Thoughts from ThePef

COFU Building

Composite “On the Fly” UI, or COFU.  The ability to generate structured UIs from relevant information.  Just like a child knows how to build a house out of building blocks, application UIs should be built in the same manner. 

The user determines the blueprint through a request.  The blocks are contained in the registries that hold api type and location, and datastore information types.  These are the needed building blocks to form the house.  Each structure is returned to the user based on relevancy match to the original request.  The user then selects the appropriate blueprint, and the UI is assembled upon tags, and order algorithms.  The form at this point may be a composite view that allows changes to multiple data sets. 

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Application Future State

IT administrators everywhere should rejoice.  The march away from individual client loads is taking place.  We have the announcements of liveoffice, meebo, as well as several other traditional client implementations moving to the browser.  Why?

Two very specific trends are allowing this to happen.

1) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.  As bandwidth increases and becomes more readily available, the need for a connectionless client is reduced. 

2) Rich UI control via AJAX and Flash.  These two technologies are allowing the browser to behave and perform like a traditional client built using visual basic or another programming language.

Why is this a good thing for administrators?

Less pieces to manage.  Fewer client loads equals less hassle maintaining a clean client.  A clean client is a happy client. 

So, what is the downside?

You need a connection to maintain functionality.  If you want to maintain functionality in a connectionless environment you will need to load a client, back to square one.  What are the alternatives?  Perhaps technology has to come to the point where every PC will have its own html server, and as apps are accessed via the web, small less robust versions of the original client are loaded into the server for access in a connectionless environment.  This would also require a small configurable on the fly database to be built within the PC to handle data that would be synched back up at a later time. 

At the end of this picture you have what looks like a server, with a smart, powerful gui.  The PC build would look something like this:

• Browser
• Web Server
• Application Containers
• Database
• Kernel Layer

That looks just like a tiered server architecture.  Imagine that. 

Software Farm Teams

Has the Open Source community developed into a farm team of sorts for software developers?   It is apparent that one of the most visible ways to display your skills and get noticed is through participation in one of the open source initiatives, whether it be Mozilla, Apache, etc. 

Often a developer with obvious skills can be noticed by one of the corporate development teams assigned to the project, and be recruited.  So, participation in the open source community is a way to hone and promote your skills.  This should be an obvious place for any developer to broadcast his knowledge and abilities to work dynamically as part of a collaborative team.  Likewise it should be an obvious place for development organizations to discover new talent.

Open Source (Standards)?

Why is it that too often Open Source and Open Standards are used in the same breath?  or interchangeably?  Is it people just jockeying venaculars around to the point of confusion, or do people actually relate the two?

I have been at the OSBC conference now for the last two days, and I have seen numerous examples of this confusion taking place, even with the highly educated audience that is in attendance. 

Lets set a few things straight, Open Standards are standards that allow for open adoption of protocols and methodologies to accomplish a goal.  Such as exchange of any segmental information, whether it be user, orders, etc. 

Open Source is a movement centered around the releasing of previously undisclosed or obviscated code to the general public and the creation and maintenance of a developer and user community that fosters improvement. 

Open Source can occur without Open Standards, likewise software that is proprietary can support Open Standards.  Too often people equate Open Source with Open Standards, and unfortunately that is not the case.  It should be a prerequisite for the moniker of Open Source, but it is not.  I hope the industry clears up the distinctions for the two, and places some requirements around the use of the Open Source terminology, if it doesn’t the industry may fall into a hole that it may find very difficult to climb out of.

Terms to be Aware Of

More terms are being coined or thrown around this year than ever before.  The Gartner Integration Conference in Orlando has brought to the forefront the following terms; some of these have existed for sometime, but are just now being pushed to the general IT public.

SOC – Service Oriented Client; a rich client capable of interacting at a base level with Web Services

CEP – Complex Event Processing; the ability to apply logic to unrelated events that have been exposed via web services, or some other message architecture.

EPA – Event Processing Agent; a listener or sink that receives the event and applies some basic analytics or function, such as tripping a counter, forwarding the event, or adding information to the event.

EPL – Event Pattern Language;  I hate to use the term AI here, but this a language structure that is able to consume unrelated events and determine trends that may be relevant.  The end goal is usually to alert a “human” to the existence of the pattern within a dashboard.

