Microsoft Live Labs released Volta today. While all the stuff about distributed application development is true, I fear people are missing the core feature offered by Volta:

Volta turns the code you write in C#, VB.NET, or just about any .NET language, into JavaScript that runs in potentially any web browser.

That's right, you can get all the advantages of using a strongly typed programming language and can still target any browser! No special browser add-ins are needed! Volta produces 100% pure JavaScript code. Currently only IE and Firefox are officially supported, but this isn't an inherent limitation of Volta.

Volta does this using a "re-compiler" that turns MISL (the .NET CLR's "assembly language") into JavaScript. First you compile your code into MISL (using the standard C# or VB compiler) and then Volta turns the MISL into a bunch of JavaScript files. As event handlers and other code on your web page executes, these files are loaded into your browser as needed. Basically, the CLR's on demand "type loader" functionality is reproduced by a script provided by Volta.

While I actually enjoy the dynamic nature of JavaScript and all the tricks it enables, I still think Volta is a major step forward for web application development. This is for one simple reason: large volumes of strongly typed code are much more maintainable then large volumes of JavaScript code. This is primarily because with strongly typed code, when you make a change, it is much easier to locate and fix all the other parts of the code impacted by that change. The compiler helps a lot and the strict encapsulation offered by languages such as C# and VB makes the impact of changes much more predictable.

I also believe that it is much easier to produce stable, high quality, and extensible shared libraries using a strongly typed programming language. Language features such as interfaces and type inheritance with virtual methods are critical parts of any sophisticated library design.

In the context of the current crisis around Facebook Beacon, it is interesting to think about how such feeds could evolve into a much more comprehensive "life logging" system.

Suppose that:

1. Just about everything you did could get logged. Everything you did at any web site, everything you did with any application, everywhere you went and the things around you (via your mobile device), the shows you watch on your cable tv, the purchases you make using your credit card, etc.
2. You could easily choose what events to not log at all, what ones to log to a private store, what ones to share with your real friends, and what ones to share with everybody else.
3. You had powerful tools to search and visualize your private event log that would (eventually) contain years of data. Think of your private log as a digitally augmented personal memory.

Facebook Beacon and it's hand full of client web sites is just the tip of the iceberg. There are all kinds of data sources out there just waiting to be leveraged by such a system.

How private and secure would your personal log need to be before you trusted it? No data mining by advertisers at all? Anonymous data mining ok?

What would be needed to really give you control over all the data you produce? Facebook's easy to miss toast with its default to public policy clearly doesn't cut it.

Would the value of being able to do search over the details of your past ever justify collecting all this data into one place, no matter how secure that place is and how much control you had over it?

It looks as if the project I worked on before joining Live Labs is being announced today. Congratulations to my ex-team! Of course it had a much shorter and more interesting code name then: Yona.

The part I worked on is the OMA-DM server at the heart of the product's device management capabilities. This server interacts with devices over the Internet to perform the management tasks requested by other components of the system. It keeps track of the state of these tasks so they can be restarted should communication with the device be interrupted.

Working on that service gave me an opportunity to work with SyncML. SyncML is RESTful in that it defines a small set of verbs (get, add, replace, delete and execute) that operate on a large universe of entities identified by URIs.

However the HTTP binding for SyncML shuns HTTP's verbs and does everything with POST messages that contain multiple SyncML operations. I suppose some people would say this makes SyncML non-RESTful or, at minimum, that it isn't a very good HTTP citizen.

But, since it was designed to interact with devices which can be slow and relatively dumb, SyncML had some interesting requirements it had to meet. You don't want to have to do any more round trips over the network then necessary when establishing a connection can have lots of latency and each message eats up the device's battery power.

Another interesting aspect of SyncML is that it allows operations to be grouped into atomic units of work. This is very important when changing something like the settings the device uses to connect to it's network. A partial change would take the device offline, preventing any further remote management.

Modeling this behavior using multiple HTTP requests/responses would require the device to keep a lot more state over longer periods of time, something that can be a huge problem given the limited amount of available memory in many devices.

