Ruby on rails is an open source web application application development environment for the Ruby programming language. It was mainly developed for web developers that require rapid create of their projects.

MVC

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, an architecture pattern to organise application programming. It has inbuilt capability to steer developers into this organisation pattern.  For example, a database named “name” will automatically be created and assigned when a class named “name” is created.

Active Record

Ruby on Rails is seperated into various “packages”, one of which is named Active Record. Active record uses object-relational mapping (ORM).  “Active Record connects business objects and database tables to create a persistent domain model where logic and data are presented in one wrapping.” (ar.rubyonrails.org) As such, Active Record is an integral part of the Ruby on Rails environment.

Naming Convention

Ruby on Rails employs a system called “Convention over Configuration”. This means that the system will automatically name many of the objects in the project to avoid confusion for the user. As mentioned before, databases are automatically named when the class is created. This means that specialised code only needs to be written when a user specifically wishes to deviate the automatically assigned names. As such, there is far less code repition and redundant naming within Ruby on Rails projects.

Task: Use Fluid.app to make a desktop version of Google Voice
Difficulty: Easy, compared to getting an invite to Google Voice
Time: 8-10 minutes
Requirements: Fluid.app (free), Mac OS X, and membership with Google Voice

How is this possible? It’s quite easy, actually. This is just a walk-through based on what I’ve learned from doing this myself (Google Voice, Docs, Calendar, Wave, Facebook, WordPress, and Instapaper) several times, as well as help I’ve received by reading various other blogs (those will be listed at the end of this post). This will be a straight-forward walk through for placing Google Voice on your desktop, running as if it were local on your computer, with its own dock badge and notifications.

First, you should head over to Fluid’s site to download a copy of their software; feel free to browse for a few minutes (it’ll give you an idea of what they’re about). I’ll wait a few.

Ok, back?

Great—so you understand that Fluid’s goal is to essentially free people from using web browsers to run web-based applications by making a Site-Specific Browser (or SSB) that is beautifully integrated with the Cocoa interface. And we’re off!

Step 1.
If you didn’t already, download Fluid.app from the right side of Fluid’s website. Once you’ve installed it (by double-clicking on the file, then double-clicking the .dmg), you’ll come to a prompt like the one seen above. All you’ve got to do now is to fill in the information until it looks like the picture below.

Straightforward enough, right? A side note: I used the Google Voice .png icon instead of the website favicon–it you’d like to do the same, just click on the icon I’ve placed at the top of this article. Download, and presto: pretty bubble.

Step 2.
Once that’s done, you’ll have the option of “Launch Now”—so do it! You’ll have to log into Google Voice, like usual, but once you’re logged in, everything should work perfectly. Not bad for only two steps, right?

Well, just in case things don’t work out exactly, we’ll throw in another step. If you’ve had any problems logging in or viewing your GV interface, this will solve them.

Step 3. – Tweak your settings!
Yes, maybe some tweaking is required, but it’s not hard, not hard at all. The first thing you want to do is make sure the allowed URLs within the application are set properly (Fluid cleverly opens all “not allowed” URLs with your default browser). All you’ve got to do is go to Preferences (with CMD + , ) and click on “Advanced.” Make sure that “Allow browsing to URLs matching these patterns:” is check, and that the allowed URLs are “*google.com/voice*” and “*google.com*/accounts/ServiceLogin*” (Not counting the quotation marks, but including the stars).
After that, just install two fantastic userscripts into your new Google Voice app:
this one for badge counts, and this one for Growl notifications (if you use Growl, which is a brilliant application as well—more on another time). At each of these script pages, click “Install” and confirm the installation. You’ll now get notifications of new calls, voicemails, and texts—all beautifully and elegantly integrated into your desktop. The best part? No worrying about refreshing the page every five minutes (of having some other site’s flash advertisements taking out your browser).

Everything work alright? If not, post here and ask! The best part of Fluid is that this method can be used to make desktop web-apps for almost anything you do online–just adjust the procedure accordingly. I’m currently running a Fluid interface for Google Voice, Google Docs, Google Wave, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress (2 different ones), and InstaPaper.

I’d like to thank the guys at FluidApp.com for such a smooth piece of software, and the authors at Lifehacker and Download Squad for their great tutorials.

