This is exactly what I’m envisioning happening with Google Wave in the enterprise.  It will become the “glue code” for the user experience.  It won’t replace existing back-end apps, but provide a much cleaner, nicer, and more productive interface for interacting with them.  The biggest problem most enterprise apps pose is the lack of focus on the user experience.  Google Wave provides a framework for improving that experience.

Google Wave as it stands is a collaboration app.  It ties together all forms of communication and collaboration in a nice browser based app.  The biggest features of Google Wave are those that haven’t been built yet.  Google Wave’s underlying platform was built for extensibility — for features that haven’t yet been thought up.  Most of the features that were demonstrated are cool techie-whizzbang features that web devs and web aficionados appreciate — features like live concurrent editing.  However, for average consumers, I’d argue that live concurrent editing isn’t that big a deal.  Think about it… most people are so accustomed to delayed communication patterns (email and snail mail) rather than the real-time, instant feedback style of communication that we get when using instant messaging or sms.  I suspect that’s not going to change for most consumers.  Regardless, I love the live concurrent editing feature, but I think the Enterprise is where a feature like that will be very useful.  Collaborating on documents in real-time is a great feature and one we’ve used in the past with Google Docs.  Since Google Wave will allow developers to build on top of this technology, think of what type of apps you can build that utilize live concurrent editing.  What if you can build a Bespin type of app inside Google Wave and make writing code a collaborative task.  Those of us who practice agile development and TDD do this already, but what if we could do it in one application that allows us to easily mashup other commonly related tasks — like automatically creating bug reports and user stories in external apps, etc?

Google Wave’s extensions consist of robots and gadgets.  Robots are basically participants that you can add to your wave that allow you to automate certain tasks within a wave.  A robot can read the contents of a wave and then perform an action.  There’s a myriad of robots you could create that will allow an enterprise worker to be more productive. Here are a few:“Expensie”

One common example that pops up whenever someone is talking about some enterprisey thing are expense reports.  We could build a robot that can be used to create or append to an expense report out of web receipts you receive.  All you have to do is add “Expensie” to the receipts you receive.

“Recruitie”

How about a robot that streamlines the whole recruiting process.  An applicant applies for a job through some standard web based form, that form gets sent to the recruiter and a new wave is created.  Now the applicant and recruiter can collaborate within the wave.  But, to automate the process, the “Recruitie” (recruiting assistant) robot is added to the wave by the recruiter.  This robot’s job is to schedule the candidate’s interviews with interviewers and make sure the candidate is well informed of the process.  It’s also responsible for making sure that the interviewer is well informed of who the candidate is by packaging up a “file” (resume, cover letter, and automated background search results facilitated by Google search) for the interviewer to review prior to the interview.  Once the interviews have taken place, the robot can solicit an evaluation and vote from each interviewer then notify the hiring manager and the recruiter of the results.  Once the hiring manager makes a decision to hire or not, the “Recruitie” robot carries out the appropriate tasks.  If hired, the appropriate notifications are sent to the candidate and then a new robot (”Onboardie”) is added to the wave to begin the on-boarding process for the candidate.

This may seem like a standard recruiting workflow found in other systems (including ours), however, the big difference is in where this process takes place.  In this case, the wave becomes the central source of truth from beginning to end with all participants interacting within the same system.  The user experience is simple, clean and very intuitive.  It’s not a series of web based forms but more like a checklist that different participants engage with.

There are so many interesting examples that can be applied using the Google Wave paradigm.  My head is still spinning with ideas.  One thing’s for sure, we’re definitely going to kick the tires and build some of these ideas out.  Let us know if you’d like to participate.  Google Wave is ripe for enterprises.

I was once a user of those other browsers, but today, I’m back to using the king of all browsers, IE6.  Screw all the bigots out there who keep tearing down IE’s glory.  I used to be one… and feel awful about it.  Today, I take everything I ever said about IE back.  It’s the only browser that should ever exist.

Join me in the SaveIE6 campaign!  Take back the browser!

How can you apply Getting Real-ish ideas inside a big company? Here’s an idea: Go rogue. Pick something and do it under the radar. Create something in a few weeks that normally takes a few months. Do something in a way that works better than the status quo (or shows the promise of working better), Then you won’t need to convince anyone with words — the results will speak for themselves.

