Now that the AJAXWorld West Conference is in full swing, I wanted to post a short update from the show.

There've been a few interesting announcements worth noting, including:

• News from Backbase about a new, free community version of Backbase Enterprise AJAX, the most widely used AJAX solution.
• A preview of Microsoft Popfly – a new alpha of a tool for building and sharing mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.
• The release of jMaki 1.0, Sun Microsystems's AJAX framework that provides a lightweight model for building JavaScript-centric, AJAX-enabled web applications.

It will be good to settle in after the show to look at the overall picture the impact of these, and other new technologies.

When the leaves start to change color here in Canada, we know it’s time to pack our bags and hit the road for tradeshow season. The busy season kicks off on Monday, Sept. 24th with AJAXWorld West in Santa Clara, CA. This is followed quite quickly by the Adobe MAX conference, which starts the following week in Chicago, IL. INM will be at both of these events, with two members of our team presenting at AJAXWorld West and a team of developers and business contacts at MAX.

Expect to see a live update from these shows, as well as a post-show synopsis. If you are going to be in either Santa Clara or Chicago for these shows, drop us an email at Services@INM.com and let us know.

Well it had to happen sooner or later. First Dilbert emerged as a comic strip parodying office politics and the antics of engineering. Now, a company called Nectarine has unveiled a new weekly comic strip called "Barely Out Of Beta" that will comment on a variety of tech and RIA topics.

Be sure to add the Nectarine blog to your RSS feed so you don’t miss the next installment.

Lately there have been quite a few articles published about the rebirth of the Desktop application. However, few have been quite as informative as "Return to the Desktop" an article in the September issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. This piece does a nice job of presenting an unbiased view of the technology driving the move back to the desktop. From Google Gears and Adobe AIR, through to Microsoft Silverlight and even the Apple iPhone, this article provides a broad spectrum view.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a classic publication in the software development world, with a history that dates back to 1976.

Microsoft officially launched version 1.0 of Silverlight today. This release, the first of the two announced versions, is really focused on delivering enhanced support for audio and video streaming and playback over the web.

This announcement heats up the battle between Adobe and Microsoft by providing a viable alternative to Flash Player for organizations that may already have their video files encoded in Windows Media format. This may be a tough battle for Microsoft, with Adobe's 90.3% install rate with Flash Player 9. Especially since the company plans to distribute the application through media applications built with it.

Also of note, Microsoft announced its intention to support Linux through the Moonlight initiative. Microsoft will build the video codecs for the Moonlight project and supply Novell with software to test and ensure Silverlight runs well on Suse Linux, Red Hat and Ubuntu.