Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile). In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services. For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management.

Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.

In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

According to Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, 'Our Skyway Community is thriving and our members are very talented. We truly look forward to their RIAs submittals and Skyway Builder extensions and are excited that all of the contributions will benefit the entire Skyway Community.' With Skyway Builder CE, Java developers get an open source Eclipse-based plugin that offers a seamless blend of coding and modeling for delivering RIAs and Web Services in Spring. Unlike any other modeling tool, Skyway Builder CE provides comprehensive modeling capabilities at four distinct application layers:

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a small issue with that and I'm not sure everyone's aware of it.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Rumor has it that in the next few weeks Adobe is going to 'reorganize' its Mobile and Device business unit where its Jobs-criticized Flash Lite lives and send the engineers to go work with the larger platform effort and Flash proper, which Jobs has also criticized. Presumably, Adobe is going to do what it takes to appease Jobs. It does want to be on the iPhone and needs Apple's help.

This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a grid there, gray background. Their users were happy because they did not see any better. This is about to change...

I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Designing a state of the art user interface (UI) in a very visual application that is managing a lot of elements posed significant challenge due to the nature of the application: virtualizing and running entire data centers through a browser.

The work of Billy Hoffman, lead security researcher for SPI Dynamics (www.spidynamics.com), which was purchased by Hewlett-Packard last year, has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites. Today though he is in full flow at the inaugural AJAX Security Bootcamp, an all-day deep dive into Web application vulnerabilities being held on Day One of the 5th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in New York City.

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/

In addition to his historic role on the steering committee of the OpenAjax Alliance, Kevin currently chairs the organization's integrated development environment working group. The OpenAjax Alliance IDE Working Group which includes Adobe, Aptana, the Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, TIBCO and others is now close to delivering a draft specification for a uniform way to describe Ajax libraries and controls and thus streamline the ability to use Ajax libraries within your development tools of choice. Kevin is a frequent speaker at Ajax industry events and is an author to many published articles on Ajax in the enterprise.

As more traditional sites adopt Web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, Web Services, SOA and PHP to perform online transactions one thing is certain--- these new technologies bring security issues and ignoring them could lead to serious breaches. Watchfire will demonstrate and discuss the most common Web 2.0 attack vectors, analyze the specific security issues of AJAX, especially cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and cross-site scripting (CSS), and explain techniques for exploiting and protecting web services including secure coding practices and how to properly secure web applications.

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.

Project Zero is an agile development and execution environment which leverages REST and scripting runtimes to speed and simplify development of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces. Project Zero is being developed openly using a Community-Driven Commercial Development process at http://www.pro jectzero.org. In this session, the audience will get an overview of the Project Zero Platform and learn how to develop, assemble, and run Project Zero applications.

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.

ICEsoft Technologies is a leading provider of standards-compliant, AJAX-based solutions for developing and deploying Java EE, rich Internet applications. The company's portfolio of enterprise level Java products includes ICEfaces, an AJAX application framework that enables Java EE application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in pure Java.

As the momentum for the new class of SOA middleware continues to grow, developers are looking for simple yet scalable solutions that can integrate disparate data across a variety of on-premises, on-demand and Web 2.0 information sources and applications. With many of such data integration problems being relatively small in scope, companies can't justify bringing expensive middleware to solve small problems. Some of the projects are built using work-arounds and custom coding. The result is prone to operational risk, high maintenance costs, and is inevitably inefficient. After this session you will: Understand the impact of data mashups on developer community, Find out how to select mashup technologies and tools for your next data integration project, Discover tips, best practices, and strategies for leveraging these tools and solving most common challenges.

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

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.

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.

Web 2.0 is one of the hottest things on the consumer Web, but where does it fit in the enterprise? What's the business value and how can developers use new Web 2.0 mashups to bring value to the line-of-business users? In this session Rod Smith discusses what IBM is doing in the Web 2.0 space, demonstrates a mashup maker being developed by his team, and shares lessons he's learned from joint Web 2.0 development projects with companies such as American Express, Dunn & Bradstreet, and Dow Jones.

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.

In this session Jon and Sumeer will describe current work at OpenAjax Alliance on OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and secure mashups. Mashups have the potential for revolutionizing the way Web applications are developed, but there are security risks. In order to unleash the industry, OpenAjax Alliance is adding secure mashup features to its OpenAjax Hub 1.1 release. This new release will include a set of techniques called 'SMash' that were originally developed by IBM Research and allows for secure mashups that run in today's browsers. The session will introduce mashups, OpenAjax Hub, and SMash, and will highlight related OpenAjax work around widget metadata standards.

Jon Ferraiolo will introduce the industry consortium that drives AJAX standards and interoperability: the OpenAjax Alliance. He will provide an overview of recent accomplishments, particularly OpenAjax Hub 1.0, but focus on new initiatives. Among the new initiatives are two mashup-related efforts: OpenAjax Hub 1.1, which is adding secure mashup and Comet support (extending existing features in Hub 1.0, which focused on simple publish/subscribe APIs), and the Gadgets Task Force, which is working on standards and open source around 'widgets' (i.e., mashup components). Ferraiolo will also review other OpenAjax initiatives, including IDE standards, AJAX security, Mobile AJAX and runtime advocacy.

New interaction paradigms and complex user interface controls of AJAX have raised concerns about access and usability for users of all backgrounds and abilities. Client-side JavaScript code may assume certain language or cultural conventions, alienating vast audiences. Graphical and mouse-based user interaction is often assumed, preventing use by keyboard or assistive technology users. This presentation will review the issues and provide best practices for building accessible and globalized AJAX applications today, including the new W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specification. This and other strategies used to provide full accessibility and globalization in the Dojo Toolkit will be shown.

jMaki is an AJAX framework that provide a wrapper over rich widgets from multiple toolkits such as Yahoo!, Dojo and many others. jMaki-wrapped widgets can be easily used in a JSP, Rails, PHP and Phobos app. This session will explain what jMaki is and show using live code demos how easy it is to embed jMaki widgets in different pages.