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

Microsoft Azure now supports PHP and allows full trust development

Microsoft at the Mix09 conference on Wednesday revealed several moves intended to bolster its Windows Azure cloud computing platform, adding support for PHP application development and native code as well as full trust capabilities.

Some important highlights of the announcements at conference -

• Managed code to native code support
• Enablement of full trust, which is how most applications or services are written
• Offering FastCGI support to allow PHP development

"Basically, the Windows Server team has done a ton of work with FastCGI that allows Windows Server to now support programming languages beyond just .Net and Visual Studio," said Prashant Ketkar, director of product marketing for cloud infrastructure services at Microsoft, in an interview at the conference in Las Vegas.. Through the FastCGI interface, developers can take existing PHP skills and PHP applications and services and run them on Azure.

Microsoft’s vision is to open up the platform to more languages, Ketkar said. Microsoft wants Azure to offer a "frictionless" development platform beyond just supporting .Net development, he said.

With full trust capabilities, Microsoft is expanding Azure beyond the medium trust capabilities that it had had since its original launch at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October 2008.

What will FastCGI support do?

FastCGI allows developers to deploy and run web applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP. This provides developers using non-Microsoft languages the ability to take advantage of scalability on Windows Azure.

From Azure’s official website -

One of our goals for MIX was to give our developers more flexibility while ensuring they still benefit from the unique time-saving deployment, monitoring, and management features of Windows Azure.  One way in which we went about this was to enable IIS FastCGI module in the Web role.  This module enables developers to deploy and run applications written with 3^rd party programming languages such as PHP.

Now this is the good news for PHP developers. Probably we can see some fellow blogger’s moving there blog hosting to Windows Azure with there PHP built blogs in WordPress and Drupal (depending on the cost though).

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:

Is Firefox dying a slow death?

Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0. The best thing about this new beta is speed — it’s 25% faster on V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to original beta version. Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill.

Wait a minute? Isn’t this article about Firefox dying a slow death … YES, it is and I am getting there.

Run Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, and Firefox is embarrassingly slow. It’s not even in the same league. It’s an old man on the running track trying to compete against a 20 year-old.

IE 8, Chrome and Firefox

The latest IE 8 absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their there stuff together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.

In Firefox All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser Clunky and slow cross platform UI implementation

When I use to run Firefox a few months ago before switching to Chrome I could feel Firefox getting slower and slower and slower as the hours of use ticked by until finally getting annoyed enough to have to quit the app and restart it. Doesn’t seem like a big deal but I would end up restarting Firefox three to four times every day just to clear out whatever junk it seems to accumulate.

Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from “fast and simplified feature set” to “include lots of features to make the web fun and easy.” They’re working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome and Safari—the new JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.

The Mozilla 2.0 [mozillazine.org] project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone’s attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and IE 8. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.

Will JavaScript decide the future and ultimately the winner of modern browser wars?

The Internet is fast growing from a Web made of static pages into a Web that also includes applications that perform computational tasks and that people interact with. In other words, browsers of future have to process data as well as load pages at a much faster speed and in a more efficient manner.

Microsoft’s dominant browser share - 67 percent according to Net Applications figures reflects the current usage of IE but will Microsoft be able to maintain this market share in the future? That is the million dollar question and will depend on a number of different events that will unfold in future. Lets discuss some of the possibilities here -

Is performance the key area?

All the major browser players consider JavaScript performance as a major part of their competitive attack, even to the point of naming their JavaScript engines built into their browsers: Chrome’s V8, Firefox’s TraceMonkey, Opera’s Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and Safari’s newly branded Nitro, which is Apple’s version of WebKit’s Squirrelfish.

Though IE lags all these rivals in JavaScript performance, Microsoft does care about performance overall and JavaScript performance specifically. Even as Microsoft launched a brand-new browser version, Internet Explorer 8, on Thursday, however, it’s also clear the company has a big difference of opinion about the matter.

“We’re going to keep making the script engines faster (but) right now it’s not clear how many people are gated by script performance,” said IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch in an interview. “JavaScript comprises a small portion of how fast a Web page will render. It is a piece, but by no means the holy grail.”

Because it’s easy to measure, JavaScript performance has “become shorthand for browser performance,” Hachamovitch added. Microsoft has begun touting its new test of page-loading speeds in which IE 8 fared better overall than Firefox 3.0.5 and Chrome 1.0. A supporting slow-motion video (click “Case Study Videos, then Performance Testing) shows page-loading speeds down to the hundredth of a second.

Likely not coincidentally, though, Google offered its own propaganda the day before the IE 8 launch. Google launched its Chrome Experiments site to tout what can be done with high-performance JavaScript and to promote its browser. While Chrome generally runs sites’ applications with aplomb, that isn’t the case for IE.

“The faster we make JavaScript, the more interesting and interactive the Web becomes,” said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director of Firefox.

“JavaScript in Chrome almost reaches the speed of Flash,” said programmer Mr. Doob, who wrote Chrome Experiments called Ball Pool and Google Gravity, in a blog post about them this week.

What about the cross browser issues?

In an interview, Mr. Doob - a Flash programmer who learned JavaScript just for the Chrome Experiments and declined to give his real name said JavaScript is about three quarters Flash’s speed. There are weaknesses, though. For one thing, he found JavaScript developer tools to be primitive. For another, JavaScript varies from one browser to the next.

“The main benefit of ActionScript is that it will look exactly the same in any browser and in any version of the browser, even on IE6! With JavaScript it depends on which features the browser supports so you would spend more time making sure the project looks good in all the browsers than actually developing the project,” he said. To make his Chrome experiments work on other browsers, “I’ll have to introduce some hacks which will slow down performance and will dramatically affect the user experience.”

For now, performance is the top priority. At least until JavaScript gets fast enough that other problems move to the fore.

“All it took was a little competition to get other companies focusing on this problem,” said Darin Fisher, a Chrome engineer at Google. At some point, “Suddenly this problem won’t be a problem anymore and we can move on to the next issue.”

So what happens in future is a thing to wait and watch I guess.

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