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.

RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. The theme of this October's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West is 'Beyond AJAX to the RIA Era' and the Call for Papers, which is currently still open, specifically encourages submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases of the fast-emerging RIA alternatives.

E-mail is extremely easy to adopt and use, and lends itself very well to certain types of collaboration. When two people are attempting to collaborate asynchronously, e-mail is usually the best solution. It's certainly far less frustrating than phone tag. But once more people are involved, email's utility rapidly degenerates. While the rise of free, open-source solutions makes it tempting to build one's own collaboration tools, on-demand or Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are the better choice for the majority of users and uses.

For many years, Java and web developers alike have had to explain to the unwitting that JavaScript had absolutely nothing to do with Java. It was one of the great marketing gaffes of the mid-90s. They were no more alike than chalk and cheese. But in the last six months, I have had to lay down my placard and walk away from the picket line with a smile on my face and skip in my step. Finally Java has been put into JavaScript.

Catalyst Resources released a 'green audit' of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaborative workspace project that allows distributed business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. The Rich Internet Application (RIA) enabled Catalyst Resources to reduce its carbon impact footprint by 21,000 lbs of CO2 per month, while simultaneously reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%.

Curl announced that the University of Hawaii at Manoa will be leveraging the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform this year for an independent study project entitled 'Anti-Keylogger for Secure Web Applications.' Curl was selected as the technology for the course because of its easy-to-learn programming language and strong security features for developing Web-based applications.

'Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,' said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, as Adobe today announced it is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

JetBrains announced the release of ReSharper version 4.0, the compan's productivity add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. This release is spearheaded by across-the-board support for C# 3.0 language, including LINQ, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 in general. In addition, the upgraded add-in features multiple new usability and productivity-boosting tools, such as standard class library annotations, solution-wide analysis (for C#), versatile code cleanup, new automated refactorings, new and improved code-editing capabilities, and more.

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.'

Curl made available the newest example of a Curl Nitro 'fit client' application. Designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com, the CurlGraph features a visual representation of the social graph of individual Facebook members. Using the desktop-based application, users can visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from an established Facebook account, enabling them to see relationships and navigate quickly through that friend data to find the information they want. Through this demo application, Curl showcases its ability to support a visually engaging, interactive desktop application that is deployed like a Web application.

Flex is a great way to introduce rich Internet applications in your enterprise. But in the real world, you often have to do it gradually. Majority of the business units of any enterprise who 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.

It's important to remember that there is a huge resource being created on the Web these days in terms of both services and content. This includes access to SaaS applications (that are better than their enterprise-bound counterparts), service marketplaces, and even mash-able applications that you can mix and match with other Web 2.0 applications / APIs / services or enterprise applications / services to quickly solve business problems.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

Curl has made available the newest example of a Curl Nitro 'fit client' application. Designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com, the CurlGraph features a visual representation of the social graph of individual Facebook members. Using the desktop-based application, users can visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from an established Facebook account, enabling them to see relationships and navigate through that friend data to find the information they want.

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.

Farallon Geographics and its design partner Stamen Designs have been selected by the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) to develop a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for the next generation of its 'California Health Care Atlas'. The new Web-based atlas will integrate interactive mapping, reporting, and charting elements with a dynamic real-time interface to tell the healthcare story in California, allowing a broad spectrum of users the ability to investigate and learn about the human health and healthcare landscape in California.

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki. The feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance.

If Gartner's assessment of AJAX's position on the Hype Cycle is correct, then the days when AJAX is the only game in town are over. Enter the age of what Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group calls 'Fit Clients' - a hybrid of Thick Clients (a.k.a. Fat Clients) and Thin Clients (HTML and RIA). Adobe AIR is definitely a Fit Client technology, but it's not the first and won't be the only player in this space.

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.

In every field of design one of the first things students do is learn from the work of others. They study and break down real-world examples in order to understand the underlying principles and patterns that make for successful design. Then they learn to apply these to their own set of problems. The real trick is to apply them in a nuanced manner. To be nuanced is 'to be sensitive to delicate differences of style.' Most of the art in crafting a rich experience on the Web can be summed up with this one word - 'nuance'.

Many of today (and tomorrow's) development projects lend themselves nicely to RIA application patterns. Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft, is giving a breakout session at the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference in October which will use the 100% free Silverlight runtime and Visual Studio tools to show delegates how Silverlight offers a compelling RIA development experience that works on Linux, the Mac and Windows as well as all major browsers.

Server-side JavaScript (SSJS) is growing in popularity fast since developers realize it can drastically simplify Web app creation by letting you use using the same technology stack on both the client and the server. While server-side JavaScript is not new - it was a part of Netscape's vision 10 years ago - times have significantly changed with 10x faster hardware and networks, making that original vision for the Web now a reality.

By producing a popular RIA widget you can distribute your code to millions of users practically overnight. Most widgets are designed to gather data from the web and then present that data to the user. Unfortunately, rich platforms tend to lead to programming errors and security issues. The users of a poorly written RIA widget can have their online accounts breached, web site passwords compromised, local computer data stolen, and even lose control of their computer.