Description

Have you ever wanted to search for a word or article, but see the word in other applications such as wikipedia at the same time?

Click on the link below to read about this great web tool

Free Dictionary is a Great Web Tool | Quazen.

It’s been an exciting and interesting year to be a web worker. We’ve come to rely more on services like Twitter, there has been huge buzz about Google Wave (s goog), and there are certainly no shortages of new applications being released each and every day.

Around this time last year I wrote “5 Applications and Services For Which I Am Thankful,” which was a tribute to the cream of the crop that I had chosen as my daily go-to products. With another year gone, I thought it would be interesting to revisit that list of products (at the time, I picked Gmail, BatchBook, BlogDesk, Toodledo and Google Calendar) to see what may have changed.

Despite the number of products that I test and review, all providing limitless opportunity to switch things around, it seems that very little has changed in my day-to-day web app usage, at least in the key applications that drive my business. Today, all five of these apps would be still be high on my list. Each continues to fulfill a very specific need and despite the growing number of other choices in each category, I would still choose these today.

With that said, there is one notable omission from this list, a product that I’ve come to rely on tremendously over the last few months. I’ve written in detail about Springpad in the past and with each day it becomes an even more integral part of my routine.

The tools that we use to run our businesses and organize our lives are tremendously important, and play a key role in our success.

What apps and services are you thankful for?
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/ / CC BY 2.0

I scan a lot of multi-page documents – expense reports, receipts, etc.  – on my flatbed scanner using Windows Fax and Scan. I then print these to PDFs using the free DoPDF.  I need a way to join up all these individual pages into a single PDF document.

This web application does the job nicely: http://www.mergepdf.net/.

A non-web alternative is the excellent and free Combine PDFs application on OSX.

SSH or Secure shell allows you to access external servers from consoles and Windows desktop applications like Putty and Cygwin. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could SSH into your server without requiring any client, so that you can access your server from virtually anywhere? Web Shell is a web application based on Python which will allow you to access SSH from any web browser and even your iPhone.

The server is written in Python and is very easy to set up on Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris, and any Unix that runs python 2.3.
Download Web Shell

This position is an Application Administrator to support operations within our client’s department. This position has a critical role in delivering our services to clients and ensuring successful ongoing operation of our applications and services. It services a highly interactive software development build/release process as well as a rich operational environment with many interrelated applications/database services. The candidate should be self-motivated, detail oriented, adaptable to change and must work well in a flexible team environment with developers, QA, operations staff, system administrators and managers.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Application and database support

• Provide on-going database administration in both back-end and front-end with application infrastructure support for our client’s administration systems, including the deployment of new applications.
• Review the physical design of existing databases for optimal database structures, database performance tuning, security, database backup/recovery strategy, implementing high-availability, and pro-active and reactive performance analysis, monitoring, troubleshooting and resolution of issues, capacity planning, monitoring data growth and system utilization, trend analysis and predicting future database resource requirements.
• Install web-base applications from ground up to full-ballooned implementation and support, including configuration at Unix/Linux/Windows system level, back-end integration with database, front-end integration with user-interface, final delivery to users to fulfill users’ requirement and on-going maintenance.
• Take the lead in ensuring that application and web services are configured and tuned according to application needs; provide troubleshooting as needed.
• Work with System Administrators to ensure test and production boxes conform to the software application configuration needs.
• Support the department-wide infrastructure application for database management, system monitoring and notification, job scheduling, deployment, provision and patching automation, application topology and service level management for campus-wide system performance.

Build/release activities

• Manage the build, tagging and release processes for a number of interdependent Java web applications and background processes in the QA and production environments. Ensure the build and release process is scalable and repeatable.
• Work with the development team to ensure efficient and understandable build procedures are adhered to and conform to a standard process for configuration and release management
• Develop and maintain tools that automate the building of software releases for an Agile-based development process. This is one of continuous integration, where the automated build process can be run many times a day if necessary.
• Work with and support the QA team to ensure automated test suites run as part of the continuous integration build process.

