Category Archives: web authoring

adobe, flash, google, microsoft, open source, software development, Sun, web authoring

Google, Adobe, Mozilla: Open source war of words is all about owning the platform

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The route to dizzying riches in this industry is to own the platform. Look no further than Microsoft, which not only sells the operating system, but also dominates the applications which run on it, from Microsoft Office on the desktop, to server products like Exchange and SQL Server, and network management software like System Center. Anyone can build applications for Windows, and plenty of third-parties have done so successfully using its free SDK (Software Development Kit), but somehow it is Microsoft that profits most.

Microsoft is still doing its thing, but attention is turning to the next generation of Internet-based computing. I touched a nerve when I asked Google’s Dion Almaer about Adobe Flash: it’s not open enough for Google, he told me. I put this to Adobe’s Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source, who assured me that Flash is all-but open, excepting (ahem) the source code to the runtime. Then he surprised me (considering he is an open source guy) by accusing Mozilla of bad faith over Tamarin, the source code to its ActionScript 3 runtime and just-in-time compiler, and remarking that Sun’s efforts to open source Java had mainly helped its competitors. I wrote this up for the Reg.

The problem is that these companies want the best of both worlds: the widespread adoption and community contributions that open source can generate, but the control and profit that comes from owning the platform.

If you can’t own the platform, the next best thing is that nobody owns the platform, which is why IBM worked to hard to get Sun to open source Java, and deliberately muddied the waters by sponsoring the Eclipse tools platform and alternative Java runtimes and GUI libraries.

Why is Google wary of Flash? Simply, because it is risky to build your own application platform on a runtime that belongs to another company. It is not enough for Adobe to say it will never charge for the runtime, any more than it is enough for Microsoft to give away the Windows SDK. Google is watching Adobe, and seeing how it is building online applications like Buzzword which competes with its own Google Docs. Companies with their own platform ambitions (Apple also comes to mind) are more likely to be averse to Flash. Oh, and look who else is building its own alternative to Flash? Yes, Microsoft with Silverlight.

Like Google, Mozilla is trying to build a browser platform that has less need of proprietary plug-ins like Flash. Although I was surprised that Adobe’s McAllister said Mozilla was using its open source contributions in the wrong kind of way, seemingly missing the whole point of open source, I was not surprised to find tensions. I quizzed Mozilla’s John Resig on this exact subject one year ago, when I wrote that Adobe and Mozilla were on course for collision.

As McAllister points out, open source also has risks, particularly the danger of fragmentation and multiple incompatible versions. Maybe Flash is better as closed-source. Still, let’s not pretend it is really all-but open source. The real issue is who owns and controls the platform, and in this case it is definitely Adobe.

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.net, microsoft, web authoring

A few notes on ASP.NET MVC

Here at Remix in Brighton Scott Guthrie is presenting on ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller). This is an alternative to web forms, the classic ASP.NET programming model.

What is ASP.NET MVC better for? Here are the things that Guthrie highlights:

  • Clean code separation presentation/logic
  • Clean URLS, SEO and REST friendly. For example, URLS like: yoursite.com/products/beverages
  • Better for unit testing. Ability to test model, view, controller separately. Guthrie demos some tests; all the main .NET test frameworks are supported inlcuding Nunit as well as Team System.
  • Closer to the HTTP/HTML model. For example, you don’t handle a button click event on the server as web forms allow; rather, you handle a form submission.

ASP.NET Preview 5 is available now; beta soon; full release by the end of the year (That timing strikes me as tight).

I think this will prove popular among ASP.NET developers.

adobe, google, php, software development, web authoring

Zend PHP Framework adds support for Adobe Flex, AMF

The PHP company Zend has announced a collaboration with Adobe to integrate AMF (Action Message Format) into the Zend Framework. AMF is an efficient binary format which is more efficient for transmitting data than text-based formats like XML or JSON. Zend and Adobe are also collaborating to improve their tools for work with applications that use PHP on the server and Flex or AIR on the client.

More info here.

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google, software development, web authoring

Google’s plans for Gears

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I attended Aaron Boodman’s session on Google Gears, here at Developer Day in London. Boodman is an engineer on the Gears team. He gave us a quick tour of the main features, most of which was already familiar to me, but I picked up a couple of interesting things. He told us that Google hopes Gears will eventually become a standard part of HTML, implemented by every browser. Some parts of Gears just implement things that browsers should do already, such as the ability to upload multiple files in one operation. Boodman would also like to see Gears enabled by default for all sites, rather than being enabled per-site as it is at the moment.

Or is it? What I had not realised is most of the Gears API is already accessible to any site, even if it is not in your “Gears enabled” list. It is only certain features, such as the ability to create a local database, which require specific consent.

