Category Archives: web authoring

adobe, bbc, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Is Silverlight the problem with ITV Player? Microsoft, you have a problem.

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I sat down last night to watch a programme on ITV’s catch-up service, using the Silverlight-based ITV Player. It was watchable, but not too good. Now and again the stream would pause for buffering, and I saw the Silverlight busy icon for a while. Quality is also an issue. Sometimes it is great; sometimes it is horribly pixelated.

I took a look at the ITV forums. It seems to be a common problem. The Best of ITV section is dominated by complaints. Some are from an aggrieved minority running Linux or PowerPC Macs; but there are plenty of others. My experience is relatively good; other issues include broadcasts that only play the ads; or codec issues; or streams failing completely half way through a programme. Here’s a sample:

Believe me guys even if you had Windows OS the player still wouldn’t work its completely rubbish; 6 times i’ve tried to watch Britains Got Talent and it either vanishes, or skips etc.
Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish! BBC iPlayer is excellent compared to this, i’m quite disappointed!

Readers of this blog will know that I have nothing against Silverlight, though my interest is more in the application development side than video streaming. Still, the impact of one on the other should not be discounted. You can guess what the pundits in the ITV forum are calling for. It’s Adobe Flash, because they have seen it working well for the BBC and elsewhere.

Now transition to the development team as they put forward the question of whether to use Flash or Silverlight for their upcoming RIA (Rich Internet Application) project. If the exec responsible struggled to watch ITV player the night before, thanks as far as she can tell to the Silverlight plug-in, that becomes a factor in the outcome.

I understand why people blame Silverlight for these problems; but I realise that this may be wrong, cross-platform issues aside. Maybe ITV has inadequate servers; or there is some other technical issue, and Silverlight is innocent.

If you know the answer to this, please let me know or comment below.

Microsoft must realise, though, that this is the most visible use of Silverlight for many UK folk. Some may also remember how BBC iPlayer transformed its reputation when it moved from using primarily Microsoft technology – though not Silverlight, and made worse by poor peer-to-peer client software – to Adobe’s Flash platform. I suggest that Redmond’s finest give it some attention; though who knows, it may be too late.

google, internet, web authoring

Google App Engine to be less free: quotas reduced from May 25th

I’m blogging this because I’ve only just noticed it; I’m not sure when it was announced. From 25th May, Google is reducing the resource quotas allowed for App Engine applications, before you have start paying. The question “by how much” is tough to answer, because the quota system is complex. Here’s the relevant document; there are quotas for bandwidth in and out, internal API calls, CPU time, data sent and received from the internal datastore, emails sent, and use of the image and caching services.

Still, what caught my eye is this:

The new free quota levels to take effect on May 25th will be as follows:

  • CPU Time: 6.5 hours of CPU time per day
  • Bandwidth: 1 gigabyte of data transferred in and out of the application per day
  • Stored Data & Email Recipients: unchanged

Currently, you are allowed 10 gigabytes in and 10 gigabytes out per day. So it looks to me as if by some measures the quotas have been reduced to one tenth of what they were; unless the new limit aggregates incoming and outgoing transfer, in which case it would be one twentieth.

The spin is that:

We believe these new levels will continue to serve a reasonably efficient application around 5 million page views per month, completely free.

It’s true that the old limits are generous. Still, the real point here is not to build your business on “free” services; at any moment the terms can change, sometimes severely. While the same is true of paid-for services, it is more difficult to make extreme changes.

It is also a reminder of Google’s usual tactic, to buy market share with generous initial terms. Remember all those Google Checkout incentives when the company was fighting to win customers from PayPal?

I’m actually more comfortable with Amazon’s approach to web services: nothing free, but commodity pricing from the get-go.

adobe, internet, java, microsoft, silverlight, software development, Sun, web authoring

Tim Bray’s contrarian views on Rich Internet Applications

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There’s a though-provoking interview with Sun’s Tim Bray over on the InfoQ site. One of his points is that Rich Internet Applications aren’t worth the hype. He says that web applications are generally better than desktop applications, because they enforce simplicity and support a back button, and that users prefer them. He adds:

Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive". Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic … ".

In further gloomy news for advocates of Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight or Sun’s own JavaFX he adds:

I suspect that the gap in the ecosystem that lies between what you could achieve with Ajax and what you need something like Flash or JavaFX or Silverlight to achieve is not that big enough to be terribly interesting.