REQUIREMENT FOR SKILL AND COMPETENCIES:

• Expert hands-on with shell scripts, other scripting languages, preferably Perl, and tool automations
• Minimum 2 years database administration experience in Oracle and 3 years Application administration experience in Unix/Linux infrastructure environments is required.
• Hands-on experience of Oracle databases 10g for 24/7 database operations and tool automation in installation, configuration, backup/recovery, startup/shutdown, data refresh, and application integrations.
• Experience with OEM/Grid Control is highly desired.
• Knowledge and understanding of large scale ERP implementation and support like Oracle Financial and PeopleSoft systems.
• Expert knowledge of Apache and Tomcat, and other web/application servers such as JBoss
• Strong Unix and system administration skills with basic network and security knowledge
• Strong experience and ability in web applications deployment, configuration and integration from both OpenSource and Commercial based systems with or without sophisticated vendor support.
• Java/J2EE based programs
• Java/servlet/JSP based web applications
• Experience with Subversion, PVCS or similar source code repository
• Experience with Maven and familiarity with automated build processes
• Experience with the Agile development methodology and concepts of extreme programming and continuous integration
• Understanding of the layers/tiers of web applications and the communication protocol between the tiers with networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, DNS, FTP, etc.)
• Ability to multi-task and work in a team environment is critical and should have excellent communication skills in both verbal and written forms.
• Ability to manage multiple competing priorities and work under pressure in high stress situations
• Excellent communication skills in both verbal and written
• Ability to work under pressure and to deliver results in a complex and dynamic operational environment

Qualifications

Minimum 5 years as an IT professional in build/release and application/database administration, plus one or more of the following areas: IT infrastructure operations 24/7, systems analysis and design, or application development.

Education
Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field or equivalent experience

If you are interested, please send your resume to tsotelo@mindsource.com.

The software industry has long been monopolised by one provider. As Bob Young explains in this video, traditional software only gives you a certain amount of room to move whereas open source software is a completely different model.

There are two reasons this video may be relevant to your start up business. First, thinking about the software you need to make your business operate smoothly, is it worth considering the open source route for any of your key applications? Second, what can your start up business learn from the closed vs open source software model?

This is a basic map of my cloud storage network, built using Gliffy, a nifty web application that approximates Visio. I was able to embed it into this post using a link generated by the app – no local storage involved in this procedure.

First impressions are good. I was signed up and creating the diagram within a minute. Interface is extremely intuitive and will be familiar to anyone used to Visio. Performance is also very respectable thanks to the application being delivered in Flash. As you might expect, it isn’t as fully featured as Visio. I wasn’t able to get particularly sophisticated with connectors, for example – no curved connectors, no bringing the lines forward or back. But good enough for this use case.

Are you like me where you just can not download any more programs, or are focusing more on business related downloads and already have so many social media type of applications?

This one is very neat, you do not even need to do a download, and all I had to do was sign in with my facebook account! Would love for them to add Digg and others, and possibly convert it like Mozilla but no download required!

Qwisk | Browse with friends, connect the web.

Why not share this posting?

I was wondering how I could run a Google Web Application Project created with the wizard in eclipse (part of the google eclipse plugin) on my own tomcat server.

Well, its fairly simple.

First it should be noted that when creating the project with the wizard you should deselect the google app engine sdk. You can still run your projects on google app engine, so you just make sure that you do not use any app engine specific functionality (what I would not recommend anyway to keep your projects portable).

If this prerequisite is given, you can you can just select the project you have created (the root folder) and click Google’s red box GWT button “GWT compile project”.

Then you can go to the project folder in the eclipse workspace. One of the folders created is “war”. Create a new folder in your tomcat webapps folder and name it according to your project name eg “myproject”. Now you can copy all the contents from “war” to “myproject”.

Start tomcat and volia the application should be running.

(I am not too sure whether there might be issues in more complex projects given that google uses jetty for the debug mode that can be strated directly from eclipse)

The company unveils the technical details of its operating system.

Google gave the first demonstration of its Chrome operating system today, at the same time opening the source code to the public. The company highlighted features that have grown out of what vice president of product management Sundar Pichai called “a fundamentally different model of computing.” Unlike other operating systems, which merely incorporate the Internet, Chrome is completely focused on it.

