In this episode, I talk with Alterity’s Brian Sweat about launching their new application, Easy Analytics for Inventory, on the Intuit Partner Platform. We talk about IPP, Flex, cloud, analytics, and the ready to go QuickBooks customer-base of 4.5 million users – a pretty exciting setup for one development team’s story on using RIAs and the cloud.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

If you’re interested in an overview of IPP, I suggest last week’s episode with Intuit architect Jeff Collins.

Show Notes

• Brian tells us about Alterity and their new offering, Easy Analytics for Inventory.
• I ask Brian to tell us how they started getting interested in using IPP and what the process was like getting up and running.
• We talk about the use of Flex and how the IPP platform integrates with the UI layer.
• Brian tells us about the ability to more closely track what users are actually using and doing (or not using) in a cloud-based application.
• While customers don’t seem to be overly concerned with cloud vs. desktop deployment – at this early point – Brain says the support and even install time on cloud seems much smaller than for traditional deployment options.
• This leads to a discussion about the other effects a PaaS, like IPP, has on a company’s structure: namely not having to worry so much about billing and other back-office concerns. And then there’s all the marketing Intuit does for them in the App Center.

Full Transcript

See the full transcript over on the RIA Weekly post.

Disclosure: Intuit is a client and sponsored this episode.

This week, Coté is joined by Intuit’s Jeff Collins to talk about the Intuit Partner Platform, or IPP, a ready-to-use PaaS for building on-top of QuickBase, including with Flex.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

IPP is a very interested Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) available from Intuit used for building on the existing QuickBase ecosystem. It uses Flex as the user-interface technology and there’s also a marketplace available to sell the applications in. More so than just using Flex, I think IPP and platforms like it are a space where RIAs will really start to shine.

As you may recall, we’ve discussed IPP before in the podcast, notable in episode #45 with guest Alex Barnett, also of Intuit.

Also, check out the full transcript over on the RIA Weekly post.

Disclosure: Intuit is a client, and sponsored this podcast.

This week, it’s Silverlight 4, Azure, Google Gears “death,” Flash with Salesforce and RIM, and more. The full roster of Coté, Ryan Stewart, and Mike Downey are back for this one:

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

See the full transcript over on the RIAWeekly.com post of this episode.

Show notes:

• RichPlatform.com – Downey’s new blog
• Microsoft PDC 2009 – Azure, Silverlight 4, a little bit of SharePoint.
• We then get into what Azure brings for RIA developers.
• Silverlight 4 – much more “plumbing,” etc. Mike talks about the Managed Extensibility Framework for doing components in Silverlight. And here’s the Silverlight and WPF merging reporting from Mary Jo Foley I mention.
• COM in Silverlight 4 – for Office integration, also looking for how to do it on the Mac.
• Silverlight muti-touch app – Ryan got an HP Compaq L2105 multi-touch screen. TechCrunch’s first multi-touch application post.
• Also, Bing’s new, Silverlight-based maps. Also, see MG Siegler’s (TechCrunch) more cautionary take on this vs. HTML 5.
• Google Gears shut-down – was used for local storage, multi-threaded apps; obviously means Google thinks HTML 5 momentum looks good.
• Then we call back to SharePoint at PDC – SharePoint 2010, a lot of Silverlight integration – “web parts,” which are widgets for SharePoint.
• Silverlight Facebook SDK – we go off on a small tangent about Facebook being the new Aol in the making
• Flash and Salesforce (Ryan’s post)
• Flash and RIM – Adobe support for doing HTML stuff on Blackberry.
• Betas for AIR 2 and Flash 10.1, Ryan’s post
• We wrap up by talking about Ryan’s recent HTML 5 post.

