iPad Launch and Steve Jobs on Flash

Although the build up to the Apple iPad launch was quite quiet (I have to admit that most of the blogs/sites I read are Microsoft centric, but there has been some coverage), once released there has been all sorts of coverage of the new iPad, both good and bad. Many of the negative reviews have been around the fact that the iPad is locked down and doesn't come with a full operating system. This was one of my issues with the iPad when it was first announced. Having bought a netbook in the past and then very quickly realising that I didn't want a device to just browse the web with, I installed a full operating system and now I have a nice mini laptop that's not doing what it's designed for and is, basically, slow. The return rates on Linux based netbooks, in my view, show a similar story. Consumers didn't want a limited device that they could only browse the web with (and a few other functions), they wanted a cheap, small laptop. When the iPad was announced, I thought it would be a passing fad: consumers want fully working computers. I recently came across a great article that covers why I'm wrong on this front, especially when it comes to tablet PCs ( http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tablet-islate-ipad-netbook-notebook,9929.html). Tablet PCs with a full operating system on them are rubbish! For an effective tablet, you need a user interface that is specifically designed for touch and tablet PCs didn't have that. They were also VERY expensive.

There's a great, balanced (and long!) review of the iPad at ars technical ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/04/ipad-review.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss). What I find really impressive is the real world battery life statistics that they have gathered. Not quite in the same league as the dedicated eBook readers, but much better than a lot of the laptops I've used.

Of course the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, don't have Flash available for them so you will still be missing that full 'web experience'. Steve Jobs recently posted his thoughts on the subject (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). He has a lot of good points and some dubious ones (paraphrasing: 'Flash is a closed technology, that's bad. Apple technology is also closed, but that's ok, I'm only talking about the web here'). Much has been written on the internet about this one post and I'm not going to reiterate any of it. I think there are two key points in the article.

1. Adobe haven't yet made a version of Flash that can achieve a good battery life on a portable device. This is so true, anyone who's seen Flash on one of the more recent Android phones must agree. It's painful.

2. Most Flash applications haven't been designed for a touch interface and so won't work that well. This is very true however not a complete show stopper, you can use Flash with just a touch interface and without relying on rollover effect.

He's right on both those points and it's understandable why Apple don't want Flash on their portable devices. Although, if Adobe can produce an efficient version of Flash, a lot of Steve Job's arguments couldn't really be used to justify not including Flash support in their products. Flash is a big part of the web currently and HTML 5 is still a long way off being a full replacement.

Internet Explorer 9

There have been a few blogs on the status of the next version of Internet Explorer. In themselves, not really worth inclusion in a 'top 5' list, but seeing as IE still has such a large user base, progress on the next version can't be ignored. Especially the fact that Microsoft are actually working on another version!  There's some great news for developers of web applications like us in that IE9 will support more web standards such as SVG and HTML 5 features. What I found most interesting, though, was that Microsoft have confirmed that IE9 will not support Windows XP ( http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Confirms-IE9-Wont-Come-to-XP/). A great quote from the article is: '…since it could be 6-12 months before we even see IE9 ship. After nearly 10 years it's time to let XP totter off and die with dignity'. Now that Microsoft have provided us with an operating system worth upgrading to (Windows 7), the author is right. Perhaps it is time to stop using XP.

SQL Azure

As mentioned in last month's article, I've been looking into Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. One thing that I came across was some interesting information about the relational database service that is available as part of Azure, SQL Azure. This is essentially a hosted SQL Server facility, with some constraints. What is most interesting from our perspective is that there is a limit on the size of each SQL Azure database of 10GB. This is hardly the transparent scaling that we have been promised when using a cloud service. Microsoft's recommendations when working with SQL Azure is to partition your data into multiple SQL Azure instances and to handle that data partitioning logic within your application. Clearly, this is a version 1 service. Hopefully Microsoft will be developing this service and provide facilities to partition data for each application. They are currently talking about expanding the 10GB limit to 50GB in the future so they are moving in the right direction.

One thing that this makes very clear is that when intending to use such a cloud service, your application must be designed for the cloud and you can't just take any application that you've already written, install it in a cloud service and expect 'free' scalability.

There's a great set of presentation slides that cover SQL Azure available at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2010/04/21/sql-saturday-sql-azure-april-2010-deck-update.aspx

NoSQL

Over the past year or so, there has been a growing momentum behind a concept called 'NoSQL', or more pretentiously 'Post-Relational' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql). The idea behind this concept is that RDBMSs, SQL and the relational model of data can't scale out, introduce too much overhead and bog down application performance. Applications would be better off not using an RDBMS and instead using some other data store that is lightweight, simpler to manage and easier to scale. Look at Google and their use of BigTable to store all of their indexed web data, proponents of NoSQL often state.

NoSQL as a concept does raise some interesting questions about the use of RDBMSs, but really discussions can be boiled down to using the right tool for the right job. Not every application needs the full set of facilities provided by a modern RDBMS and some applications have requirements for massively parallel processing of data, such as Google's search technology, where the use of an RDBMS would be inappropriate.

I recently came across an article on the subject that I have to agree with: http://teddziuba.com/2010/03/i-cant-wait-for-nosql-to-die.html (I'm not quite sure what a rollerblading Batman has to do with any of this…)

For business applications, one cannot understate the importance of the ACID guarantees that a modern RDBMS provides. Yes, there are situations that data would be better stored in a data store that isn't an RDBMS, but to always go one way or the other is completely inappropriate. As I've said above, the right tool for the right job.

Microsoft Software Launches

Microsoft have been very busy this month. The following new versions of software have been released to a great fanfare:

• Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 (both Released To Manufacturing - actual launch date is May 12^th)
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
• Silverlight 4
• SQL Server 2008 R2

I say a great fanfare, but actually SQL Server 2008 R2 came out quite quietly. It was clear when the new versions of Office and .NET were going to be released but the latest version of SQL Server caught me slightly off guard. Although it's only an 'R2' release rather than a new full blown version, there's a lot of new functionality in 2008 R2. Why it's not SQL Server 2010, I'm not quite sure. Microsoft have released a free eBook that covers a lot of what's new and it makes for interesting reading:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2010/04/14/free-ebook-introducing-microsoft-sql-server-2008-r2.aspx

Once again, what is certainly not clear is what Microsoft are going to do around service packs and cumulative updates for these new releases. We certainly won't be using these releases out of the box without any quality reviews (I've been burnt by that in the past!), but Microsoft knows that people often wait for the first service pack before deploying a new technology and so are tight-lipped about any plans, trying to encourage companies to review these new technologies now rather than waiting six months for them to stabilise.