Online Collaboration Being Taught

Rena Palloff, a faculty member at the Fielding Graduate Institute,  recently spoke about the advantages of creating a “fishbowl” for learning. 

Students are graded on their collaborative work that involves posting to an online discussion group throughout the semester.  As we move into the age of Collaboration this skillset is going to be increasingly important.  Awhile back I posted about the fact that online gaming actually increases collaborative skillsets needed for todays’ virtual world.

The skills of posting, tracking and collaborating online are increasingly important, and the individual that possesses these skills will succeed at the end of the day.  It is nice to see a collegiate teaching philosophy that seeks to augment these skills.

What does it mean Sun? Google?

Is this the end of the world as we know it, as some are predicting? 

John Paczkowski from SiliconValley.com spells out a possible Redmond reaction:

I don't know about the world, but if Sun and Google do uncrate an office productivity solution -- say a Sun Ray ultra-thin client optimized to run "Google Office" -- that shot will definitely be heard up in Redmond, along with a lot of expletives and an anguished scream or two. Because if anyone can shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into the open, it's Google.

I should have seen this coming, after seeing McNealy’s speech at Oracle Openworld.  Looking back on that speech, McNealy was pointing in this direction throughout.  Networked appliances, thin computers, the network the network the network.  Mind you, I have seen this all before.  Sun rays have been around for a long time, but now Sun is serious, and has the mindshare to back it up in Google. 

ePublishing

There seems to be a tipping point taking place within the ePublishing world.  Today I got wind of two totally different ePublishing initiatives; VitalSource and alacra. 

VitalSource is an online bookstore powered by a separate application.  It is not handled within the browser, but like iTunes I can see why.  There are some powerful tools built into the application for note taking, annotation and highlighting.  Obviously, this application and the corresponding store is focused on the educational market, with several higher education customers already lined up.  The real power would be if the application would allow for collaborative document markups.  So, if a study group were formed, one persons markup would appear in the document reader for another person in the group. 

Now onto alacra.com.  This site has allot of potential.  The focus is on providing a search tool for industry reporting, along with the ability to purchase the reports. In the past, this type of reporting usually required a dedicated researcher in the marketing department, and a host of subscriptions to reporting services.  alacra enables one to take on the search function themselves, and gives them the ability to obtain report copies independent of the subscription model.  Very powerful stuff for companies doing industry research.  It puts the power right where it needs to be, in the hands of decision makers.

Jobs' Sinister Plans

I don’t know if you would actually refer to them as sinister, since the end result is more freedom for everyone.

In case you haven’t noticed, iTunes started aggregating Podcasts.  Now I like it.  This is one less step for an otherwise lazy person, me.  But, between the free content (and it is important to note that it is also content free of traditional media houses) and the fact that iTunes now has artists that are free of the music houses (Biddies, thank you Adam Curry), there is an undercurrent that could sink the Recording Industry as we know it. 

At the end of the day, will this make for more music?  less pre-orchestrated music? will artists have more freedom to pursue “their” music?  and will they directly profit from it, rather than a recording label?

Interesting thoughts.  This really is a true turning point for the music industry, and at the end of the day, the artists may be the true benefactor, and could be truly liberated.  Food for thought.

Freakonomics Update

Looking for the root cause, past the smoke and mirrors is the stated focus that I see with Freakonomics.  More often than not we use our own preconceptions and biases to form an opinion.  We use these opinions to rationalize societal and economic occurrences, and are able to say in hindsight this happened because this occurred. 

The unfortunate circumstance is that our biases tend to obscure, or keep us from further pursuit.  A minor correlation, can be deemed noteworthy, and we tend to be lazy and say that is the reason x happened. 

This approach is more readily adopted by politicians and experts within sectors that tend to be more closed, and not open to scrutiny.  We take it for face value and move on. 

The real loss is not being able to understand the root well enough that pro-active measurements can be placed that will forewarn us of impending situations.  Like a good detective we should doggedly pursue the truth no matter how painful it may be.  Unlike a detective, we should dig deeper to the underlying reasons for the occurrence and not just adopt the first easy solution that comes to the forefront.