As the world's best athletes compete in Beijing, the summer Olympic games are setting the stage for a battle between Microsoft Corp and Adobe Systems Inc over the Web video technology competition.
Microsoft's Silverlight technology and rival Adobe's Flash format are currently locked in a race over who delivers the world's online video.
Using Microsoft's Silverlight, the NBC site offers a glimpse of what is possible with future Web applications. Its viewers are able to watch up to four videos at once or follow the action with an online commentary that runs alongside the video.
By building up Silverlight's user base, Microsoft is looking to win over developers who see Web platforms such as Silverlight and Flash as a new way to deliver powerful Web-linked programs incorporating rich graphics.
Currently, those platforms are mainly reserved for multimedia applications such as Google Inc's popular YouTube site, which runs on Adobe's Flash technology.
"It's quickly becoming a very popular way to build next generation applications. There's a lot of interest in capturing the hearts and minds of developers," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research. "It'll be a big business."
Taking this situation in mind, Adobe's director of Flash product development Jennifer Taylor said, "We have a large and established customer base. There is no doubt in our minds that Microsoft is going after this space very aggressively, but we feel very strong and confident."
Historically, Adobe's developer tools have focused mainly on design and creating for the Web. Now, it plans to extend that to more traditional software development with Flex, a system to help developers create and deploy applications.
Adobe plans to take the next step with tools called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which allow programs to run on the Web or offline on a computer's desktop.
On the other hand, Microsoft is approaching Silverlight from the opposite direction. It plans to take advantage of its legions of outside developers experienced in writing for its ubiquitous Windows operating system.
The next version of Silverlight, being tested now and due later this year, will support Microsoft's .NET framework -- tools used by developers to create desktop applications that work on Windows.
"This is a logical extension of the investment that we've had in the development space for decades," said Brian Goldfarb, group product manager for Microsoft's developer division.
Microsoft introduced its first version of Silverlight a year ago, but Gartner's Valdes said the second version is the first real form of Silverlight since the inclusion of .NET support turns the technology into "very different animal."
(based on a yahoo.com article By Daisuke Wakabayashi)
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Mozilla's TraceMonkey Speeds JavaScript in Firefox
On Friday, Aug 22, Mozilla announced a new Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler called TraceMonkey in Firefox that will significantly speed up the browser's JavaScript performance.
It will eventually replace Firefox's current SpiderMonkey JavaScript compiler. Mozilla's Interim Mike Shaver told PC Magazine that the new compiler can improve JavaScript performance by up to a factor of seven, and with more speed improvements down the road. JavaScript is increasingly important, not only because of more-demanding sites, but because much of the Firefox browser itself is coded in JavaScript.
Mozilla' Shaver hinted that TraceMonkey could one day eliminate the need for proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's SilverLight in order for sites to incorporate highly interactive content such as web-based graphics editors. Ironically, the TraceMonkey team has produced a Flash demo showing TraceMonkey in action, manipulating images.
Said Mozilla's Shaver, "[With TraceMonkey we're] competing with native code rather than with scripting languages. People have been building sites under the assumption that JavaScript is slow. Image manipulation today is not feasible in JavaScript, but TraceMonkey changes that. We're at the very beginning of what we can do with tracing."
In unpublished PC Magazine testing using the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Firefox 3.1 already outperforms Internet Explorer 7 by a factor of 7, so the new technology will double that gap. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, too, is nearly half the speed of Firefox in the benchmark. The TraceMonkey Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler uses a technique known as a "trace-tree" which isolates and compiles the most frequently used code, such as a loop, first, and "trees" out to other hot code. The tracing uses optimization based on that in Mozilla's Tamarin virtual machine project.
It will eventually replace Firefox's current SpiderMonkey JavaScript compiler. Mozilla's Interim Mike Shaver told PC Magazine that the new compiler can improve JavaScript performance by up to a factor of seven, and with more speed improvements down the road. JavaScript is increasingly important, not only because of more-demanding sites, but because much of the Firefox browser itself is coded in JavaScript.
Mozilla' Shaver hinted that TraceMonkey could one day eliminate the need for proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's SilverLight in order for sites to incorporate highly interactive content such as web-based graphics editors. Ironically, the TraceMonkey team has produced a Flash demo showing TraceMonkey in action, manipulating images.
Said Mozilla's Shaver, "[With TraceMonkey we're] competing with native code rather than with scripting languages. People have been building sites under the assumption that JavaScript is slow. Image manipulation today is not feasible in JavaScript, but TraceMonkey changes that. We're at the very beginning of what we can do with tracing."
In unpublished PC Magazine testing using the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Firefox 3.1 already outperforms Internet Explorer 7 by a factor of 7, so the new technology will double that gap. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, too, is nearly half the speed of Firefox in the benchmark. The TraceMonkey Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler uses a technique known as a "trace-tree" which isolates and compiles the most frequently used code, such as a loop, first, and "trees" out to other hot code. The tracing uses optimization based on that in Mozilla's Tamarin virtual machine project.
New Nvidia software helps Photoshop run faster
Nvidia on Friday announced the release of CUDA 2.0, a new version of its C language development environment for its graphics processing units (GPUs). It will help Photoshop run faster.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Google offers 'Insights for Search'
Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.
With Google Insights for Search, one can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.
Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.
With Google Insights for Search, one can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.
Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.
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