Stella Tools, actualización

Acabo de releer el artículo que le dedicara a Stella Tools, y creo que merece una actualización. Ya lo he hecho en el propio artículo, pero, para quienes no lleguen a el directamente, va este recordatorio: George Jeffcock, su autor, ha seguido trabajando en Stella, con gran aceptación de sus usuarios. Pero, lo más importante, ha creado una entrada en la Wiki de Plex, que puede constituír un buen punto de entrada para su uso y su entendimiento. Como se ha dicho antes, Stella es uno de los mejores ejemplos publicados y aprovechables de la potencia que ofrece el API del modelo de Plex. Nuevamente,  estoy convencido de que, a partir del API del modelo, es posible extender Plex en amplios frentes.
Sobre este punto, Lee Dare ha escrito una introducción, y una descripción algo más amplia.

Un tutorial sobre OCL

Jordi Cabot acaba de publicar una presentación sobre OCL (Object Constraint Language) que constituye un excelente tutorial sobre el metalenguaje. Creo que de lo que recuerdo, es el mejor. OCL es un conocido de todos cuantos hayan trabajado con UML en MDD, apreciado y criticado...El tutorial es muy útil para quienes estén tratando de ver el alcance del desarrollo por modelos, y ayuda claramente a entender cómo se pasa de un modelo visual a un cuerpo capaz de convertirse en código.
Desde el punto de vista de Plex, se puede decir sin dudas que el OCL tiene muchos puntos de contacto con el metalenguaje (metaoperaciones) que se puede utilizar en Plex para abstraer y extender el alcance de los modelos que se describan con la herramienta. Una mirada al tutorial, en nuestro caso, también es motivadora. Para recordar la potencia de las metaoperaciones.

Win 8/Metro, en su camino

Microsoft acaba de anunciar su tablet, que a simple vista confirma dos hechos, uno muy obvio, y otro, su consecuencia o "daño colateral". Lo primero, que el objetivo de Windows 8/WinRT/Metro es competir por una posición hegemónica en el mercado de dispositivos móviles, por delante de su preocupación por el mercado de computadores de escritorio (de servidores, ni hablar). Lo segundo, la manifestación visible de la dualidad a la que Microsoft se ve sometida: habrá dos entregas de tablets: una con "Windows 8" (Win32), y otra con "Metro" (WinRT); más aún, el tablet vendrá con un teclado flexible, apareciendo en las presentaciones "como si" fuera un portable ultrafino: ¿todo el mercado a mano? No tanto en la opinión de algunos críticos, al menos. Jason Perlow o Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols en ZDNet, Dave Thier en Forbes. El más extenso, Perlow, que no solo nota los problemas de la dualidad de oferta, sino también lo inconveniente que resulta que Microsoft salga a competir con su universo de socios fabricantes:

(...) The Surface tablets in and of themselves look like nice devices. Beautiful construction, decent specs. But absolutely nothing was said about price or availability. Only that the Windows RT/ARM version will ship around the Windows 8 retail release timeframe (October) and the Pro/Intel version will ship 3 months after that.
To quote Microsoft, “suggested retail pricing will be announced closer to availability and is expected to be competitive with a comparable ARM tablet or Intel Ultrabook-class PC. OEMs will have cost and feature parity on Windows 8 and Windows RT.”
So let me get this straight, Microsoft. You made journalists schlep across the country, no, the planet, for a product that might not ship for months? You’re lucky they didn’t burn the venue down.
Okay, no ship date, no prices and… no compelling 3rd-party applications or even Office to show on it whatsoever. So we have no idea how well it performs, and how well supported it will be by 3rd-party software developers. No partnerships to speak of. Nada.

No demonstration or even any claims of how good the battery life on each model is.

Nothing to say whatsoever about the nature of what display technology they are using, whether it is OLED or LED/LCD backlight or something else. Great, so one is a 720p and the other is a 1080p. Details, please.

Gee, that doesn’t exactly make folks want to stop in their tracks from buying iPad 3s, does it?
(...) Okay. Back to the the dual-architectures thing. They decided to launch a tablet product with their own brand, but bifurcate the message? Which one are we really supposed to buy, then? ARM for consumers? x86 for prosumers and enterprises?
And oh yeah. That niggling little OEM thing.
Does that mean that a “Surface” branded Microsoft tablet is bloatware free? Why should we as consumers buy an OEM device now, if the Microsoft is going to be the “Pure” Windows 8 experience, a la Google’s Nexus, and will be “price competitive” with the OEMs?

(...) And if the Pro version of the Surface is powerful enough, with Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge CPUs, why do we need Ultrabooks if we can just clamp a keyboard cover to a Surface Pro?
Am I the only person who beleives this thing is a total jump the shark cluster-you-know-what for Microsoft?
Right now, Microsoft’s OEMs — with the exception of whatever “lucky” company got the nod to do the contract manufacturing for this product — must be absolutely livid. To produce their own ARM and x86 Windows 8 systems, they have to pay exorbitant licensing fees.
Windows RT is going to cost an estimated $85 per copy to your average OEM. A Windows 8 Professional license on x86 will be considerably more.

I don’t care what the hell Microsoft says about partners having cost and feature parity, that’s $85 of pure margin advantage that Microsoft has and the OEM doesn’t.

But since Microsoft now produces its own hardware, that $85-$150 per copy the OEM would otherwise have to pay is pure profit which gives them an unfair advantage.

And wait until we start seeing the BOMs for Surface added up by companies like iFixit and see how much cheaper Microsoft can go than the OEMs with their own competing Windows 8 tablets when manipulating the supply chain as well.

What are the OEMs supposed to do? Well I suspect that if you are someone like a Lenovo or a Hewlett-Packard, you probably are seriously going to re-think whether or not you really want to produce tablets with similar specs to the Surface RT and Surface Pro.

You now have to out-value the Surface devices, or you have to play the Enterprise game with beefier, more expensive Windows 8 convertible tablets with higher-res screens and faster CPUs and SSDs that nobody other than select Fortune 500 firms may want to buy, because they’d rather do business with a hardware partner they already buy systems from.
And the Ultrabook concept may no longer be sexy to the majority of its target market anymore. Intel can’t be particularly crazy about that.
And the Asus and Acers of the world? How are they going to compete on margins with this thing, unless they are being chosen as the actual contract manufacturers? Something tells me that the bulk of the contract biz on the Surface is going to end up with Foxconn, Quanta and Samsung, not these folks.
Personally, if I was Steve Ballmer and the bigwigs at Microsoft, I would have done it a bit differently.
“Surface” as a brand name actually is pretty good. It sounds futuristic and new. So why just not make “Surface Tablet” the brand name for all convertible Windows 8 tablets? Or have Surface replace “Windows” as the name of the OS going forward?
Why not give the OEMs access to the manufacturing technology for the special “VaporMG” casings and the keyboard cover? Why create such a potentially hostile situation by biting the hand of the companies that license your software which is currently your bread and butter income stream?
What, you really want them to start pushing Ubuntu and Android and other Post-PC solutions for real now? Because now you just asked them to.
All of this reeks of suicidal thinking from a company that wants to deep six its long-established manufacturer ecosystem.
It does not reflect the actions of a company that tried so hard to shed long-held industry perceptions of being a monopolist, and worst case, it could potentially re-ignite federal antitrust activity that Microsoft has spent more than ten years digging itself out of.
Yeah, I’m cranky. But I’m not crazy.
Will Surface result in untenable, stressed relationships with Microsoft’s traditional OEM partners and Intel, and a renewal of its status as industry monopolist? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

La exagerada muerte del RPG

Continuando lo dicho hace poco, y a propósito de lo mismo, sigue discutiéndose en un grupo de LinkedIn acerca de la insólita opinión de un editor sobre el RPG. Insólita porque quien declara la muerte de la principal herramienta del iSeries (AKA AS400) es el director técnico de la publicación que se dedica al iSeries. Insólita, porque se une a otras voces de su competencia, dando razón a sus argumentos. Mucho ya se ha anticipado, y se puede retomar a través de las discusiones enlazadas. Sin embargo, ahora quisiera destacar algunos de los argumentos positivos en favor del RPG que en esta más que interesante discusión se están desarrollando todavía.
Antes que nada, quiero destacar lo que Scott Klement ha dicho al respecto: cuando hoy se habla de RPG, se debe hablar de RPG IV, o ILE. Desde este punto de vista, el lenguaje no sólo se muestra muy activo, como pudiera decirse también de otros muertos de buena salud (COBOL) sino que además ha vivido una importante evolución respecto a sus antecesores (III, II) que lo convierten en una herramienta poderosa en el marco del iSeries. Como Scott ha dicho, decretar la muerte del RPG (ILE), es como declarar muerto al iSeries...algo que su competencia desearía, y está lejos de suceder (salvo que IBM esté dispuesta al suicidio).
Lo que sigue, son algunos puntos destacados en esta discusión:
Nathan Andelin sobre OOP:

Saying that RPG isn't object oriented is a red herring. OO is generally characterized by "encapsulation", "polymorphism", and "inheritance". By far the most prominent characteristic of OO is encapsulation, and nothing meets that characteristic better than ILE RPG.

