Category: Technology

Bruce Eckel has an in-depth article on the language/platform of choice for RIAs (rich internet applications). Although Java (with applets) was arguably the first-mover in this space, it lost out because of a bunch of issues (difficult to install, parts not well thought out, etc) which he has dissected. He contrasts this with JavaScript and AJAX which is clearly the winner right now.

However, he goes on to say that AJAX is essentially a hack that has reached its limits and is unlikely to go much further. It will run out of steam and the technology likely to take over is Flash (with Flex as the tool for creating rich Flash apps).

Very interesting reading even if you don’t agree with him.

From the O’Reilly Radar:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Here is a graphical representation of the various system calls that occur when the Apache webserver is running on Linux:

Now, let us look at a similar picture for IIS running on a Windows server:

The blogger who created these thinks this is clearly shows why a Microsoft webserver is inherently less secure.

Also check out the related slashdot discussion