For applications that run via the Web, should they be AJAX-based, or do AIR/Flash/Flex, JavaFX, or Silverlight offer better results? To inspire you to come to AJAXWorld 2008 East and choose your direction for Rich Internet Applications, here's a brief selection from among the many dozens of sessions that you really ought to consider joining us in New York City (18-20 March) to enjoy.

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.

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.

videoNEXT announced the release of (version 2.5) to its Security Knowledge Manager (SKM). The new enhancements of this scalable IP surveillance and security solution focus on advancements in its Access Control Integration Framework and Command and Control capabilities.

www.online-degree-college .org is providing prospective students with online degree programs information offered by online colleges. An online degree gives the working professionals a chance to advance in their career without the need to quit their jobs. They have partnered with over 100 accredited Colleges and Universities offering over 2000 online degree programs to choose from.

Enterprise mashups have been going steadily more mainstream since 2006, when the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo first began giving houseroom to sessions by the pioneers of enabling the fusion of employee expertise and rich information to produce new insights and winning strategies. This March at AJAXWorld 2008 East in New York City (March 18-20) there are more sessions than ever before highlighting the enterprise potential of harnessing mashups to maximize competitiveness.

Is AJAX fit to serve as spear carrier for next-generation Web technology? That question, asked by the San Diego Business Journal in March 2007, was answered by the sheer scale of the last two AJAXWorld Conference & Expos, in March (New York) and September (Santa Clara). The undisputed answer is 'Yes!' So many companies have jumped aboard the AJAX train that when we wanted to do an informal survey the other day on upcoming Web and Internet technology trends, I was able to quickly compile a list of 800 different companies that are leaving the station.

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.

Netbiscuits is the first mobile software development platform to support Adobe Flash and AJAX technologies so developers can create the next-generation Mobile Internet experience worldwide. Now media, content and advertising professionals have a full solution to deliver high-quality, tailored web experiences that incorporate mobile advertising and shopping on virtually any mobile device. The Netbiscuits web platform empowers customers to conquer the three main obstacles to implementing a successful Mobile Internet strategy: create perfectly formatted content; publish content to any mobile device on any network in any country; and quickly generate revenue from mobile advertising and commerce.

Openwave Systems announced the availability of Openwave Rich Mail 3.0, a new solution designed for carrier-scale deployment by broadband and mobile operators. Openwave Rich Mail 3.0, which is an extension of Openwave's AJAX-based Rich Mail offering, offers a central point of access for all of the communications needs of customers, enabling new ways for mobile and broadband operators to personalize, brand and monetize their Web messaging offerings.

Openwave Systems announced Openwave Rich Mail 3.0, a new solution designed for carrier-scale deployment by broadband and mobile operators around the world. An extension of Openwave's successful AJAX-based Rich Mail offering, the Openwave Rich Mail 3.0 offering is designed to enable a converged messaging experience for consumers by offering a central point of access for all their communications needs, enabling new ways for mobile and broadband operators to personalize, brand and monetize their Web messaging offerings.

Those startups have it easy. Okay, startups don't have it easy where products, funding, customers, or revenue are concerned. But when it comes to building slick AJAX applications, if you're an enterprise developer, you have a lot more to worry about than they do. This article discusses the challenges to developing AJAX applications in the enterprise environment, how to adapt to handle those challenges, as well as ways you can avoid some challenges altogether through your choice of technologies.

I see many consumer Internet pitches these days where the basic marketing strategy is to (1) get covered by TechCrunch, (2) get tens of thousands of users from the 'TechCrunch Bump,' and then (3) 'grow virally.' While a positive TechCrunch review has the potential to send thousands of consumers your way, it does not represent a marketing plan. Munjal Shah at Riya found this out after the launch of Riya back in 2006, when he wrote about 'the cocaine-like high and subsequent crash of the Techcrunch effect.'

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.

Quasar Technologies, a global provider of AJAX-based, Web 2.0, services-oriented Enterprise Content Publishing (ECP) solutions, has successfully integrated its automatic pagination software, Paginator, for Medicom Editorial to automatically create Vademecum International, the prestigious medical reference journal in Spain.

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.

Last year Forrester interviewed 13 vendor companies - including Adobe Systems, Backbase, Curl, Cynergy Systems, EffectiveUI, Esria, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Microsoft, Nexaweb Technologies, Oracle, Roundarch, and SAP - for a report by Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski called 'RIAs Bring People-Centered Design To Information Workplaces.' RIAs are emerging, the report found, as vehicles to enable the next generation of Information Workplaces that are best suited for decision-makers and task-oriented workers who engage in complex, multistep processes - people who need seamless, individualized, and highly visual user experiences.

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.

Having sat on the board since it was started 10 years ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now going to chair the New America Foundation, a well-funded, supposedly non-partisan Washington think tank (really is anything in Washington non-partisan?). One might imagine he's getting in position to influence the policies of the next administration and wouldn't you know it but the New America Foundation supports using unlicensed television airwaves for high-speed Internet transmission, fancy that, a Google priority too.

