Don Rescigno, the director of marketing for NYSTROM Herff Jones Education, has written a post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog about Nystrom’s partnership with Roundarch and how together we are changing the face of what today’s classrooms look like with the creation of StrataLogica.

StrataLogica will be featured at Google I/O May19-20 in San Francisco.

In March I had the pleasure of attending a workshop at South By Southwest titled “HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches”, featuring Bruce Lawson (@brucel, web) – Opera and Martin Kliehm (@kliehm, web) – Namics. The discussion involved; what exactly HTML5 does right now at its current iteration, where it’s going and interesting examples of applying HTML5 practically. While the discussion may have been a little biased towards the use of HTML5 in Opera 10.5, it rightfully should have been. Opera 10.5 currently supports more features of the HTML5 draft than any other browser, with Firefox 3.6 closely trailing.

Most arguments nowadays about HTML5 seem to revolve around the demise of Flash content, or superiority of Flash over HTML5. The real beauty of W3C’s latest HTML spec lies in the simplicity of its implementation and ease of use for developers. HTML5 takes out all of qualms over coding time and browser compatibility, by unifying commonly used web application features into simple markup. It also helps
that the board that oversees the spec has representatives from all major browsers.
Read more…

I recently read an article exploring the idea that new tablet devices, including the iPad, will create a greater demand for SaaS and cloud storage.  This is an interesting perspective to me because I don’t think we’re too far away from the day when “iPod as a service” becomes a reality and there is no more need for DRM.  Paying $9.99 a month for listening to any song ACROSS any compatible device you have, and having the option not to “own” any of the albums or songs sounds good to me.  Rhapsody has an early model in place already that does this to an extent (it supports a few devices, but not ANY device). With the continued development of “As A Service” business models and frameworks I can’t think of a reason why iTunes or a future “Google Tunes” cannot do it tomorrow

What used to be called Storage Area Networks a decade ago and was intended to make enterprise storage more robust and accessible is now commoditized and called the Storage Cloud. Computation is also becoming an accessible commodity with the Elastic Compute Cloud. Access to applications and storage is now more consumer friendly and unlimited. If you think about it we’re in a sense going back to the Mainframe days. Only now you can access a “mainframe” with theoretically unlimited computing and storage power, for personal use, through your phone, sitting on a train and not just for dedicated scientific or business applications. Everything is becoming more seamless and transparent. For once we needn’t worry about operating environments, compatibility, or file formats. We can now focus less on the Information Technology and more on the Information.

The defining characteristic behind the adoption of any pervasive computing enabler (SaaS being the front runner right now) has been the degree of mobility of the associated commercially available User Agent (iPad, iPhone, HP Slate, Android devices like ICD Gemini etc). While it can be argued that these devices are still in their infancy, if Moore’s law is anything to go by, we’ll see significant improvements in associated enabling technologies, specifically connectivity and bandwidth, as these devices gain market share. As the enablers do more the devices themselves need to do less without overall loss of functionality. In other words pretty soon you will find fully functional clients getting smaller and thinner simply because the technology has matured to the degree that storage and computation is not a constraint anymore. Just so long as you are connected to a pipe that’s fast enough to shuttle data back and forth without latency (IEEE 802.16 anyone?).

Taking the idea of smaller sizes and integrated capabilities a bit further I can’t help but imagine what new possibilities nano-scale technologies and quantum computing will offer in the near future. For those more inclined towards theoretical computing foundations there seems a greater push to look beyond the traditional Church-Turing conjecture that all computing technology based on registers and pointers is arguably inspired by. What seemed like sci-fi fantasy 20 years ago is in our pockets today. Mark Weiser’s Smart Device is now a reality, the internet of things is probably not too far away. By all indications could “Hyper-computation” be doable in 20 years or less? Regardless with the advent of full virtualization, on demand licensing and increased bandwidth we’re in for some good times ahead!

