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This week Sun Microsystems published a feature on how the network is changing entertainment and news gathering in the Participation Age: The Big Mashup. It features a documentary with media and entertainment thought leaders, a community blog discussing the impact of changes brought on by the network, and other related content. An interesting list of people are involved, among others Sun’s CTO Web 2.0 and Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos. So Sun has a CTO Web 2.0. Wow.

It also pointed my attention to SnappRadio, a mashup that combines Flickr images with streams from Last.fm and Radio Paradise to a create a song-specific slide show.

[Update] The video of the feature does not play in my Firefox 2.

After a slightly embarrassing visit to the Shaolin Action Principles Website in a presentation the other day and on popular demand the last couple of days I dug out some info on Ajax frameworks and the ATF extension to Eclipse:

The Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) is a core piece of the new Open Ajax initiative, which aims to increase accessibility to the powerful Web programming technique through the Eclipse Foundation. The ATF extends the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) by adding an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) development environment for a variety of open source Ajax tool kits, including Dojo, Zimbra, and Rico.

• The ATF project
• The Eclipse WTP project
• OpenAJAX Alliance
• Dojo Toolkit
• Kabuki Toolkit (formerly known as Zimbra Ajax Toolkit)
• Open Rico

Our team has supported Alfresco, MySQL and Red Hat to conduct a benchmarking exercise on the Alfresco JSR-170 implementation.

“These benchmarks show that open source software can provide enterprise-class performance and reliability — in addition to significant TCO savings,” said Edwin Desouza, senior director of marketing for MySQL AB. “We are pleased to work with Alfresco and Red Hat to promote the benefits of open source to businesses as well as the wider software development community.”

The hardware and software configuration was as follows:

• ECM Suite - Alfresco 1.4
• RDBMS – MySQL 5.0 64-Bit
• Persistence – JBoss Hibernate 3.x
• Operating System - Red Hat RHEL AS 4 64-Bit
• Application Server – Apache Tomcat
• CPU - 2 Dual Core Opterons - 2.6 MHZ
• Memory - 12Gb RAM including 4GB RAM for Java
• Storage - 6 RAID Disks

“Modern open source ECM integrates state-of-the-art operating systems, relational databases, and application servers,” said Mike Evans, vice president, Corporate Development, Red Hat. “This clearly shows the advantages of the open source stack in terms of architecture, performance and lower Total Cost of Ownership. We’re pleased to have Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Hibernate, and Apache Tomcat play a role in this important benchmark.”

Read the full press release here.

FatWire Software, the provider of Content Server, has released several new features that allow businesses to easily deliver Web 2.0 visitor experiences. The software will allow you to launch blogs, gather customer feedback, capture and share consumer-generated content, build online communities, and increase the frequency and relevancy of communication with customers.

The new solution modules are available for download by FatWire customers, and will be included in Version 7.0 of FatWire Content Server, scheduled for release in early 2007.

Except for the document management features in Content Server provided through CS-Doclink, Fatwire was always a pure WCM player to me. I had assumed that they would jump on the ECM wave by extending their features around different content types. Instead they do the collaboration story on the delivery side. Looks like they will be competing with portal and collaboration platforms and ECM platforms with still weak DMS capabilities.

The German publisher Springer has published a book on Wiki Web Colloboration.

Wikis are Web-based applications that allow all users not only to view pages but also to change them. The recent success of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has drawn increasing attention from private users, small organizations and enterprises to the various possible uses of wikis.

Their simple structure and straightforward operation make them a serious alternative to expensive content management systems and also provide a basis for many applications in the area of collaborative work. We show the practical use of wikis in carrying out projects for users as well as for maintainers. This includes a step-by-step introduction to wiki philosophy, social effects and functions, a survey of their controls and components, and the installation and configuration of the wiki clones MediaWiki and TWiki. In order to exemplify the possibilities of the software, we use it as a project tool for planning a conference.
Written for:
Media designers, web designers, screen designers

The book can be found here as a free ebook (PDF).

The Economist has a good article on the new competition on the browser market since the release of IE7

During the browser wars of the late 1990s Internet Explorer vanquished the once-dominant Netscape Navigator by virtue of being already installed on every Windows computer. But the Microsoft browser now faces a far feistier rival in the form of Firefox, the open-source heir to Netscape’s crown. Since it was launched two years ago, Firefox has garnered more than 80m users, giving it 11% of the global market. Over the coming months, Firefox could easily double (even triple) its market share at IE7’s expense.

Full Article