Web Development Live

The future of application development might be becoming a little more social. Sun certainly hopes so, and has launched zembly, a new collaboration platform for writing small, and lightweight web applications. It’s a promising start, squarely aimed at small, long-tail developers, and a new approach to collaborative development over the web. Challenges remain, such as the long-term reliability of third-party application hosting and the findability of small long-tail applications on large platforms.
 
I was able to demo zembly, which attempts to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets and came away impressed with its focus on ease of use and belief in a new development process.  zembly is working to create a social setting for developers to share components between applications a “wiki for live, editable code that is more than just about trivial widgets, but rather about full-fledged social applications that can tap into the social graph and reach millions of users”.
 
Applications are written in javascript, rely on a widget / web service development model, and have an extensive architecture for securely managing developer credentials so that you can share outbound service calls without sharing your credentials.  These widgets and services can be shared, or cloned (forked) from other developers and carry a full change log with them, so you can freeze your dependencies to a given version.  The system makes source control and component sharing simpler for the uninitiated than tools like Git and Subversion that can be difficult to learn.
 
zembly hopes that network effects will kick in, as the service will be most successful if users trust others on the system, and share components freely - something that has been hard to accomplish even in large corporate development teams.  If successful, it will be this feature that distinguishes zembly from Google App Engine and other competitors.

Despite these concerns, as someone who sometimes needs a little peer pressure and social support to get started on development projects, I’ll be following zembly as they build out their community-oriented features and work to deliver on their promise to wiki-fy web development, and I’ll be looking forward to sharing code with friends online.

Google has been courting software developers to entice them into a money-making relationship built on turning its array of online widgets into a global infrastructure.

At a conference in San Francisco, said to be the biggest yet for net developers, the search giant made clear that the Web is the future for application development.

It wants its own bit of web infrastructure the Google Cloud to be more accessible to developers and spent two days wooing them to build and run applications on it.

To encourage them aboard, Google invited the 3,000 developers to mash-up Google’s online services, like Gmail, Docs, Maps and Search, with their own applications.

To show client-cloud connectivity, it showed off Google Gears, a browser add-on in the Adobe Flash mould that allows for richer browser experiences, to improve search in MySpace email.

It then showcased the new Google Web Toolkit, so rich net applications can be Java-built, and the hosting of new Ajax libraries, which enhances applications via JavaScript tagging.

Top of its agenda, Google wants the web browser the enabler of its cloud to have more functionality, interaction and to evolve so it becomes as powerful as its desktop counterpart.

“These diverse tools and technologies might seem loosely unintegrated and targeted at different areas,” said Ovum analyst Madan Sheina.

“In fact they’re all cogs and wheels of a more meaningfully connected web that hosts Google web services powered by the Google App Engine. Importantly some of these web services and applications aren’t written just by Google, but by an entire market of independent developers.”

The analyst believes most of these third-party developers no longer build ‘cool’ web applications just for the sake of it; rather they want a slice of Google as a lucrative advertising business.

“Google likes to separate its web development technologies from its advertising. But the two are inextricably linked,” Ms Sheina said.

“Google’s monetisation strategy is simple. Invest in advancement of the web by allowing users to do more on the internet. That makes the Web a much bigger market for Google to monetise services like search.”

Announced IBM Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web with which non-technical business people can use to experiment and build customized mashups following the success of early corporate adopters Boeing Corporation (NYSE: BA) and Carrefour Group (PARIS: CA).

On schedule for mid-year delivery, the IBM Mashup Center allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively. Using IBM’s mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

In the coming weeks, IBM will offer customers the opportunity to experiment with IBM Mashup Center and gain hands on experience for free through IBM Lotus Greenhouse. Lotus Greenhouse is a Web site where anyone can register and try out IBM Mashup Center, and many other collaborative products, such as IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and WebSphere Portal. IBM Mashup Center will be hosted on Greenhouse, giving customers a safe environment to try the technology and evaluate mashup potential without installing anything in their own environment. The hosted version of IBM Mashup Center will include widgets from IBM, and a growing network of IBM Mashup Center Business Partners, like StrikeIron and Kapow Technologies.

