Ext-JS licence to GPL

What a shower!! As Graeme Rocher from G2One puts it, “There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, but this has got to be up there with the stupidist I’ve seen and I’m not even personally an Ext-JS user.”

Well I am an Ext-JS user and have recently been selling it to a client as part of a solution comprising of open source/commercial artifacts. There are plenty of other great open source Ajax toolkits out there such as YUI and DOJO. Will this indirectly help Adobe Flex adoption as well?

Is Connecting Bits to Atoms Sufficient?

I’m just back from attending what was a very informative and thought provoking day. Well done Pat Doody and everyone else who organised the event. This event is sure to get bigger given the range of subject areas today covered. I will add my own summary of the presentations over the next few days. It was humbling and also extremely exciting to hear world class experts talk about their own particular field.

I was using Twitter during some of the presentations to send reminders for some information I was really interested in (and I had no pen). The jury’s still out for me on using it at conferences. I’m sure Jane Grimson gave me a dirty look while she was speaking. She must have thought I was texting a friend.

Tralee IT and MIT

Read this in the IT business pages. This is very exciting since it combines two areas I am very interested in and some expertise as well. Supply Chain and Data Integration/Systems Operability. 

Fantastic to see collaborations of this calibre taking place in Ireland and not just with Universities either. I would be interesting to see whether there exists knowledge sharing between CIDS (Centre for Innovation in Distributed Systems) and the DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Group) which does great work in Semantic Web Technologies. There is definately potential, Semantic Annocation and Integration of Data is the first thing comes to mind. Especially since DERI seem to have some interesting commercial projects in the pipeline.?

Flow

If you have experience with Lean Manufacturing you’ll be aware that Flow is one of the fundamental concepts.

Linguistics nerd that I am it turns out the transation of Flow in Greek and Latin.
From the Thracian Glossary
ars- ‘to flow; current, river’ [Old-Pruss. RN Arsio, Arse, Old-Ind. árs,ati ‘to flow’, Hitt. arš- ‘the same’].

From Basic Latin Elements List:
fluct-  (Latin: flow, wave)

 Flow no longer has the same ring as it used to.

Disruption in the Application Server Market

Gartner were predicting last year that there would be major disruption in the app server market in 2008. Listening to Rod Johnsons talk in Ireland recently would lend credence to this. Apparently Morgan Stanley does not use any application servers now. Instead they use Tomcat to expose their web apps. Certainly in my experience I don’t know anybody using Websphere out of choice!

Dell Gives Up On… Dell

Reading this headline on the Exolving Excellence blog. Hopefully Dell will now be forced to stop crowing how they are a lean company. But, lean isn’t just about reducing waste. The Toyota Production System is also about “respect for people,” meaning your employees, suppliers, and customers. Dell definitely scores higher on “reducing waste” than they do on “respecting people.” http://www.leanblog.org/2006/06/once-again-dell-is-not-tps.html
 

I would probably feel angrier with them if I did not know how they operate having worked for them in the past. A combination of analysts and shareholder pressure along with the massice tax breaks from North Carolina to build the plant there were large factors. Also Austin is Michael Dell’ home town!

Manufacturing Competency Centres

An organisation called the High level group on Manufacturing presented a report to Michael Martin yesterday. In it they talked about the “establishment of National Manufacturing Competence Centres that would engage with industry to address current and future needs, covering areas such as R&D, innovation in process, supply chain management and energy efficiency, as well as training and reskilling requirements”.

 It will be interesting to see how this develops and also how the different groups promoting productivity such as the Irish Management Group interact with this. All in all this can only be a positive development.

Outcome measurement uptake in EAP services

Taken from www.psyfin.com/newsletter.htm. It looks like there is some more spotlight on outcome measurement in the psychotherapy field once again. The gist of the article is that although outcome measurements have been around for some time there has been a small uptake. “But for now, Seidel says fewer than 1% of clinicians in private practice are using outcomes measurement tools.” One of the reasons of pushback from clinicians may be that outcome measurements will be used as another “stick”. “Of course, many clinicians remain resistant to outcomes requirements. Carol Goodheart, a member of the American Psychological Association’s board of directors, says outcomes measurement at managed care companies is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing issue, because it’s really not about improving quality–it’s about reducing costs.”

At the moment United Behavioral Health and Magellan are the two biggest proponents of outcome measurement in the US. Will be interesting to see the uptake in Europe.

Amazon Elastic IP Addresses, EXT JS

Amazon this week released the Elastic IP service and Availability Zones which should make it easier to host high availability web sites and web services.

In the grails world there is a new plugin for grails which should allow scaffolding for using ExtJS Ajax toolkit. Hopefully will have time to try this out.

Even more exciting is the release of the Adobe Flex toolkit for the force.com platform. I’ve never been a big fan of the salesforce.com user interface. Otherwise I’d be totally sold as it’s a powerful platform. I don’t know yet whether a complete user interface can be developed to sit on top of a force.com back-end or whether it’s just widgets as seems to be the case in the showcase on the force.com website.