According to Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, 'Our Skyway Community is thriving and our members are very talented. We truly look forward to their RIAs submittals and Skyway Builder extensions and are excited that all of the contributions will benefit the entire Skyway Community.' With Skyway Builder CE, Java developers get an open source Eclipse-based plugin that offers a seamless blend of coding and modeling for delivering RIAs and Web Services in Spring. Unlike any other modeling tool, Skyway Builder CE provides comprehensive modeling capabilities at four distinct application layers:

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.

Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a small issue with that and I'm not sure everyone's aware of it.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Rumor has it that in the next few weeks Adobe is going to 'reorganize' its Mobile and Device business unit where its Jobs-criticized Flash Lite lives and send the engineers to go work with the larger platform effort and Flash proper, which Jobs has also criticized. Presumably, Adobe is going to do what it takes to appease Jobs. It does want to be on the iPhone and needs Apple's help.

This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a grid there, gray background. Their users were happy because they did not see any better. This is about to change...

I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

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!).

Designing a state of the art user interface (UI) in a very visual application that is managing a lot of elements posed significant challenge due to the nature of the application: virtualizing and running entire data centers through a browser.

The work of Billy Hoffman, lead security researcher for SPI Dynamics (www.spidynamics.com), which was purchased by Hewlett-Packard last year, has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites. Today though he is in full flow at the inaugural AJAX Security Bootcamp, an all-day deep dive into Web application vulnerabilities being held on Day One of the 5th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in New York City.

Google said Tuesday that it's going mobile with its Google Gears technology, the stuff that's supposed to let web-based apps run unconnected to the web, beginning with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices ahead of its own nascent Android platform. Same day, Microsoft came out and made a victory-over-Adobe-Flash statement saying that Nokia and its Symbian OS-based phones and Internet tablets are going to embed its Silverlight plug-in, Microsoft's Flash-competitive crossbrowser/ cross-platform approach to delivering rich media and web applications.

IBM says it's found a way to make mashups secure enough for business. Because of inherent browser insecurity, mashups aren't really viable for widespread business adoption. But what's a little thing like viability compared to the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses - in this case the consumer mashup rage. So to keep the enterprise from hurting itself - and being held hostage by some cyber crook - IBM has come up with SMash, which basically lets information from different sources talk to each other - and create the one unified view mashups are famous for - but keeps them isolated so it's harder for malicious code to inject itself into the company system.

Sun Microsystems, a creator and industry leading advocate of emerging technologies, is revolutionizing and redefining system-wide management of rich, standards-compliant, Internet applications for the next generation Web. A singular vision -- 'The Network Is The Computer' -- guides Sun in the development of state-of-the-art, power-efficient servers and storage systems to award-winning, open-source based software offerings. When it comes to Web 2.0 technologies, Sun provides best-of-breed solutions to enterprises and startups worldwide for developing, deploying, and managing the next wave of computing. For more information about Sun Microsystems, visit http: //developers.sun.com/web/

In addition to his historic role on the steering committee of the OpenAjax Alliance, Kevin currently chairs the organization's integrated development environment working group. The OpenAjax Alliance IDE Working Group which includes Adobe, Aptana, the Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, TIBCO and others is now close to delivering a draft specification for a uniform way to describe Ajax libraries and controls and thus streamline the ability to use Ajax libraries within your development tools of choice. Kevin is a frequent speaker at Ajax industry events and is an author to many published articles on Ajax in the enterprise.

As more traditional sites adopt Web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, Web Services, SOA and PHP to perform online transactions one thing is certain--- these new technologies bring security issues and ignoring them could lead to serious breaches. Watchfire will demonstrate and discuss the most common Web 2.0 attack vectors, analyze the specific security issues of AJAX, especially cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and cross-site scripting (CSS), and explain techniques for exploiting and protecting web services including secure coding practices and how to properly secure web applications.