Been reading the various posts by bloggers on the recent Web2Ireland event organised by Enterprise Ireland.

(Photo of Marc Canter Speaking , by Dermod)

Prize for one of the better (and concise) definitions of Web 2.0 goes to Kevin Sherry of Enterprise Ireland:

Web 2.0 is the Second Wave of Internet Business Activity.

Having said that , my view is Web 2.0 is almost , but not quite , going mainstream (in Ireland at least). Judging by the people I met (more below) and the dress standards I would judge the audience as 1/3rd Business-VC (suit and tie) 1/3rd Techie (Jeans and T-Shirt) and 1/3rd Professional Technologist (Suit but no tie). This contrasts with the last Web 2.0 event , where the audience was almost exclusively techie, despite dual business and technology marketing.

You can judge for yourself from the agenda at the Web2Ireland site, but my only gripe is that I’m not sure if Enterprise Ireland got the balance right. Aside from Marc Canter (who managed to successfuly quote Joyce in a techie presentation!) the main speakers - Judy Gibbons from Accel and Jeff Clavier (Software Only) - were either VC or Angel investors. That’s not to say that they didn’t have a lot of good, interesting and relevant things to say (more below), it just meant that you had to bear in mind their angle on things (we want to lend you money). Given the success of all the people mentioned  this paragraph, I think they are well worth listening to. Adam Green , who despite being on a blogging break, hosted a very good lunchtime session (summary: ‘everything is XML’).

The key things I learned from the above speakers were (these are paraphrased , so excuse me if the quotes get lost in translation):

• Web 1.0 is dialup , Web 2.0 is broadband.
• Web 2.0 is part of a virteous circle, where each technology builds on the expectations - e.g. consumers now expect to find information online , so more information becomes available.
• Web 2.0 is still incomplete , so need to navigate around what is possible and what is not. (e.g Netflix , started with posting out DVD’s , but will stream video as that becomes widespread).
• Content is not scalable, but user generated content is.
• ‘The customer is only one click away from never using you again.’
• A valid business model is (still) seeing what has worked well in the US, then implementing it in Europe before the Americans can.
• Only exit strategy is to be bought - forget about IPO’s.
• Innovation comes from small companies.
• Make your website / service addictive.
• Leverage the power of community.
• Enterprise Web 2.0 is not there yet , but it will be.

This last point is of particular interest, given that the stuff that FirstPartners build is increasingly Web 2.0 techniques and technologies applied to the problems of the Enterprise. That’s probably worth another , separate blog post.

There a lot of good people that I met on the day, but a lot of people that I either missed, or didn’t have enough time to complete our conversations. By way of an apology , I’ll use the power of Wordpress to trackback to them. Their blogs are well worth reading for further information / angles on the event.

• Conor O’Neill from Argolon - judging by the camera angles he was sitting behind me , but despite reading his blog for a number of months , I’ve yet to meet him.
• James Corbett,Eirepreneur who I didn’t get time to interogate on his latest mad business idea.
• Paul Watson’s notes on the event
• Liam Morrison took a break from his search engines to be there.
• Fergus of Nooked did a short presentation / pitch.
• Derek Organ survived the 200m commute to be there. Another person who I was looking to , and failed to meet!
• Tom Raftery (correct spelling this time!) - a pity the podfather didn’t catch the event on video

Technorati Tags: web2ireland

I’ve just updated the FirstPartners.net site with some new Articles Whitepapers and presentations.

These include:

• How to do successful projects with Agile Techniques.
• How to use Ajax and Web 2.0 to make your users happy.
• How to capture and reuse your Business Rules.

Web 2.0 Meets the Government …. or so this seminar from the Irish Computer Society will explain at the ‘Bringing E-Government to the Citizen’ conference. It’s is good to get the Web 2.0 word out but I feel that the tag is losing it’s meaning, and getting lost in the normal commercial sales process (while I understand the need of companies to sell, I think that making the Web 2.0 term equivalent to ‘washes whiter than white’ hurts everybody, including the companies making the pitches.