It's not that RPG is not object oriented. It's just that polymorphism and inheritance are not as fully implemented in the compiler as in a language like Java. However, RPG programmers are free to implement their own interfaces that support polymorphism and inheritance to the degree of their choice. I've written about that in the past and posted sample code over the years. 

La referencia de Andelin a RPG y OOP es más extensa, y probablemente sea mejor ver pos separado. Invito por ahora a seguir su explicación, distribuída en más de una de sus intervenciones.

El mismo, sobre la potencia del RPG asociado al iSeries:

Our user interfaces are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while the majority of our server-side code is RPG. Following are some reasons one might consider using RPG for web applications:

RPG has more efficient database interfaces. Most applications NEED record level access as well as SQL for database I/O. RPG uses less CPU and I/O, has less latency, and performs much better than more mainstream languages, etc.

RPG web applications can maintain state just like 5250 applications, which takes a burden off programmers as well as garbage collectors. Users can even launch multiple instances of the same application without worrying about the state of each. Users can end jobs and free resources by clicking an Exit link.

You can launch RPG programs that perform database I/O and browser I/O and run under IBM i user profiles. You can use IBM i security interfaces to specify authorities of each. User IDs are automatically recorded in journal entries for changes made to IBM i databases and other objects.

RPG jobs can take advantage of IBM i workload management; utilizing subsystems, memory pools, run priorities, time slices, library lists, job descriptions, job logs, output queues, spool files, etc.

With RPG you can activate thousands of IBM i jobs to support thousands of concurrent users where each job can have its own runtime environment. Contrast that with so called “modern” languages that run under environments where you have to set up a separate virtual machine for each environment.

Workload management under IBM i is much more advanced and offers much more control than managing workloads with LPARS and comparable virtual machines. A hypervisor doesn't know the characteristics of workloads that run under a VM that it's managing. It may know whether a VM is requesting resources or not but it has no understanding of priority. IBM i is more effective at managing workloads.

Rather than setting up multiple virtual machines for separate organizations, or for separate development, test, or production environments, you can use separate subsystems, and separate library lists. RPG saves programming time, system administration, and computer resources, which ultimately saves money.

Giuseppe Tintor, sobre el uso de RPG en la capa servidora:

I use Java to write web application (jsp, servlet) but the databse access is done through RPG programs only; RPG il called from Java using pcml interface so I'm sure that the database is completly closed to external users and nobody can run sql, query or excel inquiries on files. None is aware that behind a web page there is RPG and none notice performance problems! I think that RPG is the perfect tool to manage database access on AS/400.  

 Una línea de discusión abierta sobre la capacidad del iSeries de sostener múltiples trabajos simultáneos toca no sólo al RPG, sino al soporte del propio sistema operativo; la comparación con un servidor Windows puede incomodar a administradores de éste servidor. A propósito de una pregunta de uno de los participantes (Is the concept of an active job in the IBM i the same as the concept of an “active job” in a PC server? As I understand it, one user in the IBM i is at least one job. In the PC world, one job can accommodate numerous users – dependent on the PC server’s resources, of course. (...) Tens of thousands? I know the IBM i QMAXJOB shipped value is 163520 but do you have experience with your system reaching that many users (tens of thousands) ? If I’m not mistaken, the client I work for only has a little more than 1500 users. Even then, their IBM i which is at V7R1 is already experiencing performance degradation. (I think I need to ask my manager about that again.) [preguntado a Andelin por Allan Roberto Garcia]):

You asked, "Is the concept of an active job in the IBM i the same as the concept of an “active job” in a PC server?"

It's a good thing that I reread your question a couple times and put some thought into it because I think I profoundly misunderstood it the first time.

At first, I thought you might be talking about the concept of a "process" under IBM i vs. a "process" under Windows. When you open Task Manager under Windows and navigate to the Processes tab you see a screen that looks fairly similar to the WRKACTJOB display under IBM i. Right?

Windows Task Manager shows you a list of .exe files "running". WRKACTJOB shows a list of "active jobs" under IBM i. I think you would find a lot of similarities between what an "active job" might be doing under IBM i, and what a Windows .exe might be doing. Wouldn't you agree?

One key difference would be that you would NEVER see tens of thousands of running .exe files under Windows. The runtime environment would be destabilized long before that could occur. But under IBM i, tens of thousands of "active jobs" would NOT be a problem.

So, while there may be many similarities between the work being done by Windows .exe files and IBM i active jobs, the design of the runtime environments are profoundly different. Windows cannot support complex workloads reliably. Complex workloads under Windows must be divided between multiple physical or virtual machines in order to run reliably (being generous with respect to Windows reliability).

One of our customers has more than 10,000 active jobs running daily on a 4-core, 32 Gig RAM IBM i server. Consider the number of active jobs that a 256-core, 8 Terabyte RAM IBM i server might be running.

Sorry for that analogy, or comparison. I don't think that's what you were really asking about. But I do think there is a relationship.

You say, "In the PC world, one job can accommodate numerous users – dependent on the PC server’s resources, of course."

Would that "one job" you're referring to be the ASP.Net server? It wouldn't have to be. It might be a PHP server. It might be a JEE application server. Actually there are many options.

Under the IBM i framework we use, one active job might be supporting multiple concurrent users. In that case, multiple concurrent requests might be queued. The program would be responsible for managing each user's state. There would be "restore state" and "save state" operations for each request.

Our framework also supports a "launch method" where a new job is loaded and run for each user who clicks on its associated menu item. We don't limit the number of menu items that a user may have "active" at the same time. User state is automatically maintained. The active job ends when the user clicks the "Exit" link.

We also support a launch method where a specific set of users may be supported by one active job; participants in a meeting for example. When the meeting ends, it ends for all users.

We run into use cases for each type of "launch method". They each have advantages and disadvantages. It's just nice to be able to support each.

I should say something about managing complex workloads under the IBM i native environment vs. application servers such as ASP.Net, JEE Application Servers, and PHP.

In the case of the latter, you will almost always find that the only way to scale those environments and make them run reliably is to separate them into multiple physical or virtual machine instances, and front end them with load balancers, which normally requires numerous skilled people to manage.

Under IBM i, we scale by launching active jobs into subsystems, each of which may be linked to separate HTTP server instances; possibly linked to separate client organizations; keeping their workloads separate.

Overall, IBM i workload management is WAY superior to load balancing between virtual machines.

La discusión aún continúa. Sólo he destacado algunos puntos. Otros, tales como el modelo OOP, o el desarrollo de aplicaciones web contra funciones servidoras RPG están desarrolladas, ejemplificadas, y ofrecen excelentes perspectivas. Una gran respuesta a quienes dan por muerto lo que no conocen.

iSeries: Con amigos como estos...

