Google said Tuesday that it's going mobile with its Google Gears technology, the stuff that's supposed to let web-based apps run unconnected to the web, beginning with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices ahead of its own nascent Android platform. Same day, Microsoft came out and made a victory-over-Adobe-Flash statement saying that Nokia and its Symbian OS-based phones and Internet tablets are going to embed its Silverlight plug-in, Microsoft's Flash-competitive crossbrowser/ cross-platform approach to delivering rich media and web applications.

IBM says it's found a way to make mashups secure enough for business. Because of inherent browser insecurity, mashups aren't really viable for widespread business adoption. But what's a little thing like viability compared to the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses - in this case the consumer mashup rage. So to keep the enterprise from hurting itself - and being held hostage by some cyber crook - IBM has come up with SMash, which basically lets information from different sources talk to each other - and create the one unified view mashups are famous for - but keeps them isolated so it's harder for malicious code to inject itself into the company system.

Sun Microsystems, a creator and industry leading advocate of emerging technologies, is revolutionizing and redefining system-wide management of rich, standards-compliant, Internet applications for the next generation Web. A singular vision -- 'The Network Is The Computer' -- guides Sun in the development of state-of-the-art, power-efficient servers and storage systems to award-winning, open-source based software offerings. When it comes to Web 2.0 technologies, Sun provides best-of-breed solutions to enterprises and startups worldwide for developing, deploying, and managing the next wave of computing. For more information about Sun Microsystems, visit http: //developers.sun.com/web/

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

Adobe's release last week of its AIR 1.0 (Adobe Integrated Runtime) cross-platform platform got plenty of ink. Much of it missed the point. And that's understandable, given that we are tumbling into the next generation of everything all at once right now - SaaS and SOA, Web 2.0, Blu-ray, cellular streaming, and on and on - like a tornado crossing a junkyard. It's one of those times when it's hard to keep things straight.

These are the notes from Adobe Education Designer and Developer Conference that Adobe put together for people who are teaching Adobe software at various universities around the country.

ILOG announced that its graphical visualization offering for Adobe Flex, ILOG Elixir, is shipping with feature and sales channel enhancements. ILOG also announced that the product will be made available to Independent Software Vendors (ISV) for OEM use through ILOG's sales and support organization. ILOG Elixir 1.0 enables creation of advanced, business-critical and engaging Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the browser and the desktop using Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIRsoftware - from dashboards to planning and human resources displays.

Adobe greased up Monday for its wrestling match with Microsoft over who gets to call the shots in the all-important rich Internet apps (RIA) department, that blurry future where web applications and desktop applications start looking and acting like each other. It finally released its free, highly anticipated Adobe Integrated Runtime 1.0 (AIR) cross-platform software development system along with the Flex 3 open source development framework and BlazeDS technology, a link between Adobe-based applications and databases. It was for this coming Armageddon that Microsoft created the Silverlight browser plug-in, and is about to roll out a beta Silverlight 2 that will let developers write RIAs for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari using .NET widgetry and any .NET language.

I'm currently creating many small applications using AIR and Flex 3. Most of them are prototypes with the purposes of showing AIR features and the quantity of code is small (600 lines at most). In this context it does not make much sense to use a framework or architecture such as Cairngorm or PureMVC or Defraga. So that I'm using a lot what in JSP is called the View Helper pattern.

ILOG. a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, announced that its graphical visualization offering for Adobe Flex, ILOG Elixir, is shipping with feature and sales channel enhancements. ILOG Elixir, available now, was warmly received by the Adobe Flex community during its Beta period.

Eighteen months ago Flex 2 was released, which literally changed the way people think of rich Internet applications. Since then lots of things have happened in the Flex community. In 2007 Adobe announced that Flex will go open source, and now it has happened. All ActionScript 3 and Java code including Flex compilers and debugger (FDB) are going open source. And let?s not forget about the number of other open source products released by Adobe during the same period of time.

