Today's podcast is a redux of last Friday's "Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds" panel discussion. Moderated by Ken Rimple (me), our guests were

• Kortina, a Google App / EC2 Developer
• Chris Richardson, author of Manning's POJOs in Action and developer of CloudTools, an EC2 deployment framework
• Chris Cera, CTO of Vuzit, an Amazon EC2 / S3-based product for managing various document formats online
• Toby DiPasquale - a long-time user of Amazon EC2 and S3

The panel discussed various aspects of cloud computing, including administration, scalability, security, tools and various strategies. It's a good listen, with lots of interesting debate and dialog.

Enjoy the show. Please email your comments to techcast-feedback@chariotsolutions.com. Show notes will be available within a few days.

Thanks,

Ken

This podcast interview features Dan Diephouse of MuleSource.  We talk about his work on XFire, CXF and his current efforts with Mule.  We discuss WS-* and REST, and other web service integration issues.

Time is running out to sign up for the Chariot sponsored Cloud Computing Conference, Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds on October 17th, 2008 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the western Philadelphia suburbs.

For more information about this and other Chariot Tech Cast shows, visit our shownotes page at www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.

If anyone has been listening since our very first Podcast, we covered flex way back in February with our own Peter Paugh.  But when we had an opportunity to talk to James Ward of Adobe, a Flex evangelist and someone passionate about Flex as well as Java development, we jumped at the chance.

James was a great interview, a fantastic source of information, and will be a good listen.  We talk about Flex, Flex Builder, the open sourcing of various technologies, the Open Screen project, why Java developers should care, and many more topics.

Helpful links and resources:

1. The Census Benchmark App - James has been working on this for a while.  It is a benchmarking application comparing various RIA / AJAX technologies and speed of operations like sorting, table management, etc...  An interesting way to see relative performance metrics.
2. Flex Home - the main Flex developer site.
3. Adobe Open Source - James mentioned this site a lot.  This is where Adobe places all of its' open-sourced technologies.
4. The Flex SDK Download Page - The open source, freely available SDK
5. The Shockwave File Format - Adobe has fully documented the SWF file format.
6. The Open Screen Project - a consortium including Adobe that wants to push Flash onto mobile devices by opening up the standards and exposing the flash player.  More info at the FAQ
7. Gnash - an open-source flash movie player mentioned in the show
8. AMF - (pdf download) the ActionScript Message Format - Read up on this, as Flex supports AMF for fast transfer of data between client and server.
9. BlazeDS - A server-side Java remoting technology using AMF.
10. LiveCycle ES - A commercial, J2EE-based server platform for Flex development from Adobe.
11. FXStruts - the FXStruts Library allows Struts developers to expose java objects within a Struts application using AMF

James Ward's blog and useful information is located at www.jamesward.com.   The Flex Show episode 50 is also a good listen...

In this third interview about startups and technology, Ken interviews two of the founders of TapInko, a marketplace for buying and selling ads.  Ken spoke to Nicolas Warren and John Newell, who architected their application in Microsoft .NET. 

What we find interesting about these three ventures is the differences in approach.  One team focused on getting ideas out quickly, another focused on application development using a combination of PHP and Python, and this team focused on .NET and building out an application framework first.  Listen to this team's approach, as we start in the middle of a conversation about building software out of nothing.  (I need to credit that quote to Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmer...)

Correction: I had originally mentioned that John Valentine was an interviewee, but it was, in fact, John Newell. My apologies.

This is the second in a three part series on technologies and startup companies.  Ken sat down with the founders of PhrazIt, a social web site focused on short reviews of 30 characters or less.  The team originally started, and will continue, a concept called Study Buddy, which would allow college students to find like-minded study mates.

The three founders, David Kosslyn, Ryan Schoen and Shankar Ramaswamy, are college sophomores at MIT and Harvard. 

This is the first in a three-part series of interviews we did at DreamIt, a startup incubator located at Drexel University's science center.  DreamIt sponsors 11 different startups, houses them in the incubator, and gives them some nominal funding and education on the startup process.

Snack Feed uses the social web to share videos between users.  The team members built a FireFox plugin that you can use to publish content to four major vendors at the same time, and also uses PHP and is beginning to work with Google App Engine for some of its' technology.

Ken spoke to Founders Jason Cyril Laan, Christopher (CC) Laan, and Mika Ohiorhenuan.

This week we feature an interview with Toby DiPasquale of Invite Media.  Toby and I discuss the Map-Reduce algorithm, which is the engine that powers Google's indexing and data processing systems.  We start off by discussing how Google started indexing pages, using traditional methods such as C/C++ routines.  Quickly this became unmanageable, as the amount of data to index outstripped the processing power and traditional data transformation paradigms.

Toby and I then go into discussing Map Reduce, which was originally posited as a thesis and then published as a seminal paper in the community.  Map Reduce has been implemented by Google, and as we'll see in the podcast, others followed suit and created the Hadoop engine, a Java-based Map Reduce solution. 

We talk about Hadoop and it's various subprojects, and then get into a discussion on Amazon EC2 and the Cloud Computing movement, including why it is valuable to organizations who want to scale from one to potentially dozens of CPUs.

