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Curl is linking RIAs (rich Internet applications) to SOA with an update to its Curl RIA Platform Version 6.0 software development technology.

The company plans to release on Tuesday its WSDK (Web Services Development Kit), which is a productizing of open-source code released last year. It is to be included as part of the Curl RIA Platform 6.0.

Supporting both REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP Web services, WSDK provides components for building enterprise applications that use Web services and an XML document model to support SOA.

WSDK makes it easier to build an application that uses an RIA client to front-end an SOA, said Richard Treadway, Curl vice president of product strategy. RIA interfaces to SOA will become more important, Treadway said. "I think it's going to become increasingly important as enterprises start to use RIAs for their enterprise applications," he said.? "A lot of enterprises have spent the last couple of years architecting their back-end solutions to take advantage of the SOA, and now they're looking [to determine] how do we represent complex data and large sets on the desktop, and that's where RIA technologies come in."

Curl RIA Platform 6.0 was announced last fall. The product includes the Curl language for building Web applications. "It?s a combination of scripting, HTML, and [an] object-oriented language," Treadway said.

The update to the platform features expanded user interface styling to provide a fresh look and feel. Version 6.0 also enables mashups that integrate JavaScript and Curl APIs.

Curl RIA Platform is available in base and Pro versions, with the Pro version offering enhancements for security, performance, and maintainability as well as the WSDK.

To broaden its development platform, Curl established a repository of open-source component libraries in 2007. The resulting three projects included WSDK, Curl Data Kit for data-centric application development, and Curl Development Utilities for unit testing and project development.

The Pro version of the Curl RIA 6.0 platform is priced at $598 for the developer kit and $12,000 for the runtime. The base version is free.

Digg's founder and chief architect Kevin Rose wants people, and his mother in particular, to know that he's not a jerk. He's simply too busy to answer his e-mail on a timely basis.

He is, in fact, so concerned that his e-mail response habits will ruin his reputation that he would like to create an application to address this problem.

This all came up at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, where on Friday he and a group of other young Web 2.0 entrepreneurs participated in a panel titled "Launch a Web app in 40 minutes."

That title was misleading. No Web application was launched. In fact, not a single line of code was written.

But the session, whose panelists included Pownce's Leah Culver, WordPress' Matt Mullenweg, Twitter's Blaine Cook, and Scrapblog's Carlos Garcia, gave attendees a good snapshot of the erratic and uncertain process that precedes the launch of a potentially popular or useless Web application.

Rose's idea, one of several proposed by the panelists, was ultimately chosen by the audience -- through their applause -- as the one the group should try to develop. What ensued was a sometimes funny, sometimes testy, and often confusing brainstorming session.

Panelists discussed and argued about, among other things, how this application should work, what features it should have, how it should be called, how it would generate revenue, and how its home page should look.

Egos were clearly bruised and patience ran low. But Rose's original vague idea -- a service that would automatically reply to his e-mail senders with statistics on how many unread messages he has and give them an estimate for when he might reply -- quickly took a more defined shape.

One of the ideas tossed around was that the application could be tied in with the person's calendar, giving it an idea of why e-mail could be piling up. Also proposed was that, via various activity-tracking and ranking methods, the application could assign senders different levels of importance and generate different replies accordingly. In addition, it was suggested that the application could alert the user by phone if a time-sensitive message arrives.

Attendees also learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes it's not necessary to go through the trouble of building a Web application to deal with a nagging issue. "Just set an auto-reply that says 'I'm not a jerk'," Culver quipped to Rose. Problem solved.

Conference chairman Tantek Celik, a computer scientist well-known for his previous roles as chief technologist at Technorati and co-founder of the Microformats.org community, on stage after the panel, gave the whole discussion its coup de grace with a devastating, but ultimately right-on-target, observation. He pointed out how ironic it was to be discussing an application about -- of all things -- e-mail technology at a conference devoted to the future of software.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should allow broadband providers to manage their networks and slow "bandwidth hogs," despite concerns that such practices arbitrarily target some customers, said a coalition of seven civil rights groups.

Net neutrality rules for broadband providers would protect bandwidth hogs at the expense of other customers and civic organizations, said the coalition, which includes the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women's Organizations.

The coalition filed comments with the FCC Thursday in the agency's inquiry into Comcast's slowing of some P-to-P (peer-to-peer) traffic. "Regulations prohibiting network management risk undermining free speech on the Internet by allowing P2P traffic to overwhelm the network and prevent non-P2P traffic from reaching its destination," the coalition said in its filing. "The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of 'back of the bus' second-class status for our speech on broadband networks -- and ought to be resoundingly rejected."