This comes at a time in which innovative companies of every size are beginning to realize the possibilities of Web 2.0, but require security, management and governance capabilities to responsibly take advantage of these possibilities. IBM Mashup Center gives users the freedom to create new, light weight applications on the fly and get customized views of disparate information, but with the stability corporations require. IBM’s deep history in open standards, information integration and emerging Internet technologies, make the company an undeniably strong partner in a new technology era.

“As an established innovator, Boeing believes in the power of Web 2.0 and embraces it not only for collaborative work, but also for the heavy lifting of enterprise planning and execution,” said Paul Comitz, Program Manager, NEO Demonstration, Boeing Corp. “The IBM Mashup Center is playing a key role in our visionary approach to strategic asset management. It’s critical to know where your major assets are and how to use them at any given time, situation or condition.”

IBM Mashup Center breaks new ground in ease of use and speed at which business users can solve everyday business problems in any size enterprise. It includes an intuitive browser based tool to easily assemble of new mashups, thus allowing non technical users anyone in a business to literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to easily create, deploy and share customized Web applications in minutes.

This upcoming offering includes a set of out of the box, business ready widgets, as well as a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups. To create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center includes an easy-to-use development environment to construct new widgets from enterprise systems and the Web. Users can also take advantage of built-in Web 2.0 community features like ratings, tagging and commenting to guide users the to the most valuable and useful widgets.

IBM Mashup Center also provides extensive and powerful capabilities for managing information feeds from enterprise sources. Information from a wide variety of sources can be mixed, filtered and mashed together to create new information sources and output in many different forms, such as RSS, ATOM or XML. With the ability to merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats, IBM Mashup Center helps create a single view of disparate sets of information in a highly re-usable manner. Feeds are an easy way to service-enable systems that do not natively provide RESTful interfaces, and thus provide an on-ramp for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

As enterprise mashups continue to climb in popularity and deliver more value for business, IBM is working with an ecosystem of Business Partners to help customers get the most out of situational applications. IBM Business Partners such as Jibes, JustSystems, Kapow Technologies and StrikeIron are introducing solutions that, when combined with IBM Mashup Center, enable rapid access to information and new and compelling uses for new types of data.

For example, IBM Mashup Center users can easily connect to data in the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace to reduce the complexity for developers or business users who want to integrate live data from a number of sources. In addition, by connecting to StrikeIron’s Lite services, users can create demos to show how easily live data can be integrated with a mashup to create powerful Web applications without having to register or purchase the service.

Jibes demonstrates the business value of mashups in the enterprise market by providing industry-specific information fabrics for the semi-conductor, airline and media industries on top of IBM Mashup Center. JustSystems provides a rich presentation layer for information accessed by IBM Mashup Center, allowing users to interact with dynamic, or living, documents that combine static and dynamic information. Together, this enables new uses for enterprise mashups such as the sharing of design and development information across collaborative research, or for use by development teams for reconciling supply and demand among trading partners.

An on-premise version of IBM Mashup Center is expected to be delivered mid-year, and pricing details will be made public at that time.

Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the Web Development JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

Road maps were detailed for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 7. Java SE serves as a base Java platform, with the Enterprise version adding enterprise-level capabilities.

With Java EE 6, Sun seeks to increase flexibility in implementing the platform.

“For EE 6, the theme is what I like to call ‘rightsizing,’ which essentially means making the platform the right size for you,” said Roberto Chinnici, Java EE platform lead at Sun.

With version 6, profiles will be created based on specific needs, such as a Web profile focused on Web developers, Chinnici said. The Web Development profile is not fully defined yet, but will feature technologies that appear in the vast majority of Web applications. Other profiles are expected such as a telecommunications profile that features SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) services.

Profiles can be created by filing a Java Specification Request as part of the Java Community Process, according to Chinnici.

Also planned is a pruning process by which certain parts of the Java platform can be made optional. “The typical candidate is those technologies that have been Web Development superseded effectively by new ones,” said Chinnici, citing JAX RPC and Entity Beans as candidates for pruning.

Scripting languages will be made first-class citizens on the Java platform as well. Web development will be made easier through annotations across Web APIs. Developers should see a reduced need to edit web.xml descriptors. Third-party libraries will self-register, removing a common source of errors for developers.

Another feature of version 6 is an API for REST-ful (Representational State Transfer) Web services. “We felt we need a new API entirely focused on them,” Chinnici said.

Enterprise JavaBeans can go inside a Web application via version 6, removing the need for Web Development nested packaging.