I'll post the show notes early next week at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.  Until then, enjoy the show and comments are always welcome.

Note:  the podcast audio got a bit distorted on Toby's side, but I don't think it distracts too much.  Rather than re-record the interview I'm presenting it as-is.

This week I'm starting an occasional series of interviews on non-Java or non-traditional platform development.  I am looking for reasons that people choose Ruby on Rails, Python, and other languages in lieu of Java EE or .NET, especially in startup organizations.  This interview features Chris Cera, the CTO of Vuzit (http://www.vuzit.com), which is a document web services startup funded by DreamIt Ventures (http://www.dreamitventures.com), a Philadelphia-area seed funding program. We talk about his experiences with various dynamic languages, including Perl and Ruby, and why he feels Rails is a great development platform for his company. At the end of the interview Chris and I get into a discussion about what makes a good programmer / developer.  Thanks for listening.  Feedback can be directed to me at krimple@chariotsolutions.com. KR

A discussion with Peter Paugh, one of Chariot's architects and Rich Internet Application developers, on the current state of GWT.  GWT was just revved to version 1.5, and is becoming a good Java-based alternative for writing Rich Internet Applications.  Peter and Ken discuss GWT as a platform, the cross-browser compiling mechanism, and other details, and also talk about the controversy surrounding GWT-EXT caused by moving of the license from the LGPL to GPL.

Commerce 360 CEO Lucinda Holt discusses technology waves and how organizations use them to their advantage. She compares four competing movements in adoption a new or disruptive technology: Custom development, Tooling, Applications and Platforms. She gives many examples from her own past and offers thoughts on how to "ride the waves" that may be appropriate for your organization. The presentation, once loaded, can be accessed at our presentations page It is a shockwave file, which should open in your browser. Click on the blank screen to start the slides. If you cannot run the presentation, you should install the latest Macromedia Flash player.

Today we feature the second of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference.  Speakers included Yehuda Katz,  Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez.  Quite a group!  

I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded.  If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

This half does contain a few curse words and some heated debates.  There is a very interesting exchange between the Java and Ruby camps.

Today we feature the first of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference.  Speakers included Yehuda Katz,  Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez.  Quite a group! 

The show was broken into two parts due to the fact that it ran rather long (over an hour).  I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded.  If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

The second half promises to be even more entertaining than the first.  I'll publish that segment next week, as we need to beep out a few choice words as the conversation got quite heated.  Enjoy the podcast!

If you're at all adventurous, you've probably loaded Linux on a PC sometime in your life.  Some of us avoid that pain by running (screaming) to Mac OS X, where we have a nice, pretty view of the world behind shiny and metallic, stylin' boxes.

Not Andy Oswald.  He's a tried-and-true Linux OS guy (Ubuntu, actually).  When given a Mac Mini to play with, he really enjoyed kicking the tires, playing with those fun apps, but when it got down to brass tacks, he felt more at home on Linux.

Once Andy got his MacBook Pro, he dug around and found a small community of users running Ubuntu on the Mac.  And he's now one of them.  Learn how he fared by listening in.  If you do this yourself, we highly recommend thinking twice, backing up, and using the right machine for the job (NOT YOUR WORK ONE!)

The show notes can be found at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/shownotes/show/7.

This presentation, by Rossen Stoyanchev from SpringSource, was delivered at the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.  Rossen discusses changes in the Spring Framework version 2.5, concerning Java and J2EE, AspectJ, OSGi, Annotation-driven configuration, Spring MVC, and new testing support with the TestContext framework.

You can find the presentation slides on our web site at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-RossenStoyanchev-spring-2.5.pdf.

Don't forget to visit the show notes page at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.

Today's show features Dmitry Sklyut, a Chariot consultant who is an expert in the Spring Framework and has been researching the OSGi initiative.  We talk about OSGi as a platform, the various containers, tooling support, and integration with Spring.

Today's show features Aaron Mulder and his Introduction to Rails talk.  It was recorded at Chariot's 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.  You can find many of the presentations in the Downloads section of Chariot's web site, www.chariotsolutions.com.

Aaron's presentation is entitled Rails 101.  Click here for the PDF file and follow along.  iTunes users:  the URL is http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-rails-101.pdf

The ETE conference was held at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.  Learn more about Drexel's iSchool at www.ischool.drexel.edu.

In this episode, Ken talks to Scott Fraser of Portico Systems.
Scott has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, and
co-founded Portico eleven years ago with CEO Ned Moore. 
Scott and I talk about scripting Java with Jython,
large-scale 64-bit Java VMs, user interfaces using Netbeans'
Visual Library, and more.

This episode features new theme music from http://www.podcastthemes.com.

Ken speaks to Tom Purcell, an architect with
Chariot Solutions, about Enterprise Service
Bus technologies.  They discuss when an ESB
might be used in an SOA environment, some of
the vendors, technical and non-technical 
challenges.

Ken speaks to Peter Paugh, a solutions 
architect at Chariot Solutions, about 
his experiences with Adobe Flex, and 
how it might fit into application 
development as a Rich Internet Application
framework.