This is exactly how we accomplished building Mix and Connect at Oracle.  Think of how much can be improved if those with a passion to change something actually did it.

This morning’s NYTimes has an article about Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.  For those of you who follow Ubuntu and Shuttleworth, the article is nothing new… just talks about Shuttleworth’s desire to displace Microsoft in the OS war.  However, it did get me thinking about my history with OSes.  When I started tinkering around with computers it was all about what was available.  Today, there are lots of choices.  Which brings to question, which OS would you impart on your children?

Most kids today will have to learn how to use a computer.  Some have a natural curiosity to learn, others don’t.  Either way, as a computer junkie, I have a desire impart my preferences to my kids.  My kids are only 4 years old, so, they’re not at an age (in my opinion) to be tinkering with a keyboard yet.  However, when the time comes, I feel a need to show them the way.  Is that good or bad?

To me, choosing an OS is a very personal choice.  A choice chock full of feelings about what that OS means and the people behind it.  In a sense, it’s a moral choice.  We make choices like this all the time.  How many people do you know who have/had a preference in always “buying American”?  My choice in an operating system is loaded with the same fuzzy logic.

Microsoft made close to $17B in sales off of Windows last year. My choice in avoiding Windows (where I can) isn’t because I can’t stand to see Microsoft make so much money — it’s because I can’t stand to see Microsoft make so much money on mediocre software that takes 10,000 developers over 5 years to make (Vista).  Choosing Windows today is like choosing to buy an American SUV (in today’s market conditions).  In my very opinionated opinion, it’s a bad choice — certainly not a choice I would allow my kids to make (well… I suppose I should be open minded enough).

Apple, the worlds latest “darling” computer/gadget company, also makes a lot of money on their operating system.  However, the passion in the craft of creating something beautiful and functional shows through in their products.  Apple’s OS (and other products) leave users inspired and push them to learn and become better.  I don’t care what my kids end up doing in life as long as they have a passion for learning.  As long as Apple continues to inspire and show their passion for their creations, I will continue to use their OS (and other products) and, hopefully, my kids will choose Apple for the same reasons.

Linux or Ubuntu Linux (to be precise) is a great OS.  I’m a firm believer in open source.  And like Mark Shuttleworth, I too believe that the open source process produces better stuff.  This is true because the people who participate in open source projects have a passion for the products they work on — why else would you donate your free time?  As a parent, I want my kids to embrace volunteerism and participate in the common good.  The philosophy behind Linux and open source in general convey these principles well.

I know I over think these things compared to most people, but I think one’s choices are important — they define us. What OS would you have your kids use?  If you don’t have kids, pretend you do.

Most (actually, all) of his talk was devoted to the consumer web.  My head is almost always focused on how to take the good stuff coming from the consumer web back into the enterprise web.  Bill’s ideas made me realize how little we (as enterprise web app developers) pay attention to the minute details that go into producing web apps that customers love.  Bill is currently the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix.  If you’re a Netflix customerfan, you’ll know that Netflix.com is a superb site.  Netflix’ business depends entirely on the success of its site.  Very small incremental changes could drastically affect their business.  All of the changes they make to the site go through rigorous testing with real users and are carefully measured.

With the enterprise products I’ve been a part of building, we’ve spent some time on usability tests.  However, they’re usually done before the product is even passed over to development.  They’re usually done during the visual design phase.  Once the UX teams have finalized their product designs, they’re approved and passed over to the developers to start building.  However, most of the time, the product doesn’t end up matching what was designed by UX.

This process wasn’t always this way.  I remember back in the PeopleSoft client-server days, most products didn’t go through any usability tests.  I suppose the reasoning is that back then, most of the “ERP” apps were focused on back-end users who were trained to use the software so usability wasn’t that big of an issue.  Today’s focus is in building apps that anyone can use without training. Aside from testing usability, I don’t know if we focus enough on learnability.  In order for software to be easy enough for anyone to use, it needs to provide enough queues for users to be able to learn how to use it.  Bill provides a lot of examples in his presentation above of how to do this.

