• eWeek has a long interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, covering areas such as the open source aspects of Flash, the competition Adobe Air is facing from Google Chrome, Gears and possibly from Microsoft and Silverlight, and a bit about new features of Creative Suite 4 (CS4). Josh Catone does a good job of covering the Adobe Air part and the competition from Google Gears and Silverlight. In conclusion Josh thinks that Microsoft might play an important part in the cloud computing/rich Internet application (RIA) arena, something that Adobe's Kevin Lynch doesn't fully recognize.

  On open source, Lynch points out how Abobe is gradually embracing the open source movement, and he gives several examples of Adobe's contribution to OSS:

  We already open source the core of Flash, the virtual machine, Tamarin. Ten years ago we published the format that Flash uses called SWF. And for a while that format had a license agreement around it where we asked that people not make their own Flash players. And the goal of that was to maintain consistency of the runtime. [...]
  we actually removed the license restriction this year from the SWF format. So anyone can go create anything they want around that format, including a player if they want to. [...]
  But we need to balance openness and consistency. So we're very open about what goes into Flash Player, the bugs in Flash Player, the code and scripting engine in Flash, the format with Flash, the protocols with Flash. 

  On completely opening up of the Flash player Lynch is more hesitant:

  [That] would be somewhat challenging in that there are some codices in Flash that we don't have the rights to all the source to. That's one challenge with that. The other is that I think in terms of what's best here for consistency of Flash on the Web, having multiple implementations and having forking and splintering of that code would be a big loss for the Web in terms of that consistency.

  Well, there might be some truth in that, but there for sure are a multitude of OSS projects that have managed to keep control of the core development, without sacrificing consistency.

  In August I wrote about new directions in the development of ECMAScript, which is the parent language of JavaScript, ActionScript and a few other languages. The ECMAScript Harmony agreement implied a step back for the group working with the more ambitious ECMAScript 4 specification, including Adobe. Kevin Lynch, however, did not express too much worry about this development, saying:

  I think the amount of innovation that we were trying to do with ECMAScript 4 perhaps was too big of a leap for some and they wanted to see a more collaborative approach on that. So the standards process is a collaborative one where there are lots of points of view. And we're happy to continue working in the process to advance ECMAScript. But we're hoping that innovation can happen faster and that we can raise the level of scripting on the Web. So we're going to continue innovating in Flash Player. We're not removing features that we've already deployed because people are relying on them and we think they're good. And we'll keep developing it further. And at the same time we'll keep working with the standards process.

  Tags: ActionScript, Flash

• Microsoft is embracing jQuery, a popular open source JavaScript library, and intend to support it natively in Visual Studio alongside its own ASP.NET AJAX library.
  Tags: JavaScript, Microsoft
• Watch out US, the European Union (EU) wants to take the lead in the development of the next generation of the Web, aka Web 3.0. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding says: 
  

  Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. Europe has the know-how and the network capacity to lead this transformation. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.

  For other definitions of Web 3.0, check out my review from April.
  Tags: Web 3.0

• Automattic, the parent company behind Wordpress, acquires commenting system IntenseDebate, writes ReadWriteWeb, who also reviews Habari, a blogging platform and potential competitor to Wordpress. Habari uses the Atom Syndication Format for feeds and the Atom Publishing Protocol for web site communication. It also builds on PHP, and makes use of PHP Data Objects (PDO) for database access, and it supports MySQL and other databases.
  Tags: blogging, Wordpress
• Ringside Networks, offering a "Social Application Server", which I wrote about in March, is closing up shop. Bad luck and timing could be the reasons.
  Tags: social applications
• Royal Pingdom has a list of ten less known operating systems. For example, MenuetOS is written entirely in assembly language and is designed to be lightweight and responsive, and it fits on a floppy disk (1.44 MB).
  Tags: operating systems