I think there is a lot of truth in what he says, and I still regularly see Flash applications or Flash-enabled sites where I wish the developers or designers had not bothered. Nevertheless, I don’t go along with it completely. I’m typing this post in Live Writer, a desktop application, when I could be using the WordPress online editor. The reason is that I much prefer it. It is faster, smoother, and easier to use.

Another example is Twitter clients. I use Twhirl though I may switch to Tweetdeck; both are Flash (AIR) applications running as it happens outside the browser. I’d hate to go back to interacting with Twitter only through web pages.

I agree there there is some convergence going on between what we loosely call Ajax, and the RIA plug-ins; Yahoo Pipes apparently uses the HTML 5 Canvas element, for example, using this Google Code script for IE support. I’m glad there is a choice of RIA platforms, but I don’t see either Flash or Silverlight going away in the forseeable future.

It’s worth recalling that the RIA concept began with the notion that a rich user interface can be more productive and user-friendly than an HTML equivalent. I’ve written a fair amount about the legendary iHotelier Broadmoor Hotel booking application which kind-of kicked it off – and I’ve interviewed the guy who developed it – and it was undoubtedly motivated by the desire to improve usability. As far as I can tell it achieved its goals, which were easy to measure in that online bookings increased.

Multimedia, rich visual controls, Deep Zoom, offline support, pixel-level control of the UI; there’s a lot of stuff in what we currently call RIA that is worthwhile when used appropriately.

Another twist on this is that RIA is enabling a more complete move to web applications, by reducing the number of applications that do not work either in the browser, or as offline-enabled Flash or Silverlight.

Still, Bray is right to imply that RIAs also increase the number of ways developers can get the UI wrong; and that in many cases HTML with a dash of Ajax is a better choice.

I think the RIA space is more significant than Bray suggests; but his comments are nonetheless a useful corrective.

.net, java, software development, web authoring

QCon London 2009

I’m at QCon London and covering it on Twitter as wi-fi and battery power allows. The focus of the conference is enterprise development, and it spans Java and .NET, SOAP and REST, but with a bias towards Agile methodology.

I was here last year, and my observation is that last year there was considerable angst about the idea that the SOAP stack was failing to deliver and that new stacks based on REST were the thing to do.

This year this same statement feels more widely accepted and people are moving on, based on that assumption.

One delegate stuck his hand up and asked, “is this a fad, or will it last”? Sounds like a cry of pain from someone who invested heavily in something now condemned. History tells that in five or ten years time we may well be equally enthusiastic about some new thing and observing all the weaknesses in the bad stuff we used to do.

Still, these trends don’t form overnight. We have to choose what looks like the best model at the time.

I’m typing this during a session on test-driven development. Personally I think TDD is a more profound improvement in the software development process than REST vs SOAP; the detail of TDD will continue to evolve and be debated; but its basic ideas are hard to challenge.

As an aside, this is one factor in why ASP.NET MVC is so important for developers on Microsoft’s web platform. Reason: it’s testable.

.net, internet, microsoft, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Mono creeping into the mainstream?

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For those of you who have not already seen this link on Twitter: I’ve posted a short piece on Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft .NET. The piece was prompted by my own experience writing a simple .NET application in Visual Studio and deploying it to Linux. Admittedly I anticipated the move by using MySQL rather than SQL Server as the database; but even so, I was impressed by how easy it was – I spent more time recently deploying an application from Visual Studio 2008 to Windows Server 2008, thanks to some issues with SQL Server Express.

Don’t Miguel de Icaza’s comment about scalability and garbage collection, two of the factors that have deterred some from real-world Mono deployments.

.net, microsoft, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Hands on with ASP.Net Membership, SQL Express and Server 2008

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Is it worth using the built-in membership framework in your ASP.Net application, or should you roll your own? I’ve been trying it out recently, and I have mixed feelings.

On the plus side, it does get you up and running quickly with user login and role-based permissions, saving time and possibly achieving more reliable results, on the grounds that Microsoft and countless other users should have found and fixed any bugs by now.

One the negative side, there are annoying limitations. The most obvious one is that a user as defined in the framework only has a minimal number of fields, not including information you probably want to store like first and last name. You are meant to fill this gap by using profiles, another ASP.Net feature which lets you store arbitrary name-value pairs in a database as a kind of persistent session. That works, but the way profile properties are stored makes it hard to do things like sorting users by last name. Therefore, you will probably end up managing your own user database and joining it to the membership system with the user ID, at which point you begin to lose some of the benefits.

