Larry Augustin's Weblog

Search for ACM Distinguished Engineers

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is searching for nominations for Distinguished Engineers.  Distinguished Engineer is a new ACM member grade recognizing those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience that have made significant accomplishments or achieved a significant impact on the computing field.  I've been an ACM member since 1985.  The ACM has traditionally had a greater focus on academic Computer Science.  It would be great to see more participation from and recognition of Open Source practitioners.  The creators of many of the core Open Source projects out there are certainly deserving of Distinguished Engineer status.  Please consider nominating your favorite Open Source guru.

AJAX VLAB Panel Discussion Recap

Last night's AJAX panel discussion hosted by the MIT/Stanford VLAB prompted some thoughts on where browser technologies are going.  One of the points I made in the discussion was that AJAX was just a technology for building the client side of a client-server application.  It's an important technology for doing so because it has achieved a ubiquity that other client-side application development technologies have failed to achieve.  What we've done is create an application that is ubiquitous (the Web browser), and that application has a way of downloading and running code within its own contained environment.

This is a very important point that I don't think most people get.  When you visit an AJAX enabled Web site, you are downloading and running an application on your PC.  That application just happens to sit within a browser, and does not require going through your operating system to install.

What this means is that Web browser programming model will continue to evolve to make the process of developing downloadable client-side applications that run within the browser easier.  The Web browser is a cross-platform UI/client platform.  How long before "Web" applications are stored and run locally from your Web browsers "cache" without the need for any Internet connectivity?  It's not that far off, and sounds a lot like a downloadable client, doesn't it?

MIT/Stanford Venture Lab: The Next Wave of Web 2.0

On Tuesday February 21 I'll be part of a panel session presented by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab entitled 'The Next Wave of Web 2.0: Is Ajax Where the Action Is?'  The session will be  6-8:30 p.m. at Bishop Auditorium, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, South Building, Stanford.  Om Malik from Business 2.0 will lead the discussion.  Other panelists include Scott Dietzen from Zimbra,  Dan'l Lewin from Microsoft, and Pradeep Tagare from Intel Capital.  Here's the abstract:

VCs and entrepreneurs are talking about a "funding frenzy" in the AJAX powered applications space. What is AJAX? It is the special sauce behind a new generation of rich internet applications such as Google Maps, Yahoo's Flickr, and a plethora of emerging Web 2.0 applications.

While some technology pundits are dismissing AJAX as nothing but a cool technology that enables web applications to act like desktop applications, others are claiming that there is more to AJAX then enhanced user interfaces. Many of the emerging AJAX companies have adopted disruptive business models that have successfully displaced incumbents' offerings.

Come and hear several break-out companies, including Zimbra, which are on the cutting-edge of Web 2.0. The panel will explore the source of value in AJAX, the viability of new business models, and the impact on software and user experience.

Why Does Beta Last So Long?

There's an interesting article by David Kesmodel in the WSJ on how companies are now having longer and longer beta test cycles for software.  The article was also discussed here on Slashdot.

Kesmodel is critical of companies for long beta cycles and for turning the concept of extended testing among real users (beta-testing) into a marketing exercise.  I'm sympathetic to that criticism, but I think that since the terms "alpha" and "beta" came into use at IBM in the 60's to refer to test cycles the complexity of software has increased dramatically, and our ability to test that software has not.

Three major drivers of this phenonoman are 1) the number of users, 2) complexity of interaction with other sofwtare, and 3) the desire for early and broad user feedback.  First, it is virtually impossible to test major Web applications at scale.  If you're Google, how can you possibly replicate the deployment platform (tens of thousands of systems) and test the shear volume of traffic?  The only true test is to open it up to the real world.

Second, the number, variety, and configurations of systems that your software must interact with is truely mind-boggling.  How amny Linux distributions are there?  How many Windows registry variations are there?  Even trying to test all variants of Microsoft IE alone can be overwhelming.  You have no choice but to open up testing to the world.

Finally, "release early, release often" has become a standard mantra (for good reason) among developers today.  Successful Open Source developers practice it religiously.  What's the equivalent in the proprietary software world?  The extended open beta test.  How long was it before Linux 1.0 was released?  Three years?  Proprietary developers are just doing the same thing as their Open Source counterparts - getting early feedback before all of the features have been implemented.