Flash Summer Camp Berlin!

Flash Summer Camp Berlin is a completely free event organised by Flex Labs, the Berlin Adobe Flex User Group. I will be presenting a two-hour hands-on code camp.

This will be a whole day of experts sharing hands-on coding, presentations, and their knowledge with you. Topics include Flash, Flex and AIR, ColdFusion, Frameworks, Designer Development Workflow, and many more. If you are in Berlin June 14, you might want to come and meet some of the Adobe team and community leaders, as well as network with fellow developers and designers.

Whether you’re just getting started with the Flash Platform, or consider
yourself an expert, there’s something for you!

Ich hoffe auch, dass zu viele Biere mit meinen Freunden in Berlin in einem Biergarten (mit Sonne!)

Bis denn!

Duane's World Episode 20

This show is from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I get to interview Padster Reynolds from E-Smartz and show some code samples of LiveCycle ES access using Java. The tutorial is a bit difficult to set up but I can help out if any of you have some desire to get it running.

Can Squirrels code RIAs in Adobe Flex?

My life is very weird. This morning I was making coffee when I saw a cute black animal pop up from behind my wife's desk. A squirrel. Despite trying to chase it out, scare it, bribe it outside with food and water, it keeps running back into our house. I felt bad that I had to leave for a few hours so I fed it some nuts and stuff. I think I scared it though when I asked it towards the end of this video if it wanted to help me code up some RIAs in Adobe Flex. Every day I think my life cannot get weirder but it does.

Web 2.0 Architecture - the book is here!

Web 2.0 Architectures, the book, is now out! I got to hold the first physical copy in my hands yesterday! (Thank you Betsy!!). James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe, and I put in a ton of work, but there are so many other people that contributed to this book or helped us with our research that I couldn't even begin to list them all. The number one thank you I do want to make though is to O'Reilly -- specifically Tim O'Reilly, Steve Weiss and Simon St. Laurent. Simon played such a pivotal role in this book I feel his name should be on it as a co-author.




Here are my other thank yous in no particular order.

Kevin Lynch, Michele Turner, and Jeff Whatcott from Adobe for letting this
take precedence over filing status reports ;-); my wife, Bettina Rothe, and
my children for putting up with me during the process; Ted Patrick, James
Ward, Prayank Swaroop, Alex Choy, Kumar Vora, the entire Adobe Platform
Business Unit, Enrique Duvos, Ivan Koon, Mihai, Serge, Tom, Piotr,
Chet, Greg, Eugene Lee, Waldo Smeets, John Hogerland, The rest of Redmonk, Burton, Gartner, Ben Watson, Matt Mackenzie, Melonie Warfel, Ed Chase, Diane
Helander, David Mendels, and Ben Forta for challenging the intellect and
generally being great people to work with; Ensemble, Rom Portwood for the blue hair
idea and the Balvenie 21-year Portwood finish; Bobby Caudill (when is that
demo tape coming???); Andre Charland (Nitobi and constant blogger); my bands
22nd Century (http://ww.myspace.com/22ndcentury) and Stress
Factor 9 (http://www.myspace.com/stressfactor9); the guys and girls at
Weissach for keeping the Porsche tuned; Matt and Trey, the creators of
South Park, for inspiring me to reach for something lower, and Beavis and
Butthead for inspiring me to create things that truly do not suck; Dilbert
creator Scott Adams; Sim Simeonov, Mike Connor, Danny Kolke, Greg Ruff, Ajit Jaokar,
Jeremy Geelan, Tim Bray, Mark Little (for taking time out of his busy
schedule to help edit this book); Yefim Natis (Gartner); the entire staff at
OASIS and UN/CEFACT; Bruce D'Arcus (the guy who I like the most despite the
fact that we never agree J), Audrey Doyle; Gary Edwards; David RR Webber;
Colleen Nystedt (friend, movie producer, and creator of MovieSet.com); Bob
Sutor; Christian Huemer; Birgit Hofreiter (for teaching me about
modeling); Brian Eisenberg; Arofan Gregory (how was that Barcelona-ian
brandy?); all the people involved in the creation of this book and O'Reilly
Media for taking on the project; John Sowa for making sense of propositional
algebra; Adam Pease for SUMO and for being an upstanding, approachable
academic; David Luckham for sharing good Scotch over discussions on CEP;
Gary Dunn; Dick Hardt (my Porsche is almost as fast as yours); Guy Kawasaki;
Bob Glushko; Shantanu Narayen and Bruce Chizen, Adobe Systems CEO, for inspiring me
on a great humanitarian level and showing that corporate success and good
community go hand in hand; all of Adobe PR for putting up with my antics;
Johnny Rotten, Randy Rampage, Zippy Pinhead, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain (for their immense wisdom and teaching me that speaking the truth is never wrong); Peter Brown (who gets stuck with the next wine bill); Pam Deziel (I'll invite you to wine if it's
Peter's turn to buy); Marc Straat; Marc Eaman for drinking beer to help
lower my wine bills and reminding me that old guys can play great ice
hockey; Chuck Meyers for not questioning my wine bills; and my friends and
colleagues who have helped me over the years in this high-tech life.

