Google's Quote "Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web"

Yahoo Developer Tools

Discussion:

• YQL - What Is it?
• Similar to Yahoo Pipes, even curl from the command line (but without having to write your own hacky code) - Much more powerful
• SQL-like queries
• HTML Table example
  
• select * from html where url="http://instantiatepodcast.com"
  Then use xpath to traverse through the DOM tree and get a DIV that does something:
  select * from html where url="http://instantiatepodcast.com"  and xpath="//span[@class='podcastHeading']"
• RSS Example:
  select title, link from rss where url="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/InstantiatePodcast"
• RSS with multuple URL's:
  select title, link from rss where url IN ("http://feeds2.feedburner.com/InstantiatePodcast", "http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?feed=rss2" )
• YQL Cashes your results for you
  
• Get the response API Formats in JSON or XML
• Powerfull, yet simple.
• Google Developer Tools, Yahoo Developer tools in the background
• Social, Geo + Search API's
• As per this Technation post: http://www.technation.com.au/2009/04/17/yahoo-developer-network-events-in-sydney/ there will be some Yahoo Develop days in Sydney, the first being April 22nd... : http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2413704 with Christian Heilmann

Another example of investing in the platform, not the content? Yahoo trying to do both?

References:

• http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/theres_a_great_amount_of.php

App-engine in the cloud - Discussion: Everything old is new Again?

Discussion (Main Topic):

• First Pyton now Java (Celebrating 1 year of App-engine)
  
• Sun not happy about this, Not supporting the full Java API Stack (eg Threading etc...)
• Development in the cloud? - (Short Discussion) Can this work? Collaborative development?
  Related to: Johns ite of the week
  

What does this mean for cloud computing in general? (Key Discussion)

• Going back in time? "Everything that is old is new again"
  Thin clients are back?
• (Thin) 80's - Mainframes and dumb terminals. Everything was developed for the mainframe
• Why? Clients didn't have much processing power, technology very costly
  
• (Thick) early 90's - Away from dumb terminals to personal computers with processing done on the client
• We didn't transfer all processing back to the desktop, but most of it. Share the load - client does some work, so does the server. Generally speaking - the database was in the server, and all processing was done on the client side.
• This is still the case today to some degree (eg Outlook)
  
• Network transfer overhead 
• Added extra complexity in how applications are deployed (both client and server tightly coupled)
  
• Why? Share computing power - server does the storage of data, client does computations
• (Thin) very late 90's - Client now becomes a much smarter dumb terminal
• Borwsers & the Internet becoming more readily available and accessable
  
• Web applications start to take off - but web applications are essentially 'stateless'
• User interface went back in time - we could not get the rich experience as we could in the thick client state - but we tried (CSS/DHTML/JS)
• Tried to bridge this gap with Active X applets 
• Lots of 'browser plugins' to make the experience richer
  
• Why? Could leverage off servers on the internet - Made deployments easier (didn't have to do client and server)
• (Thin) Recent Times - now - 'Smarter' clients - into cloud computing
  
• AJAX - Browsers becoming richer
• Is it me or does AJAX just seem to you like it was a fluke? Jessie James - Is it a bit of a hack? (not saying its a bad thing)
  
• Applications built with more of a 'statefull feel' over HTTP 
• CSS and JS advancing
• Cloud-based computing 
• Will we ever go back again to thick clients? is it a big circle? Are we due for another cycle back to thick? Will we ever go back? Are we going back a bit now?
  
• Discussion
  
• Next-generation apps hold a combination of both thin and thick clients - but evenly distributed load - Syncing
  
• Are we seeing this now with Google Gears? - mix of both cloud and local
  
• Adobe Flex - keeping it in the cloud, very rich experience
  
• Adobe AIR - mix of both cloud and local
  
• Local storage and server-side storage
  
• Internet reliable? The need for both online and offline? Will we every go 100% in the cloud?
• What does this mean for enterprises?
  

References:

• http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html

John's site of the week

Mozilla Bespin : http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/bespin/ & https://bespin.mozilla.com/

Related to the "key topic", Bespin is Coding in the Cloud!

• First thing you notice is how FAST it is to use... nice
• Has many features like:
• Code Highlighting (html, javascript, css so far)
• Ability to create your own commands
• File browser design stolen from OSX :)
  
• Collaborative functionality (prototype)
  
• VCS Capability - at the moment only with.... ???Sherif this sort of ended in mid sentence???
  
• Uses a web gui toolkit they've created called Thunderhead
  

 
* Video overview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmC49JTx8M
Similar to: http://etherpad.com/

Mozilla doings some great stuff like Ubiquity to be come part of the next FireFox release (TaskFox) http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/04/taskfox-prototype-ubiquity-in-firefox/

We might revisit some of the other cool stuff they are doing @ mozilla labs in the future...

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