The problem with the the visual design process in the enterprise today (as I see it) is that it doesn’t follow good software development practices like agile.  Once a visual design is finalized, it’s passed on and never really iterated for improvements.  Some enterprise software development cycles could take over a year or two from concept to design to build to release.  Over that time, new UI patterns could have emerged as well as totally new ways to solve the same problem that the software originally sought out to solve.  This is the reason why agile methodologies exists.

What Bill described as his overall process for building good looking web sites that work can be reduced down to an agile process for visual design.  It doesn’t make sense to design once then move on.  The process needs to be iterative.  Feedback from real users with real data need to be used as a way of testing ideas and measuring success rates iteratively.  I’m no expert with UX, but this process makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyone out there in Oracle UX land care to comment?  Are you guys already doing this?  If so, how’s it working?

BTW, Bill’s got a book coming out on this topic… added to my wishlist.

Anyway, I’ve been tinkering around a lot lately with some of the illustration tools.  I recently stumbled upon Xara Xone and found some awesome tutorials.  I decided to put a few of those techniques to work using the photo of the cup that Paul posted in the previous post.  Within 10 minutes, I had this:

It’s far from being exact, but it’s pretty easy to trace an existing photo and create a vector based illustration.  During OOW, I sat down with Anthony and showed him a few of these techniques.  In no time, he was able to create his own avatar pretty easily.

This begs the question… why aren’t more engineers interested in creative design — aside from the reason, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body”?  It’s a great way to stretch your brain if you primarily code all day.  I find that it’s a nice way to do something totally different but totally useful too.  I think everyone innately has some creative skills, but many people don’t bother nurturing those skills.  I’ve seen some amazing art work from the kids at my boys’ preschool.  If these kids (2-6 years old) can kick out amazing art, why can’t many adults do it?  Is it a skill that degrades over time?  Or are people just not interested in it?

Being a good developer requires creative skills. Writing beautiful code is akin to creating something that’s visually pleasing.  Engaging in your creative side helps you improve those skills.  Alright, enough of the preaching.  Do you practice your creative muscles?  If so, sound off and tell us why you like using the other side of your brain.

A couple of weeks ago a poll was started on OraTweet regarding Vi vs. Emacs:

How could there even be a comparison?  After all…

And for those who think TextMate is the best thing that they’ve ever installed on their macs, I say, “Vi still rules and Textmate is still €39 ≈ $57 — more than free.”

This post is nothing but a good ole fashion flamebait.  As I type this, I realize that the only reason I’m posting this is because I got a little too excited when MacVim (a very cool Vim app on OS X) added support for a mvim:// URL handler — now you know what excites me.  Anyway, since we’re at it… Gnome vs. KDE, Bash vs. Tcsh (or your pick)… fight back in the comments.

AppsLab sticker v1

This design was set at 1″ x 2.5″ — a perfect size to add to your laptop gallery.  After calling up about 5 different sticker printers, I found a few that can have it ready by Monday.  However, the one I chose can only print 2″ or above.  So, I opted for a 2″ x 2″ design:

AppsLab sticker v2

So, if you’re interested in a commerative edition AppsLab sticker, hit us up next week.

Here’s my backstory with Apple, MSFT, Linux, and others:

• Mid to late 80s: Timex Sinclair 1000… loved writing programs on cassette tapes!  How many of you Web 2.0 kiddies can say that?
• Early to mid 90s: had an Apple LC II from high school up to the end of college (prior to that, mucked around with the Amiga (forgot the model), Atari 400/800, and Commodore 64/VIC-20)
• Right after college: OS/2 (briefly) for work, Win95 at home
• ‘97 to early 2k: WinNT the WinXP
• 2002 to 2006: tinkered with RedHat but used XP most of the time
• 2006 to 2007: used XP and Ubuntu equally… tried Vista but hated it
• 2007 to early 2008: Ubuntu 100% (on my Dell D620, same hardware as Jake’s)
• Jan 2008 to May 2008: Ubuntu 100% on a MacBook Pro (3rd gen)
• May 2008 to today: OS X Leopard 100%

As you can see, I’ve had my fair share with OS fun dating back to the Reagan era — before politics were important to me.

