Front-end engineering rocks right now. The era of boring web sites is over and we're all into pushing the envelope, erasing boundaries and getting beyond whatever prevents us from building the next killer web application. New companies building quick-turnaround web products spring up like mushrooms and many an old convention of web design is cast aside to make way for quick prototyping and agile development.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Time Magazine has published their version of the 50 best Web sites of 2007. Check it out. You may or may not agree with their ranking, but I'm sure you'll find some interesting sites there that you did not know about. It's good to see that Time has started using Adobe Flex too.

This started as a Skype chat room conversation between my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky and myself, and I thought that it would be a good idea to invite more Flex developers to join this discussion. Having said this, I'd like to make it clear that over my career, I've been developing frameworks myself and truly respect people who are capable of creating frameworks, and Anatole has huge experience in this area as well. Here we're just questioning the need to create frameworks not for a general-purpose language like Java, but for a domain-specific framework like Flex.

Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS. The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, is being sent into the wild under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), making Adobe the first major company to use the little-used new license. Public betas are out at labs.adobe.com.

In Java world, the solution to this issue is pretty simple. A typical Java application consists of a number of .jar files (think libraries or swc) and there is a concept of a class path. If a program needs to use a class MyGreatCreation, the Java class loader tries to find it based on the classes or jars listed in the classpath. If there is more than one version of this class in the path, the class loader will grab the first one. This greatly simplifies deploying any patches in Java production applications. Just make changes to your class and place it in the jar that is listed first in the classpath. Then deploy just this jar in production, and the loader will be happy to pick up the brand new version of MyGreatCreation.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

Adobe earned $222.2 million, or 38 cents a share, up 21%, on record fourth-quarter revenues of $911.2 million, up 34% year-over-year, exceeding the company's revenue target of $860 million-$890 million. It attributed the results to Acrobat, its Creative Suite 3 products and momentum in its enterprise business. Creative Suite 3, which started coming out in April, includes upgrades to Photoshop, Illustrator and software acquired with Macromedia like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. On a non-GAAP basis Adobe earned 49 cents in Q4, a penny more than Wall Street expected.

Just two of the text fields on your Flex window have to support the mouse wheel. The user turns the wheel, the numeric field in these fields is incremented or decremented. Let's do it.

Release of BlazeDS is a great help from the Flex enterprise adoption perspective. On the technical side, BlazeDS provides a lightweight replacement for LiveCycle Data Services ES. The remoting part seems to be identical to the LCDS offering. But how the LCDS implementation is different from BlazeDS? What's under the hood?

Adobe and Yahoo have launched a beta Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! so online publishers can stick context-based ads in a panel next to PDF content for incremental revenue from Yahoo. The context ads are dynamically matched to the content of the documents. Adobe does the inserting. The text ads, brought through Yahoo's self-service ad system, are only seen in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The program is free in English and available only in the US.

There are different ways of connecting Web clients written in Flex with the server-side applications being that Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP or anything else that can generate HTTP responses. Up till today, the least expensive way was by using Flex objects HTTPService or WebService. You did not have to purchase any expensive communication software to use these two Flex objects. Adobe has released Beta version of BlazeDS. This changes the market of the fast Web 2.0, but there other players here too.

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I?ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here's the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS. While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.

Cynergy Systems, Inc announced the opening of its second European office in Central London. The company?s other European office is located in Copenhagen. Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president, shared, ?The European market is clamoring for the business benefits delivered by rich Internet applications. As the global leader in RIA design and development, expanding our European footprint is a natural progression in our company's continued growth.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Based on the calls I'm getting, it seems that people are confused by the word certified in the name of this program. So I'll try to provide some clarification here. But let me start by explaining what the title Adobe Certified Flex Instructor means. I'll start with my own story.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like focus change, and you may need to spend hours if not days trying to spot some sophisticated errors. That's why a commercial-grade logger is a must if you work with an application that is spread over the network and is written in different languages such as Adobe Flex and Java.

If you use Adobe Flex Web applications that connect to Plain Old Java Objects on the server side, chances are you use a popular, robust, and freely available server called Apache Tomcat. If you use Eclipse-based Flex Builder, you can smoothly debug both Flex and Java code without leaving Eclipse. Flex Builder debugger does not need any special configuration. But we need to add a couple of parameters to the startup routine of Tomcat so it'll engage the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), which will allow other applications attach to JVM that runs Tomcat and debug deployed Java classes remotely.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Dave Wolf, vice president, Cynergy stated, 'With the opening of our new Taipei office, we are building on the continued demand for Cynergy designed and developed rich Internet applications, as well as expanding our global presence. Business applications users have come to expect the same user experience they get as consumers of Web applications so the market for RIAs throughout APAC is exploding. Our new Taipei offices give our growing customer base throughout this region ready access to native speaking RIA experts who can quickly and skillfully address their business needs.'

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

This new site should become a one-stop shopping point for college professors, full or part-time students, and everyone who is studying or teaching Adobe Flex, AIR or any related products. There is a registration link where students and faculty can get their free copy of Flex Builder, and it provides links to various Flex tutorials.

Why is this new Google Web site important? You may not know, but for many years Google was a three-language company: Java, C++ and Python. The fact that they are starting to use Flex is important not because it's more proof that Flex is a solid technology for RIA, yada, yada, yada. What's really important - this can serve as a signal for a myriad of small software vendors that will now be inspired to work on what will possibly become the next killer application in Flex and maybe, just maybe, will get these small vendors on Google's radar.

The Web is evolving as an open platform with rich user interface capabilities of desktop clients. This has triggered user-driven management of service consumer ecosystems, expanding the reach of SOA with rich interactive controls and Web 2.0 tools to access the Web content and services. However the usability dimension of these Web 2.0-based service consumer ecosystems is often ignored, leaving doubt about whether present usability testing techniques in Web-based systems are capable enough to guarantee a usable experience in RIA-based service consumer systems.

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

'In keeping with our vision to provide 'any video, anywhere', our partnership with RipCode is a definitive step towards furthering this strategy,' said Bill Joll, president and CEO of On2 Technologies and featured speaker at the upcoming iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (San Francisco, November 12-13), as on2 and RipCode announced that RipCode has integrated the On2 VP6 codec, used in Adobe Flash Player 8 and 9, for the industry's first hardware accelerated 2-pass encoding appliance for VP6.