The book is available here (Click on Book)

Video tutorial - talking to BlazeDS from Flex

This is a simple tutorial you can complete in about 5 minutes once you have the required files. Download the full BlazeDS package from http://www.web2open.org/courses.html (get the Building Service Clients course) and follow along with the video. Written instructions and the source code for this are available from the download.

New Flex Course available for everyone

I just finished giving a course on map-based RIA development in Adobe AIR and Flex at Where 2.0. Where often begins with the notion of a location. Service Oriented Architecture allows mashup clients to use location-based services for building rich, interactive media clients. In this course you will build six map-based projects in a largely (85%) hands on learning environment using Adobe Flex and AIR.

Preparation

To take this course, you will need to do the following:
1. Install and configure Adobe Flex Builder 3.0 or later
2. Set up an account with Yahoo Developer Network and get an API key
3. Download the Yahoo SWC file
4. Download the ESRI SWC file
5. Download and take the course from here - http://www.web2open.org/courses/Where2.0.zip

This lab preparation assumes you need to install everything from scratch. While these instructions cover installing a standalone Flex Builder, it is also possible to install Flex Builder as an Eclipse plugin. Please seek out and follow the instructions from the Adobe website if you wish to install the plugin version.

Where possible, notes are augmented for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

A. Installing and configuring Adobe Flex Builder.

1. Go to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flexbuilder3 and download the Flex Builder trial.
2. Open up the disk image and follow the on screen instructions.
3. Note where you set up your workspace. This is where you will place all the files you work on and various libraries needed for this course.
4. Mac OS X: By default, this will be under your ~home_directory/Documents/Flex Builder 3.
5. Windows: By default, this will be under your c:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3.

LINUX ONLY

6. For the Linux version, download the plugin from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flexbuilder_linux.html.
7. Run the installer either marking it as executable (chmod +x) or by using a shell to execute it (sh flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin).

8. When prompted, specify whether to install Flash Player 9 (note that this is an updated version of Flash Player 9 and that Flex Builder Linux will work with earlier versions of Flash Player 9 for Linux). This is the debug version of Flash Player 9, which is required for debugging support and exception display.


B. Set up and account with Yahoo and download the SWC file.

1. Use your browser and navigate to https://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp/

2. Sign in if you already have an account or register for a new one. If you have already registered for an API key, you can see it via the hyperlink near the top of the page.

9. If you do not have an API key, fill in the form and agree to any license terms.

10. Click “Submit” and a key will be generated for you. Make sure you save it somewhere in a text file on your desktop.

C. Accessing the YahooMaps.swc file.

1. Next, you need to download and install the Yahoo Maps SWC file. Aim your browser at http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/maps/
2. Save the zip to your hard drive and open the archive. You will see a file called YahooMaps.swc inside the zip.