• The last word on JavaScript performance among competing browser engines has apparently not yet been spoken. This week it was reported that an updated version of SquirrelFish, dubbed Extreme, which is the native WebKit JavaScript engine, has regained the lead in JavaScript performance. Reportedly it was faster than both the V8 engine of Google Chrome and TraceMonkey of Firefox. The results suggest that Google should have stuck with the original SquirrelFish engine of WebKit, instead of developing their own V8. Can we expect a close comeback from the V8 team? Let the struggle continue!
  Note however that performance reports like these must always be taken with a grain of salt. For example, it is quite easy to optimize the code to perform well on a specific test.
  Tags: JavaScript, Chrome
• Google Chrome will eventually support Add-ons and User scripts à la Greasemonkey, said Google Engineer Ojan Vafai at the Web 2.0 Expo last week. They hope to make a stable implementation, he said, referring to the less stable experience of Add-ons with Firefox. Personally, with Chrome I miss the Google Toolbar, with the Gmail notifier and the PageRank indicator. Hopefully it will be released for Chrome soon.
  At the same Web 2.0 panel, Microsoft's IE platform architect Chris Wilson, hinted that IE might add support for vector graphics and the canvas element, a part of the HTML 5 standard I wrote about last week.
  Tags: Add-ons, Chrome
• If you want to stay on top with the latest updates to Google Chrome, you can join the Dev Channel and get access to more recent but potentially less stable updates to the browser.
  Tags: Chrome
• Google's embeddable 3D virtual world Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, has hitherto received little attention. Nevertheless, Google has high plans for the service, revealed creative director Kevin Hanna at the recent Game Developers' Conference. They plan to open up the API further to allow for the creation of entire 3D games. In the long run, Hanna hopes that Lively will become part of the backbone of the Web, much like Java, Flash and HTML are today.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• A Pew Internet Project report shows that 97% of all (American) teens, ages 12-17, play some kind of video game on a computer, console or portable device. Further, nearly 50% of all boys visit game related web sites or forums, and 14% contribute to those sites. For girls, the corresponding figures are somewhat lower. The study also shows that about one third of teens play mature or adult rated games. Of those teens, boys are in majority, 79% vs. 21% girls. In conclusion: regulations will always fail, and boys are still boys (phew!).
  Where I think the study fails, is that it does not distinguish online Flash-based games as a separate category, despite the fact that it is an important genre, and presumably popular by younger teens at least.
  Tags: gaming
• Finally a Web 3.0 conference, Oct 16-17, in Santa Clara, Ca. Jupitermedia is organizer and RWW is a sponsor. Semantic Web technologies seems to be a key feature of the event. Don't miss my Web 3.0 review from April, and the catch-up in July.
  Tags: Web 3.0

• There was some discussion this week about which products and technologies are really threatened by Google Chrome. I agree with those who argue that other rich Internet application frameworks (RIAs) are the technologies at greatest risk. These include the proprietary Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Air (with Flash). The great promise of the Chrome browser is that it pushes for the open technologies JavaScript and HTML. Chrome comes with a fast JavaScript engine, and with improvements in the JavaScript language itself, as envisioned by the recent ECMAScript Harmony agreement, JavaScript could become a real challenge to the programming languages used in Silverlight (C#) and Flash (ActionScript). ActionScript and JavaScript have the same roots in ECMAScript, but ActionsScript requires a proprietary runtime component (Air or Flash player) to run in the browser, whereas support for JavaScript is built-in into most browsers. Silverlight also requires a proprietary runtime component.

  JavaScript can not alone pose a threat to Silverlight or Flash, an enhanced HTML is required, with elements from the emerging HTML 5 standard, such as the canvas element, for drawing to the screen, and the video element, for displaying video. The canvas element is currently supported by WebKit, the HTML rendering component used in Chrome, and by Gecko, the one used in Firefox, but not natively in IE, though there are workarounds. The latest Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 release includes support for the video element.

  Another advantage with Chrome is that it comes included with the browser extension Gears, which is a JavaScript framework that equips the browser with additional capabilities like offline access for supported sites.
  Tags: Chrome, JavaScript

