From its viewpoint in the SOA infrastructure and services space, Active Endpoints has mailed 30,000 US developers this week (did they forget the UK?) with a WARNING to the development community that change is risky, but stasis is fatal.

The company claims to be well versed in the development of the Business Process Execution Language and as such feels it warrants a position to comment on current failings within implementations of middleware.

Fair enough you might say, but the company’s message is fairly Gung-Ho, “We are emailing you because we are concerned about you. We’ve learned something about the state of middleware technology, its impact on outsourcing and business competitiveness that we felt strongly we should share with you.”

This company is apparently at pains to tell us that they are experiencing a huge surge in downloads for its products from India and China. If you believe the hype then you may want to entertain the theory that US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems, too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors and too comfortable with their status quo.

Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues – and without the temptation to use those issues as inertia – adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly.

The propaganda doesn’t stop there, so they round out with this comment, “No matter how daunting change may seem, it’s better than the alternative: a world in which your company and you personally have been eclipsed by external competitors.”

We don’t, I believe, digest this kind of over-played press comment well here in the UK. Hopefully that’s why many US companies still employ European PR agencies, but even they can’t stop the rot sometimes. I’d like to argue that middleware is too embedded a technology layer to warrant this kind of hard sell. It certainly doesn’t do the vendor in question any favours.

Not one to shy away from a good read, I spent some of this last weekend reading Google Apps: The Missing Manual. Faced as I am with writing projects that span from Ohio to Tasmania with a brief stop off in London for morning coffee and Dubai for afternoon tea, the option to work with collaborative document sharing is of interest to me – but also threatens my editorial control, so it makes me nervous at the same time. I wanted to find out more.

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It’s impossible to convey the look and feel of a 700-page text in a blog, but this book could be of some use to the reader who wants to go beyond Gmail and consider Google’s “suite” as a one of the viable alternatives to Microsoft Office. The problem for most people according to the book’s author Nancy Conner is that people don’t know how to ‘navigate’ their way around the various offerings, so she sets out to try and fix that.

There are plenty of, “oh, cool – I didn’t know that” things for even the casual reader. For example, did you know that you can set up your Gmail account so that messages sent to your other email accounts arrive in your Gmail inbox so that you can check all your email accounts in one place? I didn’t!

It has to be said that this book goes from the extremely simple to the rather more complex in fits and starts. One page she’ll be talking about cutting and pasting into Google chat, the next she’s talking about building web sites and the next she’s talking about application management and administration issues. I guess the publishers would defend this and say that the author is being, “comprehensive” – but it does make you question as to what level of reader the book is pitched at.

On the whole there are some really great TIPS and shortcuts in here, navigating between various replies in a Gmail message with P (for previous) and N (for next) for example – you are bound to find something that you like. I have to confess that it did get me finally using Google Documents and Calendar, so it must be pretty good.

If you like the sound of this volume, then it's easy to find on the web as is the rest of the ‘missing manual’ series. My wife is currently working through Your Brain: The Missing Manual and is threatening to perform psychoanalytical tests on me any day now. Watch this space.

Given the impending start of the Beijing Olympics on August the eighth we can no doubt brace ourselves for a flurry of news themed around the fact that XYZ Ltd’s latest application has been refined and toned up to support the technology needs of the event.

It’s been competitively quiet so far though. You could almost argue that you have to go looking for this of type news.

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In meetings with Microsoft last week I picked up on the fact that the Silverlight 2 Beta had been rolled out to specifically hit a time frame that would enable NBC to use the technology to support the 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content that it has planned.

Microsoft calls this, “An immersive and interactive video experience that will redefine how sports fans consume content online.”

Gartner says that due to the sheer size of China’s economy, the games will have a “limited impact” on China’s PC market, let alone the applications development that could support these extra users when they start to come online.

A report by China mainland-based Gartner analysts Simon Ye and Eileen He said the August event will have a lesser impact on China than it had on the host countries of recent Olympics.

ZDNet Asia has reported recently that spammers are gearing up for the event and that security vendor Symantec's latest State of Spam monthly report highlighted a series of messages that purport to be from the 'Beijing Olympic Committee'. Suggestions are that applications affected may be more predominantly within the mobile space now.

Mobile application development for Beijing has been going on for sure, but it’s not as easy to find as you might think. I had to Google terms like “Symbian Beijing Olympics” before I could find offerings from Handango and the like.

