New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

Coming in 2007: the VR internet

In his now-classic 1981 short story True Names, author Vernor Vinge imagined a worlldwide virtual reality network in which users could assume alter egos and manipulate data with techniques similar to wizardry and magic. Many computer users, particularly gamers, embraced those concepts wholeheartedly, as attested to by the success of Second Life and other online environments (including World of Warcraft and similar MMORPGs). Now a non-profit group is building a new type of internet specifically for VR games and applications:

Neuronet, which is separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable of meeting the data transmission requirements of emerging cinematic and immersive virtual-reality technologies," according to a Wednesday announcement from the Vancouver-based International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies.

The first-generation Neuronet is scheduled to go live in 2007, the group said. Consumer applications are expected as early as 2009.

Virtual reality generally refers to environments with visual and audio information that makes a person feel immersed in a computer-generated realm. The growth of environments such as Second Life has spotlighted such efforts, and IBM believes that virtual worlds will open new doors to e-commerce as well.

The group promises that Neuronet will have high-speed communication, a key constraint for virtual reality, which requires transmission of large quantities of graphics and other data, as well as fast responses to give users a better illusion of realism.

Although the full impact is still years off, it's not much of a stretch to imagine the impact of such a VR network on project management and collaboration among remote team members. Online meetings and webinars, once a novelty, are now a staple in the business world. In 10 years, will it be commonplace for project teams to collaborate in simulated meeting rooms, solving problems by manipulating shared data models in 3D? IBM's endorsement of Second Life, and now Neuronet, is an indication that it may be.

The wild, wild Web

Read/WriteWeb weighs in with predictions of the important Web technologies and trends of 2007. Topics include, Microsoft vs. Google, enterprise collaboration, the proliferation of Amazon-like Web services and the rise of rich internet and mobile apps.

Open source Java vs .NET

With Sun finally announcing that Open Source Java will be here in 2007, ZDNet's Dana Blankenburg asks the relevant question, "Should you care?" He considers Sun's move to be purely defensive in the face of the rising star of .NET.

What do you think? Is Sun's announcement too little too late? Does .NET have the momentum? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below.

DB2 - the home version

For novice SQL/DB2 enthuasiasts, IBM is offering a free tutorial in the form of The DB2 Business Game:

If you're a beginner with IBM® DB2® and SQL, you may wonder how the technical skills you're learning are used in the "real world." Here is a chance for you to put your DB2 SQL skills into play in this interactive game! Jump into a "run your own business" scenario, where your company's future depends on a key report needed to secure funds for a critical upgrade. Use your relational database skills to build this report.

This is part of an ongoing series of SQL and DB2 tutorials currently offered by IBM.

Analyze this!

An interesting post from Juice Analytics on "Lightweight data exporation in Excel", which shows how to set up in-cell bar graphs using Excel's REPT function. A follow-up post has more examples and a spreadsheet you can download and play with. A must for data analysts and Excel power users.

Sun's Dave Johnson coming to Charlotte

New Equities is pleased to be sponsoring the CharJUG's August meetup, which will be held Monday, August 21st, 6:30 pm at our headquarters in downtown Charlotte. This month's guest speaker will be Dave Johnson from Sun:

Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol

Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.

More information at the CharJUG Meetup site.

Wally McClure presents Ajax

On Tuesday, July 25th, New Equities is sponsoring an event for .NET developers through the Charlotte chapter of the Enterprise Developers Guild: "Wally McClure presents Ajax". Here's the event info:

Date:	7/25/2006
Time:	6:00 PM
Location:	Microsoft Campus

Join us Tuesday, July 25, at 6 PM on the Microsoft campus for an evening with Wally McClure -- MVP, author, and Tennessee neighbor. Wally is working on a new book and is eager to show us how Ajax has progressed for .NET web developers. In case you've been vacationing on the South Pole without an internet connection, Ajax is the technique of getting information exchanged between the client and the server without a post-back and the usual page flash and redraw.