Example: one of the other speakers will explain how ‘How Ireland.com has succeeded in the Irish online newspaper market’. Excuse me? Can Deirdre Veldon from Ireland.com and Bill O’Brien (from Microsoft, talking about Web 2.). actually be sharing the same platform?

Hint for Bill: Point out that user generated content is the core of Web 2.0 , and how bloggers won’t link to walled pay sites (like Ireland.com / Irish Times). You’ve done well in the Web 1.0 world and I wish you luck Deirdre reinventing yourself now that things have moved on. 

A good starting point: This weeks survey by the Economist Magazine on New Media.

And we’d like to welcome the Irish Internet Association to the Blogosphere.

Fair play to Fergal O’Byrne - 3 months ago at the IIA Web 2.0 Event that we presented at, he was honest enough to admit his ignorance of blogs. Now a short time later , he’s turned things around and is blogging himself. Congrats!

The 2nd most useful Java-Oracle Tool that I’ve used this year is schema spy.

How often have you taken over a project without any documenation? Even worse , there is a database involved, and everybody just ‘knows’ (or pretends to know) where things are. What if all the orginal developers are gone and nobody is left to explain things? I can find my way around most legacy Java code , but databases leave me cold.

Still not convinced - take a look on the Schema Spy website. The level of information that this tool gives you takes you from knowing nothing about the database to knowing almost everything.

Interested in trying it out? Follow these simple steps
- Download it from http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/
- Change the configuration to point to your database
- Install the Graphviz component (available here)
- Run the tool and await your fully documented database.

Just to shame the commercial competition , as well as Oracle , Schema Spy supports  DB2, hsqldb    ,    Microsoft SQL Server,     MySQL, PostgreSQL and Sybase. It’s written by John Currier and is well worth a donation.

In case you’re wondering, the most useful Java-Oracle tool for 2006 is Oracle’s project raptor. Schema spy runs it a very close second. Considering that it’s a Billion dollar company Vs one man , I’d chalk that up as a victory for the little guy!

If you’re non-technical , or less technical than you used to be , it can be daunting sorting the good people from the bad (and believe me , I’ve met some of the bad ones).

This is doubly difficult for new languages like Ruby , where you might not have the expertise in house to sort out the most obvious blaggers. Java used to have this problem 5 years ago when it went mainstream , but there’s enough half-decent Java people in most companies to flag when something seems wrong with a CV / interviewee.

If you are looking for Ruby people (maybe attracted by it’s ability to do make the routine things easy , or by it being the lingua franca of Web 2.0) , then this article on O’Reilly maybe a good place to start.

If you’re suffering from the ‘too many blogs to read’ syndrome , the perhaps you should sign up for Bloglines. It allows you to gather all the blogs (and other web site feeds) into one place to browse at your leisure. All the blogs I read on a regular basis are listed here.

Some technical Irish Bloggers / Bloggers based in Ireland that I’d especially recommend are:

• Michele Neylon (pronounced Ma-kay-leh) , on Unix but just as often , Business.
• EirePreneur (james Corbett) , on Micro-Business , but has a passion for tagging.
• El Paso Times - not a technical blog , but everything that is going on in my (original) home town of Dundalk.
• Justin Mason - Happy Software Prole - Has probably done more the reduce Email spam than anybody else.
• Argolon - Conor O’Neill.  Enterprise Software Development , from Cork.

This list was compiled by the very scientific method of using the last 5  blogs I read today. See the full list here.

In Reponse to a email message on NoUnit

Original Message

Hi Paul

How are you?when i was executing “ant unit-test-results” command then my
project is scuccessfully compiled but it was one error when executing
“unit-test” target it was not executing whole test cases and when executing
“unit-test-results” target I got the error :
“D:\test-director\nounit\build.xml:116: Could not find a valid processor
version implementation from *weblogic.xml.jaxp.RegistrySAXTransformerFactory
*”

please Paul help me as soon as possible.

with regards
Richa

Response
Not sure of the exact cause of the problem , but when I’ve seen this before it’s been caused by the wrong XSLT / SAX libraries in your classpath. I’m guessing that you’re running this on Weblogic, it might be worth getting the Apache SAX libraries and adding them to the start of your classpath.

