Adobe Systems is opening up access Thursday to its Flash technology via the Open Screen Project, an industry initiative intended to provide a Flash-based unified runtime environment for rich content across all devices.

An analyst viewed the move as partially a competitive measure against Microsoft's new Silverlight browser plug-in, which could provide a formidable rival to Flash. But Adobe's Dave McAllister, director of stands and open source, emphasized Flash is the largest single environment for content delivery and said partners are pleased with the new initiative.

"[Otherwise], we wouldn't have every partner saying, 'We want to be involved in this,'" McAllister said. Companies partnering with Adobe on Open Screen Project include ARM, Intel, Motorola, NBC, Nokia, NTT Dokomo, MTV, Qualcomm, and Sony Ericsson.

Specifically, Adobe will remove license restrictions from use of the SWF specification, which is the file format for the Flash Player, as well as for FLV/F4V specifications for streaming Flash content.

These restrictions have prevented others from building a Flash player. While Adobe is not aware if anyone actually will build a player to rival its own at this juncture, third parties want access to specification to have more control over their systems that use Flash.

"In 10 years, we've been a good enough steward that no one has complained," McAllister said. "I expect people will build a Flash Player, but I don't expect that they will challenge the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash Player."

Silverlight Worries

Adobe's move was seen as both a way to stave off Silverlight and a visionary effort.

"I think it's two things. It is partly a tactical, competitive response to the Silverlight challenge in advance of Silverlight's release," said analyst Ray Valdes, research director at Gartner. It also represents a strategic vision of greater interoperability among different types of screen devices, he said.

Different devices, ranging from laptops, TVs, and game consoles, are becoming more alike, Valdes said. "The idea is that if you could have one display technology foundation for all those screens, then that would put Adobe in a good position," said Valdes, who called Adobe's strategy a good move.

SWF has been published for a while, but anyone who wanted to read it had to agree to not build their own implementation of the Flash Player. "We're removing all restrictions so anyone can now read this and make use of this in any way they like," said McAllister.

"People can read things they couldn't read before and build things they couldn't build, and Adobe is no longer going to get in the way," he said.

Anyone is free to use the specification to embed Flash playback capabilities in other applications. Port information will be published to enable the porting of the existing Flash Player onto other devices or applications. With the freeing of Adobe's FLV and F4VF specifications, third parties now can build tools to work with these specifications.

"The goal of this is to provide this consistent runtime using Adobe Flash and, in the future, Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) across all these devices," including consumer electronics and mobile Internet devices," McAllister said. Desktop systems and phones also are factored into the Open Screen Project.

No Royalty Fees
"What we're doing is extending the reach of the Web, and we are making sure that Adobe technologies don't get in the way of making the Web as open as possible," said McAllister.

Adobe Flash Cast and AMF (Action Message Format) protocols also will be published. AMF provides data services.

Also, the next generation of the Flash Player will have no royalty fees. This version is due as part of Open Screen Project in mid-2009. There has been a per-device royalty charged for devices and handsets using the software.

Adobe believes that by opening up its Flash environment, it can sell more developer and design tools to offset any loss of royalties.

Open Screen Project is not specifically an open source effort because there are certain technologies in Flash, such as audio and video codecs, that are licensed from others. The "heart" of the Flash Player, the ActionScript virtual machine, already is available via open source, said McAllister.

Further technology announcements pertaining to Open Screen Project will be made after May 1, McAllister said.

Today Microsoft announced a new step forward for one of its Software as a Service (SaaS) initiatives, Microsoft Online Services, with online betas of Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint Online and Exchange Online can be accessed only by companies who register for the online beta.

Redmond announced Microsoft Online Services in September of 2007 for businesses with more than 5,000 users, but now says that the service is open to companies of all sizes. Exchange and SharePoint are the first major Microsoft software releases on the platform, which also offers calendaring, e-mail, Web conferences and other online tools via Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting.

"With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs," said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in a statement released to the press. "In the future, customers and partners should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility for all of Microsoft's software and server products."

Companies are able to choose whether they want to use the entire service or buy products a la carte. Subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services also include the server version of the online software purchased, and today Microsoft announced that those with Software Assurance can purchase the user subscriptions to the online service at a discount.

The service is expected to exit the beta stage and go live in the second quarter of this year, the company said.

Microsoft made this announcement days after rumors hit the Web that the company is planning to unveil significant SaaS and cloud computing initiatives during the next few weeks.

More information on Microsoft Online Services can be found here.

Resources for Microsoft partners regarding the service can be found here. According to Microsoft, partners that have signed on to support Microsoft Services Online include Unisys, Atos Origin, BT, Getronics, Evolve Partners and HCL Technologies.

Despite public confidence that SQL Server 2008 would ship by the end of June, Microsoft today indicated it probably is more likely to arrive toward the end of the year.

Microsoft will release SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing in the third quarter, Francois Ajenstat, Microsoft’s director of SQL Server project management, said today in a blog posting.