In order to create a multi user Flex application, you can take advantage of one of the features of LiveCycle Data Services: the Messaging Services. The Messaging Services allows you to connect your Flex application to a message destination and send/receive messages to it from other clients. You use the JMS adapter to subscribe to JMS queues configured on an implementation of the Java Message Service. The Java Message Service (JMS) API is a Java Message Oriented Middleware API for sending messages between two or more clients.

If I could pass just one Flex advice that would be: Use Data Transfer Objects. Use custom Data Transfer Objects to pass data between server and Flash tiers of your Flex application. Do not use XML. Yes, I know that XML cool. Do not use raw objects.

Question: What do AOL, eBay, NASDAQ, The New York Times Company, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group's Nick.com, Sharp Corporation and others have in common? The answer is that've all launched pioneering Rich Internet Applications deployed on Adobe AIR, to coincide with the official release today of AIR 1.0.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

AJAXWorld in 2007 was sponsored by the world's leading rich web technology providers including: 3Tera, Addison-Wesley, Adobe, Apress, Backbase, Bindows, Conference Guru, Cynergy Systems, Dynamic Toolbar, Extension Media, Farata Systems, Flash Goddess, FrogLogic, GoingToMeet.com, Google, Helmi Technologies, IBM, ICEsoft, ILOG, IT Mill, Ittoolbox, JackBe, JetBrains, Kaazing, Krugle, Laszlo Systems, Lightstreamer, Manning Publications, Methods & Tools, Microsoft, Nexaweb, OpenSpot, OpSource, Oracle, Parasoft, Passport Corporation, PushToTest, Quasar Technologies, Rearden Commerce, Servoy, SmartClient / Isomorphic Software, SnapLogic, Sun Microsystems, TechTracker Media, Tele Atlas, The Thomson Corporation, ThinWire, TIBCO Software, TileStack, Universal Mind, Vertex Logic, Web Spiders, and Webtide.

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.

Parleys.com is a great Web site with lots of recoded videos of technical presentations on a wide variety of Java-related topics. While the original version of Parleys has been created in AJAX, more advanced Flex and AIR versions are now available too. I had a chance to chat with a man behind this project.

Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl.

So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in those good old days, 'hacks' which appeared in O'Reilly titles were actually just low-level down-and-dirty nuggets of pure gold that geeks and admins loved but were all perfectly legal.

OK, car manufactures go Flex. Will they lose or gain customers because of that? Car manufacturers want to have fancy consumer sites. It's a world of RIA, and having interactive Web sites should bring more people to car dealerships. But poorly performing Web site can turn into lost revenues.

4 of our 6 first quarter projects have major components in Java ME. These are new applications, from companies who understand the porting issues and the complexities. This quarter is not particularly different from other quarters: we get far more work designing applications than designing web sites. Java ME is going to keep on chugging, maybe even seeing a rebirth, for quite a while yet.

The article is basically 'Flex rules, everything else drools'. It goes on and on about the good things about Flex, while giving only cursory coverage of Flex drawbacks. Meanwhile, it's just the opposite regarding the other technologies, going on and on about drawbacks, and giving only cursory coverage of advantages. Case in point, Yakov says that Java Swing development is 'hugely expensive'. Nonsense. First, NetBeans is completely free, and NetBeans has the wonderful Matisse GUI designer, making the development of great looking Swing UIs a snap. Second, there is JavaFX, which is an XML based declarative scripting language that is used to quickly build rich Swing UIs super easy, and is very similar to MXML/Action Script, as is featured in Yakov's beloved Flex. Third, there is a plethora of third party libraries and controls in the Swing ecosystem, that further extends Swing capabilities, and makes Swing development easier.

