Bungee Connect Developer Network » Podcast

The Open Web Foundation, with Scott Kveton

Brad Hintze — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:41:27 +0000

Overview
The Open Web Foundation was announced at OSCON 2008. Created by and endorsed by numerous highly influential individuals and organizations, the Open Web Foundation has also been received with a fair amount of skepticism. We speak to Scott Kveton, one of the key people involved in the organization’s establishment to learn more about the organization’s purpose, goals and near term objectives.
33:13, 15.2 MB

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode:

The Open Web Foundation (.org)
- Q & A from .org site (getSatisfaction.com)
Scott Kveton
- blog (feed)
- Twitter
OSCON: “Supporting the Open Web” (Recordon’s Keynote/OWF announcement)
- Video
Critique on OWF:
- “Some Thoughts on the Open Web Foundation” (Dare Obasanjo)
Alex & Ted’s Cool Web Tips
- Balsamiq Mockups (Alex’s Tip)
- “Tim Bray slams SOAP … and Java” (Ted’s tip)

@task, with Nate Bowler

Brad Hintze — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:24:49 +0000

Overview
Nate Bowler, CTO of @task, becomes our first in-studio guest on the Bungee Line. @task provides project management, Gantt chart, workflow, and time tracking software through both traditional host-your-own and Software-as-a-Service models. As with so many companies in the providing web-based software, they provide an API.
36:25, 16.7 MB

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Alex & Ted’s Cool Web Tips
- Google search gets social (Alex’s Tip)
- OSCON (O’Reilley Open Source conference Ted attends in Portland, OR this week)

MindTouch Deki, a Programmable Wiki

Brad Hintze — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:38:34 +0000

Overview
MindTouch’s Steve Bjorg joins us to tell us all about their wiki platform called “Deki.” MindTouch is rapidly growing Deki’s install base, largely on its slick user interface. But there’s something hidden under the all the UI slickness: under the hood, Deki supports a comprehensive web API. In fact, the PHP user interface fully delegates all operations over web-service calls to the API. In other words, web-dev geeks like us can safely customize or extend the UI without risk of interfering with Deki’s business logic, such as page permissions or revisions. Coooool! Oh, and did we mention that it’s Free Software?
44:18, 20.3 MB

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Alex & Ted’s Cool Web Tips
- LibraryThing (Alex’s Tip)
  - My LibraryThing on Facebook
  - Books iRead (Which Alex says is inferior to Library Thing)
- Dopplr (Ted’s tip, a cool tool for sharing your travel plans with Facebook friends)
- Jeremy Zawodny, friend of the show, departs from Yahoo!, heads to Craig’s List

Update from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb

Brad Hintze — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:00:25 +0000

Overview
ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser returns to the Bungee Line to give us an update on the API action of early 2008. Alex and Ted apologize for the unfortunate audio treatment to the Bungee sound in the previous episode, promising “never again!” In related news, check out the new intro music for our “Cool Web Tips” segment.
25:13, 11.6 MB

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

ProgrammableWeb (rss)

Web 2.0 Expo
- John’s Session at Web 2.0 Expo

So what is this Platform as a Service thing?

Alex Barnett — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:08:36 +0000

The “platform-as-a-service”, or PaaS meme is getting more air play the last 24 hours as news of Google App Engine makes its way through the tech media and blogs. ReadWriteWeb has a good write up and Phil Wainewright’s summation by declaring “Let the PaaS wars begin” I think fairly captures the mood and reaction to the news.

Exciting times no doubt, and pretty cool that Bungee Labs is getting mentioned in a number of blogs reacting to the Google App Engine news an example of the new generation of companies emerging in the PaaS space.

So, what is Platform-as-a-service? And why is PaaS interesting? Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Dana Gardner and Phil Wainewright in this sponsored podcast – full transcript available here – all about PaaS. I’ve taken the liberty of copy and pasting a snippet of the conversation below that speaks directly to the whole notion and definition of PaaS.

“Gardner: Okay, we’ve established that the tide is turning to the Internet, that there are some great Web-based services available, that technologies are now bubbling up to allow for better and easier connectivity. And yet, there is still a need for the right platform and the right infrastructure to make this all mission-critical and enterprise-ready.

So let’s get into PaaS as a possible stepping stone that, in a sense, bridges the best of the Web-oriented architecture and the available SaaS and the APIs-world with what developers inside organizations — be they ISVs, service providers, or enterprises — need to make these approaches acceptable and within the acceptable risk parameters.