3. Remember the location of this file as you will need it for Labs 2,3,4.

d. Download the ESRI ArcGIS SWC library.

1. Navigate to http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/apis/flex/index.cfm?fa=downloadDisclaimer
2. Agree to the terms and conditions of the license and click “Download”.

3. Save the file to your hard drive as you will need it for labs 5,6,7.

4. Unzip the file and you will see a SWC file as shown in the course setup guide.

5. Remember the location of this file as you will need it for labs 4,5,6.
That is all for now – now you can start the labs.

Next Flex Builder product renamed to Flash Builder? What do you think?

As an Adobe evangelist, I explain many of our products. One of the products is called "Flex Builder" which sort of insinuates that it builds "Flex". The truth is that Flex Builder actually builds Flash or Adobe AIR applications. For people building browser-based applications, they are, for all means, Shockwave Flash (swf) files. Given this confusion, there has been discussion about the next version of Flex Builder being named Flash Builder 4. It would be the same Eclipse-based IDE with a new name and lots of great new features. This theoretically would be a name change to the commercial product only, and does not affect the Flex framework or Flex SDK.

Some points to consider being sending me flames or applause ;-)

- It's still the Flex framework, and you are still a Flex developer.

- People searching for developers to build Flash would probably get connected with Flex developers much earlier in the development cycle.

- Flash Builder is the development tool for the Flash platform,
supporting the use of the Flex framework or pure ActionScript.

- Flex is the open source framework at the core of the Flash Platform,
including Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.

- The name of the current product, Flex Builder 3, would remain the same, and would not be renamed Flash Builder 3.

It sort of just makes sense and would probably result in a lot of new revenue when people realize all these "Flex Developers" can actually build them Flash applications rather than smaller development shops having to educate the public about Flash vs. Flex.

These are ideas. What do you think? After all - it's your community.

City of Vancouver to be "Open Source/Open Standards" based!

I got a great email today from David Eaves. Vancouver City Council has put forth a motion on "Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source" as written by Councillor Andrea Reimer (I met her at some functions during current mayor Gregor Robertson's campaign). According to the motion, the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

• Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with
citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data
possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;

• Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to
adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats
of media;

• Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing
software or considering new applications, will place open source software on
an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles;

Read the rest here! Vancouver council: Welcome to the future!!! Thank you!!

New Video Tutorial - Full Screen AIR Video

This is just a quick tutorial for AIR developers to build an application that plays video in the full screen interactive mode. You can substitute the video for images or other digital assets. There are a couple of other tricks to this you can find in the AIR API docs such as how to remove the bars at the bottom.

Enjoy!

Video: How to build chromeless AIR apps in 5 minutes (update)

I had previously posted a technical article on this topic however it is out of date due to changes to the Adobe AIR application descriptor file. This video is an updated tutorial on this topic. You can download the complete project files from http://www.web2open.org/codesamples/AIR-ApplePear.zip.

Software as a Service: A pattern for modern computing

Mihai Corlan, Jack Wilber and I have put together a short white paper on Software as a Service (SaaS). Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a popular term within software industry circles since its introduction in early 1999. While many in the press have predicted that SaaS may eventually replace the incumbent model for software delivery, more likely an approach will evolve that combines the best of both worlds.

The white paper examines the core pattern of SaaS in pragmatic terms. It also outlines some of the strategic advantages SaaS can provide over distributed and shrink-wrapped software. The paper is not intended to be a singular authoritative source for defining SaaS so please do not interpret it as such.

Read it here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/saas.html

Book - Web 2.0 Architectures

Is finally done. This book was the result of exhausting research into various aspects of what Web 2.0 really is. In short, this book is about Web 2.0 for those who do not merely acquiesce to it being explained as a series of buzzwords. We examine it from a pragmatic architectural standpoint.



