1. G+ will be of limited utility until the majority of people I know or care about is using it (ie. it has to catch up with FB and Twitter)
2. Circles – great start but needs finishing – need more set theory – subsets, intersections, compliments, etc. will make it very powerful though maybe a little nerdy for the non-technical.
3. UI is very slick – amazing demonstration of what is possible in a standard browser
4. I represents a personal dilemma. I’ve been using Facebook for mostly personal stuff; Twitter for mostly work stuff. With a little natural overlap. I can manage two social networks; three will be tough.

This is my profile if you want to connect.

Talking of Sacha – he’s just announced he’ll be leaving Red Hat. Sacha interviewed me when I joined Red Hat (just under a year ago) and I’ve enjoyed working with him – super-smart, very passionate and a genuinely nice guy – a rare combination. Good luck for the future Sacha and enjoy the break – after 8 years you deserve some R&R and time with with your family.

The JBoss Tools team delivered another major release – JBDS 2.0 and we also introduced JBDS – Portfolio Edition – which included the run-times for all the new features in JBDS 2.0.

JBoss continues to slash costs – two more customer success stories, first Covad (provider of data, voice and wireless telecommunications) who moved to JBoss from “inflexible and costly proprietary middleware software” because “That’s why we love JBoss– it allows us to do more with less,”.

IWBank (online banking and financial services) of Milan also selected JBoss because “JBoss enables us to provide more and more efficient and affordable services, which is crucial in the current economic climate”.

Finally, JBoss will be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) – you’ll have the chance to work with some of the smartest, most exerienced Open Source developers in the business. Head over to JBoss wiki if you are interested.

Today Red Hat announced a couple of things :

1. that we’ve signed Google’s corporate contributor agreement

2. that we’re adopting GWT (Google Web Toolkit) as a core part of JBoss Middleware

The world doesn’t need another Java framework for developing rich AJAX apps. so we’ve decided to go with what we think is a real leader – Google Web Toolkit. We can do that because of Google’s commitment to Open Source and Red Hat’s long track record of being a valued contributor to some of the most exciting technology in the industry. That’s the power of Open Source.

JBoss and in fact Red Hat has been using GWT for some time now :

1. Red Hat’s IT has been deploying GWT since 1.0 RC1 as part of www.redhat.com applications for our online store, customer center and product activation.
2. The Drools / BRMS UI uses GWT extensively – more details here
3. We have some initial integration with Seam 2.1 – more details here

In case you have questions, I’ve put together a short FAQ, if you have other questions ask them here and I’ll try and answer them :

Q. Does RedHat offer support for GWT today ?
A. Not yet – the plan is to offer full support in the first half of 2009 as part of a larger initiative.

Q. Is there a commercial relationship between Google and Red hat ?
A. No – this is purely about open source collaboration.

Q. What is Red Hat’s current involvement with the GWT project ?
A. We have a number of people in Red Hat developing with GWT and as we earn our stripes we’ll start to increase our contribution the GWT community; beyond that we’re open to ideas – but obviously Google will continue to lead the project.

Q. Does this mean that Red Hat doesn’t care about Rich Faces / ajax4jsf anymore ?
A. Not at all – for many Java developers – GWT is a complimentary technology for others it might be an alternative. We’re not prescribing one particular approach – we’re supporting what we believe are the best technologies for developers. Our commitment to Rich Faces and ajax4jsf continues.

Google have made their 2001 search index available and have linked it to the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t resist and did a quick vanity search to see if I existed on the webertubes back in 2001. Just three hits – a couple from 1997 on a CORBA mailing list (shudder) and another advertising a class I taught to the Scottish Police in Glasgow on the wonders of J2EE, XML and XSLT.

Talking of growing communities – interest in JBoss in China is really picking up – there’s a new site dedicated to JBoss – Kava which contains translations of many JBoss related blogs and articles you’d find in North America and Europe.