El 16 de mayo, Mel Beckman,en Iprodeveloper, publicó un artículo decretando la muerte del RPG (Is RPG Dead?), con cuestionamientos definitivos al lenguaje más básico y fundamental del iSeries, (o AS/400, o System i, o como se lo quiera llamar), que desató una larga discusión cuyos ecos continúan. Una gran parte de la discusión puede seguirse en las respuestas de lectores al propio artículo, pero tambíen en la excelente -y elegante- respuesta de Scott Klement en mismo sitio, así como en otros medios (grupos de LinkedIn, en nuestro grupo de usuarios de Plex, en IDevelop (1, 2), y en blogs,entre otros.
Un aspecto notable de este cuestionamiento del que ha sido y sigue siendo el principal lenguaje de diálogo con el iSeries, es que fue escrito en una publicación, Ipro Developer, que está enfocada en el iSeries, en la que "RPG programming" es el primer ítem del menú que encabeza la página, y que fue escrita por Mel Beckman, quien, según el pie del mismo artículo, "is the senior technical director for iPro Developer". Y más notable aún, que, habiendo pasado casi un mes, no exista ni un deslinde de responsabilidades de la publicación, ni un descargo del director técnico (senior).
La afirmación de obsolescencia del RPG resulta peor todavía en el marco de los reclamos de la comunidad de empresas y consultoras usuarias del iSeries, que se vió obligada recientemente  a publicar manifiestos y sostener su difusión  ante la inactividad del propio IBM en su defensa. Resulta incomprensible que un sistema que ha representado y representa un importante volúmen de las ventas y licencias de IBM, adoptado por miles de grandes y medianas empresas de primera línea en todo el mundo, que defiende el buen nombre de la empresa por su fiabilidad, y que no ha dejado de actualizarse nunca, sea torpedeado por quienes viven de su existencia.
Pero, para establecer una defensa en regla del iSeries, nada mejor que lo que Scott Klement responde en su defensa:

Yet, Mel even goes so far as to suggest that C (from 1972) and C++ (from 1983) are more modern languages.  Are you kidding me?!   Like RPG, I code in C every day, it's a big part of my job.  And let me tell you, C is not nearly as modern as RPG.  It's not even close. C and C++ can't even do simple string operations without you having to code manual memory allocation, bounds checking, and extra code to make sure that a simple string concatenation doesn't turn into a security hole.  Its database access routines are nowhere near as simple or advanced as RPG's.  Its date operations are awkward and clumsy by comparison to RPG.  Don't get me wrong, I like C, especially for lower-level systems coding.  But it's nowhere near as modern as RPG, nor as well suited for writing business logic.
But, maybe Mel doesn't understand that when today's authors refer to RPG, we really mean RPG IV.  We don't bother including the "IV" every time we say it, because RPG IV today's RPG, and everyone should already know that!

What Features Are Important In Business Logic?

Before we go throwing around opinions about old, legacy, etc...  maybe we should define what is important to us?  What are important features for a language that's aimed at people writing business logic?

• Business logic uses numbers heavily.   Numbers represent quantities, prices, and weights.  These are key to almost every application in the business world.  Very few languages today support numbers with true decimal-based arithmetic (as opposed to integer and floating-point which are ubiquitous).  Java supports decimals properly, but only by working through complex classes.  RPG supports decimal numbers simply and easily, because they are the default numeric data type in RPG.
• Business logic uses databases heavily.  Almost every business application is database driven, and database access is deeply integrated into the RPG language.  Native record access is simple and powerful.  Even more powerful is SQL, which is an order of magnitude simpler to code in RPG than it is in many other languages such as PHP or Java.
• Business logic uses dates frequently.  Whether you're checking when a customer's payment is overdue, managing inventory turnover, determining when an order should be shipped, or when an employee was hired, you need to work with dates in a simple and effective manner.  Today's RPG does that.  Many other languages have APIs or classes for working with dates (this includes Java, PHP, C, C++, etc) but in RPG they are built right into the language, and that makes it simpler.
• Business logic uses a ton of string manipulation.  Concatenating, scanning, or substringing character data is something I do every day in every program I write.  This is easy in many of the languages that Mel considers modern (PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby), but some of them make string manipulation much harder than it should be (Java, C, C++).  Today's RPG, unlike its predecessors, makes string manipulation a snap.

I've coded in more than 20 programming languages.  Some are object-oriented (such as Java, C++, and JavaScript), some are procedural (C, RPG, Pascal, Fortran), and some are a mixture of the two (such as PHP.)  But when I sit down and figure out which language is  easiest for my business logic, it's invariably RPG.

El futuro de Chrome

Tengo una PC portable obsoleta, de la que me niego a desprender porque en su momento me dió buenas prestaciones, ahora escasa  en velocidad de su procesador, memoria y disco disponible, pero con una capacidad de conectividad que sigue siendo importante. Durante un tiempo pensé en instalarle algún Linux light, pero nunca me terminó de convencer la alternativa. He pensado en usarla como "servidor" para tests en casa, o para restringirla a un browser y un editor de texto...En meses recientes, sin embargo, se ha presentado una posibilidad más interesante: instalarle el sistema operativo de Chrome, aparentemente más o menos light, como para ayudarme con el hardware que tengo, y orientado especialmente a la nube. Hoy, un artículo de ZD Net refuerza la idea de Chrome como un sistema operativo hegemónico, y con razones nada despreciables. Esto es lo que Christopher Dawson afirma en ZD Net (5 reasons everyone will be using Chrome OS in 3 years):

Google’s first round of Chromebooks met with mixed reviews and far greater adoption in schools where their easy management and fast boot times made them more popular than with consumers. Google and Samsung announced yesterday that next-generation Chromebooks were rolling out, along with a major release of Chrome OS and new devices call Chromeboxes. All in all, it was a big day for Chrome OS, and yet, as Larry Dignan pointed out, the pricing on Chrome OS devices remains too high for serious consumer or enterprise adoption.
However, in computer-land, three years is forever, and in that period of time, I expect that Chrome OS will be all over the enterprise, consumer spaces, schools, and SMBs. In fact, I expect that it will be ubiquitous in the way that Linux and Java are: we don’t even know we’re using them on our phones, in our TVs, in our DVRs…everywhere. Here’s 5 reasons why.

1. It’s going to be cheap

Yes, Larry’s right. These devices are too expensive right now. But Moore’s Law tells us that this will change. Fast. And Chrome OS doesn’t need the latest hardware to run quite well, particularly now that it can take advantage of GPU acceleration. Sure, the original Atom-based Chromebooks were a bit pokey, but enhancements to the OS itself have taken big steps to address the issue. The latest generation of Chrome OS devices aren’t exactly using quad-core beasts. They’re leveraging commodity hardware, paving the way for serious price drops in the relatively near future.
Chrome OS is also being tested on ARM hardware and is unencumbered by much in the way of licensing since it’s based on the open source Chromium OS project.

2. It’s flexible

Have you used the Chrome Web Store? There’s a lot of really useful software just a click away that runs right within the browser. Whether you are using Chrome OS or the Chrome web browser, the experience is the same and the developer ecosystem is pushing hard on the boundaries of what we thought was possible in terms of web applications. The variety of applications already available in the Web Store is impressive, to say the least, just a year and half after its launch.
If Netflix, Facebook, Angry Birds, and Autodesk applications can all run happily in Chrome OS, there won’t be much to differentiate it from a full-blown desktop OS in the months and years to come. Or from an embedded OS. Or a mobile OS. It all depends on the applications OEMs choose to develop, surface, and install for users.

3. Because Chrome OS and Android will merge

As early as 2009, Sergey Brin predicted that Android and Chrome OS would likely draw closer to each other and then merge. The Chrome browser for Android is hinting that this is getting closer to reality, as are various bits of information emerging about Android 5, most of which point to at least the beginnings of unification.

Android is already dominant in mobile devices and runs on everything from televisions to refrigerators to tablets. Chrome has the largest browser marketshare now. When Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android all start looking very much like each other and all dominate their respective markets, it’s not a big stretch to start calling Chrome OS ubiquitous.

4. It’s Google

If Google has proved anything, it’s that they have enough money to keep hammering away at a market until they own it. They proved it with Android on mobile phones. They proved it with their Chrome browser. They proved it with search and related ads. They’ve had their share of missteps and projects like Google+ remain out with the jury. However, if the project is ultimately about growing their core business (namely advertising) and getting ads in front of more people, they’re absolutely dogged. And while their war chest isn’t quite up to Apple’s standards, they can win wars of attrition with just about anyone. Besides, what would you rather see on that connected television? A familiar web browser with snappy app interfaces and a cool Web Store or some kludgy Java interface that doesn’t look a thing like what you use on your desktop, laptop, mobile phone, or tablet to access content?

5. Because the web will be all you need

This is already true for most users. In developing countries, the only personal computing device that many people own is a simple mobile phone with basic web access. Elsewhere, cloud-based applications continue to displace desktop applications and increasing numbers of users spend their days staring at a web browser instead of any particular application. Microsoft’s Office 365 acknowledges the need for at least a hybrid approach to the cloud and most of the interesting software we read about now comes in the form of cloud-based web applications or mobile apps.

Even Adobe, the last reason I bother using a full-blown PC, started shipping Muse (a rich WYSIWYG web development platform) this month and, while not a web application itself, leverages the Air runtime environment to be small, light, and fast.

The next version of Bethesda Software’s massively popular and visually stunning Elder Scrolls series? An MMORPG. No, it won’t be 100% browser-based, but without the web, fans would just be sitting in front of their aging XBOXes. Goodbye game consoles, hello cloud.

