Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

4D announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D AJAX Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Yesterday, a new component architecture and feature specifications were provided to the Flex SDK open source developer community. The Flex team targets three primary teams: design in mind, developer productivity, and framework evolution.

Adobe says it's going to 'dramatically improve' the search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs) for Google and Yahoo by giving them optimized Flash Player technology. This new widgetry, which will read and index SWF files, is supposed to uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines and provide more relevant automatic search rankings for the millions of RIAs and the other dynamic content that runs in Flash Player.

Food Dial is not just a book of recipes. Here's the big idea - you came back home, tired and hungry. Start the Food Dial application and open the fridge. Here's the red pepper. Turn the dial with food categories...

Following the private Beta release last month, DreamFace Interactive announced the general availability of the DreamFace-Fx Mashup Kit for Adobe Flex. As promised, DreamFace-Fx is the first Mashup Kit to reach developers in a comprehensive roadmap which will extend the DreamFace Open Source Web 2.0 Framework to include complementary technologies. Olivier Poupeney, DreamFace Interactive CEO explains the choice of Adobe Flex for the first Mashup Kit, 'There is a need today for RIA technologies in SOA applications, and Flex is getting attraction from the Java community thanks to its smooth integration with J2EE, however, using Flex usually means abandoning AJAX with the risk of being linked to a single technology. With DreamFace-Fx, developers can easily integrate Flex and AJAX, leveraging the combined technologies and resulting in functionality greater than the sum of its parts.'

Flex is a great way to introduce rich Internet applications to your enterprise. However, in the real world, you often have to do it gradually. Most business units of any enterprise that are sold on RIA would prefer adding Flex-based components to their old but working Web 1.0 applications one at a time. With DreamFace-Fx, it's a trivial process.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

Adobe has released a substantially enhanced BPM/RIA solution. While LiveCycle suite isn't new software, its popularity increased in June of 2007 when the entire suite started to run on the same J2EE server and the RIA components were introduced. Today, over 5,000 enterprises use LiveCycle in financial services, government, manufacturing, and other verticals. Flex developers will enjoy easier integration with this powerful BPM software.

I received an email stating that AOL finally abandoned the ugly Java applet that was used in the ICQ2Go, the Web version of the hugely popular (about 30M users) instant messaging system. The person who sent me this email also wrote, 'IMO this was the last popular Java applet. Now the king is dead.'

Keynotes are often boring, but watching today's keynote from WWDC conference was just great. I do not want to repeat the facts about iPhone 3G. Needless to say that I'll buy a couple of them this summer. I do not want to bore you with the facts about the countless possibilities that open iPhone SDK brings to the table. Just watch the keynote.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Adobe says Acrobat 9.0, a major upgrade, will be available in July and in three different versions: Standard, Pro and Pro Extended. It will be sold standalone and Pro will be integrated into Adobe's Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions. CS 3.3 is also due in July.

Adobe, which is not exactly unfamiliar with the concept of the free giveaway, has put out a public beta of a simple version of its popular Photoshop photo-editing software for free over the web. Think of it as an answer to Google's Picasa. It's called PhotoShop Express and Adobe says it'll add features over time, evidently in response to the feedback it gets from the beta.

Adobe has put out three free public betas: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth, all of which will be part of the next-generation Creative Suite when it arrives. Its delivery date is still a big secret. The betas are only good for 48 hours once they're downloaded unless you're a Creative Suite 3 customer. Dreamweaver is for web design and development, Fireworks for prototyping and Soundbooth for audio creating and editing. Adobe describes the early release software as 'a taste of the radical workflow enhancements that we have in store as we redefine how designers and developers collaborate to deliver stand-out digital experiences.'

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers. Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company's two-day developer event in San Francisco, will take down the barricade. Google also disclosed what it's going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

I might have skipped some of the new features of Flash Player 10, but you can always refer to the official FAQ page. Visit Plash Players 10 page on Adobe Labs to download new player (there is no debug version yet). The standalone debug versions are also available. You can use the official demos and Flash Player 10 API documentation to build your applications using special version of Flex SDK. Adobe's Flash Player team made a substantial progress with new release of this very solid VM, which makes it even more solid platform in the RIA space.

Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be available later this week. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, and enjoy significant performance and productivity gains.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.

Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.

The popular code generator Clear Data Builder will become available free of charge. Originally, Clear Data Builder was released as a command-line open source code generator a.k.a. DaoFlex. We've submitted it to Adobe Flex component exchange about two years ago, and it quickly became one of the most downloadable components.

I like reading stuff in pdf format. But it's even better if you can easily create pdf files. By easily I mean a button click. Literally.Since I have Adobe Acrobat, my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint just have an extra menu to create it. But it's kinda boring. Let me share with you a couple of better ways.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

I spent last week in India attending the Great Developer Indian Summit (GDIS) that took place in Bangalore, in the Institute of Science, one of the most prestigious graduate schools in the country.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Before we're all reduced to shank's mare, Concurrent is wading into the automotive industry, observing that with the amount of electronics in cars constantly on the uptick, it's a good place for an embedded Linux-based networking system. So it's announced FlexRay communication support for its SIMulation Workbench, which provides a complete framework to develop and execute real-time hardware-in-the-loop and man-in-the-loop simulations.

TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a 'click and connect' process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical 'information spaces' as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

A bunch of the boys have joined Adobe in forming the Open Screen Project to drive a consistent rich Internet experience across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics regardless of operating system. They've been persuaded that the way to squeeze the World Wide Web into those little bitty phones and newfangled MID things - and make it look like a PC - is to enable, maintain and optimize a consistent runtime environment using Adobe's Flash Player and later on Adobe AIR.

Adobe Thursday turned its little piece of Disneyland for developers loose. The pre-release of Flash Player 10, a k a 'Astro,' which promises richer, more immersive Web 2.0 experiences, has gone to public beta ahead of general availability sometime later this year. It adds custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout and GPU hardware acceleration. Adobe thinks it's a game changer about what can go on the web.

In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year -old-but-still-upcoming - and definitely late-to-the-party - Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices.

Today, Adobe announced the immediate availability of Adobe Flash Player 10 beta as a free download from Adobe Labs. Adobe Flash Player 10 beta, code named 'Astro', builds on the capabilities of the world's most ubiquitous application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout, and GPU hardware acceleration.

Xceed launched Xceed Upload for Silverlight, the commercial offering in support of Microsoft's promising new Silverlight technology. The product is available now for purchase or as a fully functional 45-day trial on Xceed's website. Xceed Upload for Silverlight lets developers add upload capabilities to any Silverlight 2 Beta 1 application. All upload operations are asynchronous; as a result, the Web page hosting the Silverlight application remains perfectly responsive and usable throughout the transfer.

According to Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, 'Our Skyway Community is thriving and our members are very talented. We truly look forward to their RIAs submittals and Skyway Builder extensions and are excited that all of the contributions will benefit the entire Skyway Community.' With Skyway Builder CE, Java developers get an open source Eclipse-based plugin that offers a seamless blend of coding and modeling for delivering RIAs and Web Services in Spring. Unlike any other modeling tool, Skyway Builder CE provides comprehensive modeling capabilities at four distinct application layers:

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.