"Our goal is to deliver the highest quality product possible and we simply want to use the time to meet the high bar that you, our customers, expect," he wrote. "Over the coming months, customers and partners can look forward to significant product milestones for SQL Server."

A key milestone, he wrote, will be a CTP with all of the features intended for SQL Server, to be released in the second quarter. The final release to manufacturing (RTM) candidate will be released in the third quarter.

Observers were not surprised by the latest delay. "The last couple of CTPs were late and the idea that we're now only five months away from release seemed far-fetched," said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at the consultiancy of TwentySix New York in an e-mail.

Brust, who also runs the New York .NET User Group, adds that he had been telling people that SQL Server would be pushed back at least once. "There's no point in pushing this out the door before it’s ready, especially when the financial results announced yesterday are so good," he added. "September 30 is fine. And for that matter, so would be end-of-year. Only real egg on their face is that the 'launch' of the product is next month."

Ajenstat wrote that the delay will have no impact on the Feb. 27 launch event.

Microsoft PDC is back on the schedule, albeit a year later than previously planned.

The next Professional Developers Conference will take place Oct. 27-30 in Los Angeles, according to e-mail sent Thursday.

Microsoft nixed PDC 2007 that was to have been last October; the announcement came last spring.

The company bills PDC as "the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects," so the cancellation raised questions, even though observers criticized Microsoft for event glut in the last few years.

Critics have also slammed the company for failure to deliver on most all of the promises made at PDC 2003, where it had talked up the infamous "pillars" of Longhorn; nearly all failed to appear anywhere near on schedule, and most are being fitted retroactively to run with Windows XP. The last PDC was in 2005.

Since that conference, the company had to split the Longhorn release into the Vista client, launched early this year, and Windows Server 2008, slated to officially debut in February. Both were/are very late.

One of the implicit messages from PDC 2007 cancellation was that Microsoft wanted to make sure there was lots to talk about. By next fall, the company should be well on its way to the next Visual Studio release, code named "Rosario."

In the meantime, developers hope to have had final releases of Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in their hands for several months going into PDC 2008.

Microsoft released Entity Framework Beta 3 on Dec. 6 and officially announced the third-party database vendors and ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have agreed to support the framework.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft technology to support the RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Entity Framework Beta 3 provides the data access APIs for .NET 3.5. It follows Entity Framework Beta 2, released in August, which is built on .NET 3.5 Beta 2.

In addition to support for the final versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Beta 3 provides new features, bug fixes and major performance enhancements. "We've got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL, we've taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas," said Elisa Flasko, program manager for the Data Programmability team at Microsoft. Beta 3 also offers more similarities to SQL, for example, partial methods in code-generation for certain property changed events.

"The changes have mostly been around the mapping and in the Entity Data Model of the Entity Framework itself," Flasko said. "As far the LINQ implementation [LINQ to Entities], it has mostly been fit and finish." Users can, however, now do compiled LINQ query for better performance.

Roger Jennings, principal consultant at Oakleaf Systems, who is using Beta 3, called it a major update. "With Beta 3, it is coming into shape," he said. "There are substantial performance improvements--that was one of the problems. Almost everything involved with queries is faster now."

Developers who have been using Beta 2 should note that there are breaking changes in Beta 3. "Most of them are not huge code changes," asserted Flasko.

New Tools CTP

Beta 3 requires the Entity Framework Tools December 2007 CTP, which was also posted Dec. 6 and is available for download on MSDN. This is the second CTP; the first preview was released in August.

In the latest tooling preview, the Entity Data Model Designer adds the ability to used stored procedures as an alternative to dynamic SQL for populating entities. "We've had the ability for a while in the runtime to use stored procedures in SQL Server behind the Entity Framework rather than dynamic SQL," explained Flasko. "Now the tooling experience will allow you to use the tooling rather than having to code by hand to hook those two things up."

The Entity Framework is built on ADO.NET, a connection technology that allows .NET users to access third-party databases. The framework provides a conceptual model for database schema that makes it easier for developers to program against business logic, according to Microsoft.

Provider Writers

ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have committed to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework include Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, IBM, MySQL, and Sybase, among others. These companies are planning to extend their data providers to support the framework -- three months after it RTMs, or by year end.

Oracle is not on that list. "We have been working with them, but at this point what we have are the providers that are included in the press release," Flasko said.

Microsoft is planning to release the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, which will include the REST-based data services model (codenamed Astoria), in the same time frame. All of these technologies are expected in the first half of 2008, but the actual productization has not been finalized. "We haven't locked down the ship vehicle for ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions," Flasko explained.

The upcoming CTP of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, expected this month, offers the first public preview of the model-view-controller (MVC) option, support for REST, additional AJAX functionality, and Dynamic Data Controls. The data controls, which include a scaffolding framework, will be provided by an open source .NET toolset, Castle Project's SubSonic.
Next SQL Server CTP Coming Soon

The next preview of SQL Server 2008 with new support for spatial data types and a new Resource Governor feature is slated to hit in a week or two, according to Microsoft.