• Last week I posed a question regarding the relative performance of Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 compared to the latest Firefox engine TraceMonkey. Now John Resig has given a balanced answer, and it turns out that V8 and TraceMonkey are quite comparable. V8 is faster in some tests, in particular those involving recursion, while TraceMonkey is faster in some other tests. For tests including both JavaScript and DOM manipulation, WebKit based browsers like Safari and Chrome are somewhat ahead of TraceMonkey and Firefox 3.0.1. IE is generally lagging behind.
  Tags: Chrome, Firefox
• A proof that Chrome is relatively compliant with emerging Web standards is that it performs well on the Acid3 test, with a score of about 78 out of 100.
  Tags: Chrome, web standards
• Finally, Ted Dziuba challenges my comparison of Chrome to an operating system last week, though he probably didn't read my article, instead he mainly goes after a post by Michael Arrington who labels Chrome "a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Though that expression might be somewhat over the top, I enjoy the vision in the post that eventually the need for a stand-alone desktop operating system will disappear, and that basic OS features might as well be integrated into the browser. A possible solution could be based on a stripped-down version of the Linux OS combined with Google Chrome.
  Tags: Chrome, vision

• The greatest news this week (and perhaps this year) is of course Google's launch of the browser Chrome. The news broke while I was finishing the list below, and it puts some of the items in a different perspective, particularly the one about the launch of IE8 beta 2 below.
  Tags: Chrome
• Last month, I wrote about some troubles for Google's Android mobile platform. These problems seem now to be history, with the release of a new 0.9 version of the SDK, which is expected to be quite similar to the 1.0 version running on the first phones. Google is now also improving on the communication side, with the release of a developer roadmap, which promises a 1.0 SDK release and retail phones by Q4 this year. Actually, there are already rumors floating about an Android phone by HTC, the "Dream", slated for November 10th.
  Tags: Android
• Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about feed.informer, formerly known as Feed Digest, a web service for mashing, filtering and publishing RSS feeds. As mentioned by Marshall, the site has some faults. For example, I found that the link to the Docs & FAQs page is broken. Another provider of similar services is Yahoo Pipes. For self hosting, the PHP RSS library SimplePie provides detailed functionality for parsing feeds, though there seems to be no built-in functionality for keyword filtering. SimplePie on this page compare themselves to a few competing libraries.
  Tags: feeds, RSS
• From the JavaScript/Firefox department there were reports on progress in improving the JavaScript execution speed in Firefox, leveraging a technique known as tracing optimization, hence the project code name Tracemonkey. Ars explains the basic idea behind tracing:
  

  The tracing mechanism records the path of execution at runtime and generates compiled code that can be used next time that a particular path is reached. This makes it possible to flatten out loops and nested method calls into a linear stream of instructions that is more conducive to conventional optimization techniques.

  The goal is to achieve execution speed comparable to native code, taking JavaScript performance into "the next tier", and "redefining the boundaries of client-side performance." Wonder how this improvement compares to Google Chrome's new V8 JavaScript Engine?
  Tags: Firefox, JavaScript

• Internet Explorer 8 is getting closer to official, with a Beta 2 release just being announced. It's a massive makeover according to Ed Bott, with improvements in usability, privacy, standards compliance and new features like Accelerators, which are kind of smart shortcuts that perform a task, e.g. search, on selected text, and Web Slices, which provide a kind of subscription to a part of a web page that updates frequently. It's up to the developer to slice-enable particular web pages, by adding appropriate markup. The standards compliance is of course exciting, and it will eventually make the life easier for developers. Though it will take several years, with about one third of web surfers still using IE6.
  Tags: IE8
• BackType is a new comment aggregation service, liked a lot by Michael Arrington. Comments are automatically collected around the web, and can be searched for based on people or subject. You claim your comments by creating a profile and indicating which url you use when commenting. This is my profile. I think it's a nice idea, with an open approach. Blogs can keep their comment system of choice, and still being included. No need for JavaScript solutions à la Disqus (my profile), for example.
  Tags: comments
• Fred Wilson suggests that social sites start using the concept of neighbors, which are automatically discovered people with similar interests like you, instead of relying on so-called friends or followers and the habit of befriending or follow people. Seems like a practical idea to me, not having to manually look for friends, but have them automatically suggested.
  Tags: social networks
• Marshall Kirkpatrick explains the concept of embargoes in blogging and why it generally is a better idea than exclusives. An embargo works as an agreement between bloggers and a company not to write about a new product or service until a specific time. This has several advantages, such as a broader and deeper coverage from multiple perspectives.
  Tags: blogging, PR