Credit: Technology Review

The Chrome OS is based so aggressively on the Internet that devices running it will not even have hard drives, Pichai said, emphasizing that “every app is a Web app.” All data will be stored in the cloud, and every application will be accessed through the Chrome browser. Because of this, he added, users will never have to install software or manage updates on the device.

The user interface closely resembles the Chrome browser. When the user opens applications, they appear as tabbed windows across the top of the screen. Users can stick their favorite applications to the desktop with one click, creating permanent tabs for them.

Pichai coyly demonstrated the way the Chrome OS can deal with competitors’ file formats. He inserted a USB drive into a laptop running Chrome OS, launching a window that showed that the device contained several Microsoft Excel files. When he clicked on one of the files, the system automatically pulled up the Windows Live Web-based version of Excel, opening the file inside.

“It turns out that Microsoft launched a killer app for Chrome OS,” Pichai said, adding that anyone who writes a Web application is writing an application for Chrome by default.  Read more:  http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23987/?nlid=2542

For some teams, the iterative design process has gotten out of control. Instead of focusing on how to make a product or service better, the process has turned into an approval monster. ZURB hopes to change that with Notable, a web-based app that allows teams to give direct feedback to each other. “Notable was created to solve the feedback problem in companies,” says Dmitry Dragilev, ZURB’s marketing lead. Dragilev says the company created this application to fight the philosophy of getting approval and a move toward helping teams make something better.

The tool allows everyone to provide feedback and stay in the loop with a design’s progress, as well as archiving the design’s history. You can control who can see and leave feedback on each captured design. For example, a project manager could share one page with the copywriter, another with the whole team and yet another with the developers. The feedback occurs multiple ways, instead of one-way.

For example, let’s say I open a Notable account for the meryl.net web site. I work with a designer and a blog app expert; we’re all web workers living in different states. I capture different pages on my web site to highlight the current problems and identify ways to improve them, as the screenshot below shows.

While I could use my screenshot application to get a snaphot of the page to make comments on, Notable works faster. With a screenshot app, I’d capture the web page. Then, I would use the application’s drawing tools to add call outs. Notable takes care of everything for you. All I have to do is click and enter notes.  This video shows the process of capturing and annotating a site.

Notable offers a Firefox plugin for capturing any web page, which is especially helpful for those pages stuck behind logins. I grabbed Facebook pages and other password-protected pages with the plugin. You can also capture pages from a URL from within Notable, use a special URL formula to capture a web page (for example, www.notableapp.com/www.webworkerdaily.com would capture the home page of this site), download the iPhone app, or upload an image.

I can send my notes for one page to the designer and notes from another page to the blog expert. Or I can send it to both. Notable gives you control on what feedback and notes you share with others, and you can remove someone from the discussion after the fact. The designer and blog expert can capture their own pages to add notes or leave comments on my notes.

In this case, I have a workspace called “meryl.net” for the meryl.net redesign project. I can organize the pages into three sets: one for the business section of the site, one for games and one for the pages about deafness, as the next image shows.

Notable sends email notifications whenever someone adds notes and shares them. You can control who receives the notification to be able view the specific page and leave feedback. Permissions are also available on a per-set basis.

You can also see different views of each page. You not only view the design, but also you can see and post annotations on the code (the underlying HTML code of the page), the copy (just the page’s copy, without any distracting visual elements) and search engine optimization (which lets you see the page’s structure for SEO purposes).

Currently, Notable works with Firefox and Safari. However, I could leave comments and view notes in Google Chrome — just not capture pages. One of the biggest benefits is that it cuts down on emails and confusion. The only emails you receive are notifications of new notes or updates, rather than a bunch of emails from different people on a project and trying to keep track of it all. Best of all, Notable is fun to use. While it works great for teams not working under one roof, but it’s suitable for those that do because the work is centralized and visible in one place.

Check out the use of Notable on the CNN and MSN home pages. A free plan is available that handles up to three users, 3 GB storage, one private workspace and the iPhone app. However, the free plan doesn’t come with enhanced security or private URLs. Other plans range from $24 per month up to $119 per month, based on number of users, storage size and other features. You can try any paid plan for 30 days with no obligation.

Have you tried Notable? What do you think of it?