I did find one tech-focused press conference hosted by the Beijing Olympic Committee, but it was entitled – “Press conference on self-reliance & high-tech innovation used in Beijing Olympic venues” – and the reporters and spokespeople seemed to be more interested in electric vehicles and power consumption than anything else.

It’s only informed (I hope) conjecture, but it appears that China’s all-consuming focus on construction, growth and economic wealth means that it wants the world to see the bigger picture this summer. Perhaps they want us to view a generalised glossy image of prosperity and aren’t so concerned with the minutiae of details that could go to make up the viewers’ experiences.

I travelled extensively in China for three months in 1990 when the country had only been open to tourism for twelve years. Although I survived snake soup, dog with spinach and gravy and a very painful ear infection I adored the country. I hope we do hear good tech stories coming out of the games and with my own particular interest in software application development I hope that many of these tales relate to some cool apps. Birds nest soup anyone?

For a long time now we’ve been arguing that all application development must inevitable scale to the mobile device – but it never quite does. There’s development for the corporate data centre and there’s desktop development and there’s mobile development too. It’s not really just one big happy family yet is it?

I was hoping that the Asus and Acer type netbooks would (or will) really shake up this situation as we now get a more powerful handheld device to use (even if it does need two hands).

But an increasing amount of the application development and data management companies that I typically follow appear to be positioning themselves with iPhone products. So maybe we can take a step back from netbooks after all?

Sybase iAnywhere last week started hanging out the bunting to celebrate support for the new iPhone 3G model. The company says this will offer iPhone users wireless email access to Lotus Domino. Mobile email is not ground breaking in itself I know, but this is a company known for heavyweight databases that typically get hidden away in the depths of defence and finance organisations now talking about enterprise email support.

In the near future, Sybase iAnywhere says that it expects to enhance iAnywhere Mobile Office with additional components such as push email, contacts, corporate directory access and calendar. So, that was personal information management development and not weapons-grade plutonium-attack resistant multi-tier military database development then?

Then there is DeviceAnywhere - no relation to the above. One of the two company’s marketing departments must be kicking themselves right?

Anyway, this Silicon Valley outfit works in the remote mobile testing space. You know the kind of thing - developers remotely access live handsets hosted in data centres around the world via the web and interact with handsets as if the devices were in their hands. Good for testing pre-deployment if you want to announce compatibility with more than six handsets etc.

So over the past three months, mobile developers have spent over 1100 hours developing and testing applications using the DeviceAnywhere service for the Apple iPhone to be made available via the iTunes Apple Apps store.

I suppose it is encouraging to see this kind of progress in the mobile development space, we keep saying we’re not there yet but we soon will be. You know, there’s Adobe talking about occasionally connected Rich Internet Applications one minute and there’s a whole bunch of other vendors like the above extolling the virtues on robust enterprise apps on mobile. Perhaps it’ll take nationwide wireless with no subscription charges (or as part of our TV license) before we all embrace mobile applications in totality. Whatever it takes, it’s interesting to watch it develop.

Large IT vendors are fond of trying to use the breadth of their ‘technology stack’ to convince us that they can bridge the divide between the development team and the operations function. This gap, as we know, results in the all-too-common scenario where applications are simply thrown over the wall in whatever form they exist.

NB: with the push for Agile and Rapid development necessitating a, “many releases little and often” state of affairs – it’s tough to know who to blame here… so let’s blame the customer for now.

Speed is everything these days; time is money after all – so now we must also consider rapid application deployment alongside rapid application development. Also called remote control software deployment, news out of Moscow in Russia yesterday from Famatech is evidence of the company’s efforts to coin yet another phrase to describe rapid admin with, you guessed it, the Radmin deployment tool.

System administrators and/or DBAs using heterogeneous network infrastructure, have typically had to install and activate a large number of licenses manually. This is almost redolent of the virtualised application management that I talked about last week. These are tools to automate and manage and try to cross the chasm.

Technology big boys like IBM will talk about products such as Rational ClearQuest and the role they have to play in bug tracking to stop shoddy applications being thrown over the wall – but at the same time, they bill these as process automation tools or reporting and lifecycle traceability offerings.

I’m trying to convey the fact that there is some fuzz on the airwaves here. What kind of development process do we want? What kind of deployment process do we want? What kind of application update process do we want? What kind of process do we want to track these deployments through the lifecycle?

Crucially though, do we need ALL these steps?

Possible answer = we probably need a degree of each but not as much as we’re being told we do.

It’s for sure that we’re all being over-branded and over-sold in the application management space. Cutting through this fog is going to be tough and is only likely to get harder.