I noticed that Bungee Labs does not call this “Development-as-a-Service” or “Deployment-as-a-Service” or “Integration-as-a-Service” — but “Platform” as a service. Alex, give us the primer. What does “Platform-as-a-Service” really mean?

Barnett: That’s what we are trying to define at Bungee Labs. PaaS is one of those terms that we’re going to be hearing more and more. And they are going to be different — varying levels of definition and interpretation of what that means.

But what we’ve done is put a stake in the ground in this respect, and then saying that in order to really be a PaaS — and not just any one of those single pieces that you’ve mentioned plus more individual pieces — that you need to be able to provide the end-to-end services to really call it a “platform.”

From the developer’s standpoint, which is the development cycle, this means the tools that they need to develop applications, to be able to then test those applications, to be able to connect to Web services and to combine them, and to have all those kinds of capabilities — and to then deploy and to make those applications instantly available to the business users.

Literally, we mean a URL that is the end-point for the end-user. From that, they can start consuming the application.

So, PaaS means having an environment in which you deploy inherently and have built-in scalability, reliability, and security. Once you’ve deployed your application, you know that you don’t have to take care of all the infrastructure in the datacenter and the capital investments and the bodies that are required to make it scale when newer applications increases in use.

There is also the ability to connect to the various distributed data sources or functionality that the application needs to be able to consume. You can get that inside of that platform, the ability to be able to do that in a Web-native way, and so take advantage of the architectures we descried earlier, such as SOA.

There is also the ability — and we touched on it earlier — for developers to be able to collaborate on projects that are built-out in the cloud. They can share code, check in code, do all the standard revisions and collaborative-type functionality that developers need when they’re working on projects with teams distributed across the world or across your offices. And they can do this without having that entire infrastructure on-premise.

And then, the last, but critical, piece is having deep instrumentation and an analytics ability around the use of the application — of how it’s being used, of where the connections are — right across the board from the “glass of the window,” the browser, for example, and right on through to the Web services in the CPU, or the rest of it.

As a result, you are able to understand performance. You are able to understand your billing, if it’s a billing proposition that you have. And all of what I described is comprised within six pillars [of Bungee's offerings]. All of that is delivered and available purely as a service, so there are no on-premises requirements for any of those components across the development and platform used in a utility model. You use it as much as you pay for, or as much as you use in a utility-based model — all in the cloud. No bit needs to be installed on any machine at the enterprise in order to take advantage of all those Web services and functionalities.

Gardner: For our listeners who are just getting used to this concept of PaaS, let’s just get right in quickly and describe what Bungee Labs is. It’s a young, innovative company. And you’ve come out with a service called Bungee Connect. This is essentially one place online where you can go to develop, mash up, and access data, to put together Web-based applications and services, and then instantly — with a click of a button, and perhaps I am oversimplifying — develop and deploy in basically an integrated continuum. Is that correct?

Barnett: Yes, and provide very rich user experiences as part of that, with highly interactive application functionality. We’ve built out essentially that stack that I’ve described earlier. We’ve made that available for organizations to take advantage of. We’re specifically targeted at developers who really want to be able to build very sophisticated Web applications that leverage orchestration workflow around connecting to Web services.

We are not in the business of being able to provide non-programmers with the ability to do these nice simple mashups.

Gardner: Well, if you can do that, let me know, because that would be a very good trick. I am sure the world would love to have development by anybody!

Barnett: Yeah, and that’s a great dream to be able to have, but inherent in that is inflexibility, because you are simplifying it all for the end-user. What we really offer is for the developers who are tasked with building sophisticated Web applications to do just that, deploy that, and then deliver very rich user experiences out on the Web.

Gardner: And to be clear, this is not just open source. This is commercial code, if they wish. The people who develop on this system, that code is their intellectual property. Is that right?

Barnett: The intellectual property of the code that is developed by the developers is absolutely their own intellectual property and remains so. We do have a community side of things that allows developers — just as in the open source world — to be able to share code and even entire applications as open source running on our grid.

But in terms of a company, it’s entirely their intellectual property that they developed and they are able to literally export the code. And if they want then re-factor that for a different kind of a grid or runtime, it’s their property.

Gardner: Phil, how do you see the relationship between PaaS and what Bungee Connect is doing, and then the larger SaaS trend? Do you see a relationship of one aiding and abetting the other? Or are they in separate orbits? How does that work out?

Wainewright: I think they are very much in a similar orbit. And to an extent, I don’t think of PaaS as being part of SaaS or vice versa. It’s just everything moving to the cloud. These are two examples of that happening.