A previous post in this blog defined the demarcation line between The Agile Executive and BSM Review as follows:

If software development is your primary interest, you might find my forthcoming posts in BSM Review go a little beyond the traditional scope of software methods. If, however, you are interested in software delivery in entirety, you are likely to find good synergy between the topics I will address in BSM Review and those I will continue to bring up in The Agile Executive. Either way, I trust my posts and Cote’s will be of on-going interest to you.

Since writing these words, I realized how tricky it is to adhere to this differentiation. The difficulty lies in the “cord” between development and operations. Development needs to devise algorithms that take into account operational characteristics in IT. Operations needs to comprehend the limits of such algorithms in the context of the service level agreements and operational level agreements that had been negotiated with their customers (either external or internal). The mutual need is particularly strong in the web application/web operations domain where mutual understanding, collaborative work and joint commitment often need to transcend organizational lines.

Given the inherently close ties between development and operations, here are some BSM Review articles and posts that are likely to be of interest to readers of The Agile Executive:

• The Joys of Real Hardware – what it means to do Business Service Management on a very large-scale
• The Voice of the CIO – a study on the attributes needed by today’s CIO (yes, you had better be agile and Agile…)
• The Quest for a Maturity Model in Business Service Management – while the focus is on BSM, some of the models might apply in a fairly straightforward manner to Agile
• Business Service Management, Six Sigma and your IT Compliance Program - lessons to the champion who has one foot in Agile, the other foot in Six Sigma
• A Measured Approach to Cloud Computing – what it really means to ”… make muck so you don’t have to”
• The Case for Agile Business Service Management – the fusion of modern software development methods with the prevailing preference to run IT from the perspective of the business customer

It is a little premature at this early stage to project how BSM Review will evolve. My hunch is that forthcoming articles in BSM Review on cloud computing, large-scale operations, leadership, risk mitigation and technology trends will be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

Google recently announced their SPDY protocol that they’ve been working on to address a number of inherent non-performant aspects of the HTTP protocol that most of the web depends on.  In the last few years the web has shifted much more towards real-time applications.  Web application development is starting to think about interaction experiences much closer to desktop apps.  It’s not out of bounds to consider the response times of certain queries on a website in terms of keystrokes (~200ms).  Moving the request/transmission protocols to catchup with this change makes sense.

One thing that I am happy about with SPDY is that is appears to be built with deployment clearly in mind.  This isn’t the first attempt to improve web speeds, it’s not even the best, but it does appear to be the simplest to deploy in to the wild and see rapid adoption.  If Apache and Firefox gained support for SDPY out of the box, and it was show that using the protocol would improve server throughput, it would be enough to shift most websites over.  That’s only two players.  That’s pretty promising.

There is an interesting little issue occurring in web development at the moment and it is all being caused by the rise in mobile browsing.

The mobile device has always been a bit a challenge (anyone remember WAP?) but until the iPhone it was an issue that was pretty irrelevant. Web browsing on a phone was so painful that no-one did it. Right now if you check your logs most sites are only going to have a tiny amount of iPhone traffic. However if you live in a major city and you own a phone with a decent screen and browser then you are probably aware of how quickly you start to expect to have access to the same level of information you have at home when on the move. Why should I know more about delayed trains in bed than on the platform?

So the technology is finally reaching the point where the consumer is starting to expect to be able to browse the web on mobile devices. In parallel there is the rise of the app. The prime advantage of the app over mobile web browsing is that the app can sensibly cache data locally and therefore provide a degree of offline tolerant behaviour. You can also simplify some of the UI if your user interacts with your site instead of just consuming the content.

So what do you do? Do you invest in creating a mobile version of your site or instead create an app? Obviously if you can afford it you may want to pursue a web/mobile web/iPhone/Android strategy, i.e. do everything. For most companies though the practicalities lean towards trying to have a main website that more or less works with modern mobile browsers (mostly the iPhone). There are a lot of things that go into that like page load but in essence is a “code and hope” strategy where you hammer any nails that stick up after the event.

What’s interesting about this strategy is that HTML5 has some offline capabilities that allow you to provide some offline capability as long as you as you are happy to ignore the non-Opera/Safari/Chrome users (and frankly why not). This means that can stick to pure web development and have a reasonable mobile experience. Adding a JSON API to your site’s content also opens you up to third-parties developing apps for you.

