There’s an interesting article that popped up this week on eWeek.com about the 5 Steps to Next Generation Web Applications. Jim Rapoza, Chief Technology Analyst at eWEEK talks about how the key to building a successful web application today lies in embracing what the web is becoming, a next generation operating system. Amongst Jim’s recommendations for success are embracing rich applications, keeping applications open through the use of SOA and web services, and supporting offline environments through integration of technologies like Adobe AIR.

It’s like you’re reading our minds Jim. Great advice.

For those of you keeping tabs on new rich internet applications, an interesting one just went live last week here in Canada. Okay, we may be a bit biased as we were the ones that developed it. The project, done in conjunction with Willings Multimedia, is an online newspaper archive for the Terrace Public Library in northern British Columbia. Through the application, library patrons can now access the library’s immense collection of digitized newspapers from the comfort of their own homes. Patrons can conduct searches, view results and even read complete articles online through an integrated document viewer.

Try it out for yourself at: http://www.terracelibrary.ca/. Just click on the “Newspaper Archive” link in the middle of the page and start searching.

There’s a new magazine about to hit the racks. Late last week, Sys-Con Media announced the launch of Flex Developer Journal, the first and only independent magazine serving Adobe Flex developers. Yakov Fain, a noted RIA and Java expert and the co-author of the best-selling book Adobe Flex & Java, was named editor-in-chief of the publication.

Flex Developer Journal will cover all the technologies around the Adobe Engagement Platform, including AIR, Flex, Studio, Creative Suite, Contribute, Acrobat, LiveCycle, CF, and Flash Lite. It should be an interesting read.

Adobe announced today a new update to Flash Player 9 that will allow it to support full HD video. Flash Player 9 Update 3, available later today, will support 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. This new update will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2. This is an interesting play from Adobe and it provides a good alternative for developers that were looking toward Silverlight for better video support.

In a recent article entitled Tipping the Microsoft Cash Cow Could Be Adobe's Next Move, Wired speculates that Adobe may be soon getting into the office productivity tools market.

It may sound ludicrous to attack such a well-established Microsoft stronghold, but the market is in fact wide open, waiting for someone credible to make a move. Ideally, this move needs to come from someone with more muscle and a better chance to stand behind its technology in the long run than a small visionary startup could.

In addition to fine engineering, Adobe is very well positioned to provide tools that actually meet users’ needs, elegantly integrate with existing workflows, and seamlessly deal with compatibility issues (in every possible sense of the term: OS, hardware, file versions, etc.). As well, Adobe can address online/offline usage challenges, which some readers may recall the company learned the hard way.

There is so much value to be delivered to end-users by the sheer RIA-zation of office tools. In fact, almost every industry out there is waiting with open arms for landslide innovation through RIA-zation of their tools, by combining the power, expressiveness and usability of installed applications with the low-cost deployment and data centralization of Internet applications.

On the other hand, nothing convincing has come out of Microsoft Office Live, Google has great technology behind increasingly inconsistent user interfaces, and the OpenOffice crowd is just trying to play catch up with MS Office.

By the way, if you are wondering what happened to the 100M$ Adobe Ventures fund, it is now official that Scrybe - an outstanding and highly usable Flex-based calendar - got some of it. There are also rumors about Buzzword - and amazing RIA-based word processor - having gotten some too. Coincidence? I think not.

Why build a custom search engine when you can leverage Google’s own algorithm on your website for just $100 per year? As part of a widespread effort to offer a series of tools and services for small businesses, Google has launched Custom Search Business Edition. This new service for small businesses allows companies that don’t have the time, money, or resources to develop their own search functionality to integrate Google search into their site, without including Google ads or branding.

The service starts at just $100 per year for searching up to 5,000 pages. It’s also offered in a second tier for larger sites which covers up to 50,000 pages for $500 per year.

This is an interesting, and cost-effective way for businesses not to re-invent the wheel.

This week, Sun Microsystems announced that the most powerful CPU they've ever designed (89.6 Ghz of parallel computing on a single chip) will be released as an open-source technology under GPL (General Public License). Still this week, Lenovo announced that they will begin selling IBM Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed and fully supported by them. Dell had started selling Linux-based PCs earlier this year.

This basically tells us that what's under the hood (hardware, operating system and other "enabling software", a.k.a. the Metal) is becoming commodity.

In the last 15 years, we've experienced a strong presence of hardware and operating system in the value chain of information technologies. Globalization and fierce competition brought hardware to a level of undifferentiated low-margin products. Operating systems seem to be following the same trend.

On the other hand, the Mental is making great strides: content, knowledge, expertise, application, all the "abstract and smart stuff" seem to gain appreciation in the industry's value chain.

So, expect more competition to get enticing and relevant content out to the largest audiences possible in the most pervasive way. The future growth of this industry seem to be coming from the part closest to the user, and farthest from the power plug.

Late last week Microsoft rolled out the release candidate version of Microsoft Silverlight, the solution touted to be Microsoft’s “Flash killer”. Silverlight is a cross-browser technology for interactive Web applications that delivers media experiences based on the company’s .NET technology. This first 1.0 version of Silverlight will be heavily geared toward web video, with many of the richer developer features only coming out with version 1.1 (no release timeframe has been quoted for this second version yet).

Silverlight is an interesting technology for businesses to track, as early comments from the industry are quite favorable. So far, Adobe has a pretty solid head start with Flash 9 racking up 83.4% install base in just 9 months. To compete, Microsoft is pulling out the big guns and is offering free infrastructure support, at least initially, with up to 4 GB of free space in its data centers. And a new Silverlight Streaming service and other kinds of support are also being offered for free. It will be interesting to see how things play out on this battle.