Here is the copy review description:

This fascinating book puts substance behind Web 2.0. Using several high-profile Web 2.0 companies as examples, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor have distilled the core patterns of Web 2.0 coupled with an abstract model and reference architecture. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration.
Full Description

Web 2.0 is more pervasive than ever, with business analysts and technologists struggling to comprehend the opportunity it represents. But what exactly is Web 2.0 -- a marketing term or technical reality? This fascinating book finally puts substance behind the phenomenon by identifying the core patterns of Web 2.0, and by introducing an abstract model and reference architecture to help you take advantage of them.

In Web 2.0 Architectures, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor -- who have 40 years of combined experience with technical specifications and industry trends -- examine what makes successful Web 2.0 services such as Google AdSense, Flickr, BitTorrent, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia tick. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration. This book reveals:

A Model for Web 2.0 -- An in-depth look at how the classic Client-Server model has evolved into a more detailed Web 2.0 model.

Web 2.0 Reference Architecture -- A generic component view that helps decision-makers recognize basic patterns in existing Web 2.0 applications-patterns that can be repurposed for other commercial ventures.

Specific Patterns of Web 2.0 -- How Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service pattern (SaaS), Participation-Collaboration Pattern, AJAX, Mashups, Rich User Experience (a.k.a. RIA), Collaborative Tagging Systems (Folksonomy), and more can be used in your technology business.

We also present the reference architecture and patterns on their companion website so that people in the industry can augment it and continue the discussion.

Links:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514433/#top

Duane's World Episode 19

After a brief pause, Duane's World 19 is now online.

Getting Familiar with Flex Builder

If you are new to Flex Builder, this video will help you understand the basics.

LiveCycle ES Hosted Beta is now Live!

I got a great internal email today from Matt MacKenzie. In preparation for the next release of LiveCycle ES, Adobe is running a pre-release program and we invite you (see qualifier) to participate. We are providing our strategic customers and partners with early access to a hosted LiveCycle ES system on LiveCycle Developer Express to ensure an exciting and high quality release.

What’s new?

A vast number of improvements have been made to LiveCycle ES. A sample of some of the new features includes:

· Improved development and authoring tools, including the introduction of Action Wizard in LiveCycle Designer and changes to Process Designer to make team development possible and process design more intuitive

· Improved end-user experience development including LiveCycle ES Service Discovery for Flex Builder and a re-engineered Form Guide Builder

· Improved support for document assembly of XDP-based documents as well as PDF Portfolios including a new Document Builder interface to generate DDX commands

· Improved administration and platform maturity with improved backup and recovery support (hot backup), Health Monitor, expanded platform, database, and full 64 bit JVM support

· Improved out of the box solutions for Review and Commenting workflows which include Content Services

How do I get involved?

The goal of this early preview of the next version of LiveCycle ES is to provide our preferred customers and partners with the opportunity to preview the next release of LiveCycle ES. By participating, you will have access to:

· “What’s new” presentation

· Feature Spotlights (short recording of LiveCycle ES engineers presenting the new features)

· Access to your own hosted system with LiveCycle ES Server and Workbench pre-configured

· Test cases that will guide you through the new product areas accompanied with a survey to collect your feedback

While we always strive to drive quality releases, the goal of this early preview is to collect your valuable feedback on the usability enhancements that we have added to this new release. We will also be running a public beta in early summer to solicit testing and quality feedback.

TO DO: Immediately register yourself in the pre-release program here <http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=prerelease_interest> to ensure you get access to this early preview of the next release of LiveCycle ES. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours to activate your account.

How to get started?

Once you have registered, you will receive an email confirmation with information on how to access the prerelease.adobe.com site. Adobe is taking another big step in cloud computing by offering you a completely hosted environment to test our early version of our next release. We have our prerelease.adobe.com site ready to go which will provide you with access to a hosted system, support forums, bug & enhancement logging and tracking, documentation, etc.