One of the things I want to highlight, as Alex was saying, is the useful experience. When people start developing for the Web, for the cloud, then it’s not just building the infrastructure — it’s also learning what is involved in writing applications for that environment.

There is much more emphasis on the user experience. There is much more emphasis on reusing what other people have done, whether it’s by mash-ups or by reusing other people’s code, as opposed to reinventing the wheel every time. There is much more emphasis on developing applications and programs that can adapt and change to future opportunities in business conditions.

All of those things also have to be learned, at the same time as building the infrastructure. Using PaaS enables you to tap into that shared expertise in a way that you can’t do, if you try all by yourself.

The other thing that’s happening here is that we’re connecting into the resources of the Web, and getting onto the Web, so that we can interact with partners and customers and connect into those other Web resources. This is what we’re really expected to do as businesses today, in order to stay competitive. So, there’s a tremendous pressure building to be able to do this kind of thing.

Now, there are three ways you can get onto the cloud. You can go to a cloud-computing provider and basically build your stuff in that cloud, which gets to some of the infrastructure, but, there’s still the issue of how do I write applications in this environment and connect to other client resources.

Second, you can go to pure SaaS whereby you get a ready made application and you can do some customization, but there are going to be quite a few gaps around what that provides and what you actually want to do. There are going to be quite big gaps in terms of integrating that into your existing on-premises applications and to the other client application that you use.

Third, where PaaS comes in, it allows for the ability:

A) To get much faster to the custom applications that you need to build for that environment

B) To do the integrations to fill in the gaps and to access other SaaS applications and services, and to patch and connect back to the existing on-premises applications. “

Full transcript available here and podcast here. Bungee Labs’ definition of Platform as a Service here.

Alex Barnett, VP Community, Bungee Labs.

Developer Community Management with Jono Bacon

Brad Hintze — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:00:14 +0000

Overview
There are few developer communities as large and distributed as that of Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular brand of GNU/Linux distributions available today. Jono Bacon is the first official community manager for Ubuntu. He joins to tell us what he has learned in his 18 months of working with this vast and disparate community..
35:05, 16.1 MB

Special prize will go to whichever comment best deprecates this shows guest. Enter today.

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Jono Bacon (rss)
- LugRadio (an R-rated podcast on free software)
Egomania on Wikipedia
Ubuntu
- Ubuntu-mania on Wikipedia
- PlanetUbuntu (blog planet)

*Offer not valid after January 28, 2008.

Social Design with Joshua Porter

Brad Hintze — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:41:13 +0000

Overview
Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes five years at world-renowned User Interface Engineering. Josh’s blog (Bokardo.com) is a must-read favorite for UI and web designers and is finishing up his first book, to be published in the next few weeks (details below).
47:55, 21.9 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Bokardo.com: Joshua Porter’s blog (rss)
Joshua’s new book – Designing Social Web Applications (Voices That Matter)
“How do you create and launch a vibrant social web application that people are motivated to use? Getting people to participate (and stay participating) is the key to any web-based strategy, but you have to do more than simply add features. This book teaches you how. By using real world examples and a bit of social psychology theory, this book provides a solid foundation for designing your next great web application.”
Joshua & Alex’s past podcast endeavors
Feb 8-10: Socal Linux Expo is coming
- Come see Ted’s presentation
This Show’s Web Tips:
- Alex: Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID
- Ted: SOAP API comments: MantisConnect and Novell GroupWise
How to find The Bungee Line online: click here

*Offer not valid after January 28, 2008.

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

Brad Hintze — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:32:22 +0000

Overview
As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source.
42:14, 19.4 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Alan Lewis’s blog (rss)
- “Adobe – Go All In on Open Source!“
eBay Desktop
eBay Developers Program
- GetPopularKeywords (Alan’s little-known API tip)

Alex & Ted’s (“Amazon Fanboys”) Web Tips:
- Amazon SimpleDB
- JungleDisk

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

Brad Hintze — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:26:18 +0000

Overview
Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book.