SyncML's URI space is open-ended and very flexible. A number of standard URI groups have been defined (that, and a security model, is mostly what you get from OMA-DM).

Note also that SyncML and OMA-DM are industry defined standards, not something Microsoft made up. They are implemented to at least some extent on most cell phones as well as many other kinds of embedded and remote devices.

When Listas Toolbar's Show Clippings button is clicked, it highlights the clippable parts of the page as shown below:

As you can see, the highlight is a layer above page content. When you mouse over a highlight, the Add and Close buttons are shown.

You can click on the Add button to add the clipping to a default list or click the little "drop down" arrow in the add button to add the clipping to a specific list.

Due to the way your web browser works, these clipping highlights keep you from clicking on any links under the highlight. When you add the clipping to a list the highlight is removed, allowing access to the links underneath it. To remove the highlight without adding a clipping to a list you can click the close button in the upper right corner of the highlight.

We considered a number of alternative designs when developing the toolbar. One option was to always insert the Add button into the page content itself instead of having the show/hide clippings action. Our concern was that this additional button would ruin the carefully designed look of the web pages you visit.

The layered approach adds the inconvenience of having to explicitly choose to show/hide clippings, but has the advantage of making it clear that the add button is provided by the toolbar, not something provided by the original page. Also, the highlight approach helps to clearly identify exactly what will be clipped and, because you don't have to worry about finding a good place to insert the add button, makes creating clipping definitions easier.

What do you think? Are the advantages of the highlight approach worth the inconvenience? Does having to click show/hide clippings make the clippings feature too much trouble?

We want your feedback! Please add comments to the Clipping Highlight Feedback list.

Security

One of the goals of the Listas Toolbar is to enable some Greasmonkey like functionality without having to download JavaScript code to your computer. The fact is it just isn't safe to allow scripts contributed by the community to be distributed to other people's computers.

Instead of using script code to find interesting elements in a web page, the Listas Toolbar's clipping definitions use an XPath expression. This XPath is evaluated against the page's DOM, not the page's source HTML.

So, when we enable community sharing of clipping definitions, we'll be distributing XPath expressions not script code.

Ease of Creation

Another goal of the Listas Toolbar is to allow a large number of people to create clipping definitions. The toolbar provides an UI that lets you drill down to the interesting parts of a web page simply by clicking on what you want to be a clipping. Behind the scenes, the toolbar constructs an XPath expression that identifies the part your clicking on. Here is a video of defining clippings for the Windows Live search results:
 
Video: Listas Toolbar Define Clippings in Automatic Mode

While this "automatic" mode works for a lot of web sites, there are some that are too complex for the heuristics we use. For such sites the "power users" among us can enable the advanced mode which allows them to view the document's HTML element tree and edit the XPath directly. Here is a video of advanced mode in action:
 
Video: Listas Toolbar Define Clippings in Advanced Mode

We felt that using XPath instead of JavaScript for clipping definitions would make the advanced mode accessible to more people, but it does come at the cost of flexibility.

What do you think? Try defining clippings for a few of your favorite web sites. Did the automatic mode work OK for you most of the time? For which sites did you have to switch to advanced mode and why? In advanced mode, were you able to work out the XPath that did the trick?

We want your feedback! Please add experiences to the Clipping Definition Feedback list.

In What if I actually like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? David writes:

The majority of web sites and applications still suck. And if most developers and designers can’t make a clean run with the training wheels and constricted playground of HTML, then we probably are in no rush to start playing with a Ducatti on the Autobahn.

 
Photo by Chris 73

 
Photo by Chris 73

I think the correct analogy is more along the lines of a 1886 Benz Motorwagen (HTML, CSS, and JavaScriipt) to a 1924 Model T (a Rich Internet Client platform).

We have so far to go before we are giving users of the web (and computers in general) the experiences that technology should be delivering.

Do you really think that application development 10-20 years from now is the mishmash of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript we have today? I don't.

I don't think it is necessarily Silverlight or Flash either. But those, and things like them, are steps along the same evolutionary path that led us to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I want to see where they take us.