This webification movement has taken off in the last 18 months. It isn’t hard to imagine what the next three years will do to the way we think about personal computing. So while Chrome OS got off to a slow start, it’s only a matter of time until Google can take advantage of this inflection point at which we find ourselves.

Creo que el elemento determinante entre los argumentos, es la futura confluencia de Android y Chrome, facilitando un enfoque de la informática absolutamente ubicua, dado el uso de Android en toda clase (y aumentando) de aparatos de la vida diaria o la industria. Su introducción en el mundo multimedia hogareño es sólo el principio.
Windows 8 sin duda es una salida a hacer frente esta perspectiva próxima, con la gran desventaja de que el factor movilizador de este cambio de paradigma ha estado en telefonos inteligentes y tabletas. Y este es un mundo donde Microsoft está prácticamente ausente.

Facebook, pinchando la burbuja

El descalabro inicial de Facebook en la bolsa norteamericana (hoy, a media jornada de bolsa, oscilando en los 29 dólares por acción, muy lejos de sus $42 iniciales), no hace más que traer un poco de realidad a las febriles elucubraciones sobre el valor económico de esta y otras empresas. Y algo más: nuevamente, se pone en duda la imparcialidad y calidad de la evaluación de los agentes que colocaron el lanzamiento a bolsa: Morgan Stanley o Goldman Sachs, bajo investigación por esta operación, lejos de servir a los accionistas, especialmente a la porción minorista.
Dice a esta hora El Economista:

¿Qué ha hecho Mark Zuckerberg para merecer esto?, se preguntarán ustedes. La salida a bolsa "más decepcionante" del último año sigue poniendo en jaque a los inversores institucionales, que ven como el precio de la acción de Facebook sigue cayendo en picado y pierde los 30 dólares por título desde los 38 de su estreno.
Ni rastro queda ya de esos 42,05 dólares con los que comenzó a cotizar hace ya más de una semana. Ni si quiera los veintipocos centavos que ganó durante su primera jornada en el mercado bursátil de EEUU. Muchos hablan de teoria conspiratoria. Al fin y al cabo, Zuckerberg y compañía se han labrado una gran legión de enemigos entre los que se encuentra Google, por ejemplo.
Sin embargo, como bien explica Aswath Damodaran, profesor de la Escuela de Negocios Stern de la Universidad de Nueva York, en un editorial en la CNN, "los suscriptores de la OPV fijaron los precios de la oferta en función de cómo cotizaban las acciones de Facebook en el mercado privado y según la demanda institucional". Un hecho que demuestra el desatino de Morgan Stanley o Goldman Sachs, entre otros, al no tener demasiado en cuenta "el crecimiento de los ingresos, los márgenes de riesgo o cualquier otro fundamento", señala Damodaran.
Ahora, con la realidad sobre la mesa y con una acción claramente sobrevalorada, la pregunta está en cuándo el precio de los títulos de Facebook será apetecible para los inversores que todavía se han salvado de la masacre bursátil de la red social.

De suelo... al cielo

Pues bien, según Brian Nichols, analista independiente, la oportunidad para entrar en Facebook llegará cuando la acción toque los 22,50 dólares. ¿La razón? básicamente el comportamiento de los inversores.
"La acción de Facebook es cara, pero también lo son la mayoría de los títulos de otros medios sociales", señala. "Mi análisis sobre las participaciones de Facebook es técnica pero también psicológica", explica en la web Seeking Alpha. "Las redes sociales y otras acciones de alto riesgo tienen una larga historia de caer alrededor de un 50% desde máximos para luego regresar a ganancias de al menos el 50%, todo ello en un par de meses", asegura.
Al menos así lo demuestra la evolución de las acciones de las últimas redes sociales en salir a bolsa, según estima Nichols. Así, Renren alcanzó un máximo de 24 dólares por título el día de su salida a bolsa, y entre el 5 de mayo y el 24 de junio de 2011 la acción cayó un 70% para luego recuperarse a partir del 7 de julio registrando una rentabilidad del 70% desde mínimos.
Por su parte, Linkedin llegó a registrar un máximo de 122,70 dólares tras su salida a bolsa y luego cayó un 50% durante el mes siguiente. Finalmente, tras tocar mínimos, aumentó alrededor de un 75% en tan sólo tres semanas.
Otro caso de volatilidad absoluta fue el vivido por Pandora, que tocó los 24 dólares por acción en su salida a bolsa y que luego cayó un 50% durante los cinco días hábiles posteriores. El título se recuperó rápidamente, ya que se estabilizó con un incremento del 50% durante los cinco días siguientes a registrar su mínimo.

Adios a Bill Hunt

Esta noticia está dirigida a usuarios de Plex. Probablemente muchos ya se han enterado, pero lo cuento aún tanto por algún que otro no informado aún, como por mí mismo, por reconocer sus méritos.
Bill Hunt ha sido, salvo un breve interregno a cargo de Wasim Ahmad, el responsable de Plex en CA hasta ahora. Este primero de mayo, después de luchar por cerca de dos años con el cáncer, Bill ha muerto. Sólo dos días antes, todavía estaba en contacto con miembros de la comunidad de usuarios de Plex, planeando tareas próximas, como desde siempre.  Sinceramente creo que se ha ganado el reconocimiento general de la comunidad de usuarios de Plex, no sólo por su trabajo infatigable, sino también por su apertura, su disposición para escuchar, su capacidad organizativa. Es incontable lo que Plex le debe a Bill, y será muy difícil reemplazarlo. Lo saben muy bien todos aquellos que viven arremangados en el trabajo diario.
Bill era todavía joven, con una familia que hubiera necesitado aún mucho de él, pero su vida se cortó de pronto, cuando quedaba mucho camino por recorrer.
Quien quiera hacerlo, todavía puede acercarse a la ceremonia de recuerdo suyo.

Objeciones a SOA

Johannes Ernst dedica una nota breve a SOA, explicando algunas razones por las que podría decirse que SOA está muerto ("SOA Is Dead; Long Live Services"):

Some of us, including your’s truly, always felt like cringing when overzealous IT architects would sing SOA’s praises — long before anything got delivered to anybody that actually worked. Some risk factors were obvious:

• How can you hope to glue together system A and system B in any way unless you have a very clearly articulated and jointly managed cross-system information model?
• Same about event models, security models, etc.
• Far too little attention was paid to release management of services supposedly usable by other people. As a result, many composite applications were almost never up, because interfaces kept changing. This is not an easy one for corporate IT that does not usually have the funding or expertise for that kind of thing. (Side note: we now have the same problem, internet-scale, with OpenID, OAuth, and the like. Nobody has solved that one either, which is why often, "OpenID does not work" for some user who uses an unusual IdP/RP combination)
• Caching. Any production implementation has to consider that servant systems are not always going to be available, that they might not be able to bear the load at all times, that they may not always be fast enough, and that whatever information is obtained from them has to be related (and thus cached, and kept consistent!), to information in the client app. Otherwise there is no point to do it in the first place. Not an easy problem to solve.

¿Windows 8 en el filo de una navaja?

Por primera vez, leo en un comentarista la posibilidad de que Windows 8 pudiera convertirse en una falla catastrófica de Microsoft. En realidad, una relectura de la gran cantidad de información publicada en los últimos días muestra signos no muy tranquilizadores. El más reciente, la campaña algo acuciante en busca de desarrolladores y empresas que soporten Metro y Windows Phone 7 y 8, en sus aplicaciones y lenguajes, y la continuada ratificación de la limitación o extinción de soporte de .NET y Silverlight, respectivamente. Por largo tiempo, se percibía que la irrupción masiva de dispositivos móviles representaba una amenaza cierta a la hegemonía de mercado de Microsoft. Si Metro era la respuesta de la empresa a este desafío, hoy da la impresión de que pudiera ser un fiasco mayor, que comprometa su posición en todos los frentes. Pareciera que fue lanzado sin abrir suficientemente su arquitectura a proveedores y socios de negocios, de tal forma que hoy pudiera no contar con suficientemente respaldo de quienes deberían soportarlo. Así sucede aparentemente en el mercado de ARM. Dice Patrick Moorhead en Forbes:

As we head toward the availability of Windows 8 in Q4, the amount of information available about X86-based platforms dwarfs that of ARM-based platforms from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.  One example is the Consumer Preview (CP).  The Windows 8 CP on X86 (Intel/AMD) was and still is openly available for any consumer on the planet to try, without exaggeration.  In contrast, there’s Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) where, without an NDA, no one can even touch a system.  There can be a few reasons for that, including secrecy, the unique ARM software images required, it just isn’t ready yet, or a combination of all.  With approximately six months until launch, is Microsoft ready for Windows 8 on ARM? (...) Microsoft has written a lot about this on their Building Windows 8 blog, but the questions still remain on specificity.  Specifically which hardware peripherals work well, which ones work but without all features and which ones just don’t work.  This means USB printers, webcams, scanners, digital cameras, SD-cards, game controllers, displays, headsets, speakers, etc.  Sure, drivers are being written now and will be updated well after launch, but without anything definitive, what are OEMs and channel partners to plan?  The channel needs to prepare appropriately with the right peripherals that are compatible with WOA systems. (...) We’re six months from launch and channel partners and OEMs should know this already to prepare for the holidays.