According to Jnan Dash, Chief Strategy Officer of Curl, 2008 and beyond will see increased adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. 'But the door for this entry will be RIAs (Rich Internet Applications),' Dash notes, 'rather than mash-ups or blogs or wikis.' An industry veteran who spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002, Dash adds: 'Big players like Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime) have joined the race for RIA. But they lack the critical dimensions of scalability, performance, and security, very important for large enterprises.'

'Those of us in the business of writing rich Internet applications have seen the focus swing from how to add richness to how to manage richness and the resources it demands in the browser,' says Eric Miraglia, one of the world's leading experts on 'advanced JavaScript utilities and widgets' - who works for Yahoo!'s Presentation Platform Team and will be speaking in October at SYS-CON's 6th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA (October 20-22, 2008).

'The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged web, is upon us,' says Andrew Donoho, Web Theorist with IBM's Emerging Internet Technology Team, who will be speaking in October at SYS-CON's 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA (October 20-22, 2008). Donoho been creating and pushing implementations of the bi-directional web since 1999 and has been extending that idea to building a Co-Web with a scalable UI for the last 18 months.

Nicholas Thomas, co-founder and COO of Finicity, believes that Flex + AIR via any desktop + Mobile (in one or more technical forms) can take us a step towards the vision that Mark Weiser presented in his original works on ubiquitous computing. As the primary client for a consumer web-based SaaS product, Flex has both advantages and disadvantages, according to Thomas.

The OpenAjax Alliance has recently published two new white papers, one on Mobile AJAX and one on recent browser advances. The first white paper, Introduction to Mobile AJAX for Developers, provides an overview of AJAX application development for mobile devices. The second white paper, Good News for AJAX - The Browser Wars Are Back, highlights the major changes in the browser world that are manifesting themselves in this year's browser releases (i.e., IE8, Firefox3, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.x).

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile). In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services. For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management.

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.

One of the welcome developments in GWT 1.5 was the inclusion of some decent looking CSS themes -- standard. chrome and dark. How can you use them in your GWT app? Just include one of the following lines in your apps .xml file. You can see them in action in the ShowCase application. For those of you without the patience to kick start the app, here are some screenshots of the new themes.

With over 150 bug fixes, Java 5 language support, new compiler optimizations, default visual themes, an entirely new DOM API and JavaScript overlay types, the release candidate of Google Web Toolkit 1.5 has gotten very positive feedback from early adopters, reports Google's Kelly Norton.

Curl is executing on the next phase in its Eclipse strategy with the availability of the beta versions of the new Eclipse-based Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) development tools. The first release of the Curl Development tools for Eclipse (CDE) and newest release of the Curl Runtime Environment (RTE), Version 6.0.4, provide enterprise developers with the tools to build and deploy their mission-critical, enterprise-class RIAs within the increasingly popular Eclipse environment.

'I'm looking forward to helping Appcelerator shake up the rich Internet application market,' said Bearden. 'Companies are struggling with how to take advantage of all the money and time they've poured into SOA. Appcelerator answers the question once and for all by enabling them to build rich applications on top of that SOA infrastructure.'

'Should CFML developers switch to Java?' asks Andrew Powell in an article this week at SYS-CON.com. 'No,' he answers. ColdFusion is the fastest way to get data to AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, and even JavaFX, according to Powell, who adds: 'ColdFusion also provides complex services easier than Java, .NET, Ruby or whatever wishes they could.'

The move from native, OS-specific applications to web applications continues to be one of the biggest 'disruptions' in the software industry today, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch recently in an interview with the Wharton Business School. 'We're a leader in enabling that transition to happen with things like AIR,' Lynch noted, adding: 'We're focused on taking advantage of that shift, not only with our enabling technologies, but also our applications like Premiere Express, Photoshop Express and BuzzWord.'

Cooperating applications, such as mashups, must be able to exchange objects with robust interfaces. An object must be able to encapsulate its state such that the state can be modified only as permitted by its own methods. JavaScript?s objects are soft and currently the language does not include any means to harden them, so an attacker can easily access the fields directly and replace the methods with his own.

Nexaweb announced it has contributed new software to the Dojo Foundation that will further advance the use of open source AJAX within a company's critical business applications. The software, dubbed 'dojo.E,' will allow users to more easily create enterprise Web applications based on the Dojo Toolkit, one of the industry's most advanced sets of open source AJAX tools.

Cynergy Systems announced it has been selected as a finalist for the 2008 Helios Apollo Awards. In conjunction with the Washington, D.C. metropolitan chapters for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and SmartCEO magazine, Helios HR, a provider of outsourced human resources and HR consulting, has chosen to honor Cynergy as a local company dedicated to promoting employee development.

Curl announced the general availability of the Curl Run Time Environment (RTE) for Macintosh. The Curl RTE is the engine of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform that executes Curl applications and renders code, content and graphics on client machines. As a result of this release, Macintosh users can now take advantage of the same enterprise-class features of the Curl RTE that are already offered to Windows and Linux users.