That position puts the civil rights groups at odds with several consumer rights groups, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, which have called for the FCC to stop Comcast from slowing some Internet traffic. Those groups, among a coalition of consumer rights groups that filed a complaint against Comcast in November, submitted their own comments late Thursday, saying opponents of their argument have misrepresented them.

The consumer groups don't want all network management outlawed, just discriminatory targeting, they said. Opponents of their petition "don't have a leg to stand on," the new consumer groups' filing said. "All of their responses either painfully misconstrue our arguments or rely on technical-sounding nonsense and 'father-knows-best' claims, which are either irrelevant or invalid."

The FCC can act against network discrimination on a case-by-case basis, the consumer groups said. "We are asking, simply, that the FCC clarify what should already be obvious from FCC and congressional precedent and policy: when network providers discriminate against, delay, degrade, or block particular applications of a consumer's choice, the network providers violate [FCC policy] and should be punished," the groups said in their new filing.

The controversy over Comcast's network management erupted late last year after press reports that the cable provider slowed BitTorrent traffic. The company has said it engages in "reasonable network management ... necessary for the good of all customers."

While the consumer groups repeated their calls for a stronger net neutrality policy at the FCC, the coalition of civil rights groups suggested a few bandwidth hogs could clog broadband networks if providers aren't allow to manage their networks.

"We need some honesty in this debate," Harry Alford, president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "Content discrimination is a real threat to an open Internet, but so are bandwidth hogs -- particularly those who traffic in illegal, pirated material. Bandwidth management can be objectionable if it is aimed at censoring certain content, but it is in the consumer's interest if it is aimed at preserving bandwidth for consumers that pay for it."

About four-fifths of the proposed changes to a draft standard for the OOXML document format were waved through, undiscussed, at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Geneva.

If the specification for the OOXML file format is adopted as a standard in its current form, "there are likely to be hundreds of defects," said the head of the U.S. delegation at the meeting, Frank Farance.

[ Amidst all these changes, some wonder if the OOXML vote even matters ]

OOXML, the default document format in Microsoft Office 2007, has already fallen at one hurdle on the route to becoming an international standard. Members of Joint Technical Committee 1 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) rejected it in a vote last September. National standards bodies participating in the vote made 3,500 comments suggesting improvements to the draft.

At this week's BRM (ballot resolution meeting) in Geneva, the sponsor of the draft standard, industry consortium ECMA International, presented 1,100 recommendations for changes to the draft.

However, delegates only had time to discuss and modify around 20 percent of those, said Farance, an industry consultant with expertise in standards issues.

"Virtually every comment we processed did not survive unedited," he said.

The 80 percent of comments that were not discussed during the meeting were put to a "default vote," resulting in the automatic adoption of ECMA's recommendations without modification by delegates, he said.

Farance questioned why the meeting's business had to be rushed.

"I see no particular rationale for why we were limited in time. I don't know how you can deal with 6,000 pages with 3,500 comments in a week. It's like trying to run a two-minute mile," he said.

Andy Updegrove, a Boston lawyer who works with industry consortia on technical standards, described the meeting process as unsuccessful.

"Hopefully, the national bodies will not compound this error by approving a clearly unfinished specification during the voting period ahead," he said.

Although not a delegate to the BRM, Updegrove had spent the week in Geneva at the meeting venue. He said he had heard from people within the meeting that only six countries had voted in favor of adopting the undiscussed recommendations.

Representatives for ISO and IEC could not be reached as the meeting ended.

Now that the ballot resolution meeting is over, the 87 national standards bodies that voted in last September's ballot have 30 days to vote on the revised draft. That ballot concludes March 29.

Cebit is taking on a green tinge this year, with the Climate Savers Computing Initiative playing a central role at the trade show, which opens March 4 in Hanover, Germany.

The climate initiative aims to reduce IT's carbon dioxide emissions from computer operations by 50 percent between 2007 and 2010. The group, led by PC manufacturers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, among others, will present energy-efficient IT products in a special "green village," and a central information point in Hall 9 will point visitors to other companies with environmentally friendly products. Showgoers can also take away a green IT guide produced with the help of IDG's Computerwoche magazine.

[ Related Sustainable IT blog:  The greenest gets the gold ]

Climate Savers will hold a news conference Monday evening to laud the environmental efforts of some companies -- while those featured in a Greenpeace event the next morning can expect the opposite treatment: the campaign group in recent months has focused on uncovering IT manufacturers' use of pollutants.

