hardware applications. Instead, it should be seen from a meta-IT perspective, a perception that examines and understands the management of IT as a firm-wide service and infrastructure fabric in the cloud that collaborates with business units to respond rapidly, innovatively, and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. Traditional IT strategy and governance models fail because they do not take into account the changing needs of the markets in which businesses operate and the new cloud-enabling technologies that are now available to expedite and facilitate optimized IT management. The strategy to fill this void is the concept of a meta-IT model in which IT is positioned as complementary to other strategies for attaining greater market agility.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Tony Bishop, Founder and CEO of Adaptivity, the IT transformation company, was named to the International Advisory Board of Cloud Expo. By forming an International Advisory Board, Cloud Expo extends its leadership position as center of gravity for the worldwide move by Enterprise IT away from running all applications within a traditional corporate data center. Bishop joins a distinguished roster of Enterprise IT heavyweights.

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Click Here to Download This White Paper Now! In this January 2010 Technology Audit, OVUM Butler Group analyst Rob Hailstone describes Intel's SOA Expressway and how the software appliance can be deployed as a point of entry for SOA or as a point-of-usage device that offloads process-intensive tasks from a traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In this white paper Rob describes key findings including how SOA Expressway can even replace the need entirely for traditional forms of ESB. The report provides coverage on how SOA Expressway delivers a set of run-time governance functions, both passive such as monitoring and auditing, and active such as policy enforcement and security gateway. It also addresses how the product is able to provide the service mediation functions of an ESB, and has some ability to provide service orchestration functions. In his review, Rob elaborates on how SOA Expressway can be viewed as several different types of products according to situation and need.

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The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. Additionally, there are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files. The Flash Player’s product direction has traditionally been heavily influenced by the community and their needs. The core language for Flash Player is an implementation of ECMAScript 262, which is the same specification for JavaScript. Flex also uses CSS for styling of components/applications.

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