This is my first day as a part of the Microsoft Live Labs team. This should be fun....

Jon Udell's post pointed me to RSSBus. I still have a bit of exploring to do, but this seems to be fascinating technology. The way the documentation is integrated with the "development" environment is powerful.

But I ran into a problem early on: I use Google Reader but it can't access the local feeds I created using the RSSBus Desktop application.

Just before seeing Jon's post (synchronicity?), I had been thinking about how I would like to use Google Reader to read my e-mail, forums, etc. In short, any media that is bested delivered as a stream of data. Clicking on the title of an item could take me to a web page where I could reply, etc.

I think RSSBus Feed Server would let me create a feed that made work e-mail accessible on the web. I could probably even secure the end point in some way. But I would still have to give the credentials for that feed to Google so that the Google Reader servers could pull from my Microsoft corporate e-mail feed. I might get in trouble if I did that....

I could safely read my Microsoft e-mail via Google Reader if Google Reader could access local feeds. I could use credentials stored/entered locally to pull corporate e-mail using OWA's APIs and make it available as a local RSS feed.

But the reason I really like Google Reader is that no matter what computer I end up using, I can pick up exactly where I left off in the stream of items, star items for later follow up, etc. However, even if the feed were local, the backend could still store state and configuration information for that feed. 

I think a comment by Andrew Shebanow on Mark's Silly Season post makes a key point:

I want to point out the underlying assumption of all your questions: that the browser is the only appropriate and necessary application for interacting with the internet. I think this is a common assumption amongst the web cognoscenti, but it too is an assumption that can be readily challenged.

I assert the core value for the web of the future will be in the services not in the UI. APIs let anyone and everyone build whatever UI they want and need. UIs need to be diverse to meet the needs of specific sets of users, scenarios, devices, etc.

After thinking about the issues raised by Mark Pilgram and Steve Gillmor while listening the the Social Networking: Enabling the Two-Way Street panel discussion from Mix 07, it seems the future of the web is a combination of a compelling user experience, enabled by things like Silverlight and Flash, in conjunction with comprehensive APIs that provide access to the data behind those user interfaces using foundational web technologies like REST.

We need to ask ourselves, is the real "web" the presentation layer or is it the data and the protocols used to access that data (the services)?

Where is the real long term value for users and companies? I think it is in the services.

Steve Gillmor's The Two Webs post is, correctly, seen as a recongition of the strength of Microsoft's new Silverlight offering. But I think Mr. Gillmor was making a different point.

Silverlight drives home a trend that was started by Flash: using the browser to bootstrap an application platform that goes beyond what DHTML and JavaScript offer.

First, let's ask what exactly is meant by the "web"? Is it the DHTML/JavaScript presentation layer or the HTTP protocol? Or does it take both to make the "web"?

While Silverlight and Flash certainly allow applications to be developed that don't use DHTML and JavaScript, these applications will make use of HTTP and all its associated infrastructure. This goes beyond using the protocol to simply load Silverlight or Flash resources. In the case of Microsoft's offerings, at least, there is a growing recognition of the simple elegance of REST.

The web's presentation layer has changed a lot since 1992. This issue here isn't that there is change, but that this change isn't based on standards. In this regard Silverlight and Flash are in the same boat.

I can look at this issue from three different perspectives: the user's, the developer's, and the "web purest's". Other perspectives are, I'm sure, valid. But I personally understand these three.

To the user, technology like Silverlight and Flash means one thing: a better user experience than what is offered by DHTML+JavaScript. Nicer graphics, better performance, more features. As an user why do I care what technology is used?

While most users probably won't directly think about it, the underlying concern is that all the applications they want to use won't be available on the computer in which they have invested time and money or on the new computer they want to purchase. Applications that use only standard based technologies are more likely to work no matter what kind of computer and operating system you have.

But given the nature of market forces, is this really a valid concern? Presentation layers like Silverlight and Flash will get ported to wherever the users are. They are the new platform. It isn't an issue of Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac anymore. Granted, Silverlight's availability isn't as pervasive as Flash's yet... but it is just a matter of time and market forces.

