Category Archives: web authoring

bbc, internet, web authoring

The BBC is rebuilding its web platform

2 Comments

Yesterday here at Qcon I attended an informal get-together to discuss the BBC’s “tech refresh”, which turns out to mean the rebuilding of its web platform.

Apparently the budget has just been approved, which means the BBC will be going ahead with a new content platform built on Java supplemented by a lightweight PHP layer. The primary goal is flexibility. Recently the BBC went live with a new widgety home page which demonstrates its interest in personalization; ambitions include more extensive customization, more of a social platform (possibly using OpenSocial, OpenID); making a platform more amenable to mash-ups; data-only APIs.

As an aside, the BBC home page right now is a bit broken; it says “due to technical problems we are displaying a simplified version of the BBC homepage.” After yesterday’s session, I know a bit about why this is. The BBC’s current site is mostly based on Perl scripts and static pages. It’s not really a content management system. The recent home page innovations, which I blogged about recently, are not hosted on the new platform, but are a somewhat hacky affair built on the old platform using SSI and parsing cookies with regular expressions. It went live, but is currently not very reliable. It also uses more CPU, which ultimately means more servers are needed.

So what is the BBC’s backup plan for when its site fails? Well, it has a “big red button” which is really designed for moments of crisis when the whole world descends on the BBC to find out breaking news – an example was the London bombing in July 2005. At such times, scalability trumps everything, so the big red button switches on a simple home page which removes non-critical features like user tracking or smart widgets. The same procedure is handy for fallback if there are technical problems.

Another thing which interested me: apparently BBC pages are designed in PhotoShop and handed over to HTML coders for implementation. Unfortunately this doesn’t fit well with what I would like, which is pages that reflow nicely when you resize the page.

The BBC is conscious of its archival responsibilities and works with the Internet Archive. One of its problems is having to keep old material online, including some driven by old Perl scripts or even in some cases C scripts where the code has been lost. It is considering the use of virtualization to host old versions of Perl for content like this.

There is a bit of Ruby on the site but this has been problematic because of memory leaks. Maybe JRuby would help.

The current/old BBC site may be built on old and unfashionable technology, but I’ve personally appreciated its great availability and performance. And the lack of ads, of course.

I’m attending a further session on the BBC news site later today, so perhaps another post later.

Technorati tags: , , ,
internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

The psychic powers of the man from Mozilla

I spoke to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, and used some of his comments in a piece for Guardian Technology. I’m pondering putting the whole transcript online.

One of the topics was whether Internet Explorer will ever support ECMAScript 4.0 (aka JavaScript 2), which has been a contentious subject. For the sake of balance I also spoke to Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Mozilla, who was also at Mix08. I told Schroepfer that I’d spoken to Hachamovitch and that he had said he could not commit to ES 4.0 when it was not yet finalized. Schroepfer then said:

…but what he didn’t say was, we’re actively working on it, we’re excited about it, we hope when it’s finished we will implement something in the future. He didn’t even go anywhere near that. He gave you a correct and politically astute answer.

Schroepfer was spot-on and I was impressed by his psychic powers, since he had not been present when I spoke to Hachamovitch. Microsoft has lots of experience in implementing languages with features similar to ES 4.0 and it seems to me that its reluctance to embrace it must be for strategic rather than technical reasons.

Technorati tags: , , , ,

.net, apple, flash, java, mono, open source, silverlight, web authoring

Mono on the iPhone

1 Comment

Unlocked iPhone, of course. Miguel de Icaza has the details and some video links.

Flash, Silverlight, Mono, Java: surely Jobs won’t keep all these runtimes officially forbidden for ever? It strikes me that Flash has the best chance of getting there, simply because without it the Web is a little bit broken for iPhone users. It’s an influential device and its runtime support (or lack thereof) will be a factor in web development trends.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,
internet, software development, web authoring

Imagine this: A REST microkernel

Here at QCon, I realised that the Googly “cloud as middleware” track was probably not going to deliver what I want to discover, which is where Google thinks it is going with all its diverse offerings, being mostly about third-party services such as Yahoo Pipes and Amazon Web Services with which I am already familiar. I therefore went instead to what proved to be a fascinating session on programming REST (REpresentational State Transfer). Peter Rodgers of 1060 Research spoke about his NetKernel, which is a kind of REST runtime. “I’m typing byte code”, he explained, as he put together URI strings that performed various operations. He observed that much computing can be reduced to doing something to some resource with another resource, and that this can be expressed as a URI. Here’s an example:

Active:toUpper+operand@ffcpl:/demo/data.xml

In effect this is functional programming via URIs.

Unfortunately I had to leave a little before the end of the session; but one of the points I notice from the 1060 research site is that URI-based programming is tailor-made for caching results, with potentially improved performance.

A thought-provoking session; my quick reaction is that he may be onto something.