There is no specific release date yet for Java EE 6, although it has been anticipated for later this year.

Visual Ajax Studio enables you to create Web applications using drag and drop assembly techniques. The software supports SOAP, REST, and RSS Web services and deploys a standard Java .war file.

WaveMaker offers open-source tools for Web development. Visual Ajax Studio has been released under the GNU AGPL version 3 open-source license (it’s also available under a WaveMaker commercial license).

WaveMaker noted that Visual Ajax Studio 3.2’s Mac release is a public beta version, and offers full support for Apple’s Safari Web browser.

Visual WebGui, developer of the AJAX enterprise application development and deployment platform, has announced the availability of their browser-based solution.Visual WebGui is an open source framework, which is available for graphical user interfaces used for web applications. Visual WebGui, which is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET framework, is expected to launch a Microsoft Silverlight compliant solution, supported by Microsoft.Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), is a combination of Javascript and XML technologies that allow the content of a web page to be updated without reloading the entire page, thereby enabling browser-based applications to behave like software applications.Visual WebGui solves the development setbacks associated with AJAX by providing developers with a Rapid Application Development solution with full Win Forms support. Visual WebGui is delivered with a designer, the application interfaces (WinForms designer), instead of Word documents (ASP.NET designer). This enables interfaces using drag-and-drop editing. Visual WebGui is available under LGPL.

Google will hold a developer confab in May, called Google I/O, to discuss the challenges of writing applications for the Web.

This year’s two-day event in San Francisco is larger than last year’s Google Developer Day, its first organized conference aimed specifically at Web developers.

While the format is different–there will be more in-depth technical sessions and tutorials for newbies who want to write mash-ups–Google’s developer strategy remains the same.

Why do they court developers? To encourage creation of more and better Web applications, said Tom Stocky, a senior product manager at Google, on Tuesday.

“We’re trying to get more users, in general. We want to increase the number of users and the amount they use the Web. And improving the platform is the best way to do that, we’ve found,” Stocky said.

What will be different this year is an increased focus on developing social applications, reflecting Web development in general. Google will have sessions on social applications, including ways to use OpenSocial, which is designed to let people share information on social networks among different applications.

There is also a track on mobile development, including ways to use Google Gears for Mobile and Android, the mobile phone platform Google and its partners introduced last November.

JetBrains, creator of Java IDE - IntelliJ IDEA, has released Java IDE 7.0.2. The new version 7.0.2 is a bug fix release. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2 comes with Spring and Hibernate support, Web Services, Maven and ClearCase integration, and improved support for EJB, JSP, HTML, CSS and XML. IntelliJ IDEA has tools for the development of Web applications, Web services support and enhancements for dynamic languages.New features in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 include: Spring and hibernate support Web and enterprise development Performance improvements Eclipse and maven integration VCS integration Dynamic languages Debugger Dependency structure matrix (DSM) Other productivity %26 usability features

Visual WebGui, developer of the AJAX enterprise application development and deployment platform, has announced the availability of their browser-based solution.Visual WebGui is an open source framework, which is available for graphical user interfaces used for web applications. Visual WebGui, which is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET framework, is expected to launch a Microsoft Silverlight compliant solution, supported by Microsoft.Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), is a combination of Javascript and XML technologies that allow the content of a web page to be updated without reloading the entire page, thereby enabling browser-based applications to behave like software applications.Visual WebGui solves the development setbacks associated with AJAX by providing developers with a Rapid Application Development solution with full Win Forms support. Visual WebGui is delivered with a designer, the application interfaces (WinForms designer), instead of Word documents (ASP.NET designer). This enables interfaces using drag-and-drop editing. Visual WebGui is available under LGPL.

JBoss a division of Red Hat announced the Enterprise Application Platform in version 4.3, which is upgraded with messaging and Web services technologies. Various JBoss.org components have been integrated into JBoss Enterprise Application Platform v4.3 and are fully supported for use in both development and production.The platform provides open-source technologies for the development and deployment of Java Enterprise Application Services and integrates the JBoss Application Server with Hibernate Seam and for the development of Web applications. JBoss Messaging serves as a messaging architecture for JBoss 4.3 and 5.0. JBoss Web Services, another part of the platform, now supported, according to a press report JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services), a Web service API, the JAX-RPC 1.0 in the Java stack.