Más aún, está claro que Windows 8 no será compatible hacia atrás para ARM: <<For some it may be an obvious thing to state, but Windows 8 on ARM will be a completely blank canvas with no compatibility mode for any software running on previous x86 versions of Windows. If a developer wants an older app to run on Windows 8 ARM, they need to develop a new version specifically for the platform>>
Mary Jo Folley escribe el 3 de abril acerca de la llamada de Microsoft a escribir aplicaciones y adaptar lenguajes a WinRT, destacando que <<Microsoft officials have been encouraging developers to consider HTML5/JavaScript and C++ when writing new Metro-style apps. However, as Development and Platform Evangelist (DPE) Jerry Nixon recently noted, it’s the managed languages and .Net that seem to be where most of the Windows 8 developer interest is — at least when measured in terms of developer questions and comments on the MSDN forums (...) I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising, however, that devs prefer using what they already know>>. La propia comunidad de desarrolladores de Microsoft se encuentra desorientada, y probablemente defraudada, sometida a un cambio no esperado, y sometida a la presión de la obsolescencia de todo su desarrollo previo.
 En fin, estos son algunos elementos de los últimos días que marchan en una dirección concurrente. Bajo estos antecedentes, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, agrega el problema del hardware, para componer un escenario más que complicado para Microsoft:

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley wonders when are we going to start seeing ‘reimagined’ hardware that will make using the touch-centric Windows 8 less painful and more compelling.

“The problem is,” writes Foley, “without these next-gen PCs and tablets, it’s hard for me - and I’d think others, too - to really grok how Windows 8 is going to work from running it on PCs and tablets that were designed for a non-touch-centric operating system like Windows 7.”

Yeah, that is a bit of a problem. Especially given that we’re probably six months or so away from Windows 8 being released. So, where is all this cool new hardware?

Don’t hold your breath for it just yet.
We can be certain of one thing. There will be Windows 8-specific hardware, in the form of tablets, ultrabooks and touch-enabled PCs, available at the launch of the operating system. The problem isn’t going to be the availability of hardware, but the price point of the hardware.
Touch adds dollars to a system — especially to the price of a PC, where the market hit rock bottom a long time ago — and it is adding cost at a time when both consumer and enterprise buyers are most sensitive to price. To make matters worse, OEMs currently have no idea how the mass market will react to Windows 8. It could flop like Vista, in which case demand for touch-enabled hardware is going to be very soggy and OEMs will be left struggling to offload hardware. Alternatively, it could be a runaway success like Windows 7 was, in which case it will be harvest time for the OEMs.
Problem is, failure is still very much an option, and the idea of Windows 8 being a catastrophic failure is a massive turn-off for hardware makers; doubly so when they are expected to pour significant capital into design, development and production of Windows 8-specific systems. Failures of devices such as Motorola’s Xoom and RIM’s PlayBook are still on the minds of all OEMs.
Another problem is the incumbent desktop and notebook PC. While Microsoft is undoubtedly embracing touch computing with both hands, we’re still not sure what the game-plan is here. Microsoft has made a lot of noises about how touch is the future because it is better and easier to use, but many others and I still remain unconvinced.
The keyboard and mouse are far too entrenched in computing to be swiped away overnight. I firmly expect that the majority of systems that will ship with Windows 8 over the new operating system’s lifespan will be traditional, non-touch systems featuring keyboards and mice, and the OEMs must also suspect this.
Then there are Windows 8 tablets. It’s here I feel that Microsoft’s new operating system will shine the brightest, but it’s still far too early to say that there’s any guarantee of success. The biggest problem facing OEMs here is that they have to deliver a product that competes favorably with the iPad when it comes to a number of metrics - form factor, weight, battery life and, probably most significant of the lot, price.
If the OEMs can’t get all their ducks in a row here, it could be a bloodbath.
Why are we not seeing some OEMs take a leap of faith now and start releasing touch-enabled hardware powered by Windows 7 in advance of Windows 8? Simple. That would be a bloodbath too. Windows 7 is an appalling choice for touch-enabled hardware. This means that OEMs don’t really have the option of shipping touch-enabled hardware now with the promise of a free upgrade down the line to Windows 8.
Windows 8 will reimagine hardware, just not that much. There will be touch-enabled systems available, but they will command a premium price and appeal to a niche market. The traditional desktop and notebook will continue to be the main platform for Windows 8. There will also be Windows 8-powered tablets, but it remains to be seen just how well these will stack up against the iPad.
Uncertain times lay ahead for the OEMs.

 En estas condiciones, consultoras y empresas planeando su estrategia futura, deberían ser muy prudentes en sus movimientos.

Educación y tecnología ¿por dónde empezar?

Hace algún tiempo, a propósito de un comentario de un dirigente de empresa chileno, me preguntaba acerca del real valor de los planes de soporte tecnológico en Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, y muchos otros sitios. Bien, esta semana tengo una respuesta sobre su valor en Argentina..."La netbook casi no se usa en el aula"...
Dice Franco Varise, en La Nación:

Las computadoras todavía no pueden competir con la tiza blanca, el pizarrón, el cuaderno, la lapicera y el eterno lápiz negro. Por ahora, las netbooks de los programas Conectar Igualdad y S@armientoBA, de los gobiernos nacional y porteño, respectivamente, no encuentran su lugar en las aulas argentinas.
Según un estudio del Observatorio de la Educación Básica de la Argentina, los dos millones de computadoras personales entregadas a alumnos de los niveles primario y secundario se utilizan poco y nada en las aulas. El relevamiento fue hecho para indagar sobre las deficiencias del sistema y poder corregirlas.
Estas no son buenas noticias para quienes creían que los maestros y los profesores iban a reemplazar los instrumentos tradicionales de enseñanza por las nuevas tecnologías como forma de complementar o enriquecer los contenidos educativos. El diagnóstico muestra que los docentes, y en consecuencia los chicos, usan las netbooks casi exclusivamente en sus casas. El estudio del Observatorio, integrado por la Fundación del Centro de Estudios en Políticas Públicas, la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) y el Banco Santander, y que cuenta con el apoyo del Ministerio de Educación de la Nación, le puso datos a lo que había comenzado a notarse en el aula desde que comenzaron a entregarse las netbooks.
"Si bien el 90% de los profesores usan computadoras, no lo hacen en el aula", explicó el experto en educación, Gustavo Iaies, durante la presentación de los resultados del relevamiento y, agregó que, estos dispositivos tecnológicos, no encontraron aún un lugar curricular.

La falta de una currícula específica que incluya a la netbook dentro del aula es una de las explicaciones sobre la falta de resultados educativos de estos programas. Porque, si bien todos tienen la computadora, nadie sabe para qué usarla todavía.

Mientras se piense que con "fierros" y sin metas educativas se resuelve todo, la educación seguirá igual, y los únicos que prosperarán serán quienes ganen licitaciones de aprovisionamiento de recursos.