The session was packed; I’m not sure if this is because folk were interested specifically in NetKernel, or whether like me they just went along because REST is a focus of activity right now.

Technorati tags: , ,
eclipse, google, internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

QCon London

Today I’m at QCon in London. I enjoyed this conference last year, when among other things I got the scoop on Microsoft’s Volta (then LINQ 2). First up this year is Erich Gamma of Design Patterns and JUnit fame, who will be talking about how Eclipse has influenced his view of software development (others would talk about how Gamma has influenced Eclipse). I’m also intrigued by what Google’s Gregor Hohpe is going to say about “The Cloud as the new middleware platform.” It’s going to be an interesting contrast to Microsoft’s Mix08 conference last week. Be sure I’ll be reporting back here; or if you’re here too, by all means get in touch.

Technorati tags: , , ,
internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

Mix08 is all online

Microsoft has put the sessions from Mix08 online. You can stream them with Silverlight, or hit the download button to save them in WMV or MP4 (“for iPod”). The quality of the sessions I’ve attended or watched was uniformly high, so I recommend these if you have any interest in Microsoft’s web development plans. In particular, the sessions on IE8 and Silverlight deliver lots of new information.

Technorati tags: ,

microsoft, software development, web authoring

MSHTML: layout engine completely rewritten for Internet Explorer 8

2 Comments

MSHTML is the Windows component that renders HTML. It is part of Internet Explorer but also used by other applications (both from Microsoft and from third-parties) to embed HTML content; it is still sometimes called by its code-name, Trident. I’ve been interested in MSHTML for some time, and have worked on a free .NET wrapper called HtmlEditor.

At Mix08 I attended a session by Lead Program Manager Scott Dickens on cross-platform layout with IE 8. He told us that the layout engine in MSHTML “could not get us to where we needed to be” for the more standards-compliant IE8, which implements the CSS 2.1 spec. Therefore, the engine has apparently been completely rewritten.

As an aside, Dickens mentioned that the IE team worked with other teams in Microsoft that have layout expertise in order to rewrite MSHTML – he didn’t say which, but one imagines the XAML/WPF folk could have been helpful.

I clarified this point later. MSHTML actually lives on in IE8, but contains both the old and the new layout engines as different code paths. If you specify a quirks mode in IE8, it will use the old layout engine; but if you ask for best standards support (now the default), it will use the new layout engine. However, where MSHTML is embedded into another application, it will still use the old layout engine by default. “For hosted Trident, it will maintain that IE7 compatibility,” Dickens told me, though it will still be possible to opt-in to the new layout engine.

Technorati tags: , , , ,
.net, internet, microsoft, search, software development, web authoring, yahoo

Steve Ballmer: post Yahoo, we will be a PHP shop

Steve Ballmer took a few questions yesterday at Mix08 in Las Vegas, and I asked him what Microsoft would do with all Yahoo’s PHP applications if its takeover bid succeeds, especially where they duplicate home-grown applications that are running on ASP.NET.  PHP is deeply embedded into Yahoo’s culture, and Rasmus Lerdorf, who invented PHP, works at Yahoo as Infrastructure Architect.

He gave me a fuller answer than I expected, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

There’s really two different questions. In a number of areas, and I won’t go into specifics, but we will have to make some kind of integration plans after presumably we reach deal and it will be appropriate to talk to the Yahoo guys. We shouldn’t have two of everything. It won’t make sense to have two search services, two advertising services, two mail services, and we’ll have to sort some of that through. Some of that technology undoubtedly will come from Microsoft’s side, and some will undoubtedly come from Yahoo’s side, whatever technology comes, it will also come with an infrastructure that runs it.

You ask what we will do with those PHP applications? I’m sure a bunch of them will be running, at high scale and in production for a long time to come.

I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the core infrastructure which we have on Windows today with ASP.NET, and Yahoo have in Linux and PHP today, and over time probably most of the big applications on the Internet will wind up being rebuilt and redone, whether those are ours, or Yahoo’s, or any of the other competitors. But for the foreseeable future we will be a PHP shop, I guess if we own Yahoo, as well as being an ASP.NET shop.

One of the things I love which we got into the new Windows Server, is that we put a lot of attention in to making sure that PHP applications run well on Windows Server. That’s not the current Yahoo environment and I’m not suggesting that we would transition that way, but for those of you who do have PHP skills, we are going to try and make Windows Server the best place to have PHP applications in the future.

It was a good answer, though I’d still expect integration to be difficult. One danger is that post-merger infighting over what gets preserved and what gets scrapped could stifle innovation. Microsoft’s Live platform actually looks increasingly interesting, as we’ve learned here at Mix, and I imagine that some of these teams will be nervous about what will happen to their efforts in Microsoft-Yahoo becomes a reality.

adobe, flash, microsoft, nokia, silverlight, web authoring

Thoughts on Mix08 Day One

So how was the Mix08 keynote? Let’s start with the good stuff. It went without a hitch; it was engaging; we saw some terrific Silverlight demos; and Internet Explorer 8 looks like a compelling upgrade. Not all Microsoft’s keynotes are this good.