So what kind of reasons should drive you to develop an app? The first reason is really the customised rich user experience, an app should radically simplify accessing your content. For example for a timetable site a mobile app can make it easier to enter and refine queries, defining search options on mobile web tends to be a pain and you often want to save and reuse search settings rather than re-enter them. Sites with user-generated content may also want to have a rich UI to encourage the user to keep supplying material.

An app should also always be trying to cache content when online and pre-empt the user’s needs. For example it makes sense to try and download timetable information and travel updates for locations I use frequently in my search. If I open my timetable search app and the first thing I see is whether there are delays on my route home are and when the next bus or train is going to be then I may not need to do anything else.

Apps also open sophisticated location service options, although location has been broadened to web browsers too your ability to respond to location based information is very limited on your home PC. A reviews website for example has a strong incentive to invest in an app so it can supply location-based reviews.

It is not clear at the moment whether it is more important to develop a mobile web or a mobile application capability. The emergence of capable, enjoyable web browsing on handhelds in an important development, there are many more mobiles than computers. Thinking about how your web content works on those devices is suddenly very relevant. Developing a mobile-capable site is a good defensive strategy but for some businesses being able to enter the mobile app market earlier is going to be much more important as it could potentially form an audience for them that is greater than their current web users.

BugsVoice in use

The error trapping online service is online here.

An introduction saying what it is is here.

An introduction to BugsVoice rules engine is here: Solving the “halting problem”…

An also How to contribute a sample error trapping page for your favorite technology.

There is a new web resource for freelancers similar to Scriptlance that launched yesterday. Gigapxmedia.com offers the design services you would expect from a collective of freelancers but is also geared toward linking professionals up with clients.

Read more at Gigapxmedia’s Blog

Apache Struts is a free open-source framework for creating Java web applications. Web applications differ from conventional websites in that web applications can create a dynamic response. Many websites deliver only static pages. A web application can interact with databases and business logic engines to customize a response.

One way to separate concerns in a software application is to use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. The Model represents the business or database code, the View represents the page design code, and the Controller represents the navigational code. The Struts framework is designed to help developers create web applications that utilize a MVC architecture.

The framework provides three key components:

A “request” handler provided by the application developer that is mapped to a standard URI.

A “response” handler that transfers control to another resource which completes the response.

A tag library that helps developers create interactive form-based applications with server pages.

The framework’s architecture and tags are buzzword compliant. Struts works well with conventional REST applications and with nouveau technologies like SOAP and AJAX.

If you are looking for to build your STRUTS skills Fortune Technologies will provide them to you. To find out more about the courses, instruction system and facilities available, log on to: http://www.fortunetechnol.com/index.html and http://www.train4job.com/

10% discount on our list price for all the online training listed on our website.

I recently spent some time in a grindhouse development department learning Flex as well as supporting some basic AJAX features. I’ve also been working with Silverlight for over a year as a part of my Textfyre work. In the past, I’ve worked on projects that used some DHTML. I’m familiar with RESTful web services, jQuery, HttpWebRequest, and all of the other aspects of building highly interactive web apps. I’ve never done any real Java work, but I have played around with the technology enough to know that you can do decent things with Java (although the visuals have always left something to be desired).

Throughout these efforts I’ve always kept an eye what businesses might consider the most cost-effective solution for scaling their applications, whether the application is for internal use, external use, or a hybrid. Google took the lead in developing applications with AJAX when they introduced the nicer features of gmail.com and Google Maps. This was the birth of Web 2.0 and I would say we’re still in the middle of that era. A lot of companies have adapted to AJAX using jQuery and other toolkits. In many cases, using jQuery to liven up a website is very successful.

Then there are websites that are much more than just a website. We call these web applications and they tend to try to do many or all of the things that a desktop or “fat client” would do. These applications will load large amounts of related data, like customers, orders, transactions, and more.

A few years ago, our PC’s weren’t capable of handling this kind of scenario. It wasn’t the browser, but the lack of memory, disk space, and bandwidth. Today, most people have access to high speed Internet access. Most people have newer computers with more memory and more disk space. Certainly many businesses have either adopted these kinds of computers or will within the next year or two (in their move from XP to Windows 7).