Access to the hosted server on the LiveCycle Express system is very easy. Log on to the prerelease.adobe.com site where you will find a short welcome note. Here you will find a link to our Getting Started page that contains all of the information you need to get started with your very own hosted system.

Some guidance:

The prerelease site supports online forums. Please use the forums when you have a general question or suggestion that you feel other testers can benefit from. We would also encourage you to look at the forum posts prior to submitting a question, as someone may have already found an answer.

If you have questions or need help, please contact me at dnickull at adobe dot com.

We look forward to your feedback and appreciate the time and energy that is invested to help improve the quality and usability of our product

Search Engine Optimization Tricks and Tips condensed.

I have written quite a bit on the subject of search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO. Not everyone agrees, nor do they all understand the depth of what is going on (including me) but there are many more points that the experts do seem to agree on. Since my posts on the subject are sort of all over the place, I have condensed them here. Of course, you can always go to google.com and search for "search engine optimization tricks" and the articles should come up within the top ten or so. By the way, that particular term ("search engine optimization tricks") is one of the hardest to get in the top ten for since everyone who is really knowledgeable about SEO and does it professionally knows that their prospective clients search for that term. Me? I just give the advice away for free.

Before anyone uses these to "trick" Google, know that doing so will often result in helping nobody. After all, what is the use of having a website selling some medication come up in the top ten results for someone seeking to read about golfing or fishing? Yes, you might be able to do this, but it will not benefit you and it will not benefit the readers so don't bother. I have said this before and will say it again, Google's ranking system is very fair and if you want your sites to do better, use proper enhancements, not black magic tricks. I have never had to resort to anything underhanded to gain #1 spots and keep them. Some examples? Search for these terms in Google and click to either the sites that points at this blog or back to Adobe.com: SOA White Paper, Enterprise Developer Resources, Sombrio (goes to my friend's site), Search Engine Optimization Tricks, Adobe cloud computing, understanding REST, Adobe MAX 2009. Note that some of these will change over time (as they should) as new works become available. In the past, I have helped clients get #1 for bicycle, mountain bike, aromatherapy, yoga, skiing, mac and more.

Here is a list of some relevant posts on the subject made in the past.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/07/searchable-flash-some-early-tips.html
Some tips related to Flash SEO.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2007/06/seo-search-engine-optimization-tricks.html
8 quick tips anyone can implement.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/10/flash-search-engine-optimization-tricks.html
A recap of a talk I did on Flash SEO at the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin. Slides included.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-seo-tips-to-save-you-tons-of-work.html
Some general tips to save you work by really understanding some of what Google ignores.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/flash-search-engine-optimization.html
A video of how Ichabod indexes SWF content in different states. Note that as Beussery noted in the comments, this is now old and there are still major questions about how Google actually uses content it grabs.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/10/flash-seo-research-google-does-use.html
A report on Google's use of Ichabod (code name) for indexing SWF content.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2008/06/duanes-world-tv-episode-3-live.html
A pointer to a video tutorial of how Google tracks searching and click-through traffic.

If this still is not enough, try Google's site. They pretty much tell you exactly what you will need to do to help elevate your rankings.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

There are also some other people who I consider of guru status (we don't always see eye-to-eye but generally they are very knowledgeable):

Danny Sullivan
Beu Blog

Anyways, this is enough information to get you higher than you are now in the rankings.

My next work is some trial studies to determine how well SWF content ranks against HTML content given the same context. This study is ongoing and has to be totally uncontaminated by people searching for or linking to it so I cannot divulge any secrets, but I will share all when ready.

I am also working on cracking the codes within the Google page results. If you search google.com for a term, you will find some cryptic strings within the source of the results page like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FArchitectural_pattern_(computer_science)&ei=Lv2lSYXeL8TMnQePtZWjBQ&usg=AFQjCNHZFyB7San73Hj6Lb0zkcUbGq_N0g&sig2=nNH5vIakDgirDg8dMpz7RQ

Now note that this is often different on most geographical, temporal, and browser/OS combinations, but you can generally find these strings:

ei=AOKlSaLSBMTMnQfhs5GjBQ
usg=AFQjCNHtxRnR1RWVZrM6TD0uYFmK8GWFTA
sig2=eFYPDz8WzdtLw9OB_y00qA

The middle one, starting with AFQjCN will be in most search results however the 7th letter often changes. If I search in Vancouver, I nearly always get an "H" but others have experienced differences.

