Web Platform Installer (Click once install) Beta 2.0 released for Windows 7, Vista SP1, and XP SP3

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer has evolved this week from version 1.0 to 2.0. In fact, as MIX09 debuted, the Redmond company made available for download the Beta development milestone of Web Platform Installer 2.0.

Web Platform installer 2.0 beta allows users to install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI. This feature was not there in Web platform installer 1.0.

Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta is only supported on Windows Vista RTM and SP1, Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. However, the bits also manage to integrate with the next iteration of the Windows operating system, Windows 7. With version 2.0 the software giant aims to take the already simplified download and install process of its collection of web solutions a step further.

“It includes everything that you need to get up and running to build your web solutions – from servers, tools, and technologies, including the most recently updated products. This means you don’t have to go to a different website and download to set up your dev machines or servers! With the WebPI, you can install the entire stack all from one website – www.microsoft.com/web and one installer. Additionally, the WebPI installs the community version of PHP 5.2.9-1 so you have easy integration with popular web applications. All you need is a Windows machine or hosted version of Windows,” revealed Mark Brown, Microsoft senior product manager.

What is Web Platform Installer? or as I call it - Click Once Install for Microsoft Web Solutions.

The WebPI provides a simplified download/install experience for Microsoft’s free web products. It includes everything that you need to get up and running to build your web solutions – from servers, tools, and technologies, including the most recently updated products. This means you don’t have to go to a different website and download to set up your dev machines or servers! With the WebPI, you can install the entire stack all from one website – www.microsoft.com/web and one installer. Additionally, the WebPI installs the community version of PHP 5.2.9-1 so you have easy integration with popular web applications. All you need is a Windows machine or hosted version of Windows.

What makes the Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta - 

• IIS 5.1, 6.0 or 7.0 depending on your version of Windows
• SQL Server 2008 Express
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• IIS Extensions including: Media Services 3.0, Admin Pack, DB Manager, WebDav 7.5, FTP 7.5, FastCGI for PHP support, URL Rewriter, Application Routing, Web Deployment Tool
• ASP.NET and features such as ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
• The Community Version of PHP v5.2.9-1

PhoneGap - open source framework for mobile development with JavaScript.

The creators of PhoneGap think it’s nonsense that developers have to write the same app in several different programming languages to reach the widest swath of mobile phone customers, so they developed an open source, cross-platorm framework that bridges the gaps among them.

“PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you,” reads the Web site.

To get an idea of the types of mobile phone features PhoneGap supports currently (more are on the way), take a look at this quick reference chart the creators put together:

PhoneGap is the Adobe AIR of the IPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Just like Adobe AIR enables web developers to build Windows and OS X applications using the HTML and CSS skills that they know and love, PhoneGap allows web developers to build applications for the mobile devices with web technologies while taking advantage of the native mobile phone API’s.

Using PhoneGap, a developer need not write any Objective-C code and yet they can still have a proper app installed that is essentially a slightly customized PhoneGap application that sports a custom icon and a certain URL where application lives online (very much like AIR). When a user starts PhoneGap it essentially creates a browser on the mobile device and navigates to the specified URL where the author of the web page can access that particulars phone’s API through JavaScript like this:

getLocation();

//GAP will invoke this function once it has the location
function gotLocation(lat,lon){
    $(’lat’).innerHTML = “latitude: ” + lat;
    $(’lon’).innerHTML = “longitude: ” + lon;
}

Or access the accelerometer data like this:


function updateAccel(){
    $('accel').innerHTML = "accel:"+accelX + " "+accelY+" "+accelZ;
    setTimeout(updateAccel,100);
}


Seems like RIM needs some applications built on this API. And then all those RIM users might be able to run all the cool iPhone apps on there blackberries.

For a quick introduction to PhoneGap, watch this three-minute video:

Top navigation Horizontal Menu appears below the content when using Nice Menus with Zen layout - Drupal

While working with a client hosting a VOIP based solutions web site on Drupal. The top navigation menu was hiding underneath the content DIV. We were using the Nice Menus along with the Zen layout.

BUG - The top navigation menu was moving underneath the content DIV.

And this was happening only for IE7 and IE6, Firefox was working fine. So I used bit of a CSS hack for IE browsers and made following changes to colmask class in layout.css. This made the menus show up fine.

/* column container */
.colmask {
    position:relative;        /* This fixes the IE7 overflow hidden bug and stops the layout jumping out of place */
    clear:both;
    float:left;
    width:100%;                /* width of whole page */
    overflow:hidden;    /*      This chops off any overhanging divs */
    *z-index:-1;     /* Adding this is the key   */
}

Also on another note Nice Menus will not render the hover effect in IE6. IE6 only works with hover for anchor tags and since Nice Menus is using lists, hover on lists will not work in IE6.

To fix this issue you can use csshover.htc, you just need to add this to behavior of the body like following in the CSS file and you will be good to go.

body    {     behavior:url("csshover.htc");    }

Remember -  csshover.htc needs to be copied to the document root of your web application AND not to relative root of CSS.

What is .htc extension?