Windows Metro y sus clientes corporativos

Acabo de ver una presentación sobre la evolución del mercado de aplicaciones móviles, que muestra una tendencia abrumadoramente inclinada hacia el crecimiento de la venta de recursos móviles (tablets y teléfonos) en perjuicio de un mercado estancado de computadores de escritorio. Ninguna novedad, así como tampoco lo es que el contenido de las aplicaciones varía radicalmente del que poblaba los PCs de escritorio. Se trata de una verdadera explosión del alcance de las aplicaciones, que escalan al uso diario de cientos o miles de millones de personas. El hecho es que la computación corporativa o de negocios pasa a ser una fracción relativamente estable del mercado total, y, comparativamente, con un crecimiento mucho menor que el resto. Esta es, a mi juicio, la razón que explica el estilo del nuevo Windows 8: salir a luchar por una porción dominante en el mercado de móviles. ¿Estará a tiempo todavía, o estará condenado a compartir una porción dividida con la competencia ya suficientemente establecida? ¿Podría haber sido más adecuado, a partir de un núcleo común, desarrollar dos líneas de producto que respetaran las diferencias de estos dos mundos?
El problema está en el universo corporativo: ¿contempla Windows 8 genuinamente este mercado? Por ahora, por lo que veo, no: Fundamentalmente, lo único que se ha destinado a este mundo es Win32, al que se ha declarado obsoleto. Todas las herramientas y lenguajes disponibles apuntan a soportar lo nuevo, básicamente pensado para dispositivos móviles, poco aptos para el trabajo de escritorio. Ni siquiera, al menos por ahora, es posible arrancar una estación Win 8 en modo "tradicional": usted debe iniciar en Metro, y luego cambiar manualmente de modo: se avecina una pesadilla para todos los administradores de servicios de escritorio que tengan scripts de inicio de sistema...Microsoft desprecia las grandes diferencias que existen entre una estación de trabajo y un aparato de comunicación móvil.
¿Será esta la versión final corporativa? Creo que todavía habrá importantes cambios, y, quizá veamos todavía, en "el Service Pack 2", algo más próximo a lo que este mercado requiere. Entretanto, haga sus cálculos financieros para solventar el cambio, o estaciónese en Windows 7.
Mary-Jo Foley comentaba hace poco lo incómodo del nuevo panorama:

While many love the tiled Metro start screen and are looking forward to using it on touch tablets and PCs, many others aren’t keen on it — especially business users who are convinced that Metro will be nothing but a nuisance, especially on non-touch-enabled hardware, and that they’ll do most of their work in the Desktop app on Windows 8.
Paul Thurrott of Windows SuperSite told me a while back that he believed Microsoft would allow users to get around Metro using a group-policy setting, but when I ran that past my contacts at Microsoft, I was told this would likely not be the case. So in the end, it looks like So who knows at this point whether business users who don’t want Metro may get their wish, after all.
(...)
The other big looming question that many business users want more information about is what they will and won’t be able to do when it comes to managing their Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) tablets and PCs.
Microsoft posted a document for download on February 29 (not sure if intentionally or not) that outlined Consumer Preview features for business users. In that document, Microsoft corroborated word that WOA tablets won’t be able to join an Active Directory domain. Some sites have reported that the document also said that Microsoft wouldn’t allow WOA tablets to be managed at all using Microsoft’s own management tools.
(...)
Charles Fitzgerald, a former Microsoft exec now working at VMWare, noted that the domain join limitation means Microsoft won’t be able to one-up the iPad on this front. (And lack of manageability was one of the themes that Microsoft has advised its salesforce to use in selling agains the iPad in businesses.) From Fitzgerald’s March 1 post:

Lack of domain join “means Windows 8 ARM tablets are going to be consumer devices that don’t integrate with the Microsoft enterprise infrastructure any better than the iPad, so Microsoft loses what should have been a major selling point. You will have to sacrifice battery life and go with x86 to get enterprise features and manageability. This is a big blow to Microsoft’s tablet proposition for the enterprise and WOA may be DOA as a result.

Foley todavía dejaba lugar en su comentario a las novedades que la participación de Microsoft en CeBIT pudiera tener para mejorar este panorama. Hasta donde se puede ver, no ha habido cambios notables.

Plex 7.0 disponible

Desde hace unos pocos días está disponible la versión 7.0 de Plex, con buenas novedades especialmente para la variante .NET, soporte de Azure, servicios web, java/JEE (pensado para java 7), y el uso incrementado del API de Plex. Un aspecto que especialmente valoro es que su aparición mantiene un ciclo relativamente corto de actualizaciones.
La persistencia en el trabajo sobre el API del modelo facilita además la labor de partners, que pueden crear extensiones con mayor control sobre el modelo. Podemos decir que Plex sumado a las extensiones que explotan el API abierto, permiten cubrir ampliamente las plataformas existentes y las emergentes. En particular, estoy esperando en algunos días ver el primer ensayo sobre Windows 8 Metro, la ejecución de una aplicación construída con WebClient (Plex generando Java, HTML5, JavaScript, y CSS3). Considerando la evolución de Windows 8, creo que tenemos garantizada una nueva actualización de Plex en un ciclo más corto que el anterior.
Un documento de presentación está disponible en el sitio de CA.

Java y Metro/WinRT

Windows 8, en su versión orientada a futuro, es Metro/WinRT. Francamente, no sé si Metro será un nuevo Vista, condenado a ser cambiado a una nueva versión tras ser descartado masivamente; sin embargo, creo que está claro que este será el nuevo sistema operativo de Microsoft, con mayores o menores parches o variaciones, después de un mayor o menor paso de tiempo. Y también está claro que el API de Win32 tiene sus años contados, que será considerado "legacy", y que no se deben esperar mejoras futuras sobre él. En estas condiciones, que creo que son irreversibles desde el punto de vista de Microsoft, WinRT debe ser considerado como el futuro del mercado Windows dependiente.
Si esta premisa es cierta, la pregunta siguiente es acerca del universo de productos, lenguajes o herramientas construídas sobre y para esta plataforma: seguramente, algunas que ya hoy han quedado obsoletas, o cambiarán radicalmente, o deberán repensar una tecnología que las suplante, como sería el caso de Flash. Otras, las más, enfrentan un camino complicado. Particularmente, en este momento pienso en Java; no sé si tendrá sentido crear una máquina virtual pensando en Metro como interfaz de usuario (tiles, pantalla táctil), que pudiera quedar a futuro como algo más asociado al usuario final, a tablets, a dispositivos móviles en general. Pero seguramente sí debe comprobarse que una máquina virtual puede ejecutarse sobre WinRT. No he visto todavía ningún pronunciamiento de Oracle ni de otros responsables del estándar, y probablemente pase algún tiempo antes de que haya alguno; habrá problemas de políticas (qué excelente momento para cerrar Windows a la competencia...), antes de resolver cómo enlazar la máquina virtual. por ahora, solo es posible encontrar algunos sencillos intentos de ejecutar java, algunos logrados, pero doy por entendido que estos casos lo han hecho sobre el escritorio (Win32). La siguiente es una pequeña lista de  casos en este sentido:
Ejecutando Java en DOS, claramente sobre Win32,
Lo mismo, en una edición temprana.
Un intento de  instalar Eclipse.
Un intento algo inadvertido, quizá sobre Metro, pero que cae hacia Win32.
Un intento con muchos problemas.

Sin embargo, lo más sustancioso está en otros casos tempranos enfocando Metro/WinRt. Particularmente uno en Google Groups (The Java Posse), discutiendo los problemas de arquitectura (aunque para nada hay que despreciar otro argumento discutido allí: "The real reason is Microsoft pathetically trying to exclude competitors and competing technologies, trying to impose HTML5 for everything"):

So it seems that Windows 8's new "Metro" user environment will make IE plugin-free. Any attempt to use plugins like Flash, Java, Silverlight or anything else, will bring the user to the "old-style" (as in  Windows 7) desktop, which will be seen as a severe experience degradation for users who prefer the new environment.

I am not as much plugin-hater as some people; in my Android smartphone, I certainly appreciate the support for Flash, for simple practical purposes - the rare website that uses some Flash and has no mobile-optimized version or native Android app. And yeah, my karma be damned but Flash works well enough  for me (admittedly on a nice hardware - Tegra2, dual-core Droid X2, rooted & debloated, Flash updated to 10.3).

Still, I love the idea of a plugin-free world, if only for the security improvement. (Including avoidance of trash like "security plugins" mandated by online banking sites...) But this is not really fair if we consider modern browsers that run plugins in separate and low-privilege processes, plus enhanced plugin technology like Google's (Pepper and NaCl / PNaCl), plus plugins for runtimes that are managed and have their own sandboxing and security mechanisms and are sufficiently well patched (candidates: Java, Flash, Silverlight - yes none of them are perfect, they all add some to the attack surface, but the ever-growing browser is already a huge attack surface, there's no single week going without new security bugs being found in every major browser so I don't think the "three big" plugins would make things significantly worse).

There's already people betting that Microsoft will have to back away and maybe, put an option to allow plugins in Metro mode even if not active by default. I know for sure, that corporations are writing new apps with things like Flash, by the thousands. Everybody complains that the corporate world is still dragging its feet with old versions of IE, remarkably the much reviled IE6; but if you think that ActiveX code for IE6 is holding back the web, this is nothing compared to how much stuff depends on Flash. A plugin-free IE10+ will be adopted in corporate world by 2020 with some optimism...