That raises the question of security. I asked about risks like sites creating malicious desktop shortcuts disguised as good ones. Boodman says that creating a shortcut always raises a dialog so the user should spot this. What about reputable sites infected with malicious code? Boodman figures that if you are browsing such a site you are in trouble anyway.

Gears is built into Chrome and part of a consistent Google theme: upgrading the browser to make it a better platform for applications.

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adobe, flash, google, software development, web authoring

Why Google doesn’t use Flash (much)

Here at Developer Day, I couldn’t decide between the sessions on Android and App Engine, so ended up hearing Ajaxian Dion Almaer talking on the state of Ajax. Almaer also works for Google on its developer programs.

The talk was a bit fuzzy and high-level for my taste, though I enjoyed his tour of JavaScript libraries.

Following the talk I asked him why Google makes little use of Adobe Flash (which he hardly mentioned). He said it would like to, but did not regard it as an open platform. I asked him what Adobe would need to do to change that, and he said that the key things would be to open source the Flash player, and to give the community more influence over future Flash development.

Might this happen? Almaer said that it is a subject of ongoing discussion with Adobe. The implication is that if Adobe makes these changes Google will start supporting and using it more actively.

It will be an interesting subject to take up with Adobe when I next have that opportunity.

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google, software development, web authoring

Sophos video about hacked BusinessWeek site

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Sophos has a short video showing evidence of a hacked page on the BusinessWeek web site. I was impressed by how Google Chrome handled this:

The interesting point is that we are finding malicious JavaScript on highly reputable sites. Sophos says this one was caused by SQL injection, and I noticed that the page uses Microsoft’s old .asp technology in which it was particularly easy to code insecurely.

What’s the solution? Beats me; there are just zillions of insecure web applications out there. However, it’s disappointing that BusinessWeek still has not cleaned up the pages, which were reported last week (but perhaps that means last thing Friday).

apple, google, software development, web authoring, windows

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux will be a long while coming

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When I looked at the Chromium source code and did a build, I noticed how much of it was Windows-specific. Although the WebKit rendering component is already cross-platform, it seems that the Mac and Linux versions of Chromium and therefore Chrome are a long way from ready. This is from the build notes for Mac OS X:

Right now, the Mac build is a work in progress that is much closer to the start than the finish. No application that renders web pages is generated at the end of these instructions!

Cross-platform work usually involves compromises, and it looks like the Google team pointed the dial more towards optimising for Windows than towards ease of porting. That surprises me, since it likely means more work maintaining the application for several platforms as well as delays now.

Chrome’s ambitions as an application platform cannot be realised until it runs on the Mac. Further, a disproportionate number of web designers and developers use Apple.

How long is a long while? Good question. I’ll be seeing some Google folk tomorrow; I’ll let you know what they say.

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adobe, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring

H.264, AAC comes to Silverlight. Game over for VC-1?

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Microsoft has announced that Silverlight will support the H.264 video standard “in a future version”, along with AAC for audio. H.264 is also used by Adobe Flash and has wide adoption across the industry; it’s likely that your HD video camera records to H.264, for example.

Good news for Silverlight, though it may be a while before we see this rolled out, but surely bad news for VC-1, Microsoft’s preferred video format and part of the Windows Media family. Why would anyone not standardize on H.264 now?

adobe, amazon, apple, google, internet, iphone, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring

Defining cloud computing

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I liked this post by Larry Dignan on the cloud computing buzzword and how meaningless it has become.

Writing on the subject recently, I was struck by the gulf between what some people mean – online apps like Google Apps and Gmail – and what others mean, on-demand utility computing such as that delivered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Flexiscale. These things have little in common.

Dignan has even more examples.

Should we abandon the term? Maybe, but I find it useful if only as shorthand for describing how the centre of gravity is shifting to the Internet.

Some services are more cloudy than others. Dignan refers to this Forrester report (though you’ll have to look at the blog post for the extracts, unless you want to buy it) which has a table of “six key characteristics.” I don’t agree with all of them; the business model, for example, is not an inherent part of cloud computing. I am interested in number two:

Accessible via Internet protocols from any computer

Any computer? OK, probably not the Atari ST which I have in the loft. Any computer with a web browser? What about requiring a “modern” web browser, is that OK? Java? Flash? Silverlight? A specific version of Java or Flash? What about when we need a runtime like Adobe AIR or Microsoft Live Mesh? What if it doesn’t run on Linux? Or on an Apple iPhone? What about when there is an offline component such as Google Gears? All these things narrow what is meant by “any computer”.

This is the old “rich versus reach” debate; it is still being played out. My point: cloud computing isn’t a boolean characteristic, but a continuum from very cloudy (NTP) to not cloudy at all (Microsoft Office).