Its a Jscript file (csshover.htc) and is added to the page via a Microsoft proprietary "behavior" rule in the CSS file. Another way of adding this to the page is

<head>
…title element, meta tags, etc…
<style type="text/css">
/* some ordinary CSS rules… */
</style>
<!– The line below starts the conditional comment –>
<!–[if IE]>
  <style type="text/css">
body {behavior: url(csshover.htc);}
  </style>
<![endif]–> <!– This ends the conditional comment –>
</head>

We don’t want our CSS to fail validation, so a conditional comment is created to contain a separate style sheet to hold our behavior rule.

csshover.htc file can be downloaded from here - http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/csshover.html

Is Cloud Computing reliable enough? How to monitor downtime or poor performance of the cloud?

Everybody seems to be talking loud about cloud computing nowadays. But the recently reported outages at Salesforce, Amazon and Google has made us think otherwise and wonder if the cloud is really ready to meet all the hype and attention its getting.

No doubt, there are cost savings related to licensing, maintenance and application / server management. But does this ensure that your end users are getting the online experience you want them to have?

Is Cloud computing reliable?

When a 40-minute outage at Salesforce.com affected thousands of customers around the world in early January, it generated quite a bit of cry throughout the industry. Dan Goodin exposed the dark side of cloud computing in this article “Salesforce.com outage exposes cloud’s dark linings” when Salesforce.com suffered an outage that locked more than 900,000 subscribers out of crucial applications and data needed to transact business with customers.

What about performance monitors provided by vendors?

Many cloud computing providers provide custom built management consoles or control panels for managing server resources. These consoles provide customers with availability statistics and status messages in the event of significant outages that impact end users.

Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge and Lenny Rachitsky from WebMetrics are among those who voiced concerns about the effectiveness of a cloud or SaaS provider hosting its own network uptime panels / dashboards. Keynote Systems Vice President Vik Chaudhary suggests that, “… the prospect of a cloud application provider doing their own performance monitoring is akin to a fox guarding the hen-house.”

So what can be done?

The first and foremost thing to keep in mind is that even you are hosting on a cloud or have a SAAS app running somewhere, your end user expectations are no different then the regular client server application. So in a generic sense User Acceptance Testing is not much different then testing on a Client Server Architecture.

Remember web based application environment in the cloud is a jigsaw puzzle of pieces. At the core you have your virtual hardware followed by your operating system. Each of your servers is then configured differently depending on its specific duty. You may have application servers, web servers, search servers, database servers etc. Each of these servers needs to be monitored from several points of view - both internally and externally.

Though you dont have direct access to performance monitoring like in a Client Server Architecture. But still you can follow following steps to make sure your users are getting the experience you want them to:

• Use the same browser for testing and monitoring that the majority of your end users are using.
• Use a Testing service like Gomez or monitis. These external watchdog systems help to keep everyone informed if the cloud is having issues. These also provides with important statistics on response time and application performance that can be used to determine how to adjust the infrastructure.
• Re-record testing scripts on a regular basis, because cloud API might change over time affecting the performance.
• Monitor the availability of the application as well as response time.
• Set alarms that let you know when performance is trending toward unacceptable levels, or when there is an abrupt decline in performance.
• Make sure monitoring agents are consistent over time so that historical data and current data can be compared easily to identify trends.

Your monitoring system can be the difference between keeping your systems alive OR having unhappy customers and missed SLAs. It can help you pinpoint exactly what went wrong and reduce the time to identify and solve the issue.

Cloud computing portability, where are we heading?

Over the last few months there has been a growing amount of concern around Cloud portability or in other words Cloud API’s portability issues. With Cloud service providers multiplying in numbers everyday, and almost all of them using there own proprietary API’s, moving from one cloud service provider to another is going to be a huge initiative in the near future thus consuming both time and money.

Lets first discuss what cloud API portability really means?

Cloud portability means ensuring that an application has a common method of programmatic interaction to the underlying resources and services. More simply, Cloud Compatibility means your application and data will always work the same way regardless of the cloud provider or platform, internally or externally, open or closed.

So what is the problem?

As we saw with the recent demise of Coghead. Cloud and platform-as-a-service application portability are sure to be big issues this year, as the economy continues to be a question mark. I highly doubt that Coghead will be the only service provider that fades out, leaving customers to fend for themselves. APIs are nice, and open standards are necessary.

This is really needed now -

I believe that its about time someone need to set the API standards to ensure portability when shifting vendors for cloud services. May be its the time for Amazon’s and Microsoft’s to come together and have a consensus on a common API or a Virtualization format that should be used by all cloud service vendors. 

 

Different types of Cloud API’s used right now as we talk -

Control APIs, which allow cloud infrastructure to be added, reconfigured, or removed in real time, either by human control or programmatically based on traffic, outages, or other factors

Data APIs, which are the conduits through which data flows in and out of the cloud.

Application functionality APIs, which enable the functionality with which end users interact, such as shopping carts, wikis, and widgets.

What is been done already?

One such example that address several of these concepts is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). The format is an “open” standard proposed by the DMTF for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or more generally software to be run in virtual machines. 

However, one of the problems a lot of these system management standards are missing is any kind of usage outside of the traditional “enterprise” system management platforms or in the case of VMWare or Microsoft, they are simply limited to their own platforms - interoperable, but only if you’re using our software.

Where are we heading?

At this point it seems like we are heading towards coexistence of a number of mini clouds. Major cloud players will have there own mini clouds and there cloud API’s will be portable within there platforms.

Please add on to the thoughts and leave your comments, I will probably do another post soon. if you have a better vision / suggestion of where cloud computing portability is heading and how major players should be playing this cloud game, you can leave your comments or email me at info[at]coolwebdeveloper[dot]com.

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