Having spent time following some of the latest trends in rich internet applications I’m really excited to see how this blog turns out.

A blog like this has been missing from the landscape to my knowledge. There are plenty of blogs on modern web application design and development, however, the topic of RIA implementations seems to polarize the industry into 2 camps: AJAX vs. Flash (Flex, Silverlight). The first few posts on Inside RIA include information on both Flex and Flash, however, there is also an interesting article on server-side JavaScript.

As I mentioned in a previous post  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about alternative service architectures to support Internet based communication. At one point I went so far as to consider rekindling my love for ACE to maybe build one myself. I certainly took a good look (one that’s not necessarily finished yet) at BlazeDS due to the fact that I’ve been playing with AIR using Flex lately.

Another thing that caught my eye is recent developments and buzz around XMPP. You may be most familiar with it as the protocol that powers Jabber (and GTalk, as it is based on Jabber). I thought I would use this post as a link source of some of the stuff I have found on XMPP, Jabber and ejabberd to highlight it’s potential uses.

Good starting points:

• Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication? (ReadWriteWeb)
• Is XMPP the ‘Next Big Thing’ (Slashdot)
• ntroducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example (Process One)
• XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services (jivetalks)

XMPP appears to have it all:

• Distributed (cloud) services, secure within the individual entry points.
• The promise to end all the hacks to make the web work, not how it was meant to, but how we choose to use it.
• Controlled scalability
• The end of service polling.
• Growing support from Apple, Google, IBM and others.

As a developer, architect or even technologist this is something that should not be ignored. Topics like The Semantic Web and Web 3.0 (?!?!) abound, here’s a topic that has all the makings of the next big Internet thing

Recently I needed to add XML comments to a web services project and realized it’s not as easy as for other projects. Thanks Derek for helping out, here’s how I did it.

In the web.config:

<configuration>
<system.codedom>
<compilers>
<compiler
language=”c#;cs;csharp”
extension=”.cs”
warningLevel=”4″
type=”Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider,
System,
Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089″
compilerOptions=”/doc:xmldoc.xml
/nowarn:1591,0618″>
</compiler>
</compilers>

</system.codedom>

This provides building of xml comment files on build of the project (in this case the xml file is called xmldoc.xml in the main project directory, you can change to whatever you like). Note that I have some specific requirements for this build but in most cases you can safely remove the /nowarn switch within compiler options.