I highly suspect that this is anti-spamdexing technology engineered by Google and returns a hash value based on an IP address and timestamp, making it impossible to gain click through success. It is probably impossible to get around or spoof but nevertheless presents an intriguing puzzle.

I recently posted a challenge to a few people such as Danny Sullivan, Tim O'Reilly, Dick Hardt, Matt MacKenzie, and others to see what they got as the 7th character. The results varied.

Google can track what you click on. This means that over time, search engine results can be tracked and dynamically adapted based on who clicks on what. The actual mechanism is far more complex than such a simple algorithm, however, as ontology classifications are mixed in along with other ways to determine how each result should be treated in future searches.

Using a different machine and browser combination from a different IP address, I also found this little snippet of code in the source:

a href="/url?q=http://www.answers.com/architecture&r=67&ei=EAGmSY7pO5DZnQfsxb3jDw&sa=X&oi=dict&ct=D&cd=1&usg=AFQjCNGEcgqgfjDs8O9JnDVraTEt07mqQQ"
in particular, compare the value of usg=AFQjCNHZFyB7San73Hj6Lb0zkcUbGq_N0g to this value

usg=AFQjCNHZFyB7San73Hj6Lb0zkcUbGq_N0g
usg=AFQjCNGEcgqgfjDs8O9JnDVraTEt07mqQQ"

Can it be a coincidence that the first 7 characters are the same? The odds against this are 52 to the power of 6 or better than 1 in one quadrillion +. This is based on only observing upper and lower case letters. If you include numeric values the number is much higher.

When I clear my cache and cookies, the value changes yet the first 6 characters remain the same:

usg=AFQjCNF6pTl1_OknMH4NN88IVnlugECBBQ

If these values do not change, it is possible that the first 6 characters are based on some unmutable part. At first I thought perhaps it was the search itself so I changed the search term yet got this response:

usg=AFQjCNF_5AxdU_kbNpKl21c1VcXmXRLnGA

This is an interesting and probably ultimately pointless exercise, but I am the type who does crosswords and picks up Rubik's Cubes when I see them (best time to solve ever was 5'30" flat).
Mental Masturbation? Perhaps. There is probably a document somewhere outlining exactly what it is but I prefer to figure it out on my own.

Understanding REST

There are a lot of people talking about REST (1) yet very few actually have taken the time to read Roy Fielding's thesis about it. This blog post will attempt to explain REST in a simplified manner to convey the basics. Please do not consider this authoritative however. REST means different things to different people at this time and this blog post is based on REST as per Fielding's work.

First and foremost, REST does not equate to HTTP and XML. REST is an architectural style. Encapsulated within the REST style are several key principles governing network architecture. While the HTTP/XML confusion reigns in most articles, it is in fact possible to write an HTTP and XML interface to a resource that does not comply with the principles of REST.

REST can be simplified down to the following:

1. REST begins with the notion of a null architectural style (imagine that there is only a "thing" with no discernible detail). From this emptiness, the first constraints of REST emerge. A client-server architecture is the first emergent principle; a separation of all into two concern groups. This allows each group to evolve separately and scale across multiple domains (similar to SOA).

2. REST then adds the principle of stateless binary relationships. In section 5.1.3 of his dissertation, Fielding writes "each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server". These types of requests are also termed "idempotent". Inference? Any site using cookies or stored contexts is not compliant with REST.

3. REST does make the possibility of caching available to improve efficiency. While not violating the principles of stateless invocations, client side caches can be used to allow reuse of information.