• Dare Obasanjo explains the essence of a REST-based architecture, some benefits over SOAP, and how it obeys to the architecture of the Web itself: "Don't fight the Web, embrace it." The ideas behind REST stem from a Ph.D. dissertation by Roy Fielding in 2000, and are a bit abstract and academic in their nature. But the essence seems to be to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the HTTP protocol, such as using GET, PUT and DELETE wisely instead of fully relying on POST. For example, caching is a benefit offered by using GET.
  Dave Winer chips in, and reminds us not to forget about XML-RPC, which on the XML-RPC home page is explained as "remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding."
  Tags: REST, web development
• Josh Catone shares some insights into why people pirate software, as compiled by game developer Cliff Harris. Low game quality and presence of DRM, are important reasons for piracy, besides the obvious reason of saving money.
  Tags: DRM, gaming
• Twitter quietly announced an important new feature to their API, as noticed by Jesse Stay. It is now possible to reply to any specific message in the past, not just to the last one posted.
  Tags: Twitter
• My recent post on ECMAScript Harmony and the future of JavaScript and ActionScript.
  Tags: JavaScript

Important new features proposed for ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2.0) were support for classes (object-oriented programming), packages, namespaces, type annotations and static typing. Packages and namespaces have been dropped from the Harmony project, classes will remain in some form but the status for type annotations is yet unclear.

ECMAScript (JavaScript) is an open language, supported natively in some dialect by most browsers. It propels many Web 2.0 sites, enabling features like AJAX for example. JavaScript and HTML form the basis of standards based client-side Web programming, and is generally preferred over proprietary technologies like Flash (Adobe) and Silverlight (Microsoft).

The scripting language ActionScript (specifically version 3.0), which is used in Adobe Flash, is based on an early proposal for ECMAScript 4, which kind of gives Adobe a break. However, the script is compiled to bytecode before running on the client, and a separate runtime component (e.g. Flash Player) is required. It can be expected that ActionScript is adapted to comply with future versions of ECMAScript, possibly keeping some additional features.

The latest stable edition of ECMAScript is 3 (from Dec 1999), which roughly corresponds to JavaScript 1.5, JScript 5 and ActionScript 1.0.

• There was some buzz about SproutCore this week — YAJF (Yet Another JavaScript Framework) if you like, though this one comes with an application framework supporting the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern. SproutCore, labeled by some as a Flash competitor, relies solely on web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, the provided demos relies on elements of the forthcoming standards HTML5 and CSS3, currently supported by the Safari browser, but not by IE7, for example. However, standards compliance is always welcome, even if a bit ahead. Hopefully this can help to speed up the compliance efforts of the other browser vendors.
  Tags: JavaScript, web development
• Semantic search engine Hakia opens up their services to developers and provides an API. Free access to the search API is time limited "until the partners' quota is filled," as they write. The text analysing API, however, does not seem to be time limited and is free up to 1000 requests per day. Currently available for text analysis is the "Summarizer", which provides "a summary of a large text block or URL". Yet to come is the "Categorizer", "Characterizer" and "Text Meaning Representation (TMR)", which are additional semantic analysis tools.
  ReadWriteWeb tested the Summarizer API component, and weren't very impressed, writing: "Mostly, it seemed to just return the headline or first sentence as the summary for articles we threw at it."
  Tags: API, semantic search
• Lifehacker, featuring The How-To Geek explains a few tweaks how to make Windows Vista less annoying. Something for Microsoft to read and learn. I'm still using XP, though I'll probably shift to Vista in due course. I'd rather use Linux, but I'm afraid I'm too dependent on Microsoft-only tools and software.
  Tags: Windows Vista
• Ed Bott asks if we will be using petabyte-sized (1000 TB) disks in 2020. That's not unlikely if Moore's Law continue to hold. Historically hard disk capacity has increased 10 fold every 5 years. To get some perspective, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day. Around 2035, we will have exabyte (1000 PB) disks. That can still be useful, since in 2006 it was estimated that Internet users created 161 exabytes of new data, a number that is estimated to grow to around a zettabyte (1000 EB) in 2010. Next in turn storage devices are yottabyte (1000 ZB) disks, which can be expected around 2065, which is probably beyond my lifetime though.
  Tags: storage
• Josh Catone leaves RWW, sadly enough. He will always be remembered by this blog for his Web 3.0 posts though.
  Tags: Josh Catone