Because the new presentation layers are (or at least will be) ubiquitous and can all be installed on a computer at the same time, they actually work to reduce lock in for the user, not increase it.

As for the developer, let's face it: DHTML+JavaScript, in addition to whatever back end framework you use, doesn't make for a great developer experience. The layers and layers of JavaScript code necessary to develop the typical AJAX application cause debugging, code maintenance and performance issues. It is also difficult to cleanly separate the design and behavior aspects of an application, making it harder to rapidly iterate on features.

Having a cleaner, consistent, end-to-end platform with deep support from great tools certainly makes devolvement easier. That is what these new presentation layers are offering to the developer.

However, developers also have concerns about lock in. One of the first choices made for any software development project is the technologies that will be used. However, within the scope of a single project what you have to work with is more or less a known quantity. Either you can build what you need given what is available when you start or you shouldn't use that platform. There isn't a lot of up front concern about what may nor may not be possible two or three years down the road. Things are changing too rapidly to make worrying about that worth while.

For developer's the real concern with lock-in isn't a project by project issue, it is a career and skill development issue. As a developer, I invest a lot in learning particular technologies, acquiring, building and becoming proficient with specific tools, etc. If I invest in a proprietary platform and that platform falls apart, my lively hood is at stake. But if I invest in standards based or open source technologies, I'm not too concerned if particular vendors come and go.

But for the vast majority of developers, those who use the platforms/tools provided by others, it still comes down to making a bet on Microsoft, Adobe, or the "open source community". Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Microsoft and Adobe offer more consistent and complete "end-to-end" solutions, but the energy and productivity of the "open source community" can't be denied. None are going away anytime soon.

And finally, the web purest. There is something that just feels right about the level playing field that an entirely standards based platform implies. Proprietary computing platforms have been causing problems of various sorts for much longer then any of the current players have been around. Making sure no single player has absolute control is a good idea.

But aren't there concerns of a different kind of "lock in" here too? Should genuine and needed innovations funded by and for commercial interests be ignored? Should they be looted from their creators for the sake of the community? 

Standards are but one of the forces that drive the evolution of technology. Sometimes they are the most significant and much needed force (they were necessary to create the web). At other times might they stand in the way of real and needed progress?

The web ecosystem is diverse and robust. No single solution or approach dominates. Silverlight isn't going to change that. I look forward to seeing how everybody will get their game on as they rise to the occasion of continuing to evolve the single dynamic and ever changing web.

I've been monitoring blogs for people's impressions of what is happening at Mix 07. Here are some more comments that caught my eye:

Day 2 of MIX07 (Jason Clark) - I know there will be plenty of people calling this the Microsoft Flash, and I can see that viewpoint (I guess), but the truth of the matter is that it appears, at least on the surface to be much more.

Microsoft Silverlight takes on Adobe, AJAX (Tyic) - It’s a way for Microsoft to attract developers interested in making web applications that a more functional than the typical old-style form-based interface. Nowadays, that means AJAX developers, using primarily JavaScript on the browser side.

Silverlight Overview at TechCrunch (Andrew Wooldridge) - I love this tit for tat going on between Adobe and Microsoft, it pushes the envelope and in the end us web developers have more options to create cool stuff for the web. Now that two of the big players in this space have shown their hands, I can't wait to see what comes out of Google/Firefox world.

Windows Live API to be opened (Venkatarangan) - Microsoft is certainly late to the game, but can they pull it off from behind this time, let us wait and see.

Microsoft is NOT anti open source (Knoxville Boy) - I am so pumped that Microsoft is up on PHP and they have been showcasing demos of debugging Silverlight on OSX which rocks!

The Day the Web Changed: NET in the Browser! (Jeff Prosise) -It means goodbye JavaScript, hello C#. It means managed code in the browser. It means an escape from HTML and browser DOMs and a better way to build browser-based UIs using XAML.