The title says it all. Or more accurately , web2ireland blog post says it all.

Don’t worry , even though the event is fully booked - no doubt it will be blogged , live, to a painful level of detail!

If you’ve been following this blog , you’ll have seen the links from del.icio.us get posted automatically onto this blog.

Not only longer you won’t - the experiment is over and the daily links were just getting in the way. If you want to see what I’m bookmarking online, just check out Paul Browne’s links directly on the site.

If you’re using Internet Explorer to browse the web (and if you’re not sure , then you probably are) , then you’re missing out on some great features of Firefox (the main alternative). The good news is that IE7 (currently in beta from Microsoft) gives some of these features - better security , tabbed browsing (a bit like multiple sheets in Excel) and above all , the ability to get plugins to extend the browser.

The bad news is that it will take time for these plugins to appear for the new version of IE. In the meantime, here are a list of plugins for firefox that I can’t live without on a daily basis.

• Del.icio.us - share and access bookmarks from any PC
• Linked in - professional networking tool
• StumbleUpon - view sites recommended by people with the same preferences as you.
• TabBrowser Preferences - change how you browse using Tabs.
• AdBlock - an extremely good tool for blocking unwanted ads.
• Performancing - Blog and surf at the same time.
• Selenium - record what you’re doing on the web - useful for testing web applications.
• DownloadThemAll - get a copy of an entire website to surf later.

If you’re in the IT business , it’s very easy to concentrate on the interesting Tech bits, and forget about the boring legal bits. Except that it’s those same boring legal bits that will come back and bite you some day.

The Irish Computer Society have just posted an article online about some of those legal bits. The April Bulletin is available here. The main points , if you can’t be bothered to click the link , are:

• You can’t exclude liability for death or injury in Irish Contracts (although thankfully for software, the need to rely on this is not great).
• You can get insurance to cover your liability.
• Like everything how much risk the supplier will bear is all subject to negociation.

If you’re interested in Security , and you’re about in Dublin next Wednesday (April 26th), you could do worse than check this one out:

Extract from the full meeting agenda:

The major questions we will attempt to cover in the discussion are -

• What makes the security profession distinct?
• Is it a particular
  security certification/qualification/experience or is it less tangible?
• What are the entry criteria for a security professional, the milestones
  and the potential career directions?
• Is there a formalised security career path?
• How can an employer tell the
  difference between a professional in the field and a (for want of a
  better word) spoofer?
• Is the career path supported by credible and useful industry efforts and
  academia?
• Who are the main professional organisations and institutions?

I haven’t (yet) been to one of the ISSA events , anybody that does go along please let me know if it is good , bad , or indifferent. I’m off to the Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 event at the Helix DCU instead.

Want to know what we’ve been up to in the module on Adaptive Software? Simon Dobson’s Home Page (the course head) is as good a place to start as any.

When you understand Adaptive Middleware , replication , self -management , context collection and self-directed systems management , please let me know. It seems a long time since we covered these topics back last November and I’m currently ploughing through them preparing for the exam at the end of next month.

Apparantly Fuzzy logic isn’t just something that happens down the pub after a few pints, it’s alive and well in the chip that controls your washing machine. The theory of fuzzy logic does not cover what happens where all the odd socks disappear too.

or so the guys at Web2-Validatorthink - 23 out of 49 might not be that great , but it’s better than 50% , given that it’s not really a Web 2.0 blog in the first place!

I wonder if they can come up with a percentage probability that a given Web 2.0 site will be around in 18 months time …

It’s all been very quiet over here , too quiet. And not just because of the hosting issues (the people at Netbunch, you know that I’m talking about you)

It’s been very quiet , because I’ve been very busy. On top of all this , we’re coming to the end of the year for the (part time) Masters at UCD in Dublin, so we’ve also got exams coming up. Thankfully it’s the last year, the downside being I have a dissertation to write.

Being a blogger , I’m not happy putting together a weighty tome that will sit gathering dust on a shelf. Instead , I want something that will solve some business problems , and that I can use as interesting content. So after much thought , the proposed title of my dissertation will be …… cue drum roll ….. ta-da!

