ReadWriteHack

You've heard this from ReadWriteWeb for the past several months: The exodus to the cloud for enterprise services and resources is moving control of everyday work away from the IT department. So what happens with all those displaced IT workers and administrators who are no longer managing applications and services day-to-day?

Well, if you ask the folks producing the next edition of Visual Studio for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8, they become developers.

One other way to think of a "content management system" is as a database engineered to present data in a rich and navigable format. As such, a CMS doesn't have to be "the company blog;" and a business' communications - especially the kind that used to be logged on the intranet - don't have to look like WordPress.

A few months later than originally planned, the "RTM" code for version 5 of the open source Umbraco CMS has made its way to CodePlex, Microsoft's open source distribution channel. Now the hard part begins: updating, and in many cases replacing, existing documentation that goes back to version 3.

When mobile users feel they don't like how their apps perform after the first trial, some 75% of them won't launch the app again. That's the metric cited by engineers and marketers at HP Software, who note that this first wave of mobile apps brought forth by the iPhone has resulted in a glut of programs that make even the best performing mobile hardware into a pocket full of silicon cement.

This morning, HP begins a repurposing of the performance testing tools for websites that it gained through the Mercury Interactive acquisition of 2006, for the mobile apps era. It's unveiling what it calls "LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud," complete with hyphens. It will act as an off-premise testing platform for mobile apps that are deployed as services, simulating the activity generated by thousands of users simultaneously to gauge the resilience of servers and resources. This way, you might not have to disappoint three-fourths of them to learn how well your service holds up.

Last month, the team responsible for the creation of SproutCore, one of the more successful of many JavaScript libraries for Web application development, were absorbed as a whole into Facebook, and will likely be working on an apps distribution platform there, probably involving HTML5. What Strobe left on the table was SproutCore, a project which had evolved into its own independent HTML5 apps framework for both assembly and distribution, but which began at Apple as a JavaScript toolkit for rendering Web apps, including for mobile.

Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale had already left SproutCore in October, prior to the rest of the team's acquisition. Katz is a core contributor to a number of major, recognizable projects including Ruby on Rails and jQuery; and Dale confirmed in a tweet last month that he, Katz, and other notables were starting a new venture to be called Tilde. This morning on his personal blog, Katz announced Tilde's first key project: the reworking of SproutCore 2.0 into a new and emerging project called Amber.js.

Spokespersons for Microsoft and all other sources on the subject are remaining mum today, after an unofficial general release deadline of the end of November for the next edition of its Silverlight Web apps platform passed quietly. The Silverlight 5 project had been launched as the evolution of Microsoft's graphical platform for Web functionality, though that was before the company's dramatic shift in preference to WinRT as the Web apps platform of choice for Windows 8.

Late yesterday, Microsoft's spokespersons were unable even to confirm that Silverlight 5, whose release candidate remains available now, will make general release in 2011. However, a launch announcement page posted earlier in the year continues to show 2011 as the promised timeframe. One spokesperson would only say that further news would be revealed "in the coming weeks."

Today, CollabNet announced Connect, its new integration framework to provide app dev orchestration and management. The big news here is its integration with Atlassian's bug tracker tool JIRA. It also brings the Git source code repository into an enterprise setting that can be used more adroitly by larger project teams. The goal is that your data stays in one place while you move through the development and test lifecycle.

You can download a free trial of Connect here.

For most of its existence, Firebug has been the de facto JavaScript developers' console for Firefox; and for several years, most Web development in general involved Firebug to at least some extent. Now with HTML5 developers expecting to see more workbench functionality built into the browser, Firefox finds itself in yet another chase, this time not only with Google Chrome but with Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer, in a race to incorporate functionality that Firebug users had always thought they had.

Mozilla's latest nightly build of Aurora, the development channel for Firefox, reveals the incorporation of at least one new feature in its growing built-in dev toolkit that, while welcomed, will already look familiar to some who've sneaked into the Chrome camp: a "bread crumbs" toolbar that represents the relationships between page divisions in the active DOM model, and lets you click on a division name to see it isolated in the browser.

How exactly should you gain visibility into the performance levels your customers are seeing when they use your Web applications? One method that's still in wide use is compelling users to install plug-ins and background processes. But for many users, that's not just performance monitoring, that's behavior monitoring. You don't want your analytics tool straying too far into the realm of potential privacy violations.

Until HTML5 can fully implement its standard methodology for capturing browser performance specs, Web developers need alternatives. One candidate, provided by a company RWW spoke with called New Relic, is to have Web apps servers supply performance measurement agents to clients while the apps themselves are being served. These agents communicate not with your server, but with New Relic instead, and the results are made visible as analytics charts through your browser.

Modern browsers are, generally speaking, so much better about stability than they used to be. Still, who hasn't had a browser crash in the middle of filling out a form at some point? Maybe the odds are 1 in 100, maybe they're 1 in 1,000, but it will happen. Now, consider the odds for all the people visiting your sites. If your site has forms of any kind, you should consider using Sisyphus to add Gmail-like saving to your site.

As we wrote about earlier this week, Klout has reworked its algorithms, and your scores have changed. Some have gone up, some down. Despite claiming more transparency with their algorithms, they are still mostly opaque and mysterious. As one of our readers commented, "Klout just pulled a Netflix, taking trust off the table."

So while they tinker with their code, you might want to explore other alternatives that can help you measure your social media effectiveness. We have come up with 17 different services, some free, some fairly expensive. I have tried most of them and will give you my impressions so you can have a head start with your own explorations.