Silverlight and the DLR (Ted Leung) - In the end, though, I probably won’t be doing much with Silverlight, for the same reasons that I’ve written about before. The technology has definitely gotten stronger, but the other issues haven’t really changed much: there are no tools for the Mac or Linux, and as far as influencing the technology, you’re just standing outside the Big House, pressing your nose up against the window.

Actionatr, Web as Hash Pipe, and SaaS via Domain-Specific RESTful Hosting (Jon Crosby) - The Microsoft take on this is to build a tool [Astoria] that plugs into a regular SQL data store, but what I would like to get at are the possible business models that could be built on top of such a thing.

Mix07: A Directed Conversation (Jacques Surveyer) - You and I have given [Microsoft] the browser and OS desktop monopolies to allow them to “enforce” their position in the market. So Vista is a clunker, IE7 just barely good enough, security a schizophrenic mess, and the Web still the enemy until Microsoft has equivalent SilverLight control or dominance in the market. Live with it - we gave Microsoft the de facto power to make it “just good enough” so.

MIX07 - Dynamic Languages (Josh Holmes) - What's a lot of fun is the interplay between all of the different languages. For example, they created a library in C# that they could pull in and leverage from Ruby and a JavaScript lib that was doing some 3D work that they pulled in and did some quick and easy work.

I've been monitoring blogs for people's impressions of what is happening at Mix 07. Here are some more comments that caught my eye:

Mix07 keynote - the pendulum is swinging again (Steve Clayton) - [Ray Ozzy is] very subtle and some things he alluded to today sound terrific. He clearly likes to keep his powder dry though and only announce stuff when it's really done. For example, it was GREAT today that the apps that were demo'ed were made available for download from the web immediately afterwards.

Silverlight - the New Attack Vector (Kevin Murphy) - This is how the news cycle goes with Microsoft’s new Silverlight program, specifically pertaining security.

TopBanana Video (Don Burnett) - Challenge: Do this in flash with 720p HD video folks.. Did I mention this also directly supports DRM transparently on both the Mac and PC..

the bright lights (Steve Holstad) - ... Orcas appears to be ready to move development teams smoothly into the latest release of .NET 3.5. They've accomplished this by satisfying .NET developers wants, needs & more...

New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls : Nifty, But Not Real World (Bryan Dougherty) - Some of you roll your eyes when I voice my skepticism for the magical wizardry that Visual Studio and some controls (Web or Winform) offer to make data access and display too easy and impractical for real world enterprise applications.  I can usually support my position in a debate, though I many times I'm satisfied to say "it just doesn't feel right."  With these new Dynamic Data Controls, though, I think we'll all be able to agree: They're just not practical for most enterprise situations.

Solving Data != Objects with LINQ (Robert Freas) LINQ provides the next evolutionary step beyond strongly-typed DataSets.  It brings with it a host of new features and it seems Microsoft was able to integrate this new technology into .NET in a very nice way.)

MIX07- Swag (Cheryl Wise) - I'm torn, do I go to the parties or install and play with the new suite?

News Flash: The future of the web is client server (via HTTP) (Sam Sethi) - Google will see the data stored on the web as the golden copy and anything stored locally as a cache.... However Microsoft will probably treat the local desktop copy as the golden copy and anything in their cloud as a cached data set.

SilverLight and Ink On The Web (Warner Crocker) - But what caught my eye is that Silverlight also has an Ink Componet as well. This should open up opportunities for web developers to include Ink in their rich web applications.

Silverlight, DLR and other MIX07 Announcements (amand) - To be honest the past couple of months I've been feeling a more and more unimpassioned about Microsoft technology but I get the feeling releases like Silverlight 1.1 and the DLR might just be changing that again :)

I've been monitoring blogs for people's impressions of what is happening at Mix 07. Here are some more comments that caught my eye:

Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer (Nik Cubrilovic, TechCrunch) - Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer.

Mix07 Keynote (Morten Nielsen) - Through .NET you can also work with and manipulate the HTML DOM, use REST services etc. No more JavaScripting! (and I was just about getting to a point where I really started to like JavaScript).