Enterprise Web 2.0

Now, if you’ve talked to me , you know I spend a lot of my working day as an Enterprise Java Consultant , working for various banks. The idea is to take some of the Web 2.0 ideas (and you don’t need me to repeat them) and apply them to the sort of problems large companies have. Or , if you want the catchy subtitle , ” it’s all about sucking the knowledge out of people’s brains and putting it onto (ugly) websites”.

So an obvious topic to cover is the use of Ajax , which while big on the web at the moment , is going to be huge once companies realise what it can bring to their internal applications. The rest of the topics cover knowledge management (what is web 2.0 if it’s not about sharing knowledge), but also some tools and techniques that will all Enterprise Java (with all it’s robustness and scalability) compete with the nimbleness and tricks of Ruby.

Business Problem 1: How to present this information to people in a easy to deploy, but powerful way.
Solution: Update to Sun Java article - this one on how to do Web 2.0 / Ajax ‘right’ in Enterprise Java (i.e. not worrying about legacy code)

Business Problem 2: Where you have documentation, but don’t know how to find it.
Solution: Write up of the Red-Piranha Adaptive Search engine that ‘learns’ what the team wants , and finds more of it.

Business Problem 3: Where you have information in Excel sheets, but can’t do much with it.
Solution: Update to previous O’Reilly Articles on JBoss Rules - this one on JBoss’ ability to ‘run’ Excel Spreadsheets.

Business Problem 4: Where you have information that people ‘know’ , but that a machine finds it hard to ‘learn’
Solution: Simple Neural Networks using Joone, applied to a ‘real life’ business problem.

Business Problem 5: Where several people have to work together on a set of information , following a strict set of steps.
Solution: JBoss workflow, with a simple online example

Andrew Penrose (him of online Ordering Eats.ie) has threatened me with on overdose of Cold Pizza if I didn’t link to his site on this blogpost about the Web 2.0 presentation that we did..

So , if you’re around Dublin , or Ireland , and fancy ordering your choice of takeaway food online, then click on the link below

What is Web 2.0 is still the article that most people read on O’Reilly’s Website , week on week. I’d like to think that in some small way it’s because we linked to it. And , in the networking / linking world of Web 2.0 , that’s probably true.

An Article in this weeks Economist shows how Microsoft’s core business is under threat from online software. This is on top of the threat from Open Software.

Below is an extract of a report Distributed by Computer People. It’s a breakdown of all the Java Job Adverts for the last 6 months in the London Contract / Permanent Market. While it should be treated with caution as (a) it’s sales and marketing material and (b) the London / UK market will differ substiantially from Dublin. For example , I would not expect to see as many Sybase roles in Dublin as London, due to the use of Sybase in the London Financial markets.

Example from the figures: Of all java jobs advertised in the UK , 36,86% were also looking for J2EE (Enterprise Java) Skills.

• 22504 (36.86 %) J2EE
• 17476 (28.62 %) Oracle
• 16045 (26.28 %) UNIX
• 15510 (25.40 %) XML
• 15321 (25.10 %) SQL
• 15269 (25.01 %) C++
• 12815 (20.99 %)  Finance
• 12370 (20.26 %) Banking
• 11152 (18.27 %) Graduate/Degree/BSc
• 10069 (16.49 %) OO
• 9465 (15.50 %) .NET
• 8413 (13.78 %) CSharp
• 8188 (13.41 %) JSP
• 7529 (12.33 %) Sybase
• 7340 (12.02 %) HTML
• 6940 (11.37 %) Investment Banking
• 6740 (11.04 %) UML
• 6606 (10.82 %) Front Office
• 6479 (10.61 %) Windows
• 6343 (10.39 %) SQL Server
• 5991 (9.81 %) Linux
• 5533 (9.06 %) Perl
• 5047 (8.27 %) WebLogic
• 4940 (8.09 %) JavaScript
• 4685 (7.67 %) Struts
• 4547 (7.45 %) EJB2
• 4456 (7.30 %) Servlets
• 4435 (7.26 %) Microsoft
• 4136 (6.77 %) VB
• 3892 (6.37 %) Fixed Income