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.

SYS-CON's upcoming '3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo' faculty includes such distinguished speakers as: Al Aghili (Managed Methods), Alan Chhabra (Egenera), Andi Mann (Enterprise Management Associates), Andrew Conte (APC), Andy Astor (EnterpriseDB), Ariel Cohen (Xsigo Systems), Bill O'Conell (IBM), Bob Lozano (Appistry), Bob Quinn (3Leaf Systems), Brian Martin (IBM), Carlo Innocenti Ph.D. (DataDirect Technologies), Chris Shayan (Ashna Samane), Chris Wiborg (Cisco), David Kleidermacher (Green Hills Software), Doc D'Errico (EMC Corporation), Donato Buccella (Certeon), Dror Gill (Ceedo), Etay Bogner (Neocleus), George Pradel (Vizioncore), Geva Perry (GigaSpaces), Gordon Hunt (Real-Time Innovations), Gregory Brail (Sonoa Systems), Greg Lyon (Egenera), Harry Petty (Brocade), Hezi Moore (Reflex Security), Hubert Yoshida (Hitachi Data Systems), Ian Thain (Sybase), Jacek Kruszelnicki (Numatica Corporation), Jeremy Geelan (SYS-CON Media), Jerry Melnick (Marathon Technologies), Joe McKendrick (WebServices.org), Johan Nordin (Software AG), John Goodson (DataDirect), John Senor (iWay Software), JP Morgenthal (Avorcor), Julian Weinstock (Desktone), Keith Swenson (Fujitsu), Ken North (Computing, LLC), Kenon Owens (VMware), Kevin Epstein (Scalent Systems), Koen Aers (Red Hat/JBoss), Kurt Daniel (Parallels), Kurt Ziegler (SIMtone), Kyle Gabhart (Web Age Solutions), Mark Davydov Ph.D. (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Mark Hapner (Sun Microsystems), Mark Milligan (VirtualLogix), Matt George (Fidelity Investments), Michael CareyPh.D. (BEA Systems), Michael Gorman (Whitemarsh Information Systems), Mike Pizzo (Microsoft), Miko Matsumura (Software AG), Nikita Ogievetsky (Morgan Stanley), Parviz Peiravi (Intel), Paul Lipton (CA), Paul Vasquez (VMware), Peter Manca (Egenera), Phil Morris (Sun Microsystems), Pierre Fricke (Red Hat / JBoss), Ravi Gururaj (VMLogix), Rich Lechner (IBM), Rich Schreiber (Nastel Technologies), Richard Mark Soley (OMG), Rick German (Stoneware), Robert Steward (DataDirect), Ron Williams (Tivoli Software), Sean Derrington (Symantec), Shai Fultheim (ScaleMP), Simon Crosby (Citrix), Stefanos Damianakis (Netrics), Stephen Herrod (VMware), Stephen Pollack (PlateSpin), Tom Bishop (BMC Software), Ursula Sinkewicz (Fidelity Investments), Victoria Livschitz (Grid Dynamics), Yakov Fain (Farata Systems), Zoran Cakeljic (Virtual Iron).

XML is increasingly being used as the language of data exchange. An XML document based on a DTD or an XML Schema contains data that conforms to a standard structure. A number of technologies, such as ebXML (Electronic Business XML), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and RDF (Resource Description Framework) are based on XML.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

At the eleventh hour Brazil, India and Venezuela joined South Africa in appealing ISO's highly politicized standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. Meanwhile, the Danish Open Source Business Association has protested the Danish Standard's 'yes' vote for standardization claiming a lack of consensus, rules violations, no final draft and little chance of interoperability. It wants ISO to reopen the issue. Denmark's is not a formal appeal and Danish Standard disagrees with the charges made. Microsoft declined to comment saying the flap is between ISO/IEC and the national bodies.

South Africa has formally objected to the fast track used to get OOXML to the brink of ISO standardization. South Africa, which has given the world Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, is one of the so-called 'P' members of JTC 1 - meaning it's got enough clout to delay or possibly derail ISO's standardization of Microsoft's precious OOXML file format.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Office will support the Microsoft-hostile OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1 when Office 2007 Service Pack 2 arrives in the first half of 2009. Microsoft said users will be able to open, edit and save documents in ODF directly from inside Office applications without having to install any other code. That means no more translators. They will even be able to set ODF as the default.

