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Web Services and Smart Data.

Amazon'a Mechanical Turk project is organizing help in the search
for missing aviator Steve Fossett. By signing up for this HIT (Human Intelligence Task), volunteers can pore over satellite images from Google Earth. Fossett failed to return from a solo flight in Nevada on September 3. A tracking transmitter on Fossett's single-engine plane would have been activated in the event of a rough landing, but so far no signal has been detected.

Posted by John Dorsey at 04:58 PM  Permalink |

The Prototype Core Team announced Prototype 1.6.0 RC on Wednesday. Team member Sam Stephenson notes the significant improvements to the events library in the announcement: "We dubbed 1.6.0 the 'event overhaul' release internally, and it shows--one of our worst APIs has become one of our best..." Other new features include improved support for JavaScript 1.6, grep semantics, and and improve DOM API. Get Prototype 1.6.0_rc0 here.

Posted by John Dorsey at 07:10 PM  Permalink |

Adobe's AIR team finished the western U.S. leg of its bus tour in Denver, CO in July. Check out this video from the last stop, Andre Charland : Building AIR Applications with JavaScript Frameworks. The video features Nitobi co-founder Andre Charland discussing how the AIR platform helps JavaScript developers address usability concerns -- for instance, supporting drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste between data from other apps and AIR-based apps. Andre points out how AIR apps helps straddle the divide between the web and desktop.
Next week they'll start the month-long eastern/central leg starting in Atlanta, ending up in Chicago just in time for Sukkot. Visit the onAIR Bus Tour site for more videos and tour dates.

Posted by John Dorsey at 03:35 PM  Permalink |

If you're in the Emerald City or thereabouts, Ignite 4 Seattle is being held Wednesday night, August 8. The event, hosted by O’Reilly Radar's Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis of Make: Weekend Projects fame, is an evening-long party for "on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking)." The event is held at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, and starts with a Make: contest at 6:30, followed by Ignite presentations at 8:30. Check out Brady's blog for the list of scheduled speakers.

If you're not in the neighborhood, you can still check out Ignite videos online: http://ignitenight.blip.tv/.

Posted by John Dorsey at 02:24 PM  Permalink |

Adobe held a free Flex Camp night at its San Francisco headquarters on Friday night. Several videos from the evening's presentations are now available online at flex.org/camp.

David Wadhwani, Adobe's VP of Product Development RIA Platform, gave an overview keynote before introducing a couple of demos.
According to David, Adobe has recorded 2,000 downloads of the Eclipse-based Flex Builder IDE and 2.3 billion (with a b) installs of Flash Player 9. The keynote demos were presented by Andrew Laffoon and Aryk Grosz from Mixbook, demonstrating the UI for their collaborative book-building site, and Mitch Gross, who showed a beta of Sliderocket, an online presentation generator built on Flex.

Adobe's Ken Wakamatsu also spoke during the keynote, explaining how Adobe is developing products, such as Premier Express, in Felx.
Videos for other topics covered at the Flex Camp are also available, including Flex and CS 3 Integration, What's in Flex Builder 3, and Getting started with Flex and AIR.

The next Flex Camp with be held in Vancouver, B.C. on August 30th.

Posted by John Dorsey at 08:02 PM  Permalink |

More news from OSCON: Apatar has launched a Data Mashup contest at the show to promote wider use of its open-source data integration tool. Apatar lets you visually map a data-integration path between databases, web services, and local static files, which you then save as an Apatar DataMap. You can migrate data between a number of databases (Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL) and online data feeds (including Amazon S3, Flickr, and Salesforce.com), and well as CSV or plain text files. Several DataMaps created by Apatar users are available for free on Apatar's community site, apatarforge.com
Entrants in the Data Mashup Contest will submit their Datamap, and two winners will be selected. The Best Business DataMap will win an 80-GB video iPod; and the Most Innovative DataMap Concept will win a 2-GB iPod Nano. The contest is open to everyone, not just OSCON attendees, and the deadline for entries is Friday, August 31, 2007.

Posted by John Dorsey at 05:19 PM  Permalink |

I recently spoke to Nicolas Vandenberghe about Iterating, a structured wiki for software products. The wiki allows users to view Comparison Matrices for various tool categories, such as JavaScript toolkits. You can compare Dojo, Google Web Toolkit, Mochikit, Prototype, YahooUI, and jQuery, on a couple dozen data points, such as Back button support with Ajax, Cross-Browser Compatibility, and Drag-n-Drop. If youre looking for info on these or other tools, or want to share your opinions on them, check it out at Iterating.com.

Posted by John Dorsey at 01:01 AM  Permalink |

Developer Azer Koçulu's Rainbow 9 is an open-source web-based tool writing and testing JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Rainbow9 was uploaded to the Google Code site a couple of days ago, but you can also check it out at rainbow9.org. A video demo is also available.
If you like Rainbow9, check out Azer's thrilling Future of Cows 3 game or just drop him a line and say "merhaba".

Posted by John Dorsey at 12:49 AM  Permalink |

Eric Bruno's article, SOA, Web Services, and RESTful Systems looks at building SOA systems using REST. Eric presents a Java-based REST framework that consists of a REST Server, which is the Java Servlet that maps HTTP URL queries to application code; and a REST Worker, which is the Java class that is dynamically invoked by the framework when a request is made, and subsequently generates a response.

Posted by John Dorsey at 01:36 AM  Permalink |

Google Developer Day events will be held in locations around the world on May 31, including at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. If you won't be able to attend, you can stream the live webcasts. Check the GDD 2007 web site for session details.

Posted by John Dorsey at 08:47 PM  Permalink |