A little more

Here’s some items we didn’t get to in this episode:

• Best & Worst practices for RIAs, a presentation.
• There’s an updated Flex Builder 3 for Linux, that doesn’t expire.
• WaveMaker 6.0 Cloud Development Platform Features Automated Multi-Tenant Support
• Winter Olympics via Silverlight
• Upcoming RIA related conferences.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Adobe are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

This week, Ryan and I finally get Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith on to talk about the Palm Developer Program. Tragically, my voice goes all robot-style pretty quickly due to some (obviously) bad equipment. Thankfully, I don’t yammer on too much this episode:

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

In this episode we discuss:

• What are you guys do over at Palm?
• The announced Palm Developer program.
• Freely accessible app downloads, and raw feeds to all catalogs so people can build their own app stores.
• What’s WebOS like?
• Ben speaks to spreading the web to all aspects of programming. As Ben says, “we believe in the web.”
• Then Dion tells us the technical break-up of WebOS. Mojo, Ajax, etc. accessing device services as URLs. Multi-window applications, notifications,
• Ryan asks how mobile will (or will not) drive HTML and Ajax (or “open web”) evolution. “For us, the web really is the platform,” -Ben “We don’t want to create our own weird APIs,” they want the APIs to be standard.
• Flash on the Pre.
• I ask Dion and Ben to tell us about the Pre – is it just an iPhone clone?
• We then talk about the different form factor of mobile development a tad.
• Getting ahold of the Pre for development – in December there’ll be a developer device program, but not you just got get the retail one.

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

I’m always searching for more advanced uses of desktop-bound RIAs, like AIR, Silverlight Out-of-Browser, and JavaFX’s out of browser options. Thus far, most examples have really just been web pages on the desktop that, at best, have off-line modes or are closed-up video players. It was nice, then, to find a use of AIR that took moved beyond these uses in Konductor’s AIR client. As Derek Zarbrook walks us through – first in an interview and then a demo – the AIR client hooks up to the Konductor hosting system to give non-designers an easy, but controlled way to update their web sites.

Interview

Demo

(As a side note, this is the first time we’ve used VideoPress to host videos. What do you think?)

Disclosure: Adobe is a client.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

While at SAP TechEd this week, I snagged Matthias Zeller of Adobe for a leisurely discussion about enterprise RIAs. First, we talk about the freshly announced LiveCycle Mosaic, the RIA mashup/composite application/portal-ish product Matthias and team have been working on (previously under the name “Project Genesis“). As we note in the recording, this was the product he’d been doing a lot of field research around that we discussed in episode #55. Being at SAP, we then talk about the notion of “timeless software” that SAP had been talking about and what that means for RIAs: namely, layering client RIA’s on-top of SOA-faced back-ends.

While at Adobe MAX, I had the pleasure of talking with one of the customer keynotes, Adam Mollenkopf of FedEx Custom Critical. His team had worked on a Flash Platform and LiveCycle driven console for tracking high-dollar shipments and monitoring just about every aspect of the shipment itself. I’m always searching for stories of why an RIA (here, Flash) was used over Ajax or traditional GUIs, and I think in Adam does a good explanation of why they came to pick the Flash Platform over Ajax in the first part, the interview. We then sit down and he walks us through the demo of the console in action.

(Update, Dec 4th, 2009: I’ve added a transcript for the interview portion.)

Interview

Adam first tells us what FedEx Custom Critical does, and then we jump into a discussion of how they came to select the Adobe stack for implementation of their shipment tracking console. They not only chose Flex and LiveCycle for the rich interface, but also for the high-speed data transfer between front-end and back-end. Adam really likes the data management that comes with the stack, esp. being able to use “true push” to the client.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Hello, everybody here we at Adobe MAX 2009 in the lovely Los Angeles. Not Los Vegas and this is Michael Coté of course, with RedMonk and we’ve got a guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Adam MollenKopf: Hi, I’m Adam MollenKopf. I work for FedEx Custom Critical and glad to be here today.

Michael Coté: I was talking with you little bit before the filming and we were going through the pretty interesting demo that we are going to see in a little bit, but for the first thing I’ve never actually heard of FedEx Critical, so could you tell people what exactly FedEx Critical is?