XBRL can help to transform business, dramatically simplifying filing and reporting and improving transparency and information access in ways never before imaginable. Now, SEC Chairman Cox says an XBRL mandate is on its way. In an upcoming Webinar, JustSystems, the SEC, XBRL International, and EDGAR Online will discuss how XBRL turns flat, one-dimensional information into live, interactive information that reveals its full context. Suddenly, financial data is universally accessible, richly contextual and highly comparable.

Becta, the British Educational and Communications and Technology Agency, has taken its gripes against Microsoft's allegedly 'anti-competitive' licensing policies for schools and the 'interoperability impediments' in Office 2007 to the European Commission, as a contribution to the new antitrust investigation of Microsoft and its OOXML file formats - among other things - that the EC opened in January.

While EDI transactions account for most worldwide commercial activity, XML-based alternatives are beginning to gain traction. According to Forrester Research, stateful XML, stateless XML, and even flat file exchanges are all projected to grow at a faster rate than EDI over the next few years. The firm predicts stateful XML transactions will be required for a growing number of B2B process-oriented transactions and are projected to exceed the growth of EDI transactions over the next five years.

JustSystems announced that it is contributing intellectual property rights for its invention of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) rendering technologies to XBRL International, the standards body responsible for the oversight of the XBRL specification. The invention, known as the 'formatting linkbase,' provides enabling technology for viewing XBRL data in financial and other business applications.

JustSystems announced its campaign to help organizations adopt XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), the XML-based standard for communicating financial and business information. In related news, JustSystems also announced that it has contributed intellectual property rights of the 'formatting linkbase,' a key JustSystems innovation that enables formatted rendering of XBRL information.

Word documents generated by the current version of Office 2007 don't conform to ISO/IEC 29500, the OOXML file format draft standard Microsoft moved heaven and earth to get ISO to accept. At least that's what Alex Brown, the guy in change of the ISO group that's supposed to maintain OOXML.

DataDirect announced Benefitfocus is using DataDirect XML Converters to automatically transform thousands of X12 compliant EDI documents from insurance carriers to XML for accelerated processing. DataDirect XML Converters provide bi-directional, highly-scalable software that streams EDI, flat files or other legacy data formats as XML and back, making data accessible to any application in the enterprise. The high-performance Java and .NET components support past and current X12 and HL7 EDI standards and provide a highly scalable streaming architecture to exceed the most demanding enterprise system requirements.

Against the backdrop of a noisy protest march through downtown Oslo Wednesday by 60 Norwegian software experts - including Opera CTO Haakon Wium Lie - objecting to Norway's Yes vote for Open XML standardization by the International Standards Organization, ISO took control of the controversial Microsoft file format, setting up three committees to handle it from here on out.

JustSystems was included in the list of 'Cool Vendors' in the 'Cool Vendors in Content Management, 2008' report by Gartner. The report was authored by Toby Bell, Mark R. Gilbert, and Rita E. Knox. According to Gartner, 'Cool vendors in content management are establishing new directions for established technologies which can benefit professionals engaged in valuable content-focused business processes. Making their lives simpler, and the content itself smarter, yields extremely rewarding results.'

JustSystems announced the 'document as the application,' the company's vision for the future of information creation, collaboration, and delivery. JustSystems' 'document-as-application' approach blurs the line between traditional documents, which provide rich context, persistence and portability; and business applications, which provide live data and an interactive user experience. The result is a dynamic document that comes to life with diverse and distributed information sources that are always up to date.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Microsoft has gotten enough votes to make its Open Office XML file format (OOXML), the default file format in Office 2007, an ISO standard, theoretically saving Office from being run out of town by a lot of ODF-smitten government agencies. There have been, as everyone must know by now, myriad accusations of chicanery, undo pressure, committee-stacking, ballot box-stuffing and other voting irregularities - on both sides of the aisle actually - Microsoft points an accusing finger at IBM, an ODF supporter, as Sun did during the aborted Java standards process for poisoning wells - and right after the results were in CNET reported that the allegations roused the European Commission - which, let's face it, has what can only be described as a hard on for Microsoft - to investigate.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

LogiXML announced the availability of the new Logi ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) product designed to support integration of enterprise data into a consistent format to support a variety of corporate applications. The new Logi ETL product is a Web-based data integration application that can transfer data from diverse sources to multiple destinations directly, be invoked by predefined processes, including scheduling, or be triggered by application actions. Although Logi ETL is part of Logi Unified BI Platform, the product can be used independently as well.