So today we have the platform and the ability to make highly interactive and data intensive web applications. But the first question anyone should ask is, what are the requirements? I’ve seen a lot of applications ported from perfectly sound desktop applications (with deployment headaches, but still, they worked) to web applications. Deployment issues aside, there was no other requirement for the application to be built in web technologies. In many cases, the users lost many features and flexibility when their apps were webified. The process of moving a complex desktop application to the web paradigm is very expensive. We now have people called “information architects” that take very sound desktop user experiences and port them to web technologies. Why do we need these people. Because building smart web applications is vastly more complicated than building smart desktop applications.

There certainly are benefits to having an application webified. In a desktop application you might have a very strict set of menus and options or a single path to each feature. In a web application, you can develop multiple paths to features with varying usage scenarios. Some of this is possible in a desktop application too, but a web app offers these types of options through links and is much more seamless.

Benefits aside, web applications are very complex applications to build and moreso, to maintain. To allieviate the maintenance costs of building web applications, tools have been developed that make creating and debugging most applications very easy. Inline debuggers allow us to literally step through every line of code, see the stack trace, review element values, and resolve issues without throwing darts blindfolded. Debugging used to be a much higher level skillset. It’s still an art and skill, but with the tools today, it’s much more widely available to the average programmer. With an exception. AJAX.

AJAX is great, as I said before, for making websites behave nicely. But when you take the technology of AJAX and marry it to a complex web application, you’re exponentially adding complexity and cost to your application development and maintenance budget. The tools for debugging AJAX are not simple. In many cases a developer will resort to using Fiddler (a tool that watches HTML transactions) and arcane alert(‘here I am!’); statements haphazardly placed within the application’s javascript. This is a nightmare scenario for any developer. The more AJAX you implement in a web application, the more complex the interactions get and debugging capabilities rapidly deteriorate. And this is if your codebase is developed well and is highly readable. If the code was slapped together in a rush, forget it. You may never completely understand what the code is trying to do and it could be safer to do an organ transplant instead of minimally invasive surgery.

With any problem, someone inevitably sees it and develops a solution. Oddly enough, Sun developed a solution before the problem existed with Java technology. The problem is that Java made more of a name for itself in the server world and standard web application development. The client side features of Java were left to cute games and scientific demonstrations. You can blame a little of this on Sun for so desperately trying to make Java pure across platforms when they should have recognized the value of implementing a VM->Native compiler for each platform (Sun, Mac, Windows, Unix, etc). Instead, Microsoft saw the potential and created .NET, not necessarily to be cross-platform, but to enable managed code, garbage collection, for client-side and server-side development.

Eventually Sun realized the potential for Rich Internet Applications and has been actively marketing related solutions. But so has Adobe with Flex and Microsoft with Silverlight. These three platforms enable cross-platform application development that does not rely on web technolgies like html, css, and AJAX. These technologies offer front to back development environments with very robust and clear layout engines (arguing that CSS is hardly clear although it is robust), strong debugging tools, and deep integration with web services.

This is where application development is headed and it’s primarily because CIO’s have started to quantify the cost of developing web applications. We made enormous strides in resolving deployment problems (10 years ago we had to package software to be installed automatically on thousands of PC’s upon login and if there was a problem or virus, well, it was very painful), but at the cost of lost features and very expensive maintenance.

We now have the ability to deploy applications that more secure ane vastly more stable than before. Managed code, which is used in all three platforms, is the key to the stability issue. Security has become a primary focus within Microsoft and no one would argue that their systems and applications have improved dramatically since the early XP days of major viruses appearing daily.

We can now develop middleware that is adaptable and maintainable at a low cost. We now have the ability to develop disconnected presentation layers that can manage large datasets, but is also easily developed and maintained. It looks pretty too, if you have good designers.

If you look at new development requirements coming out of the major job sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Dice.com, you’ll see that Silverlight and Flex have taken off. I’m not sure why Java hasn’t, but I assume some companies will adopt the Java desktop model too.

Throw away your CSS and AJAX libraries. You’ll save time, money, and your users and your infrastructure staff will love you. So will your shareholders.