4. Uniform interfaces and uniquely identified resources are pivotal to being RESTful. Having a uniform interface between components (such as the use of certain methods like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE in protocols like HTTP), enables implementations to be decoupled from the service interfaces. This principle is also embodied in Service Oriented Architecture, which perplexes me why so many people compare SOA to REST.

Fielding writes more about the subject in section 5.1.5 "In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state."

5. A resource is explicitly defined as "the intended conceptual target of a hypertext reference" and later in section 5.2.1.1 as "any information that can be named...". The first of these definitions seems to concretely link HTTP to REST yet there are arguments that hypertext is used here in a generic manner. In fact, later in section 5.2, it quite explicitly states "REST ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax in order to focus on the roles of components". Nevertheless, the way to interact with resources is via representations of the resources, as per 5.1.5. Note that Resource is defined in W3C terms as "any thing that can have an identifier".

6. Resources are identified with a URL or URN. Note that in this case, the URL should be constrained to be free of non-uniform interfaces (such as http://www.domain.com/someOperation?operation=manipulationByURL&moreOperations=notAllowed). This style of manipulation of data elements through invocation of non-standard operations is the anti-pattern or REST. REST therefore can be contrasted to Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) which generally encapsulate the notion of invoking a procedure on a remote server.

REST is an abstraction of all these architectural elements plus a few more within a distributed hypermedia system such as the Internet. Now here is the one sentence summary:

REST-based architectures communicate primarily through the exchange of representations of the state of resources through uniformly defined interfaces.

Try saying that 5 times fast.

So is it possible to define RESTful services for SOA? Absolutely. Do you have to use XML in REST? No.

There is a lot more about REST that you should look at in detail but I think this captures the gist.

Don't believe me though - read about it here yourself. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm

References:

(1) Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000

Ontology advice needed for SEO playground.

OK - I am a geek. A nerdling. Social misfits do stuff like this just to prove it can be done. Here is my current question du jour.

I am right now placing First Order Logic (FOL) binary and n-ary relationships into the associations binding for labeled relations in a test metadata facility (Registry-Repository). I am doing this because I got sick of Computational Intelligence researchers just talking about this and not actually coding and doing something to solve the problem so the Canadian cowboy instinct to code first and see where problems arise has taken over. Search technologies on the web have kind of plateaued. With no real competition, are Google and Yahoo going to keep innovating search to the point where a 3-word search term can find a needle in a haystack? I do not think so but it is not outside the realm of possibility. While researching some advanced SEO topics, I started realizing that fuzzy logic and quantum computing patterns have not yet been optimized for NL programming heuristics.

I have run into a problem that I would appreciate input on. My goal is to bind something like this (From SUMO - thanks to Adam et al for doing the hard work).

(=>
(instance ?OBJ Object)
(exists
(?TIME1 ?TIME2)
(and
(instance ?TIME1 TimePoint)
(instance ?TIME2 TimePoint)
(before ?TIME1 ?TIME2)
(forall
(?TIME)
(=>
(and
(beforeOrEqual ?TIME1 ?TIME)
(beforeOrEqual ?TIME ?TIME2))
(time ?OBJ ?TIME))))))

..to a registry-repository node instance to allow folksonomy tags to reference the upper level ontology classes that the folksonomy tag owners believe they belong to. Additionally, each instance of a folksonomy tag may have * relationships to other ontology classes or even other folksonomy tags. The latter relationships can be defined in terms of constrained relationship tags like “synonym, disjoint, etc.”.

I want to represent all upper ontologies; however some of them contain subtle nuances between their terms. Dolce, SUMO and others have defined binary relationships like transitive, intransitive, reflexive, irreflexive, symmetrical as well as some partial ontologies. The problem is that there are no namespace qualifications for these so I want to introduce that into my work. I was planning on just using the root URLs for each work however there are versions possible in some of the work.