JustSystems announced that All Nippon Airways ('ANA') has adopted JustSystems' dynamic document vision and the xfy document-centric composite application platform as the foundation of its new system for creating, editing, and managing aircraft rulebooks and operation manuals.

Layer 7 Technologies announced a go-to-market partnership with Novell to secure programmatic Web services, leveraging Novell eDirectory and Novell Access Manager identity solutions. Under the terms of the agreement Layer 7 will become a preferred partner joining Novell's identity and security management partner ecosystem to help address Web services security. End-users will benefit from an integrated best of breed approach to Web and Web services security.

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!).

Documents are a key part of manufacturing processes, from requirements and specifications, to bills, parts lists, marketing materials and technical maintenance manuals. However, documents typically provide static views of a dynamic business. In turn, documents can introduce design, development and maintenance delays, mistakes, rework costs and compliance issues that can rapidly erode profit margins, customer loyalty and time-to-market advantages.

TopQuadrant announced that TopBraid Composer and TopBraid Live now include a Semantic email importer. This technology enables organizations to develop Semantic applications that combine email metadata with other data sources, which can be searched and analyzed. This allows organizations to answer business questions using a combination of data from email, relational databases, spreadsheets, XML, UML, RSS/Atom and Semantic data imported from GRDDL, RDFa, RDF triple stores, SPARQL endpoints.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

The OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva ended in tears. Sun's Tim Bray immediately recorded his thoughts on the meeting, and his verdict was withering: despite some good that perhaps came of it ('With a very few exceptions, everyone really tried hard to work together and make the document better,' he writes), he described the BRM process as 'complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit.'

OASIS announced that its members have approved the XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS XLIFF Technical Committee, the new standard defines a vocabulary for storing localizable data and carrying it from one step of the localization process to another.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

An online course about meta-technology, a new type of strategy to understand technology, has recently been launched online via the website, TheMetaTechnology.com. According to founder, Luca D'Angelo, 'Meta-technology is created by taking a piece of technology and modifying its standard input-process-output flow. By using meta-technology, we can experience a different type of interaction so when we use the original technology, we gain a deeper understanding of it. It's like going to the moon, experiencing a different gravity force, and then coming back to the world so we can have a deeper understanding of the world's gravity.'

The European Commission has started poking around the rough-and-tumble of the standardization process looking for evidence that Microsoft broke anti-competitive antitrust laws trying to get its Office Open XML format (OOXML) memorialized by ISO, according to a story last Friday in the Wall Street Journal.

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.

DataDirect announced its DataDirect XML Converters are being used by leading healthcare organizations to comply with the X12 electronic data interchange (EDI) and Health Level Seven (HL7) clinical and administrative data standards in an effort to accelerate application development efforts, enhance operational efficiency, reduce overall costs and improve patient service levels.

ExtraLabs Software announced the release of Feed Editor 4.76. Designed for the Windows OS, this application enables you to create, edit and publish RSS feeds and podcasts surprisingly fast and easy. Compared to other RSS editors in its category, Feed Editor combines an unprecedented number of features, including a support for various RSS formats, a podcasting support, a WYSIWYG HTML editor, an XML editor, an RSS Feed preview, an FTP upload and publishing, automatic date management, and an ability to convert CSV or HTML to RSS and back and others.

Layer 7 Technologies announced its XML Firewall and XML Networking Gateway software products support the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running on SPARC platforms from Sun Microsystems. Layer 7 is the only XML security and networking vendor to offer server software for Solaris 10 OS running on SPARC and x86 platforms through an upgradeable family of XML appliances for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications.

ZANTAZ, an Autonomy company, announced that ZANTAZ Introspect is compliant with EDRM's Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard, EDRM XML 1.0. Autonomy ZANTAZ Introspect is one of the first e-discovery products to achieve compliance with the newly released XML standard, which was designed to improve interoperability and the transfer of electronically stored information (ESI) between applications involved in the discovery process.