What about the applet tag? This is not part of HTML5 anymore, but it's part of previous versions even if deprecated. This should give Java applets special privileges, at least if Metro-mode-IE will support pre-HTML5 markup (and sure as hell it must, for a long time still). I'm too lazy to install the Win8 beta just to check this, would anybody report if applet [tag] works in Metro/IE? Just curious, I guess it doesn't...

Even in HTML5, there's the [object] tag which is supported and not even deprecated. Will Microsoft break the spec and declare that this feature of HTML5 is not supported in Metro mode? What about Java WebStart, maybe the deployment toolkit can be adapted to detect Metro and not depend on [object], I guess the only fundamental need is the ability to download a JNLP file and launch the associated program? Will Metro restrict such launching too? Both Oracle and Adobe are working on their Plan B for the eventual dominance of HTML5, with new tooling that convert their stuff in plain HTML5. In Oracle's case, there is hope for JavaFX 2.0 if its Web Runtime turns out to be good (it's not yet included in the public beta so I have no idea). There is no similar hope though for old-style, AWT/Swing applets or JAWS apps that will not benefit from a similar Web Runtime.

By the way, the JavaFX Web Runtime (WRT) will be a very interesting test for the claim that Javascript & HTML5 can be fast enough and powerful enough to build any application, competing at least with Java/Silverlight/Flash if not with native apps. Summarizing, the WRT will have a pure-web implementation of the JavaFX frameworks (animation, controls, graphics etc.), I guess using canvas or WebGL and Javascript; and the application code will be (perhaps partially) converted to Javascript code. So, supposing that this WRT is well designed and implemented - and that's a core part of the v2.0 reboot plan so I guess they carefully redesigned the whole thing to make the WRT possible - then if it turns out to be much less efficient than the conventional runtime, this will be strong evidence that the mantra "HTML5/Javascript is fast enough" is bullshit. Let's wait and see.

In another interesting development, Google's technologies like PNaCl and Dart can be powerful enablers for anything that generates Javascript code, from GWT to Adobe's and Oracle's  tools. Dart is supposed to be much more efficient than Javascript, and also, the Java language will probably be much
closer to Dart than it is to Javascript (less sure about AS3...); and I'm sure Oracle and Adobe can write new compilers that emit Dart code instead of Javascript code. Or even, PNaCl code. So if these Google technologies succeed, they can benefit other platforms too. We will still be able to run other browsers in Win8. 

Otra interesante apertura es la expuesta en Iced in code:

The big question now is where does JavaSE fit in all this bold re-imagining? Oracle/Sun have done a great deal of work over the past few years to get Java to work pretty well on Windows and become as natively integrated as possible, but with the re-working of Windows, Java will be confined to the “legacy” application section for the time being, and will not be able to play with the new cool kids in the “Metroverse”. I wonder what steps Oracle  is going to take to make Java still a viable product in the new Windows 8 platform, or will they simple give up and require us all to move to platform specific programming again, like C#?

y alguna acotación de lectores:

First, Oracle should under all circumstances make Java SE compatible with the new platforms like tables, macbooks and metro to keep their concept intact – OR – find a way to easily let Java SE applications run as “apps-likes” under another Java distribution made specificly to these platforms.
Second, Metro is nothing more (or less) than a simple “start-web-page”. Windows 8 is very similar to Windows 7, with program and filesystem seperated – where android and apple are more likely to melt these two things together. Therefore I doesn’t like andorid and apple as their operationsystem are defining the limitations. Some people would call that user-friendliness, I partially agree with that.
I believe that Windows 8 Metro will be an extension to their current desktop on traditional computers, but not a future replacement making the desktop legacy – and we won’t see anything like this within the next 10 years. But Windows 8 Metro will be the beginning of web and computers melting together – and this will eventually make the desktop computer look more like a tablet – and a tablet will look more like a desktop computer – and that will happen!

Uno de los casos que chocaron con WinRT.
Una discusión que refiere a Intel y ARM.

En fin, faltando una respuesta oficial de Oracle, comienza a abrirse el juego. ¿Va usted sopesando el impacto de Windows 8 en sus inversiones en licencias, plataformas, aplicaciones?

Firefox en Windows 8

Firefox anuncia sus planes de desarrollo del soporte para Windows 8. Su plan de trabajo delinea el tipo de dificultades con las que cualquier tercero se encontrará al trabajar para Windows 8 y Metro:

Mozilla’s Brian R. Bondy revealed today that development has begun on Firefox for Metro.

Last month, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler announced that a Metro version of Firefox was in early planning stages, with a blog post about Mozilla’s goals that in turn linked to a roadmap. Dotzler is listed as the product manager.

Today’s announcement fleshes out some of the key decisions that the Mozilla team has made in the past month.

According to Bondy, Firefox for Metro will mimic Internet Explorer 10’s split personality, as a “Metro style enabled desktop browser”:

Unlike Metro applications, Metro style enabled desktop browsers have the ability to run outside of the Metro sandbox. Meaning not only can we build a browser, but we can build a powerful browser which gives an experience equal to that of a classic Desktop browser.

Metro style enabled desktop browsers have access to most Win32 API and the entire new WinRT API.

Unfortunately a browser can only participate in Metro mode if it is the default browser. So if Firefox is not the default browser on a system, you can’t use it in Metro mode. This is a decision made by Microsoft.

Volveremos sobre la "doble personalidad...

Metro y la herencia de Win32, II

Mientras recopilo información de Windows 8, pensando en el impacto que pudiera tener sobre las aplicaciones existentes (Win32), encuentro estas observaciones de Osvaldo Doederlein, ingeniero en Google:

Microsoft's "squaring of the circle" is by no means perfect: it looks more like an octogon to me. And while I understand and even appreciate the new UI concepts (semantic zoom, layout, typography etc.), its current rendering still looks crude, and (like Peter mentions) the Desktop and Metro look totally alien to each other. Maybe Microsoft can still work on this and make Metro's look more polished, and more similar to the desktop. I like shades, subtle 3D effects, and other decorations that a large display can use (and yeah, OSX uses more elegantly than anyone, though I'm happy enough with Win7). And I'm not visually impaired to need fonts with grotesque sizes everywhere; I'll rather see more data in one screen than need lots of horizontal scrolling (which is really cumbersome on mouse systems). My PC is not a giant Windows Phone!

Now I realize that MS is struggling in the smartphone and tablet markets, and having a single OS and UI that carries over all these platforms will be a big win. Can't really blame Microsoft: Apple is moving in the same direction with Mountain Lion (but not as aggressively as Metro). Even at Google we have Android and ChromeOS, but these platforms are more device-/web-/cloud-centric, and they have no desktop legacy; also, they're not competing on full desktops, to run complex apps like Photoshop (at work, I use Goobuntu for my "macho apps" like Eclipse). The problem is, after years of failure trying to shoehorn the classic Windows into tablets, Microsoft went to the opposite extreme--the total "tabletification" of the PC. Big mistake; there's no reason to believe a device-centric UI will be optimal for a conventional PC, remarkably when running sophisticated applications like IDEs, graghic editors, office suites etc.

Esta es mi especial preocupación. Así como y antes observara respecto a la tecnología de Activex frente al énfasis en .NET, existe un riesgo evidente de que todo el universo de aplicaciones basadas en Win32 y en la interfase visual del Windows [ahora] tradicional, se encuentre ante un futuro de difícil encaminamiento. Por necesidad, volveré sobre esto. Mi cuenta de aplicaciones Win32 a atender es demasiado grande.