Web application developers and designers often give up on building rich, interactive user interfaces because they lack the JavaScript skills to make it happen. AJAX development power tools - including Dreamweaver, Spry and off-the-shelf AJAX components - make it easy to build rich user interfaces in AJAX with no JavaScript coding. Andre Charland will demonstrate how to install, set up and configure extensions to Dreamweaver, and will use them to build simple, rich interface AJAX apps.

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.

Earth Live is an application that EffectiveUI has created in collaboration with Discovery channel. The application helps people to learn the world by engaging them with a more effective UI, so complex information such as climate change can be digestible by a regular person. The application uses digital imagery so the user can interactively create a climate picture of the planet Earth. The UI offers several layers, and you can load the content of the layer (i.e. rain) onto the 3D image of the globe.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and many enterprise development managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET technologies or less known (as yet) yet AJAX, Flex, OpenLaszlo...

It's unlikely, however, that Google, the target of the proposed merger, can do much of anything other than raise dust - like its move over the weekend to raise the specter of Microsoft's possible monopolization of the Internet and its illegal leverage into 'new, adjacent markets.' As the Journal observes, Google would have a tough time making a bid for Yahoo itself because its owns too much of search and Internet advertising to clear the regulators, and even the alternatives - underwriting another white knight or helping Yahoo stay independent by guaranteeing 'revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact' - would probably meet with regulatory headwinds.

Adobe has named Kevin Lynch, a guy from the Macromedia side of the house, CTO, a chair last warmed by John Warnock. Lynch was previously chief software architect and senior VP of the company's platform business. His attention is now supposed to focus on AIR, Flex and Flash Player and his posting is supposed to mark the importance of rich Internet applications to Adobe, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. He holds three patents with others pending.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

One of the best Java IDEs on the market may become a valid Flex Builder alternative later this year. I can make a wild guess that I'll be seriously considering switching to IntelliJIDEA 8.0 by the end of 2008 unless Adobe will make some major investments in Flex Builder.

Flex is an open source product, which means that you can fix the bugs on your own. This may fork out the product, but that's another story altogether. On the other hand, developers can vote for the bugs so the Flex team can fix them. I remain cautiously optimistic that Flex team will be more responsive than their Java colleagues. Time will tell.

'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.

The defining characteristic of any RIA is that it has a stateful client that is (or should be) platform and browser independent. Thin-client web applications grew from the need to provide applications with more reach, easy access to server side data, and to alleviate the pain of having to install and configure thick client software. Thin-client web applications remain a great way to accomplish these goals. However, with the advent of these new RIA platforms, developers now have all the reach of a traditional thin-client web application with many of the useful characteristics of thick-client applications, such as the ability to maintain state on the client.

Nokia is buying Trolltech, the publicly traded Norwegian open source ISV, for roughly $153 million cash. Gee, and Trolltech just joined the LiMo Foundation, the anti-Nokia/anti-Microsoft mobile consortium that's building a middleware-focused Linux handset platform that can be shared by its members with third-party access to the APIs, and not Google's flashier Linux-based Android effort. The acquisition is practically in the bag.

Action Message Format (AMF) is a protocol that is used to serialize the data coming into Flash Player or going out to other programming environments that need to communicate with Flash Player. Say, if you create in Java an instance of the class MyOrder, this instance can be converted into a string of bytes, sent over the wire to Flash Player and then recreated there as an instance of the ActionScript object. The rules of how to do this are defined by a communication protocol, such as AMF.

The Adobe Flex enterprise market picks up really fast, and it's obvious that the need for Flex developers will only get bigger and bigger. The question is what kind of Flex developers are in huge demand. I'll share with you the experience of our company, but first, let's look at the diagram from the popular job aggregator.

Google doesn't like the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo any more than Microsoft likes the idea of Google buying DoubleClick. Today in a blog Google general counsel David Drummond said Microsoft?'s $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo 'raises troubling questions.' 'This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,' he wrote. 'It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet' openness and innovation,' throwing in Microsoft's face allegations of possible monopolization and antitrust leverage onto 'new, adjacent markets.'

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.