A MIXed Bag (ashebanow) - But [Ray Ozzie] ultimately failed to explain why his vision of finding the balance point between desktop APIs and web APIs was compelling or inevitable - you basically had to take it as an article of faith.

Mix07: Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET (Bernard Farrell) - Essentially these controls make it much easier to add master-detail editing to a web site based on a database. Polita did a great presentation that showed using both C# and IronPython to extend the behavior of these dynamic controls.

Day 1, AJAX Patterns with ASP.NET (XD003) (Loe Levi) - A late-comer to the ASP.NET AJAX offerings, the History Control adds history functionality back into AJAXified web apps — finally!

Mix07 day 1 part 2 Las Vegas (Adolfo) - Oh yeah forgot to mention in my previous post to check out the picture of the blue screen of death I got when walking into the Microsoft Keynote this morning, hilarious.

Microsoft Codename "Astoria": Data Services for the Web (Alex Barnett) - Astoria is also the codename for an incubation project started some months ago attempting to answer the following questions: if you could provide a dead-simple way of programming against a relational data store that resides on the internet, what should the programming model look like? Could it be simpler than SOAP-based data access programming?

Astoria (base4.net) - Combine REST with a conceptual model and well you get Data 2.0.

Jasper (base4.net) - Jasper is a sort of Dynamic ORM a-la Ruby on Rails, it takes advantage of dynamic language capabilities of .NET, the rails idea of convention over configuration and leverages Microsoft Entity Framework under the hood.

Microsoft Changes the Development Game (Robert McLaws) - If you STILL don't think Microsoft "gets it" after today's announcements, you're probably so ensconced in your tech-religious beliefs that there isn't much hope for you anyways.

I've been monitoring blogs for people's impressions of what is happening at Mix 07. Here are some more comments that caught my eye:

Silverlight 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha (AndrewDotHay.net) - The 1.1 alpha has the sweet C# code inside it. I can't wait to get started. It also has ominous "for developers only" text next to the download link. Who else would come to this page?

Panel at MIX07 - The Perfect Podcast Player (Derek Hatchard) - Dave shrugs off the big players and says it’s fine if they don’t get it because someone else can.  But I wonder if podcasting is a big enough area to be more than just added features on the big players’ players.

Mix07 - One million minutes a month free streaming media (Walt Ritscher) - Microsoft is setting up a global streaming  server network.  Is it competion for Amazon S3 or Akamai?  Microsoft say no, but I’m not sure I believe that story.

I have seen the future and it's not AJAX (Shaun McAravey) - Having seen the tortured workflow involved in developing any substantial Javascript-based web app and wondered about a whole new class of as-yet-undiscovered client-side Javascript attacks on AJAX applications, I have been loathe to advocate for wholesale AJAX adoption.

Day 1: Holy Cow (Jeff Blankenburg) - So it's been hyped for the past few weeks that we were going to see many new things announced by Microsoft this morning. The hype didn't keep up with reality. It was WAY better than sold.

MIX07 and Silverlight (Gert Van Gool) - Silverlight 1.1 (note: what’s the point of creating a new version when the first one isn’t finished), contains a crossplatform CLR.

Accessing Data on the Cloud (Sven Schneider) - Simply provide data services bz generating data models and exposing them through http to the cloud. Sounds easy? It surely is. No XPath, no SQLXML, just URI based access and querying.

Macs at Mix... (Guy Dickinson) - One of the things I'm sort of surprised at here at Mix, particularly during the keynote, was the focus on how all the SilverLight stuff etc. 'works on Macs'. That's a clear admission that developers are using Macs as the platform of choice, but also, as MS moves towards web as OS, they can become hardware agnostic...

Public outlines... (Guy Dickinson) - There's a MS guy here who reinforces the messages and corrects the conversations...not in a slimy PR way - quite useful to have an expert in the room!

Microsoft opens up on Web strategy at Mix ‘07 (My Internet Notebook) - One of the key tenets of Microsoft’s Windows Live strategy is to engage web developers that are used to develop using Php & Javascript scripting languages. And Microsoft’s Windows Live API offers some very generous licensing terms to developers.