Adam MollenKopf: Absolutely; most of you are probably familiar with FedEx, the express, the ground, and the freight. Custom Critical is a unique part of FedEx that specializes in shipping things that are very time sensitive. So things that need to move from New York to Miami they would expedite it. So somebody has got an assembly line down or something we can move a part to fix that appropriately. We also do special care and handling. We do a lot of sensitive shipments for perishable goods and other items of that nature.

Michael Coté: So essentially you have — I forget the agent; you have an agent and they are kind of looking at a console and then all the various trucks are feeding into the agents view of something and then I guess you have customers calling in every 5 minutes, you know, to check on their shipment and wanting to know where it is or something. Is that the kind of typical scenario for a shipment that might be going around?

Adam MollenKopf: Exactly, so the things we ship are very high value. We need to know to the minute the location and what is happening on it at any given point in time and then intent of the application that we’ll show in just a minute is basically to detect abnormal events and present those to somebody to take proactive action on it before it becomes a bad situation, and to automate all the normal events. So when we get a position fix on a vehicle I am still going to meet the expected time of arrival. We don’t really want to nuisance an agent with that, because we have in the past, so we just want them to look at the abnormal situations expectation management.

Michael Coté: The system that we’d been talking about earlier was basically tracking a truck or whatever as it is moving along and I’m curios when you are looking at the requirements for what you were going to build, like, how did you come to the Adobe stuff? How did you make, like, an RIA essentially?

Adam MollenKopf: It was actually quite a long process to get to the Adobe solution and we finally found a good solution with Adobe. So we experimented with a number of other technologies for the last few years honestly. We tried this with [Java] Swing, we tried this with Ajax component vendors and had miserable performance and scalability issues with it in the past.

And just due to the sheer volume of the thousands of trucks that we are trying to ship and the thousands of trucks that we are trying to track and the shipments that are trying to track as well just the amount of volume was too much for those frameworks to handle.

Data services, LifeCycle, and a lot of the other Adobe technologies, Flex in specific, allowed for us to have a nice visualization of that, that was effective.

Michael Coté: Given those requirements what was it about LifeCycle Data Services, and Flex that, that fitted better than say, like, Swing or Ajax or something like that?

Adam MollenKopf: Well, data management was a big part of LifeCycle Data Services when we selected that. So being able to bind automatically to the client and bind automatically to other clients. So if you are an agent at Custom Critical and I am an agent at Custom Critical and we are looking at the same shipment and you modify something or something in field modifies it – the truck does something that causes a new state; being able to see that in near real time with very little latency was very important.

So both from a data management and from a push, having a true push technology which is something that has been absent in the past. So the RTPM, the Real Time Messaging Protocol is provided and a true push protocol that’s socket based up to the client.

Michael Coté: Right, right versus, like, HTTP or something like that, yeah.

Adam MollenKopf: The server, and the amount of data going back to the server is minimized, so it’s like an observer pattern. So the client just has an open socket and we push something he wants to observe as it changes. So we’re not killing our servers, and we have a lot less server requirements as far as the number of servers to support those.

Michael Coté: What was the development process like for when you — you said your went through several alternatives and then when you did settle on using parts of the Adobe stack for it. How long did that take and what was the process for doing it?

Adam MollenKopf: It was fairly quick with the Adobe stuff. So I got hooked up a couple of folks at Adobe and we basically did a couple of proof of concepts and it was fairly quick and actually we did most of the work on our own, it didn’t require a lot of Adobe assistance because it was pretty well documented and we were able to go in there and test out the two major features of that we were looking for. So the data management and push technology and honestly we had lots of experience trying it with other –

Michael Coté: Right, your requirements all fitted that, right.

Adam MollenKopf: Right, so it was pretty well defined and it was kind of like, well, we don’t have a solution. We still don’t have a solution and we came across Adobe and now we do have a solution.

Michael Coté: You guys are using this now and it’s finished and, like, what are your plans for it in the future?

