ZDNet have finally published my interview online -- you may have been lucky enough to catch it in the last issue of Builder magazine. You may have recently won the lottery. The text has been butchered somewhat, complete with incomplete sentences. I thought I might publish the interview in it's entirety, unedited and with all the answers.
"Geoff Bowers is the CEO of Daemon, a Web development company in Sydney. We recently caught up with Geoff to talk about Web services, surviving the dot com crash, and the decision to open source Daemon’s flagship content management system."
The published piece is here... but read on for even more gossip as I called it back on 9th Oct 2003.
What technologies are you keeping a watchful eye on at the moment?
A mix of things. I think blogs and RSS are still to make their impact on the internet world -- publishing for the masses is going to be big. Flash outside the browser -- keep your eye on Macromedia's Central product.
What are some of the more interesting things you are doing (or you have seen) using Web services?
Web services are nothing new -- the only difference is a broadly accepted standard. Most of the systems integration we do still relies on Java APIs, databases and the like. However, we do have the odd project going where we've hooked into webservices -- ColdFusion MX makes this so easy it hardly seems like work.
What is your thoughts on the remoting vs. web services argument?
Remoting is definitely more efficient than web services. SOAP is very verbose, whereas the Remoting AMF protocol is succinct and binary. The biggest issue with remoting is its not widely accepted -- that said we use it where we can. Flash MX 2004 now makes it possible to do web services direct from the Flash client, so despite Remotings advantages I think we're likely to see greater acceptance of web services in the rich internet application space.
What are some of the newer features of the new Macromedia MX releases that you think developers will embrace?
Dreamweaver's CSS support is a major move forward. But the innovations in the new Flash Player and IDE are really where things are going to heat up. The object oriented environment of Actionscript 2.0, the new component architecture under the hood will make a big difference as to how far developers can push the environment. The simplicity of data-binding and the introduction of forms are going to bring a lot more UI development into the Flash arena.
Is there anything that you would have liked to of seen better in the recent release(s)?
I'm still a bit flat on Dreamweaver's hand coding support. As a WYSIWYG editor there is no competitor but day to day I still prefer tools like Homesite and TopStyle for handcoding. But I have to say that view is not shared by all of our development team.
What do you think of Macromedia's Royale imitative?
Royale is still very much under wraps. I'm excited by the prospect of serverside generated Flash interfaces. I feel more comfortable programming on the server, and maybe I'm a little jealous of Flash developers having all the fun.
Many web development companies have fallen by the way since the dot com crash. Why do you think Daemon survived where so many others failed?
We're a very conservative company financially, especially for our industry. Most of our clients are larger enterprises like BHP Steel, Roche Pharmaceuticals and Integral Energy. We tend to have long and enduring client relationships; by and large we were sustained by those longer term projects.
We've had to adapt and be flexible. I think one of the major turnarounds for Daemon was focusing on being a service driven company. We spent a lot of down time implementing support mechanisms, version control, internal training, and more. This was one of the reasons we open sourced our highly successful enterprise content management platform, FarCry CMS.
Why did you decide to start fullasagoog.com?
Well I was always a fan of blogs. I maintain quite a few of my own. The trouble was keeping track of when blogs were being updated. So I decided to try out the XML features of ColdFusion and build a tool that imported and sorted blog feeds.
I needed a name that was related to lots of news, was strange enough to be remembered and something that would keep the Americans guessing -- and so "Fullasagoog.com" was born. Macromedia liked the solution so much they licensed the code for their developers resource kit, rebadging the code base MXNA.
Fullasagoog has a life of its own now with almost 100,000 visitor sessions a month. Development hasn't stopped, I've released a webservice, category feeds, OPML directories and more. I've got all sorts of ideas its just finding the time!
http://www.fullasagoog.com/
http://blog.daemon.com.au/
http://daemon.typepad.com/arsaura
http://cfguru.daemon.com.au/
What is your biggest concern you have in the Australian development space?
To be honest I'm not all that concerned. We seem to be more resilient than other places. The biggest bugbears locally are infrastructure based -- we just pay way to much for broadband connectivity and hosting traffic charges are a joke.
Why did you decide to open source Daemon's FarCry CMS?
Content management is a commodity. Everyone needs it and everyone offers a solution -- there are literally thousands of content management systems (CMS) available on the market today.
We use to sell Farcry CMS at 35,000AU per server. It's a proven, enterprise level solution built on years of real world experience and client feedback. But in the end its still just another CMS.
We had a hard look at where are revenue comes from and its not license fees. It's consulting, development, training and our ongoing client relationship. We hoped that by making FarCry CMS available to everyone we might be able to generate more of the services oriented business we're best at.
Why did you choose the Common Public License? (As opposed to say the GPL or various other open source licenses)?
CPL is just about the most open of the licenses. Under this license, you can literally take FarCry CMS, rebadge it under another name and sell it -- provided you keep the acknowledgements in place. I wanted something simple, "have the code, do anything you want but remember to tell people it was Daemon who built it". I didn't want any of the complications associated with GPL and other licenses that might have discouraged contributions or inhibited the uptake of the code base.
What are some of the disadvantages of opening the source to your CMS?
Open sourcing your lifes work is a hard decision -- FarCry CMS is the largest open source ColdFusion code base. So we were very keen to play devils advocate and line up the potential disasters giving away the code might entail.
Foremost in our minds was the loss of the license revenue. But as it turns out we've been involved in several revenue-generating projects since the release of FarCry CMS that would not have come our way if we were still charging a license fee for the server.
We had visions of competitors using our own code base to win business. This still remains a danger, but there are still opportunities for training and support services. Besides most enterprise level clients would feel more comforatble dealing directly with the team who built the product.
Lastly we we concerned about the development team and the impact giving away the code might have. Surprisingly this has turned into one of the biggest advantages. Team Daemon has been totally invigorated by the response from the developer community -- its a totally different vibe talking direct to folk who are trying to actually build things in FarCry than navigating the treacherous path of "exceeding client expectations".
Posted by modius at 12:14 AM | Permalink
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Why would anyone shorten the sentence
The biggest issue with remoting is its not widely accepted -- that said we use it where we can.
to
The biggest issue with remoting is that we use it where we can.
???
Anyway - if I preview a comment in your blog the css changes to the previous version in black and dark grey.
Posted by: Philipp Cielen on January 28, 2004 07:09 AM
Hi Geoff,
If you had such an issue with the interview why did you not bother to contact me via phone, e-mail or stopping me at the Deamon conference earlier this year?
After the magazine was published you could have contacted us and we might not have run the same sub-edited version on the Web site.
Editor, Builder AU
Posted by: Brendon Chase on August 19, 2004 12:31 PM