GNU is twenty five years old this month – and Stephen Fry (English comedian, author, actor, columnist and tech. blogger) has a short video celebrating the event and introducing free software. btw. his podcasts are pretty good as well; if you’re a Stephen Fry fan and enjoy a light-hearted perspective on technology.

This week the Web is aflutter with the launch of Google’s browser – Chrome. Just for the record – I don’t think that Microsoft will win this browser war – give it 3-5 years and IE users will be in the minority – they’ve failed to innovate at the pace of the competition (Firefox) and haven’t established a Mobile Web foothold; and their desktop monopoly is finally being challenged (by OS/X, Linux and the mobile web). The thing is – IE won’t be the only victim in this war – other’s will get caught in the cross-fire – I think Safari will go down pretty quickly – probably within a year of Chrome being ported to the iPhone. Firefox (the only browser I’ve used for as long as I can remember) will be next. That bothers me – but only a little – that’s techology evolution – survival of the fittest (despite illegal monopolies). I’m happy for *any* free, multi-platform alternative to IE.

Finally, I think I pissed off a few ex-colleagues at Sun with my recent post. Thing is, I’m right. If you thought my post was overly critical (or wrong) – read this analysis on Forbes.com and try and argue against the fundamental arithmetic. It’s worth repeating my position – I’m not saying that Sun’s OSS efforts are wasted – I’m just saying they won’t save Sun. The projects and the people who’ve pushed them so hard will continue to flourish long after Sun has been dismantled and sold off.

Isn’t Google missing the key AlphaGeek / Early adopter constituent ? Last time I was at a technical conference – it was PowerBooks and home-brew linux distro’s all the way – not much Windows.

Is your mainstream Windows user really going to be dorking around with a new browser ?

No sooner was the ink dry on the annoucement – the JBoss Portal team show you how to get JBoss Portal running in the cloud as well – which, as you would expect, is like running JBoss Portal anywhere else.

Our friends at Hyperic have created a nice dashboard for monitoring the cloud : CloudStatus – which I presume is all based on RHQ – if so JON 2.0 managing JBoss in the cloud can’t be far behind.

One interesting problem of on-demand utility computing – is knowing where you application is running or legally can run – will you need an export control license as your application follows the moon ? Which country’s data privacy legislation do you need to comply with as your application is migrated to where the cheap computing power is ?

Meanwhile – Google just won its largest GMail migration from Outlook/ Exchange – 1.5 million mailboxes. Now Google has to determine if it’s worth moving the cloud closer to the users to reduce international bandwidth requirements.

It’s interesting that we’re seeing (at least) three models emerge :

• Amazon’s utility computing approach (they’re fundamentally a bandwidth, MIPS and storage utility) – you choose what platform you want to write to (Linux, Java, etc.);
• the proprietary SaaS platform approach (SalesForce, CogHead – sorry guys). You trade convenience, agility for complete dependence on the vendor.
• a hybrid – Google App Engine, Facebook. I don’t think these hybrids have anywhere near the ability to lock you in as much as the true SaaS platforms. For example – Google is based on Python, Django – if you’re smart you won’t get locked in. Many facebook apps. also support other ‘distributions’ – so it isn’t really a sharecropping model.

As I see it – the only thing that might lock you in to Google and Facebook’s model is convenient access to their huge customer base – that’s what they’re selling. Take it or leave it.

Potential Evilness aside, this is a pretty exciting time if you’re developing an app. for the Web – the cost of deploying / hosting your cool idea is no longer a hurdle. Competition is a good thing.

Google reader has a lot of features I care little about right now – maybe I’ll take a look in the future. Like most others, Google Reader allows you to organize your feeds into folders. I went for the Tim Bray approach and kept it at two for now; I chose more imaginative names than Tim (“A”, “B”) but only slightly. “The Best” – is for stuff I would endeavor to read daily and “The Rest” for everything else I’ve ever decided to subscribe to. At some point I’ll likely have a few more folders – but two seems a reasonable start. I just saw a nice feature in Google Reader that profiles the feeds you actually read – if it works – that’ll be useful in determining the contents of my two folders. See I told you I’d take a look at the other features in the future.