Stories about: Continuum

In this interview we chat to Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla Corporation. Eich details the development of JS from its inception at Netscape in 1995, and comments on its continued popularity, as well as what he believes will be the future of client-side scripting languages on the Web.

The proliferation of Web technologies has been much on my mind lately. Last week, I talked about the continuum of Web development tools, ranging from traditional browser-based technologies all the way to applications deployed as binary executables. The interesting thing is that all of these tools are designed to achieve similar goals. So which do you use?

For developers of RIAs (rich Internet applications), Adobe's announcement that Google and Yahoo will soon be able to index text within Flash movies should come as welcome news. Until now, Flash files have been black boxes; with these binary files, search indexers could no more extract textual information from them than from JPEGs or PNGs.

At the logic level, MacBook, the benchmark for success in mainstream notebooks, is unremarkable -- indistinguishable from every PC notebook built on Intel Core 2 and its chipset-integrated graphics. Why, then, can't anyone with the same parts list emulate Apple's growth in an otherwise stagnant notebook market? Because Apple painstakingly hand-optimized its OS for a tiny variety of hardware architectures, presently Intel Core 2, while Microsoft wrote Vista to run on absolutely everything. No PC notebook maker can take the proprietary route that Apple plays to such advantage.

When the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program was first announced in 2005, media attention centered on two aspects: the US$100 price tag and the humanitarian nature of the project. Three years later, the environmental genius of these award-winning laptops still not only burns bright but even inspires copycats. Vendors such as Asustek and Via are working to bring their own low-cost, low-power computing devices to emerging markets and education.

Like many gearheads, I've owned a lot of portable computers over the years -- and I've wanted to replace every last one with a smaller, sleeker upgrade, from the "luggable" Apple IIc onward. But most of those upgrades have left me disappointed: with the lack of software; with cheap, hard-to-use interfaces; and with "optional" add-ons that were in fact very much necessary to make the machine useful.

We've been watching the romance develop between OCS (Office Communications Server 2007) and Exchange Server 2007 since OCS became available in beta earlier this year. When OCS finally came of age last month, we brought the mature couple together for a Hawaiian wedding.

While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space.

RSA, the security division of EMC, has completed its annual wireless survey, and the news is mixed. Wireless adoption is moving briskly in the post-WEP era, with advanced encryption gaining ground, yet there have been some minor setbacks. There are also some potential warning flags for still-emerging wireless technologies, such as RFID.

One of the world's largest SAP user groups is preparing to conduct a series of surveys among its Canadian and U.S. members to establish benchmarks of how enterprises make use of the German software giant's business applications.

Australia's great e-health vision continues to stall with new research showing that greater use of ICT in the health sector could generate savings worth more than $1.5 billion per annum.