I gave a talk last night (December 2, 2008) at the SD Forum’s Java SIG in Palo Alto, CA.

The subtitle of the presentation was: “How the web has gone beyond the browser and we’re headed back to Client/Server”. I’m including the presentation slides below:

Today, at MySQL World 2008 in Santa Clara we’re excited about an announcement between XAware, Inc. and Appcelerator and the XAware Ecosystem.

XAware has been an exciting company to work with and they are really pushing leading in the SOA integration space and are creating a compelling SOA ecosystem of best of breed technology partners and platforms.

According to Marten Mickos, previous CEO of MYSQL and new Senior VP at Sun, said:

“It’s encouraging to see innovative organizations working together to expand the open source SOA ecosystem,” said Marten Mickos, senior vice president, Database Group, Sun Microsystems. “Companies such as XAware, Appcelerator and Active Endpoints provide open source solutions that address a range of business issues, and we urge conference attendees to check out their offerings.”

So what does this all mean?

This means that you can now use the Appcelerator rich Internet Application (RIA) platform together with XAware’s open source SOA solution to give your SOA infrastructure a face. You can now leverage all the existing enterprise data to build rich, powerful and dynamic web applications and seamlessly make them work together using standards, tools and skill sets you’ve already invested in in the enterprise.

Last Friday we announced support for Appcelerator RIA + Google AppEngine. This means you can build rich Internet applications using Appcelerator and then deploy them into the google cloud using Google’s AppEngine - which was released last Monday.

Appcelerator already has native support for building rich apps using a Python backend – we were quickly able to add support for appengine by leveraging this backend codebase. We made a number of changes to the product to make it seamless to interact with appengine, like leveraging the appcelerator CLI to support deployment.

To use it, you’ll need to first download the following pre-requisites: Python 2.5, the App Engine SDK, and the Appcelerator SDK.

Here’s a short screencast with instructions:

Once you have everything installed and ready, it’s easy to create a new appengine project:

app create:project ~/tmp my_app_name appengine

Make sure that my_app_name matches the application identifier in your appengine dashboard.

This should create a project with everything you need to develop appcelerator apps using appengine. Open up your index.html, make some changes and then test the deployment into the cloud:

app deploy:project

This will deploy into the cloud and you should be able to navigate to your appengine URL to test it out.

You can also run locally:

app run:project

This will run your project locally for development and testing. Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to test it out after starting it up.

You should also check out a really cool demo that Tejus built. It’s called AppTunes. It’s a RIA application that sort of mimics Apple’s iTunes running in full-screen. It has a cool coverflow of album art and you can listen to streaming audio for each track in your browser. This app was built using the new appcelerator + appengine integration and is running in the cloud.

What’s cool about this application is that is shows how you can use Flash-based Flex components inside an Appcelerator based application. I believe this gives the best of both worlds: a standards-based, HTML/Ajax application that can leverage the power of the Flash capabilities.

And now, a message from our sponsors:

In the spirit of open source and shared learning, we’d like to acknowledge a few key pieces that we put together to make this demo application that Tejus built happen:

• Doug McCune for his super bad ass CoverFlow Flex Component. We’ve used the Appcelerator Widget API to widgetize this flex widget and allow it to be both declaratively added to markup and the power of Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language to add remoting capabilities for data binding. This also shows off the power of using Appcelerator + Adobe’s Flex bridge to get the best of both worlds.
• JS Sound Kit for the streaming audio for playing the MP3s. Again, we built this as a reusable widget.
• Jamendo and the independent artists for the awesome, DRM-free music and cool looking coverart.