Some of the supplied controls, like the CreateUserWizard, seem rough-and-ready too.

Still, the real fun began when I tried to deploy my demo app to Server 2008 and SQL Server Express 2008. By the way, make sure you install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Windows Installer 4.5 before installing the latest SQL Server Express, otherwise the setup spends ages unpacking its files and then exits with a brief message. I got there eventually, copied my application across, and optimistically tried to run it.

When you debug a web application in Visual Studio, it defaults to a SQL Express database in the App_Data folder within the web site, attached on demand. In theory, that should make it easy to deploy to another machine with SQL Express installed: just copy it across, right? There must be a way of getting this to  work, but it seems a lot of people have problems. I got the message:

Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE’.

This makes sense, insofar as ASP.NET runs as this user. I temporarily attached the database and added the login, to be rewarded with a different and more perplexing error:

Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance.

A quick Google shows that many users have suffered from these errors, and that a large number of remedies have been proposed. I abandoned the idea of attaching the database on demand and set up a new database, made ready with Aspnet_regsql. I still got one or other of these errors.

Eventually I realised that my application was using more than one connection string. The problem is that the membership framework uses three different "providers", one for membership, one for roles, and one for profiles. By default in IIS 7.0, these all use an attach-on-demand connection string, defined as LocalSqlServer, and inherited from machine.config buried deep within your Microsoft .NET Framework system folder. In order to prevent ASP.Net membership from using this, you have to override all three providers in the web.config for your application. There’s an example in this article from ISP MaximumASP. I wish I’d come across it sooner; but my demo works fine now.

adobe, flash, internet, silverlight, web authoring

RIA plug-in stats: Flash dominates

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I’ve just come across riastats.com which has statistics on which RIA (Rich Internet Application) plug-ins are installed on which browser.

The stats are from a relatively small sample: it claims to have analysed 1.5 million browsers across 42 sites at the time of writing.

The headline: Flash is on over 97% of browsers; but only 52% are at version 10. Java is on just under 75%, while Silverlight can only muster 20% penetration.

I also noticed that Firefox (25%) users are more likely to have Silverlight than IE (20%). Maybe all those locked-down corporate desktops.

Another snippet: less than 30% of Linux users have Sun’s Java plug-in installed.

Microsoft can take some comfort from the direction of the graph. In December 2008 only 15% of browsers had Silverlight. That’s pretty fast growth.

Still, the bottom line is that if you want to be fairly sure that your users have nothing to install in order to view your RIA content, use Flash. But stick to version 9.

.net, adobe, google, iphone, microsoft, ruby, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Programming language trends: Flash up, AJAX down?

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I’m fascinated by the O’Reilly reports on the state of the computer book market in 2008, particularly the one relating to programming languages.

Notable facts and speculations:

C# is the number one language, overtaking Java (which is down 12%), and was consistently so throughout 2008. Although the .NET platform is no longer new and exciting, I’m guessing this reflects Microsoft’s success in corporate development, plus the fact that the language is changing fast enough to stimulate book purchases. Absolute growth is small though: just 1%.

Objective-C is growing massively (965%). That’s probably stimulated by iPhone app development more than anything else. It’s a perfect topic for a programming book, since the platform is important and popular, and attracting developers who were previously ignorant of Objective-C.

ActionScript is growing (33%). That’s Adobe’s success in establishing Flex and the Flash platform.

PHP is up 3%. I’m not surprised; it’s usually the P in LAMP, everyone’s favourite free and open source web platform. That said, the online documentation and community support for PHP is so good that a book is less necessary than for some other languages.

JavaScript is down 24%. I’m a little surprised, as JavaScript is still a language everyone has to grapple with to some degree. It may be a stretch; but I wonder if this is a symptom of AJAX losing developer mindshare to Flash/Flex (ActionScript) and maybe Silverlight (C#)? Another factor is that JavaScript is not changing much; last year’s JavaScript book is still good enough.

Visual Basic is down 15%. Exactly what I would expect; slow-ish decline but still popular.

Ruby is down 51%. This is a surprise; though it was well up in 2007 so you could be kind and describe this as settling. The problem with Ruby though is lack of a major sponsor; plus the migration from PHP to Ruby that seemed possible a couple of years ago just has not happened. It may be intimidating to casual developers who find PHP more approachable; plus of course, Ruby probably is not installed on your low-cost shared web hosting package.