Adam MollenKopf: To extend it, so — what we’ll show you here is just the start of what we are going to do. So there’s a lot of other areas that we are going to apply this to not only just shipment tracking but also how we price things to the customer, how do we analyze history, how do we analyze things over geography and time. Being able to reason both over space and time, add micro and macro views.

Michael Coté: So, I guess there is sort of new information about things you could sell your customers to put it one way; but you have a new understanding of things that — business practices that you were doing in the past that you can fine-tune and make up new products and things to sell to them.

Adam MollenKopf: Right, so actually some new revenue generating things that came out of this is our security surveillance. So being able to show our customer that we have almost like a Network Operation Center, but we have Security Operation Center that is basically tracking these things to this detail that puts a lot of ease to the customer’s minds when they’re shipping something very high value or something extremely sensitive, which is our specialty.

Michael Coté: Having talked about the demo so much let’s check it out.

Demo

In addition to the general RIA-ness, the special thing to note is the rules engine backing all of the predictions and analyzing sensor and geo data. Those create an interesting (and for FedEx useful) stream of real-time data to console of realtime data to churn over, expose in the RIA, and start making business decisions around.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored these videos.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

In this episode, I’m at SAP TechEd 2009 and jointed by SAP’s Thomas Jung and Colgate-Palmolive’s Ed Herrmann. Both, more importantly, are the the hosts of Enterprise Geeks. While this isn’t strictly an RIA themed episode, our guests Thomas Jung and Ed Hermann hit on many of the favored topics for RIA Weekly, including enterprise applications and HTML 5. We get into some HTML 5 talk as well. We discuss:

• The Enterprise Geek show – topics they’ve sussed out in the SAP, enterprise, and tech world and the emerging role the podcast plays in the SAP community.
• What they think of Google Wave: business uses for Wave and some theoretic thinking on what you’d have to do to start using it at a “normal” enterprise like, say, Colgate-Palmolive.
• What’s up with HTML 5? Does the <canvas/> tag make these two excited about dancing charts in HTML?

Disclosure: SAP is a client and paid T&E to TechEd.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

With the special numbering of 9,000, we kick off Ryan and I’s highlights of Adobe MAX 2009:

• Quick rundown of Adobe MAX 2009 announcements such as: Flash 10.1 with much focus on mobile, LiveCycle ES and mobile access.
• Check out PNC’s Virtual Wallet.
• Ryan having just given a talk on the Adobe Collaboration Services, I ask him to give us an overview.
• Of the services and announcements, I like Shibuya which is Adobe’s service for doing an App Store. This brings up our favorite topic of small development shops – even of one – having a viable revenue pipe.
• Experimental code using putting FXG into the canvas tag and other sneak previews. (Check out some more HTML 5 vs. Adobe “fun” over on Apple Insider.)
• iPhone app development with the Adobe tool-chain. Be sure to check out the “iPhone in a blender” video which is sure to further win over Apple’s hearts. And, see the PhoneGap approval we reference.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and paid travel and hotel for Adobe MAX. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

Ryan and I are once again joined by Mike Downey as we go over recent RIA-related news and topics:

• Microsoft WebsiteSpark – get web app stack for $100 for 3 years.
• Flash Platform Services – Ryan’s post – what’s the story beyond “Distribution.” What’re the analytics, the ads?
• Telemetry in applications.
• And then what are the other parts of the Flash Platform Services – Collaboration (CoCoMo/Breeze/Connect stuff). And then Social stuff, sometime in the future.
• What’s going on in RIA social apps.
• Ryan in Singapore: what’s the scene in Singapore like? Some RIA apps using sound.
• Is the US mobile scene becoming like the Asian one we always get experience-clobbered with? Genuitec on stand-alone HTML 5 synchronized web applications.
• What do things like Silverlight on Intel Atom mean? Tim Anderson’s take: Silverlight on Linux desktops.
• What’s going on with tablets?
• Adobe and Omniture – Coté’s quick analysis, and James Governor’s as well. What’s the “M” in “CPM” mean anyhow?
• Upcoming conferences.

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.