My experience is very different from Jake’s.  I’m a computer hobbyist.  I love tinkering with machines.  I can spend hours taking something apart just to learn how something was put together.  To me, Linux is a dream OS.  You can shape it to your liking.

Since I started working for a living, computers have become less a hobby and more of a productivity tool.  It’s actually more than a toy.  Most people use it to build stuff, write documents or presentations, surf the internets, etc. in the hope that it will propel us to do things better and faster.  Even though I still enjoy tinkering with computers, more than ever, I have to be productive.  And in keeping with Moore’s law, the next day I need to be better and faster.

Linux is a fun OS and Ubuntu just works.  However, as I’ve told Jake after I moved over to OS X I realized how much time I spent tweaking and configuring Ubuntu.  This isn’t unique to Ubuntu — it’s true for all Linux distros.  Ubuntu does just work out of the box and it’s got most of the software I need already installed and configured.  However, because of the Linux ethos it’s just too easy to get caught up in tweaking and configuring.  Luckily, I didn’t have the Compiz issues that Jake had.  Compiz just worked for me on the same hardware that Jake has.  Before I moved to OS X, my Ubuntu config was perfect.  I was super productive with it.  However, I absolutely hated one thing… suspend and hibernate support sucked *ss.

I had no real reason to move to OS X aside from my gripes with suspend and hibernate support.  Although, it did seem weird to be running Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro.  I suppose I was nudged to move to OS X after going to RailsConf.  I’m usually not one to succumb to peer pressure, but after seeing how productive many of the Rails devs I met at RailsConf were with their Macs, I thought that maybe I should just give it a try.

The path to making the switch from Linux to OS X was a breeze.  Anyone who’s spent a ton of time in Linux is very comfortable with the command line.  The cool thing with OS X is that most of the software I needed was already there and the things I needed to install were pretty easy to install using MacPorts.  Most of my command line tweaks (bash scripts, aliases, profiles) worked with minor edits.  VPN worked seamlessly without flaws.  And my graphics program, Xara, works great under VirtualBox.

The trick to succeeding with any OS transition is to make sure you’re using software that works on multiple OSes.  For example, my preferred text editor is old-school VIM.  It’s what I wrote my programs with in college and it’s what I still use today… and it works on any OS.  For everything else, make sure the OS you’re moving to can run a virtualization app like VMWare or VirtualBox.

In the end, OS X is by no means perfect.  I miss some parts of Ubuntu.  Compiz kicks OS X’ *ss when it comes to eye candy.  I also miss the terminal.  OS X’ terminal is usable, but lags behind (and iTerm is no better).  Ubuntu’s default command line config is also much better.  Apple didn’t make OS X for people who spend their day on the command line.  Lastly, I hate paying for software… even though I do.  I’ve gotten so used to using good, free software developed by like minded folks.  But even with these gripes, I’m sticking to OS X for now simply because it’s harder to tweak which in the end makes me a hell of a lot more productive.  I liken it to not having network connectivity.  Without access to the internet, there’s no Twitter, no IM, no email, nothing to distract you from getting stuff done… which is why I love to disconnect from time to time during the work day.

• Ruby/JRuby on Rails on Oracle (proposed by me) — details how to use Ruby, JRuby and Rails on an all Oracle stack using Mix as a case study
• Using Ruby on Rails with Oracle E-Business Suite (proposed by Raimonds Simanovskis) — Raimonds showed Jake and me some of the Rails apps he’s been building on top of E-Business Suite — pretty cool stuff that I’m hoping we’ll be able to blog about soon.

The Ruby panel I’m on will be joined by Mark Driver, Gartner, Thomas Enebo, Sun Microsystems (and JRuby co-lead), David Koontz, Happy Camper Studios (of Monkeybars fame), Sarah Mei, Independent Programmer, and moi.

If you go, twitter me at rmanalan.

Our vision for OpenSocial is different from all the consumer based social networks that are currently using it to catch up to Facebook.  One of the first things we learned here at the AppsLab is that there is large pent-up demand for social applications within an enterprise.  A large organization like Oracle can be more productive when the social aspect to day-to-day business is made available to employees.  We saw this demand first hand when we built Connect and IdeaFactory last Summer.