This Community Technology Preview (CTP) follows one in August and the first last June.

Microsoft execs, who had previously pledged new CTPs every sixty days, admitted that number three did not hit that deadline, but said that does not bode ill for the final release. The database is "on track" for release in the second quarter of calendar year 2008, they reiterated. The SQL news emanates from a TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona

Timing, always a sore point with Microsoft products, is particularly touchy for the database given the five-year gap between SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 -- a delay the company has sworn will not happen again.

Francois Ajenstat, director of product management for SQL Server, said the latest CTP offers important new features for developers and database administrators (DBAs). The Resource Governor, for example, promises both constituencies more granular control over what processes get priority in situations where there is contention.

"They can assign resource limits on a particular job or user. If the system's running payroll as well as reporting at the end of the month, a lot of payroll users will be doing processing and suddenly a reporting person writes some crazy report that starts soaking up memory and CPUs. This can ensure that the critical function gets priority and can be set by process ID or user," Ajenstat told Redmond Developer News.

As databases get bigger and are shared by more users and processes, this is a critical function.

"This could be very important but the jury's still out on how robust it is. We have to look at it. If it lives up to its promotional rhetoric, it will be very valuable," said Andrew Brust, chief, new technology for twentysix New York, a solution provider with SQL server and application development expertise. "In the database world there's a lot of gallows humor. The hope is this will stop BSTK, which stands for 'queries that bring the server to its knees.'"

In addition, this third CTP adds transparent data encryption that, in theory, means that database applications won't require recoding in order to take advantage of encryption.

The current SQL Server 2005 supports encryption, but requires tweaks on the application side to take advantage of it. "That's fine if you control all the applications, but in many cases you don't; transparent encryption takes care of that," Ajenstat said.

Also in this release is the promised FileStream feature that would allow storage of unstructured data in the database without converting it first into binary large objects (BLOBs).

That capability is a holdover from the long-promised-but-undelivered WinFS file system.

Brust is jazzed about that feature.

"Since the beginning, database people have tried to use databases to manage documents or digital photos but there's always been a tradeoff," Brust explained.

"The question is ";Do I put it in the database or in the file system and then put a reference to that file in the database?' And allegedly for reasons of performance, people have preferred to keep the file in the file system and the tag in the database. It's a little easier for programming and seems to make sense when doing backups, [because] you don't have to worry about database corruption. But here you can do both. It's in the file system, but the database treats it as if it were part of the database. That means if you do things and start a transaction against the database and then have to roll it back -- if an operation deletes a photo, you can roll back the transaction and the file will actually come back. You can access it as a file or as a store."

Database Support for spatial data should enable developers to more easily build location-based applications. Integration with Microsoft's Virtual Earth will be delivered via a separate SDK with the next CTP, Ajenstat said. At TechEd in Barcelona, the company will trot out a list of partners for its location-application push includingESRI, Spatial point, Space Software, and SWSoft.

Ajenstat downplayed any negative impact on developers from Microsoft's decision to hold back the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which was to ship with Visual Studio 2008, with the later SQL Server 2008 instead. (Visual Studio 2008 is due this month.)

To sync up the releases, Microsoft will ship an update to Visual Studio when SQL Server 2008 ships. The entity framework is now in beta 2 and Ajenstat expects another beta around the time Visual Studio 2008 itself ships.

The Entity Framework promises to let developers work at a higher conceptual level, so they will not necessarily have to know too much about the inner workings of the data setup.

"If you're a developer today, you need to know how the data is structured, how the tables were built. And developers are not necessarily database people," Ajenstat said.

The Entity Framework builds on Microsoft's LINQ, which lets developers work in the programming languages they know rather than with strings of database code. "The entity framework raises the abstraction layer [further], so developers can work with common sense objects," Ajenstat said.

It will also let developers use plug-ins to connect to Oracle, MySQL Sybase and other data sources.

Inclusion of the new graphical technology, acquired by Microsoft from Dundas, is also a big deal to many developers. "That's huge for us. We're a big consumer of SQL Server reporting services and we do a lot of views and charts. While the current reporting services are good, there wasn't a lot of depth to the report options. It wasn't as deep as say Crystal Reports," said Peter Hammond, CEO of Cybersavvy, a Redmond, Wash. developer.

Developers said this release is relatively incremental compared to SQL Server 2005, which represented a huge leap from the previous version.

"We're still focused on SQL Server 2005 because we need it to develop on and sell now. We see SQL Server 2008 as more evolutionary vs. revolutionary. They're putting the Dundas stuff in which is good and will help us create dashboards," said Lee Blackstone, CEO of Blackstone & Cullen, an Atlanta-based database expert.

None of these new features "are hugely revolutionary," Brust agreed. "This is a much smaller release than SQL Server 2005 and that's probably good. A lot of shops are still running the previous release and it'll be helpful that this is not as big a leap," Brust said.