Strong as silk: new Amazon tablet and browser
It seems that Amazon found a solution to the cost vs performance dilemma of the tablet PCs. They recently announced their new tablet PC with a completely new kind of browser named Silk. With Silk, they introduce us the split browsing experience.
There are only a few companies in the world who can deliver such kind of a technology because it needs huge and unlimited computing power on the cloud. Amazon, with their cloud architecture based on EC2 and S3, was a perfect match for split browsing offering. In this new browser, all the persistent connections, and nearly all activities requiring processing power are handled in the backend by the Amazon cloud. With this approach, tablet PC browser, Silk, only needs to display the results which provides great savings from memory and processing capabilities. Of course, no need to mention that as storage the new tablet will use again the huge and unlimited storage of Amazon S3.
With this improvements it's now possible to get a good browsing performance without needing cutting edge memory and CPU architectures. This, of course lowers the price for the new tablet and opens up a completely new dimension to the competition. This has been tried with Opera Mini for less powerfull devices, however it seems that Amazon promises a lot more with Silk.
The cloud tablet, lets see where it will go and how competition will respond to it.
Take care and stay hungry.
Enterprise grade open source portal: Liferay and Elastic Beanstalk
In this post i want to talk about a fruitful open source initiative namely "Liferay". Liferay is an open source portal framework with below features:
- Content & Document Management with Microsoft Office® integration
- Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
- Enterprise Collaboration
- Social Networking and Mashups
- Enterprise Portals and Identity Management
I have personaly used Liferay in a couple of projects and recommend it with confidence due to its performance, flexibility and stability. This framework runs on a Java application server and supports latest portlet specifications; meaning that you can plug and play new functionality as portlets into your portals. Due to its layered architecture it's also possible to change the look and feel of the portal without writing any single line of code. Layout of the portal pages is completely manageable through a browser based interface which really improve the user experience.
Thanks to it's platform independent architecture, Liferay can run on most of the available application servers. I've run it on Apache Tomcat without any problems. Recently i've read a blog about deploying Liferay on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. We have talked about Amazon Public Cloud architecture before. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is part of Amazon Cloud and is simply an EC2 instance running a pre-installed and configured Tomcat application server on top of it. Elastic Beanstalk lets the application owner to start small and scale horizontally and vertically nearly automatically based on the received traffic on the instances. You can find detailed information on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk here.
More information on how Liferay runs on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk can be found here.
Take care and stay hungry.
Next Step in Mobile Application Development
We are in the era of mobile applications and app stores. There are several app stores such as Apple App Store, Android Market, BlackBerry App World and others waiting for developers to create and distribute new innovative applications. However, as i mentioned in one of my previous posts, HTML5 standard has not been adopted as the industry standard for the mobile applications yet and there is no other easy way for the developer community to write once and deliver on every different platform.
Some vendors and organizations have seen this problem and came up with a quick solution; Frameworks which will help developers to convert and compile the code for several different non-standard platforms. I have picked three most successfull frameworks for you to analyse:
- PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/)
- RhoMobile (http://rhomobile.com/)
- Appcelerator Titanium (http://www.appcelerator.com/)
A good comparison of the three and more can be found here.
I suggest you to go through their websites and select the one best suiting your development background and requirements.
Take care and stay hungry.
Secure software triangle: cost vs quality vs security
No need to mention how important it is to correctly implement security features. However most the software houses do not design the security features but directly spread the functionality into the code during the implementation phase. This approach directly effects the quality of the software and causes security defects in the code.
There are a few ways to design security features together with functionality of the software. Most elegant way is to use extension mechanisms of UML, such as UMLSec or SecureUML. These security extensions help software designers to model security functionality using UML.
However there is a trade of between development cost, time spent on design and higher quality design. These security extensions are not very common and it is really tough to find a resource with enough competence on security. However cost savings due to less errors and less security defects in the final software can be a lot higher than the money spent on the design phase. One should weight the two and decide the software development model accordingly.
Take care and stay hungry.
Public Clouds: Is there any competition?
Cloud is one of the hottest topics of 2010 and onwards. It's all about flexibility, easy of setup, unlimited scalability and reduced capex and opex for the service providers. I have been using Amazon EC2 from the beginning and can say that Amazon did a great job with all AWS portfolio.
EC2 Features:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#features
Other AWS Portfolio:
http://aws.amazon.com/products/
All of these features can be provided by some data centers and cloud service providers. However Amazon is the only one who glues all of the services perfectly and provides an end to end management platform on the web.
Just let me know if you are aware of any competition for these features.
Take care and stay hungry.
HTML5 for the future
This is my first post, so i’ll keep it short to warm up with emerging technologies slowly.
HTML has been identified as the standard for the web for decades. However, previous version of HTML (HTML 4) dates back to 1999. Since then, web has changed, we have seen “the read only web” (Web 1.0), “the read-write web” (Web 2.0), and “the read-write-execute web” (Web 3.0). Concepts have also continuously changed, Internet on browsers, mobile internet, applications, application stores, Internet of things and so on. Vendors had to select some standards for their clients and improve those with some extensions such as flash, applets, dhtml, extended javascript, etc. to follow emerging trends and save the day. This approach led to several different standards, incompatibility and lack of convergence between different mediums.
In 2006 standardization organizations have decided to cooperate to create a new and improved version of HTML which will address existing and future needs of the web. Latest published version of the standard can be found here:
Main purpose of this new standard is to reduce the need for external plugins such as flash and java to reduce the need for scripting to make it device independent. Yes, it will be device independent, meaning that it will be the standard for n-screen approach which will enable convergence for the desktop, mobile, TV and other devices. HTML5 has already been adopted by most of the browser vendors and being tagged as the standard by several organizations like WAC.
I will be writing about my thoughts on WAC, HTML5 and mobile standardization in my next post.
Take care and stay hungry.