For those who don’t know much about OpenSocial, all you need to know is that it’s a big deal for enterprises, but most people don’t know it yet.  Here’s why it’s not on the radar of most enterprises:

• OpenSocial was built to satisfy the need of existing social networks who need a way to allow users to plugin applications into their network — it’s not being built with enterprise requirements in mind (i.e., “enterprise class” security and provisioning, and other “enterprise” technology jargon) — and to me, that’s a blessing.  The biggest thing that slows down IT projects inside an enterprise is the loads of crap that developers have to follow.  In most cases, all of that is overkill.
• OpenSocial participation (right now) is mainly by those thinking about the consumer market — with the exception of SalesForce.com (another founding member).
• OpenSocial is in early adoption mode.

I like to think that we’re a forward thinking bunch at the Lab.  Paul and I have extensive experience with enterprise portal since we spent many years before this gig dealing with portals.  From my perspective, OpenSocial is what enterprise portals should have been.  OpenSocial will make it easy for employees within an enterprise to build and deploy their apps in a decentralized fashion.  Death to IT.

As we move closer to upgrading Connect with OpenSocial apps enabled, we’ll blog about it here to give you a glimpse of this vision.  We think it’s a big deal and hopefully once we have something to share, you will too.

JRuby is fast becoming a solid (and possibly preferred choice) for deploying Rails apps. Rich Manalang from Oracle will talk about how he and a small team from ThoughtWorks developed the first public deployment of JRuby on Rails (https://mix.oracle.co…) last November. He will go over JRuby basics, the advantages of deploying on JRuby, the differences between JRuby and MRI, and run through several deployment options.

If you go, please introduce yourself.

We applied a ton of goodness on this latest update.  Under the hood, we upgraded to JRuby 1.1RC2 (which was just recently released (on Saturday!) — yeah, we’re blazing trails here.  We also upgraded a bunch of underlying libraries like ActiveRecord-JDBC, JREXML, Goldspike and a few others.  The JRuby 1.1RC2 upgrade was a big boost in performance.  Last week, I spent some time running some Apache Bench tests on my MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz/4Gb mem) and saw some AMAZING numbers.  Here’s a summary:

After running Apache Bench with 1000 requests (for my profile page) with a concurrency level of 100 (ab -n 1000 -c 100), I get these numbers:

Server Software:        Oracle
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8888Document Path: /user_profiles/10023-rich-manalang
Document Length:        100 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   8.920769 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      1000
Total transferred:      549000 bytes
HTML transferred:       100000 bytes
Requests per second:    112.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       892.077 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       8.921 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          60.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

One thing to remember with these numbers… I ran this test on my laptop. Yes, I know what you’re saying… my laptop kicks your laptop’s arse. Regardless, these numbers look very good — here are a different set of stats for comparison.  For those interested, my Rails app was configured with the Goldspike default of 4 JRuby processes max-active and 2 min-idle.  I ran these against Oracle OC4J 10g, but the numbers look the same with Jetty and Glassfish. Charles Nutter one of the guys behind JRuby has a great write up on what’s next for JRuby.  It’s a great read if you’re considering JRuby for your next project.

Ok… so, for those who don’t care about the guts that run Mix, here’s a list of the other changes we’ve applied:

• New logged in homepage — this slick new home page is smart.  It delivers you topics that are relevant to you based on the tags and products you’ve specified on your profile.
  
• New post image identifiers — Jake didn’t like my handcrafted vote box from the last release (he said it looked like a Kleenex box… bastard), so I switched to the more standard “Vote” button.  I hope we don’t offend any non-”red-white-blue” users — if we do, sound off in the comments.  Here are the three post images… can you guess which is for which?
  
• More feeds! — Anthony’s added more feeds.  Anywhere you see that little orange button, click on it to subscribe to the feed for that view.
• Groups you may be interested in — Anthony whipped up a nice feature that looks at the tags and products you specified on your profile and matches it with groups you may want to be a part of.

We’re not stopping there.  Justin K and his crew have lots of features they want… so, we’ll be busy with that and lots of other enhancements in the next few weeks.  If you haven’t done so, get in the Mix. Oh, and if you have a feature you absolutely want, sound off in the comments or, better yet, put in an idea in the Mix group.