The environmental interest of some of the "green" products highlighted by show organizers is a little obscure: a solar-powered flashlight and a banknote sorter figure on the list.

Other products won't save the earth, but will at least allow us to document, or measure, how much damage we're doing to it. For those who want to keep tabs on how much of the earth they've seen, the latest locating devices will also be on hand. In addition to GPS (Global Positioning System), some add GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) functions for transmitting data, offering a way to keep track of loved ones, according to one vendor. Or maybe unloved ones, too.

Hot specs for today's trackers include strong magnets to keep the unit on a vehicle and a tough form factor so the device can endure extreme weather. Many devices are also very small to stay hidden from view.

The new emphasis on saving energy and reducing emissions is just one of the changes at this year's show, which runs from Tuesday through the following Sunday. Previous shows have run Thursday through Wednesday. The new schedule will make life simpler for professional IT users, the organizers said.

This year 5,845 exhibitors from 77 countries are attending, a little down on last year's 6,153 exhibitors from 79 countries. The strong euro has discouraged some overseas exhibitors, organizers said, although that hasn't bothered the Chinese: After Germany, China is now the most-represented country with 500 exhibitors, overtaking Taiwan.

France is also strongly represented this year: It is this year's featured country. One of the opening speeches will come from French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Another famous straight-talker is Steve Ballmer, who will be speaking on the theme "innovation for people and the environment" at a Microsoft event on the eve of the show.

(With additional reporting by Jeremy Kirk in London.)

Some of Microsoft's own top executives had trouble getting Windows Vista to work in the weeks after its release, according to company e-mails unsealed this week.

The officials, including a member of the Microsoft board of directors, voiced some of the same complaints about missing drivers and crippled graphics that users have raised since Vista debuted in January 2007.

[ Get the scoop:  Driver problems still haunting Vista ]

Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft senior vice president who took charge of Windows development the day after Vista's retail release, was among the top officials who said some of their hardware wouldn't work with the new operating system. "My home multi-function printer did not have drivers until 2/2 and even then [they] pulled their 1/30 drivers and released them (Brother)," said Sinofsky in an e-mail dated Feb. 18, 2007.

"People who rely on using all the features of their hardware will not see availability for some time, if ever, depending on the [manufacturer]," Sinofsky continued in the message. "The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with my Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother."

Sinofsky's e-mail was one of hundreds made public Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman as part of a lawsuit that claims Microsoft deceived buyers when it promoted PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" in the run-up to the 2006 holiday season. The lawsuit, which was granted class-action status last Friday, charges that the Vista Capable logo was slapped on systems that could run only the lowest-priced and lowest-powered version, Windows Vista Home Basic. That edition omits several of the most heavily promoted features of Vista, including Aero, the revamped graphical interface that in some ways resembles the look and feel of Apple's Mac OS X.

The internal e-mails showed that Microsoft changed its mind on the hardware requirements for Vista Capable, and began communicating that to OEM partners in early 2006, about a year before Vista's launch and around four months before the company unveiled the marketing program.

Until then, Microsoft had said internally -- and to OEMs -- that PCs tagged as Vista Capable had to support the operating system's WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) video drivers, a requirement for running Aero. But in late January 2006, Microsoft got ready to tell some of its most important partners, including Hewlett-Packard Co., that it had dropped the WDDM demand.

"WDDM support for graphics is now a recommended, but not required, technical criteria for Windows Vista Capable PCs," Scott Di Valerio, the former head of the company's OEM division, said in a message on Jan. 31, 2006. Di Valerio left Microsoft last October to join PC maker Lenovo.

Mike Nash, vice president for Windows product management, was nailed by the Vista Capable change more than a year later when he bought a new laptop.

"I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run [Aero], but more important wouldn't run [Windows] Movie Maker," Nash said in an e-mail on Feb. 25, 2007. "Now I have a $2,100 e-mail machine."

Jon Shirley, a former president and chief operating officer at Microsoft and now one of the company's board directors, expressed Vista frustration, too.

In a message dated Feb. 16, 2007, to CEO Steve Ballmer, Shirley spelled out his Vista driver problem. "The other machine I will not upgrade as there are no drivers yet for my Epson printer (top of the line and in production today but no driver yet), Epson scanner (older but also top of the line and they say they will not do a driver for) and a Nikon film scanner that will get a driver one day but no date set yet.

"I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is a shortage of drives," Shirley concluded.

In his reply two days later, Ballmer told Shirley, "Thanks much ... will get after Nikon."

The messages written by Nash, Sinofsky, Shirley and Ballmer can be read in their entirety here (PDF download).