Special thanks to avid Bungee Line listener John Oliva, who suggested that we interview Toby.
49:05, 20.3 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

The Book: Programming Collective Intelligence (Amazon)
Toby Segaran’s home page
- Toby’s blog (rss)
- Sample code from Toby
The Bungee Line Ringtone (Okay, fine. It’s just a zipped mp3)
A Mummified Hadrosaur, which may or may not have had webbed feet
- National Geographic Video

The Rhapsody Demo Application, with Josh Skillings

Brad Hintze — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:20:05 +0000

Audio
In April 2007, Bungee Labs engineer Josh Skillings built a demo application for Web 2.0 Expo using Rhapsody Web Services. In this BCDN Audio podcast, Josh tells Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger how he ended up tasked with a last-minute project to create a demo application before the public debut of Bungee Connect, and how he went about bringing the application to life.
17:05, 7.8 MB

Video
This accompanying screen cast takes you on a tour of the application, providing further detail of how it was constructed in Bungee Connect.
~8 minutes

Try Bungee Connect
Developing with Bungee Connect is free of charge. Click here to get an account and get started today.

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

Brad Hintze — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:11:27 +0000

Overview
Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.
Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line.
49:05, 22.5 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Dapper.net
- Screencast Demo
Jon Aizen (atom)
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)
“Semantic Web” synopsis [Wikipedia]
Android
Apache License
- Apache License synopsis [Wikipedia]

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

Brad Hintze — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:21:24 +0000

Overview
In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate.
21:41, 9.9 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

OAuth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina

Brad Hintze — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:18:28 +0000

Overview
Three of the minds behind the OAuth initiative, Chris Messina, Larry Halff and Eran Hammer-Lahav, join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.“
54:32, 25 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

Brad Hintze — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:30:21 +0000

Overview
Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*, adding, “Take that, John Musser!” Jeff even name drops a book on our show. I wonder what site he expects us to link to on that?
32:17, 14.8 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

Jeff’s blog (rss)
The Business API’s [sic] Conference
Wikinomics [shameless Amazon.com link]
Amazon Web Services
Cool tool for this edition: Google Sketchup

*In the first edition of The Bungee Line, John Musser said about web service SLAs, “What Service Level Agreements?”

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! (Part 2)

Brad Hintze — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:31:18 +0000

Overview
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! talks to Ted and Alex about Mash, Hadoop, Yahoo Developer Network, openness at Yahoo, Yahoo’s APIs, and various related topics.
32:21, 14.8 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the services mentioned in this episode.

Jeremy’s blog (rss)
- “There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS)“
Yahoo Developer Network
- Blog (rss)
Mash
- Yahoo! Mash Blog
- “Yahoo Mash: Yahoo Tries to Be Facebook” [mashable.com]
Hadoop
Pipes
Alex’s cool site to check out: LibraryThing
- Alex Barnett’s LibraryThing
- Ted Haeger’s LibraryThing

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! (Part 1)

Brad Hintze — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:52:41 +0000

Overview
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! talks to Ted and Alex about Zimbra, Yahoo Developer Network, openness at Yahoo, Yahoo’s APIs, and various related topics.
30:15, 14 MB

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Related Links
Here are links to some of the services mentioned in this episode.

Jeremy’s blog (rss)
Yahoo Developer Network
Zimbra
- Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra (press release and links)
- Zimbra Developer Zone
- “I Zimbra,” a song off of the Talking Heads album Fear of Music
  - This link has nothing to do with the interview.
Open Hack Day results (including “Shop by Color”)

Extending salesforce.com with the Apex API

Brad Hintze — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 02:15:34 +0000

A few weeks ago a salesforce.com customer, Jake, contacted us about extending their salesforce.com CRM by adding additional interactivity. I’ve been working on reference applications so I jumped on the chance to help him. This is a super simple application, but it does show how you can quickly build new functionality on web service APIs.

Check out the screencast (~11 min.) to see the app.

I asked Jake if we met his expectations and his response was priceless:

“You took my requirements, blew them away then picked up the ashes and made something spectacular!”

Request a Bungee Connect account if you want to try your hand at building apps like these. Also, I’m going to be at the Salesforce Dreamforce event beginning Sunday night, and at Ajax World the week of Sep 23rd. Leave a comment if you are interested in meeting up while I’m there.

John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

Brad Hintze — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:49:12 +0000

Overview
We launch The Bungee Line with an interview with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb. Your hosts, Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger also introduce you to the show.
33:09, 15.2 MB

Please leave us a comment about this show.

Related Links
Here are links to some of the services mentioned in this episode.

ProgrammableWeb
- Blog (rss)
- API index
- Mashup index
FaceBook
- API
- FaceBook Query Language (programmableweb.com)
Programmable Data Stores
- Microsoft Astoria (programmableweb.com)
- Google Base (programmableweb.com)
Amazon Flexible Payment Service (programmableweb.com)
“Closed is the New Open” by Seth Goldstein