Google App Engine at Campfire One

At Google Campfire One, Google launched a preview release of Google App Engine, "a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure".

More details from the new Google App Engine Blog:

Google App Engine is a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

Videos announcing Google App Engine at Campfire One on April 7, 2008

Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 1)

Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 2)
Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 3)
Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 4)
Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 5)
Campfire One: Introducing Google App Engine (pt. 6)

WEBIST 2008 Program

The program of the 4th International Conference on Web Informations Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2008) is now available at: http://www.webist.org/program.htm.
I'll be presenting there our paper "Towards Web 2.0 Driven Learning Environments".

Abstract:

Over the last decade, it has been widely argued that technology-enhanced learning could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform the way we learn. However, despite isolated achievements, technology-enhanced learning has not really succeeded yet in revolutionizing our education and learning processes. In fact, most current initiatives do not focus on the social aspect of learning and learning content is still pushed to a pre-defined group of learners in closed environments. Recently, Web 2.0 concepts have started to open new doors for more effective learning and have the potential to overcome many of the limitations of traditional learning models. In this paper we show in which way the community-driven platform Learnr, under development at the University of Münster, puts crucial success factors for future technology enhanced learning into practice, applying well known concepts like networking and social tagging. As a consequence, a Web 2.0 perspective on learners, learning content and learning communities can be derived.

Reference:

M.A. Chatti, D. Dahl, M. Jarke, G. Vossen: Towards Web 2.0-Driven Learning Environments (Proc. 4th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technolgies (WEBIST), Funchal (to appear)), 2008

OpenID Providers

Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb has recently compiled a good list of OpenID providers, resources, and major sites supporting this authentication standard. More information about OpenID is available here.

Knowledge Management Definition

Ray Sims has done a great job in collecting 50+ different published definitions of Knowledge Management. This long list shows that KM is hard to define in a precise way. Web 2.0 is facing the same problem. There is still no clear definition of the term. Is this a sign that Web 2.0 will go the way of KM; i.e. much hype (in the 90s) followed by a slow death?
In my opinion, the difficulty to find a common definition for KM is mainly due to an attempt to define something that doesn't exist or at least cannot happen. Unlike "Information", "Knowledge" cannot be managed. Knowledge is a complex entity. Management cannot work while dealing with complex entities/systems. In this case, networking is the solution. In an earlier post, I suggested a move away from "Knowledge Management" to "Knowledge Networking" and noted that these two perspectives differ from each other on four dimensions:

• Focus
• Core Knowledge Activity
• Enabler
• Target Group

SoSEA 2008

The First International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and Applications (SoSEA 2008 http://www.cs.tut.fi/sosea08/) in conjunction with ASE 2008 http://www.di.univaq.it/ase2008/ L'Aquila, Italy, September 15, 2008

Paper submission (deadline): June 15, 2008.

Social software has emerged as one of the most exciting and important phenomenon in today's software and business arena. With social software, individuals can interact, share, and meet other individuals, presumably with similar interests, forming large data, knowledge, and user bases. Social software engineering, in turn, can be defined as the application of processes, methods, and tools to enable community-driven creation, management, deployment, and use of software in online environments.

The social software movement can be regarded as both a challenge and an opportunity for software development. On the one hand, social software itself brings its own kinds of challenges such as data sensitivity, content legality, scalability, and performance. On the other hand, the social software movement is apparently causing a fundamental change in the way software engineering is practiced, benefiting from the technologies and experiences gained from Web 2.0 and the expectations of the forthcoming Web 3.0. In the near future, various forms of social software development will become a reality. Examples include software mashups, intelligent context-aware software downloads, and online cooperative CASE tools. Such a cooperative model of software development would also meet the challenges of contemporary software engineering such as outsourcing, offshoring, open source software, etc. Due to its distributed nature, automated approaches to social software engineering are needed.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together interested academics, practitioners, and enthusiasts to discuss topics related to the area of social software engineering. Focusing on technology issues, the workshop will offer an opportunity for the participants to share experiences and discuss challenges involved in building and using social software. A special emphasis will be put the role of social software concepts and technologies in shaping up future software development. The workshop will also identify key research issues and challenges that lie ahead.

We solicit two kinds of contributions:
* short position papers describing particular challenges, experiences, or visions relevant to the scope of the workshop (not to exceed 4 pages);
* full research papers describing original work in any aspect of social software engineering (not to exceed 8 pages).

Articles should be novel, have not been published elsewhere, and are not under review by another publication. We are negotiating with major publishers the possibility to publish extended versions of a selection of the best papers (chosen by the program committee) as post-proceedings. Papers must conform, at time of submission, to the ASE 2008 Format and Submission Guidelines. Submission instructions are available at:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/sosea08.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:
---------------------------------
The workshop will concentrate on two main themes:
* engineering of social software applications;
* the use of social software in software development, exploiting models, methodologies and technologies.

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
* requirements and challenges of building and using social software, including concerns such as scalability, performance, security, sensitivity and other legal issues;
* organization and interaction schemes in social software;
* automated approaches, best practices, architectures, frameworks, methodologies, technologies, tools, and environments for social software engineering;
* industrial involvement in social software: building, managing and interfacing with communities, opening up software platforms, integrating social software;
* building social software engineering communities: the role of companies, research groups, governments, NGOs, and individuals;
* social software engineering versus other forms of globalization such as global software development, distributed software engineering, open source, etc;
* experience reports and lessons on building social software and its use in software development.

IMPORTANT DATES (DEADLINES):
---------------------------------------------------
Paper submission (deadline):  June 15, 2008
Acceptance Notification:  July 20, 2008
Final Camera-ready:  August 20, 2008

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
-----------------------------------------
Imed Hammouda, imed.hammouda@tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology

Jan Bosch, Jan@JanBosch.com
Intuit Inc.

Mehdi Jazayeri, mehdi.jazayeri@unisi.ch
University of Lugano

Tommi Mikkonen, tommi.mikkonen@tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
------------------------------------
Andrea Capiluppi (University of Lincoln, UK)
Björn Lundell (University of Skövde, Sweden)
Cesare Pautasso (University of Lugano, Switzerland)
Frank van der Linden (Philips Medical Systems, the Netherlands)
James D. Herbsleb(Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Jan Bosch (Intuit Inc., USA)
Imed Hammouda (Tampere University of Technology, Finland)
Mehdi Jazayeri(University of Lugano, Switzerland)
Mohamed Amine Chatti (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Pekka Abrahamsson (VTT, Finland)
Tommi Mikkonen (Tampere University of Technology, Finland)