Windows 8, WinRT y la herencia de Win32

Este miércoles pasado ha sido un día especial en la pre campaña de lanzamiento de Windows 8: se ha iniciado su "consumer preview", con presentación especial en el Mobile World Congress de Barcelona, y comentarios simultáneos en toda publicación tecnológica que se precie. Sigue resultándome muy curioso que un producto todavía inmaduro, cuyas prestaciones aún no están completas, sea presentado primero a la comunidad de desarrolladores (esto sí es normal) y luego al público en general, tal como está. Sin embargo, puede decirse en este caso en que existe un cambio muy grande en el producto, que puede ser entendible: medir la respuesta, conocer temprano los fallos más gruesos, delinear un mercado de aplicaciones, entusiasmar al cambio. La actividad de difusión entre desarrolladores y socios de negocios ha sido intensa, y sus principales características son bastante conocidas. Desde hace meses se pueden encontrar evaluaciones, comentarios, ensayos, normalmente favorables a Windows 8, y pocas observaciones críticas. ¿No existen reservas críticas sobre los cambios de magnitud que se avecinan?
Sí existen, pero hubiera preferido ver más distanciamiento y criterio en desarrolladores, actores varios de consultoría  y comercializadores, en cuanto al impacto que Windows 8 pueda llegar a tener sobre el mercado actual de usuarios de empresa. Algo que ahora pudiera llamarse un mercado "legacy" o "tradicional", si comparamos lo que hoy usan, y lo que Windows 8 propone.
Partiendo del hecho de que la arquitectura propuesta (WinRT) es diversa y no integrable con la anterior, todo lo que hoy existe está inicialmente confinado al ámbito de Win32, un ámbito sin prioridad de evolución en cuanto a proyectos, y también al momento de ejecutarse. Usted puede construír una nueva aplicación desde cero para ser expuesta en WinRT (y ser aceptada por la AppStore), y se sentirá muy felíz de aprovechar sus ventajas intrísecas y ser de los primeros en el mercado; o tomar su aplicación ahora "legacy" para siempre, analizarla, reescribir todo lo necesario, y portarla a WinRT; o dejarla como está, y confinarla a Win32, es decir, al "escritorio", que ahora es un contenedor subordinado. Lo que está claro es que existe una verdadera ruptura entre las versiones anteriores y la nueva: usted deberá aprender un nuevo API, y deberá replantear cada aplicación, y olvidarse de lo que conocía. Algún comentarista recomienda reconvertir cada actividad diferenciada en un servicio web, para poder ir adelante en la migración. ¿Ha pensado en rever todas y cada una de sus aplicaciones que no sean Office u otros productos nativos de Microsoft?
¿Ha sido la mejor opción definir una arquitectura orientada a recursos móviles como prioridad casi exclusiva? ¿Se ajusta al mercado corporativo? probablemente sí, en el nicho de actividades de movilidad. Pero seguramente no en la mayoría de actividades diarias, atendidas por las llamadas aplicaciones "de escritorio". Este área difícilmente sacaría ventajas del paradigma Metro. Creo que existe una posibilidad de que se repita la situación dada con Windows Vista: una prolongada resistencia a adoptarlo. Tendrá que esforzarse mucho Microsoft para lograr adopcíon en ese área de su mercado.
Presento a continuación algunos análisis, algunos tempranos (último cuarto del año pasado en adelante) y otros muy recientes. Esto es importante porque, como hemos dicho, Windows 8 ES UN PRODUCTO EN CONSTRUCCIÓN, y algunas dudas tempranas se han disipado (y otras han madurado).

Un análisis positivo se puede leer en los comentarios y ejemplos de Harry Pierson (varios). Dos analistas favorables que de todas maneras exponen la magnitud del problema, son Rockford Lhotka y Miguel de Icaza. Lhotka, por octubre de 2011, presentaba una serie de diagramas que mostraban dónde operaban distintas tecnologías, WinRT o Win32. De estos diagramas queda claro que prácticamente todo lo que hoy ejecutamos cae del lado de Win32: Silverlight, WPF, sitios web con plugins (Today’s web sites that use HTML, js, Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, and other common web technologies all run in the desktop web browser. This is the same as web sites work today in Win7), c++, MFC, ATL, Windows Forms. Y se ejecutan en WinRT casi exclusivamente tecnologías nuevas construídas por Microsoft para Windows 8: WinRT .NET y XAML (I expect this to be the most widely used technology stack for building WinRT applications. The .NET available to WinRT applications is (I think) best thought of as being like .NET on the Windows Phone. It is basically the Silverlight subset of .NET, plus a bunch of WinRT-specific features and capabilities. The differences between Silverlight and WinRT are a bit more dramatic than with WP7, but the analogy remains quite accurate. The XAML is very close to Silverlight and WPF, and the types of code you can write using C# and VB are very comparable to what you can write today using Silverlight); HTML5, WinRT c++. Excepcionalmente, también se pueden ejecutar en WinRT paginas web que consistan sólo de HTML, CSS y JavaScript (If a web site only uses HTML, CSS, and js, then it can run in the WinRT and desktop browsers interchangeably. Microsoft clearly expects this type of web site to become more common over time, though it is interesting that a large number of existing Microsoft web sites are really only useful in the desktop browser)
Resumiendo sus primeras impresiones, Lhotka dice:

Through this series of diagrams, we clearly show how today’s technologies map directly into the Win8 desktop world, still running on the Win32 API. And we show the three technology stacks that enable development of applications on the new WinRT API.
From everything we know today, it seems clear that migrating to WinRT will require effort, regardless of the technology used today, or in the Win8 desktop. Of all existing technologies, Silverlight and then WPF appear to offer the easiest migration. HTML 5, css, and js skills, along with some code assets will also migrate, but there’s a non-trivial architectural difference between web development and smart client development that shouldn’t be overlooked.

por su parte, Miguel de Icaza estudia detalladamente el nuevo modelo enfocado en .NET, y en su detalle podemos dimensionar la dificultad de readecuación a Windows 8 y su API. El API sigue un modelo asincrónico (Microsoft feels that when a developer is given the choice of a synchronous and an asynchronous API, developers will choose the simplicity of a synchronous API. The result usually works fine on the developer system, but is terrible when used in the wild. With WinRT, Microsoft has followed a simple rule: if an API is expected to take more than 50 milliseconds to run, the API is asynchronous); .NET pasa a estar disponible parcialmente en el nuevo modelo (Some developers are confused as to whether .NET is there or not in the first place, as not all of the .NET APIs are present (File I/O, Sockets), many were moved and others were introduced to integrate with WinRT. When you use C# and VB, you are using the full .NET framework. But they have chosen to expose a smaller subset of the API to developers to push the new vision for Windows 8. And this new vision includes safety/sandboxed systems and asynchronous programming. This is why you do not get direct file system access or socket access and why synchronous APIs that you were used to consuming are not exposed)

Invito a seguir sus observaciones, para ir teniendo una idea de cuánto trabajo deberá afrontar en estas condiciones para adecuarse.

Para no abundar, recomiendo la lectura del resumen de dificultades comentada en Techrepublic por Justin James. De las más importantes mencionadas, el modelo asincrónico, la falta de acceso directo a disco, el uso de pantallas táctiles, el énfasis en la nube. Hay más, pero quizá sea preferible que lo lea directamente.

Esto es sólo un pequeño resumen, para que usted piense y estime los tiempos por venir, y vaya calculando decisiones. Una vez más, sería valorable que desarrolladores, implementadores, consultantes, comercializadores, e influyentes en general, se ocuparan del impacto de la adopción del producto, y no sólo del brillo de las novedades. Tras muchos años de hegemonía, también Microsoft tiene un patrimonio "legacy", y alguien debería recordar que eso significa muchas horas de trabajo, y mucho dinero invertido.

Apple: cambio tecnológico, otra hegemonía

Tim Worstall, en Forbes, comenta el hecho histórico del cambio en la posición relativa de Apple frente a Microsoft: sólo el negocio de Iphone es mayor que todas las líneas de negocios de Microsoft combinadas. Y estima que este hecho marca hasta qué punto a cambiado el alcance de la informática de escritorio y del consumidor final:

But to someone like me who started paying attention to the computer industry around 1988, 89, this is a gross affront to the established worldview. Apple’s the plucky little upstart with a niche business and Microsoft is the globally encompassing near monopolist of the desktop.
Not that either of those were entirely and wholly true at any point but that has been, until just these last few years of iPods, iPhones and iPads, the general background to any story comparing the two firms.
So the world has changed since my youth then: possibly not the most perceptive observation anyone has ever made I agree.

Lo que resalta Worstall es que el avance de Apple es producido por el desplazamiento del centro de gravedad de la tecnología, y la presencia de de un nuevo universo, fuera del alcance del competidor hegemónico. Algo que ya le pasó a IBM antes, frente a Microsoft precisamente:

Back in the very early days of personal computing it was possible to think that this might come true: that Apple, making both hardware and operating systems would beat the highly fragmented world of the IBM compatible PC. Then for about 25, 30 years it wasn’t, in fact it was near inconceivable that Apple would ever in any way “beat” the Beast of Redmond and yet now they are.
But as I’ve remarked before, they’ve not done it by replacing Windows or Office, the things that tie the PC to Microsoft. They’ve done an end run around the end and edge of the whole PC technology. Which is also as I’ve said before. Monopolies tend to fall not when they are beaten in their own market but when their market becomes only a subset of a wider one, when advancing technology makes the monopolist’s position almost irrelevant.