Did Ray Ozzie make sense of Microsoft’s overall Internet strategy? I’m not sure. He was too visionary for my taste. That said, he made some interesting remarks. He says that “all our software will be significantly refactored” to better integrate with cloud-based services. He says that businesses will be able to choose between on-premise and cloud-based services. He says that virtualization is the key to a rise in utility computing. He also spoke of advertising as the commercial engine behind the next generation Internet.

Scott Guthrie, now Corporate Vice President of Developer Division, gave an impressive tour of what is happening with ASP.NET and Silverlight, with the latter the main focus. He says that Silverlight is now getting 1.5 million downloads daily. As expected, he announced the beta of Silverlight 2.0, which you can download now. He also announced Nokia’s support for Silverlight on Symbian, though this news actually broke on Monday. It is still significant, though getting any runtime deployed on mobiles is an arduous task: carriers as well as manufacturers have to be convinced of the value. He also mentioned that Sharepoint is getting Silverlight web parts.

Silverlight demos included Aston Martin, Hard Rock Cafe, and NBC’s site for the 2008 Olympics. Highlighted features included Silverlight’s zooming ability, which is the technology formerly known as Seadragon and now called DeepZoom, and HD video. The Olympic demos were engaging, with features like the ability to do instant, user-controlled replay of live video. Aston Martin’s demo showed how well Silverlight works for exploring an online showroom, inspecting and customizing your chosen vehicle in a virtual environment (I saw a similar Flash-based demo at Adobe’s Flex and Air launch a couple of weeks ago).

Dean Hachamovitch showed off IE8; I blogged about this yesterday.

Now, the tough questions. Silverlight looks great; but we saw similar demos here last year. Silverlight 2.0, which is the one most people care about, is now closer to release; but equally Adobe has moved forward with Flash, in particular improving its video capabilities, and the question hanging in the air is: what does Silverlight offer that Flash does not? In this respect, one of the more interesting remarks in the keynote came from a guy from Weatherbug, who demoed a Silverlight app which he said was running on Symbian. He observed that their developers had also tried to develop in Flash Lite, but it has proved costly (in development time) and “didn’t really work”. The Silverlight app by contrast had been done in three weeks. This is Flash Lite of course, not the full desktop Flash, but it would be fascinating to know what the critical differences were.

As for IE8, it is a huge step forward in standards support, but if you subtract what is arguably catch-up to FireFox, what are we left with? Activities and Web Slices look handy, but these are not major pieces. IE8 is not done yet, and apparently there will be more user-centric features before it ships – but when will that be? Microsoft’s Chris Wilson told me last year that it would be around two years after IE7, which would be autumn 2008, but that looks optimistic to me.

Overall my feelings are appropriately mixed. There is plenty of good stuff here, and Silverlight will be great for Microsoft platform developers who can integrate it seamlessly into their ASP.NET web applications. Whether it can mount a serious challenge to Flash in the wider Internet remains an open question.

Technorati tags: , , ,
internet, microsoft, web authoring

What’s new in IE8: Activities and Web Slices, developer tools

2 Comments

Here at Mix08 in Las Vegas, IE head honcho Dean Hachamovitch has introduced Internet Explorer 8, which he told us will be available for beta download later today.

The big features are CSS 2.1 standards compliance (now the default), and two new things called Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are a way of installing browser add-ons that enables new instant links. You can select text in a web page, right-click, and get links for things like “buy on eBay” or “see user reviews”. This is enabled by an XML specification called the OpenService Architecture, which is being released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Web Slices are a way of subscribing to page fragments, or perhaps pagelets (my term). This then appear as links in the IE8 toolbar. Examples we were shown were an eBay auction, and Facebook feeds. Like Activities, this is enabled by an XML specification, this one called the Web Slices Specification. The page author determines what content ends up in the pagelet.

If the specifications catch on, I imagine other browsers could easily implement them.

Activities remind me of the almost-dead Smart Tags, in the way that they enable a new in-page menu of options related to a keyword or phrase. The difference is that there is no auto-recognition; the user has to select some text and right-click.

Finally, we saw some great developer tools for debugging JavaScript and CSS. In particular, I liked the feature which lets you select an element and discover which CSS rule is winning in the rendered page.

Note: Post edited to clarify how Activities work. I misunderstood these at first, thinking they were extra links authored into a page. Apparently they are not: you have to select some text and then use a pop-up menu. The advantage is that we will not get pages festooned with extra links. The disadvantage is that you can easily select text that returns no meaningful result.

I rather liked the idea of multiple destinations for a single link, but it seems this isn’t it.

Technorati tags: , , , ,