Wallace B. McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He continued his education there, receiving a Master’s degree in the same field in late 1991. Since that time, McClure has done consulting and development for such companies as Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. He is the founder and president of McClure Development. You can find Wally’s blog at weblogs.asp.net/wallym.

We have also added Wally's blog from our Tech Links blogroll in the right column.

Directions to the Microsoft Campus can be found here, as well as on the Enterprise Developers Guild website.

The 411 on Web 2.0

Washington Business Journal has an excellent introduction to Web 2.0 concepts and lingo: "Web two-point, oh?"

Web 2.0 is slowly making its way into the business world. But there is a challenge to widespread use: No one knows exactly what it is. There's no official Web 2.0 program to install. The features have to find their way into everyday use, which they are starting to do.

Implementation of Web 2.0 does not require dramatic action but rather a subtle shift in the way users connect to applications. The subtlety of the changeover can make it more difficult to get buy-in from colleagues and clients, but the upside is that many of the applications are free or cost very little. [snip]

Plenty of tech types claim that Web 2.0 is just the buzzword for all things newly Internet, something that gets used ubiquitously and without any real meaning.

John Dvorak, an editor at PC Magazine, decries Web 2.0 as a bunch of high-tech hooey: "Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s," he wrote in a March 2006 column.

Dvorak says: If you can get past the buzzwords and conferences, the real essence of Web 2.0 is making the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet more efficient. It's about self-service.

If jargon such as "Ajax", "tagging",  "wikis" and "social bookmarking" seems a bit strange, this is a good primer. If you are already fully Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant, but are interested in going deeper, check out this widely-linked article by software maven Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software".

(Hat tip: Tiffany Bridge)

.NET at the speed of Java

Mating cats and dogs alert: ZDNet's David Berlind has an interesting report on a new partnership announced by Mainsoft and Azul Systems that allows .NET apps to run in a J2EE environment at the speed of accelerated Java. How? By translating .NET source into Java bytecode and running it on an a dedicated network attached processor:

Whereas the old-school (I can't believe I'm calling it old school) XML integration basically puts a layer of XML-based abstraction between the two normally incompatible code-bases, the new school a la Mainsoft and Azul's partnership takes .NET source code, turns it into Java bytecode (that's Mainsoft's job) and then runs that code on Azul's network attached processor.  The result, say the two men, isn't just a new form of Java/.NET integration, it also is a way of taking .NET applications that still run out of gas after being put on the most powerful systems, and squeezing even more peformance out of them.

If you're in either the .NET or Java/J2EE camp and interested in the possibilities of this sort of integration, ZDNet includes a podcast of an interview with Mainsoft's Sales and Service VP Ron Johnsen and Azul's Chief Marketing Officer Shahin Khan. The podcast is also playable directly as an MP3.

Open-source BI suite

JasperSoft is attempting to shake up the Business Intelligence marketplace with its announcement of a Java-based open-source BI suite:

The Jasper Intelligence product line will include a server for generating reports. In about a month, the company is expected to release a component for doing analysis and then a so-called ETL product later this year for moving data between different sources.

The Java-based server products will complement the company's existing open-source product, JasperReports for generating reports.

Business intelligence software--a collection of products tools for analyzing business data such as sales records--is one area corporate customers continue to spend on, according to analysts' surveys. The segment is dominated by larger, full-service companies, such as IBM and Oracle, and specialized vendors, such as SAS, Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion.

JasperSoft's strategy is to undercut entrenched vendors on price with a simpler product, said Paul Doscher, CEO of JasperSoft. It is designing its product to appeal to developers, who can take the software and embed data analysis into applications they write, rather than try to sell directly to end users.

IBM, Cognos and SAS are probably not losing much sleep at this point, but if nothing else, this may provide an inexpensive entry point into the BI space for developers looking to expand their range of capabilities.