I’m sure several things come quickly to mind when someone mentions cloud computing or cloud applications. As Mark noted in his post about different emerging cloud services there are several layers of complexity that might flavor an application built on or with cloud services. I’m going to specifically talk about building applications that consume or consist of cloud services, Software as a Service ( SaaS ). These can be services you build yourself or they can be 3rd party services. At any rate your end goal would be to have an application that can be delivered to your users, built upon cloud services and my goal is to describe the different layers of how you can build that application based on my experience of designing/building cloud based applications.

I tend to think of the cloud just as I would a traditional computing solution with a few caveats: cloud computing should be highly scalable, on demand and more cost-effective than something I could get at my local web hosting company. At least in theory. In five years time, what we think of  as cloud computing will probably be the “traditional” computing solution,  indeed you will notice that the layers I’ll describe already follow how web applications are generally built today. The reality of the situation means that while cloud computing solutions offer more for less, the trade off is that no one service can be 100% trusted, no one network can always be relied upon, and therefore fault tolerance must be built into the system.

So let’s break down the anatomy of a typical web based cloud application. Generally speaking applications fall into 3 layers, 1) Persistence Layer, 2) Processing Layer and 3) Presentation Layer. These layers can consist of several different services, from several different cloud computing vendors or api’s. You should feel free to have all of these layers talk to each other as well.

So, for the Persistence Layer you might write to a EC2 hosted MySQL database for app specific data, while also relying on the the Persistent capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, or even Google to store user specific data. When I think of the the Persistence Layer I think of only reading and writing data to disk. There should be no (or as little as possible) logic associated with this layer because any logic you write will tend to be platform specific making it more difficult to port in the future event you have to switch providers. In most cloud computing solutions this layer is the layer that implements Eventual Consistency. Interactions with this layer should be quick and to the point. You write, you read. Period. It doesn’t happen often, but if you were to move your persistence layer from one vendor to another, it should be a simple as transferring files.

The Processing layer ( just like a traditional application ) is the layer that interacts with both the Presentation and Persistence layers. This could be a layer you write in  your favorite server scripting language. It could be a proxy layer that you write that takes input from your application and then routes data to other third party services, with some of it  going/coming from Amazon SimpleDB, some of it going to a legacy database from with your network, and perhaps it ferries analytical information to Google Analytics or Omniture. The point is that, the processing layer can be used for any type of processing that your application needs.  But keep this in mind, in my experience the more you proxy to third party services, the less code you’ll have to write and maintain. Or to look at this from the other side if you’re using a third party API and your application doesn’t need to augment the data before sending it over there should be no reason to build a processing layer. Mashups can be thought of a cloud application without the Processing Layer. Can your Presentation Layer talk directly to Omniture or Amazon S3? Absolutely, as long as you don’t have application logic that needs to run before you read or commit.

The Presentation Layer is where everything gets tied together. Above all it needs to always be responsive. I’d go so far as to say that it’s development specific limitations should drive all other development, when possible. I realize that might be a bit controversial, but remember in most use cases, the Presentation layer is running on a user’s machine, which can be thought of just another machine in the cloud. The user is allowing us to run the application on his/her processor for free with the implicit expectation that the application will give something back. The very least we can do as developers is to make sure the user knows what is going on. The need to pull data from multiple locations and present in a data rich interfaces is what makes technologies like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight so appealing to developers.

So, as a quick summary about what to think about when building cloud based applications. Build the Presentation and the Persistence Layers first and only add the Processing Layer as needed. Never trust any one server or any one network. Practice failure to help build Fault Tolerance. And last but not least, the most important fault tolerance you can build is on the Presentation Layer.

In posts to follow I’ll take a deeper look at each of these layers, various options for these layers and talk about some the lessons learned and best practices for building applications upon cloud services.