Python is down 14%. Google sponsors Python, in that it is the language of App Engine, but apparently this has not been enough to stimulate grown in book sales. I guess App Engine is still not mainstream; or maybe there just aren’t enough good Python books out there.*

It will be interesting to see the 2009 report in a year or so. Meanwhile, I’m off to write an Objective C tutorial (joke!).

*Update: I was reading the charts too quickly; it looks as if the percentages above are only for the last quarter; the annual figures are similar except that Python actually grew over the year as a whole.

adobe, cloud computing, flash, internet, microsoft, multimedia, silverlight, software, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring

How will Microsoft make money from Silverlight?

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Indeed, will it do so? I like Silverlight a lot; though I appreciate that to a Flash developer it may seem pointless. It does a lot of stuff right: small download, powerful layout language, cross-platform (with caveats), rich media, fast just-in-time compiled code.

Still, what intrigues me is how Silverlight has come from nowhere to what seems to be a central position in Microsoft’s product strategy in just a few years. What’s the business case? Or is it just that someone high up experienced a moment of horror – “Flash is taking over in web media and browser-hosted applications, we gotta do something”?

Let’s eliminate a few things. It’s not the design and developer tools. Making a profit from tools is hard, with tough competition both from open source, and from commercial companies giving away tools to promote other products. I don’t know how Microsoft’s figures look for the Expression range, but I’m guessing they bleed red, irrespective of their quality. Visual Studio may just about be a profit centre (though the Express series is free); but Silverlight is only a small corner of what it does.

Nor is it the runtime. Adobe can’t charge for Flash; Microsoft can’t charge for Silverlight.

I asked Twitter for some ideas. Here are some of the responses:

migueldeicaza @timanderson, my guesses:WinServer built-in-steaming;Strengthening .NET ecosystem, and client-server interactions;Keep share in RIA space

IanBlackburn @timanderson Isn’t Silverlight going to become the "Microsoft Client" and central to s+s?  Apps built with it can be charged in many way

harbars @timanderson no doubt with annoying adverts

mickael @timanderson isn’t silverlight a defensive move against other RIA platforms (like Adobe’s one)? They might only plan selling developmt tools

jonhoneyball @timanderson In the long term by hosting tv stations’ internet traffic and providing the charging/hosting/download/player model.

jonhoneyball @timanderson ie azure cloud + silverlight + someone elses content = ms revenue. no, it wont work, but its not unexpected ms-think.

jonhoneyball @timanderson why no work? price war to come on cloud host/delivery etc Someone will host BBC for free. Game over

There are two main themes here. One is media streaming; as the Internet takes over an increasing proportion of broadcasting and media delivery (note recent comments on Spotify) Microsoft plans to profit from server-side services. The challenges here are that there may be little money to be made; Adobe has a firm grip on this already; and Apple will do its own thing.

The other is about applications. This is the bit that makes sense to me. Microsoft knows that the era of Windows desktop clients, while not over, is in long-term decline; and that applies to applications like Office as well as custom business applications. Silverlight is a strong client platform for web-based alternatives. So I’m voting for Ian Blackburn’s comment above: it’s the Microsoft Client.

If that’s right, we’ll see Silverlight embed itself into more and more of Microsoft’s products, from desktop to server, just as Adobe is gradually remaking everything it does around Flash.

The difference is that Microsoft has far more invested in the status quo: selling Windows and Office. I’m guessing that there are heated internal battles around things like Web Office. The briefing I attended at the 2008 PDC on Office Web Applications was fascinating in respect of its ambivalence; for every web feature shown, the presenters wanted to emphasise that desktop Office was still the thing you should have.

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internet, search, web authoring

Google says top two results get most of the hits – but what about ads?

A post on the Official Google Blog says that the first two search results get most of the clicks:

This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

I knew you had to be on the first page – but the “top two” result is even harder to achieve.

It is significant though that Google’s post makes no mention of ads. I am quite sure that the study included research into their effectiveness. Google has chosen not to reveal this aspect of the research.

In particular, most Google search results do not look like the examples. Rather, they have ads at the top which look just like the other results, except with a different background colour and a faint “Sponsored Links” at the right:

My question: in a result list like this, which “top two” gets the eyeballs and the clicks? The search results? Or the paid links?

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