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.

Half a year has passed since I published my article 36 GWT Tutorials. As expected, several new tutorials have come along that demonstrate deeper, more sophisticated aspects of the framework, as well as addressing specific IDEs and libraries. I myself am working on a more extensive tutorial to demonstrate porting a Web 1.0 app to GWT. Stay tuned.

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.

Newly released in three editions - a free Community Edition for development and deployment up to one server and 2CPUs, a Client Edition, and a JSF Edition - Backbase Enterprise Ajax 4.1.2 is the latest version of San Mateo, CA-based Backbase's flagship AJAX framework for the Enterprise. It adds new client SOAP API, improved form validation, several new widgets, new Debugger features, improved data binding, performance increases, and enhanced documentation.

The OPC DataHub from Cogent Real-Time Systems now provides even more ways to visualize and interact with real-time data in a web browser. Its new streaming AJAX Web Data Browser displays immediate updates to data from a wide range of sources like databases, spreadsheets, and OPC servers. This streaming AJAX technology can be used in conjunction with new Java applets for live displays of gauges, trending graphs, progress bars and other animated objects.

froglogic GmbH announced version 3.3 of the leading, cross-platform automated GUI testing tool Squish. Squish supports creating and running automated GUI tests of applications based on a variety of user interface technologies including Trolltech's Qt toolkit, Java AWT/Swing/NetBeans, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP/JFaces, Web/HTML/AJAX and Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa. Squish is being successfully used in QA departments across the world in companies such as Reuters Financial Software, EADS, Siemens, Synopsys, Xilinx, Trolltech and France Telecom Group.

SOASTA announced a new, enhanced release of its Web testing application, SOASTA Concerto. SOASTA Concerto now supports Web UI/Ajax testing ensuring Ajax-based Web applications and services meet the reliability and performance demanded by today's Web 2.0 business requirements. With this release SOASTA delivers the best, most powerful cross-browser Web UI/Ajax testing solution available.

Usually, in a rich internet application (RIA), a user with a registered account can do two different logins from two different workstations and can maintain two concurrent sessions opened. In some applications we want to limit the users to one session per account, so we have to take countermeasures.

Lightstreamer has been selected by Panopticon Software for their Enterprise product which is web-deployable and server-based. It enables you to quickly publish Panopticon's interactive data visualizations to the web - to a small staff or to thousands of users. Customers can install and configure the system quickly and get their users up and running with fully interactive visualizations in a system with a light IT footprint and excellent user satisfaction.

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.

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, March 18-20, 2008, in New York City will provide an overview of Canoo's RIA technology as compared to its other European competitors. Upcoming AJAXWorld Conference is demonstrating a stronger interest and participation from delegates around Europe. Canoo announced a new release of its Java library for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), UltraLightClient (ULC). This new 6.2 version offers addons to test UltraLightClient-based applications more easily.

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.

Within the past few years, Web 2.0 has become a major technology trend, dramatically impacting the way consumers interact with information and applications. This consumer trend is now extending into the enterprise; however, businesses have been more reluctant than consumers to adopt these new technologies.

All this talk about 'the death of the page view,' 'AJAX,' 'rich media,' 'engagement,' and 'events' is enough to make even the most savvy Web analyst think twice about what we're measuring these days. When you use Google Maps, the name of the page doesn't change. (So now you see where all that page view death conversation comes from.) 'Traditional' web analytics care about when the page name changes - they see that as an important event. Suddenly, that's changed.

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.'

'Lightstreamer gives us some unique capabilities and it was really the only choice for us when we examined all the alternatives,' said Markus Skytter, CTO of Panopticon Software, as it was announced today that Lightstreamer has been selected by Panopticon Software for their Enterprise product which is web-deployable and server-based.

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.

Reviewers overuse the phrase 'required reading,' but no other description fits the new book 'Ajax Security' (2007, Addison Wesley, 470p). This exhaustive tome from Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan places the specific security concerns of the AJAX programming model in historical perspective. It demonstrates not only new security threats that are unique to AJAX, but established threats that have gained new traction in the Web 2.0 era. It then details both the specific technical solutions and - more importantly - the mindset that are necessary to combat such threats. If you call yourself a professional web developer, you need this book.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Keynote Competitive Research, the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, announced it would make itself readily available to media immediately following Super Bowl XLII 2008 for reporting on the technical quality (responsiveness and reliability) of four leading mobile sports Web sites, three popular sites streaming Super Bowl commercials and 35 of the Super Bowl advertiser's Web sites. Leveraging the company's global test & measurement network, Keynote will collect mobile performance data to measure the response time and availability of the following four mobile sports Web sites: ESPN, Yahoo Sports, FOX Sports and CBS. Keynote will also offer comparisons between the sites average performance to their Super Bowl Sunday performance.