When Apple announced the iPad I was excited and let down at the same time.  Finally they released the mythical Apple Tablet.  It took me a few days to look past the fact that on the outside the iPad appeared to be a giant iPhone/iPod Touch.  I consider the iPad a Trojan horse in the computer world.  Apple is ushering in the age of software over technology, and it is easy to see how the Web, Widgets, and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) have inspired its apps.  With Apple’s refusal to include the Flash Player as a part of its web browsing experience a rift has grown in the Flash community.  I have always been a big believer that I am a developer over a Flash Developer and I see the iPad as a new platform to grow into.  I wrote a post that outlined a few of my thoughts on why the iPad will change the way we view RIAs and recently it was published in Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine.  It is my pleasure to share it with you here.

Also, if you do not get a free copy of Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine I suggest you sign up for it.  It is free and there are lots of good articles in it so how can you go wrong?

My second day at Microsoft MIX10 centered on a focus group dealing with building connected applications that span multiple device types and form factors. The ability of MIX10 to bring people together in a room to talk about a particular topic is such a great feature of the conference.

Notable members of the Microsoft planning team, Windows phone team, and Windows SDK team came together to chat about concerns surrounding developing and designing a user experience for multiple devices—desktop, browser, mobile, etc. Great insight was provided as to how Microsoft gathers feedback from its partners.

We had a very interesting discussion about the modality of software where we broke mobile devices down into two modes: an ID to label your identity and a conduit for pushing content and serving as a control point. Keeping these two modes in mind, we spent a lot of time on how user experience is specific to devices, which is generally accepted as a benefit by end users.

Similarly, capturing context dominated a large portion of the conversation.

• Social context- at work or at home and differentiating work time from family time.

• Geographic location –traveling or commuting.

• Surrounding environment –in front of the television, at your desktop or without a mobile devise.

It’s incredible how much depth there is to context and how it informs the user experience.

What an amazing meeting of the most discerning minds in the industry. It was so great to see Microsoft focusing on user experience, technology, and design—which happens to be the core focus of Roundarch. I took away a lot from today’s roundtable, a definite highlight of MIX10.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

This week, I’m in Las Vegas for MIX10, a conference for web designers and developers to mix and mingle ideas about how to create superior user experiences. Now in its fifth year, MIX10 attracts the very best in the industry by exposing conference-goers to new Microsoft technologies and serving as a catalyst for inspiration to create the next generation of rich web applications. Some of the sessions included in the conference this year are: Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient Web Services, Securing Microsoft Silverlight Applications, Building Web Applications with Windows Azure Storage, and Stepping Outside the Browser with Microsoft Silverlight 4.

One of the biggest announcements at MIX10 came today in the form of new details surrounding the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7s). This is Microsoft’s new power play in the world of mobile media. This series is a reset from Windows Mobile 6.5, which left a lot to be desired as a phone operating system. The new mobile platform, however, simplifies development by tying in well to the Microsoft ecosystem. The WP7s also features unified application and game development that creates synergy between products and services from the living room to the desktop to cloud to mobile and beyond. The applications and games are built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend, two free designer and developer tools for phone development.

The WP7s platform possess many features common to most mobile platforms such as: touch gestures, accelerometer awareness support for direction and movement, maps integrated with Bing, push notification. My favorite feature, uniquely supported by WP7s, is try and buy awareness built into the application programming interface. This streamlines the process of converting trial to full versions of applications for developers and end users alike. The software development kit includes Silverlight support for building applications and XNA support for building games.

Another important announcement is the milestone release of Silverlight 4 next month. It will deliver features that combine with Microsoft’s existing tools for designers and developers, Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend, to create a substantial vehicle for application development. The workflow between designers and developers utilizing these two tools is the same across all platforms, a major bonus. The application development story continues to evolve as Silverlight deploys to browsers, desktops, and mobile media.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more from MIX10 …

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Many people are turned off by iPhone app development because they don’t want to learn another platform (Objective-C). In many ways, learning Objective-C is taking a step backwards. Things like memory management and pointers are not something the modern web developer thinks about anymore. Also the idea of having to have different code bases for different mobile environments can be a huge deal breaker for adopting a platform. Nobody wants to create an application and maintain different versions of the app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Not only is it a developer’s nightmare, but the costs can be huge. New development frameworks attempt to solve this problem by abstracting the specific phone platform so that the developer can write in one codebase (usually one that is familiar to the web developer) and deploy to multiple platforms. Here are some of those frameworks:

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. It is free to use and can deploy to iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is another free and open source development tool. You can build cross-platform apps that deploy to desktop, iPhone and Android using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I’ve personally tried Appcelerator and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Monotouch

MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices. This is great for your typical Microsoft shop or enterprise that has a strong .NET skillset. A 1 year corporate license will run you about $1000.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to do cross platform mobile development while leveraging existing web development skills. It represents an exciting time because as traditional web developers we can quickly and easily create mobile applications. Speaking from my own experience over the weekend, my friend and I created an iPhone app in less than 12 hours using Appcelerator Titanium for the Day of Mobile Hackathon, and we went on to win Best iPhone app. Not too shabby for 2 people who didn’t know any Object-C walking in.

Last week I had the chance to give a presentation at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate. I got a chance to listen to Alan Warms, founder of Appolicious, Phil Di Gulio, co-founder of WellcomeMat, Bruce Payne, Director of SEO at Tribune. If I had to sum up the conversation at the conference it would be mobile. With the advent of web enabled location aware phones, mobile applications have the potential to be more relevant to the user’s context than ever before. Almost every speaker talked about or mentioned mobile. The audience was even familiar with apps like Foursquare.

Alan Warms mentioned that on his site Appolicious, a mobile apps directory and review site, there were over a 1000 listings of mobile apps under real estate. Phil talked about his latest project Pegshot which was very exciting. To quote his site:

Pegshot is a photo/video service that enables friends & family to experience what’s happening where you are.

It lets you annotate your life based on location. For example, I can take a video of my lunch and post it to Pegshot. My friends can then see my video, complete with a Google Maps that annotates just where I was having lunch. It’s a service that basically rolls something like Twitter, twitpic, qik and maybe foursquare all in one integrated service.

Another topic that was mentioned by no less than 3 people, including myself was augmented reality. It was a topic that needed no explanation, since most people were familiar with it. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s starting to enter into people’s vernacular and gaining adoption. There are many apps on both the iPhone and Android platform that do AR. Yelp Monocle is a particularly cool one that integrates w/ Yelp reviews. By pointing your iPhone around, the screen will show what you see, overlayed w/ Yelp star ratings of the venues.

Speaking of the audience, even though most people were from the real estate industry, most were also very familiar with social media and services like Twitter. In fact more than half of the audience were on Twitter and a few were live tweeting.

I think the overarching theme that we see happening if we take a step back is that computing will no longer be tied to desk. People are able to access information everywhere now and with more mobile devices equipped with even more sophisticated sensors and technology, mobile computers will be able to serve peoples’ needs better by being aware of the context of the user. Also, people no longer need to interface with machines in the traditional keyboard entry way. New devices like the iPhone and Google Android all support some sort of touch capability. A new class of users are using the internet without ever having to go through a desktop computer.

Taking it a step further, apps like Siri combine context awareness and voice recognition.

In short, the field of mobile is super exciting to be in now. Speaking of mobile, yours truly will be participating in the hackathon at the Day of Mobile Conference in Chicago this weekend.

Bringing Style to Flash Camp Chicago

Just last week I had the distinct honor of speaking at Flash Camp Chicago, the annual conference hosted by the Illinois Technology Association. Adobe Flash Camp events are great because they are a single day where the community brings together denizens of the Adobe world such as James Ward, Jeff Tapper, Kevin Schmidt, Michael Labriola, and fledgling member Ben Schmidtke. The opportunity to network with the top contenders in the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) makes this style of conference one of my absolute favorites.

Flash Camp Chicago served as the maiden voyage for my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I’ll continue to present and refine throughout 2010. I started out the talk by introducing lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continued by exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wrapped up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk was to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

I always enjoy my trips to Chicago and would like to thank Roundarch for sponsoring my talk and the Flash Camp Chicago organizers for inviting me back to speak this year.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.