I would like this to be in the form of (upper_ontology_identifier)+(version_or_instance)+(uuid) as a classifier followed by the term label such as “transitive”. I will probably use URIs for the UUID.

Question:

Has anyone ever come across a similar problem and if so, how did they solve it?

Thoughts and comments welcome too.

More SEO tips to save you tons of work

I have noticed that some of my previous tips on SEO have generated huge amounts of comments. This one for example has generated over 100 comments although I have deleted most since they were blatant advertising.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2007/06/seo-search-engine-optimization-tricks.html

I want to share a little secret to those who are still adding comments with links in hopes of building up link equity.

"Google does not follow links in blogger comments!"

Surprised? Don't believe me. Check it out for yourself. The first comment on the page above is from a company called Wavestech. They claim to be an SEO company but obviously do not understand the statement above. You can check out who links to you in Google buy going to http://www.google.com and doing a search in this format (note no space between 'link:' and domain name):

link:www.domainname.com/

Of course, replace "domainname.com" with the actual domain name. To verify whether or not wavestech has anyone linking to it, check out their results:



http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link%3Awww.wavestech.net%2F&btnG=Search

Dang!! One result. I wonder how much time they spent replying to comments in the last year and wondering why they are not elevated. Another company called 123seoservices.com tried it too but they have no results and no link equity.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link%3Awww.123seoservices.com%2F&btnG=Search

The rule of thumb here is simple. There are no easy and quick ways to get to #1 for any search term. You have to pay your dues. Let the natural path take you up there. If you make a good site, with good information, it will find its way to the top of the pile eventually. Take "SOA" as an example. Try a search for "SOA White Paper" on Google.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=soa+white+paper&btnG=Google+Search

The number one result for this is a white paper I co-wrote for Adobe.

www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/Services_Oriented_Architecture_from_Adobe.pdf

We did not get #1 by spending hours making comments on others blogs. We spent the time writing a well researched paper that tries very hard to explain message exchange patterns in SOA without pitching products. This time was much better spent making a good paper and letting people search for it, find it and get it to #1 in Google by its reputation.

People linked to it because they liked it and thought it served a purpose. There are 137 links to that paper:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link%3Awww.adobe.com%2Fenterprise%2Fpdfs%2FServices_Oriented_Architecture_from_Adobe.pdf+&btnG=Search

Google engineers also monitor networks for patterns. It is easy for them to spot a pattern to catch cheaters. Even if you crack the hashcode algorithm (I think I am very close now) for the cryptic string you get back in search results to track what you click on, your spike in traffic would be caught if you used it. Better to spend the energy creating good work that people want to use.

Advice:

Spend time making quality sites; do not try to cheat your way up to the top. Cream rises naturally to the top. Put the energy into creating good content.

FLARToolKit - 3D Flash augmented Reality

During the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to get to attend and work the booth for Adobe in the Expo area. A lot of people hate booth duty but I personally love it. It's really where we get the best, most honest responses from members of the public, and it gives us a chance to poll how our corporate image is fairing.

At the booth, I demoed FLARToolKit. FLARToolKit (source code) is an AS3 version of ARToolKit. ARToolKit was a C library that enabled augmented reality; however the Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR compatible version, FLARToolKit, is not merely a port of the original C version. FLARToolKit is ported from a Java, version which is called NyARToolKit. (NyARToolKit seems to execute much faster than the original C version after the great effort of nyatla.)

FLARToolkit will detect the marker from an input image and calculate the camera position in three-dimension space. Something like Helper library are planned, but further processing (like synthesizing the 3D Graphics) needs to implemented by yourself. You can try a demo of it here at General Electric.

While at the booth, we got awarded the "Best in Show" award from Web Professional Minute, sponsored by Peachpit Press. This image links to the video.

My colleague Lee Brimelow took the concept one step further and has now produced an excellent tutorial on how to use the FLARTookKit for AS3 (Flash/Flex/AIR) developers.



If you haven't seen Lee Brimelow's GoToAndLearn website, it is a must see.