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Is it fair to treat all people equally? This isn’t the start of some philosophical discussion, just the starting point for this blog. So, if you agree, it’s not fair to treat all people equally (remember how the prodigal son was treated), then can it be fair to treat all organizations equally? And, if different organizations should be treated differently, who is to decide what is fair and what criteria they should use for deciding what’s fair?

Part of the answer is that these decisions are usually left to the courts. And so, Neon Enterprise Software, which is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with IBM in the US courts, is filing a complaint with the European Commission alleging “ongoing anti-competitive and abusive conduct” by IBM.

Neon originally filed a lawsuit in December 2009 accusing IBM of intimidating potential customers away from its zPrime software. zPrime, as you’ll recall, allowed businesses to run workloads on specialty processors (zIIP and zAAP) – giving money to NEON. That saved organizations running those workloads on their central processors and the associated usage charges – money that would have gone to IBM. In January, IBM filed a countersuit against Neon, suggesting an attempt to hijack IBM’s intellectual property. They suggested it was like stealing cable TV.

The European Commission is already familiar with anti-IBM cases. T3 Technologies, which was a clone mainframe distributor, has filed a complaint in Europe. And TurboHercules, with its commercial version of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator, has similarly filed a complaint. Microsoft faced the EU from about 2003 to 2009 – you may remember suddenly having a choice of browsers being made available on your PC.

So is IBM acting fairly? Are these other organizations being fair? We’ll wait and see what the courts say, but I wonder what you think?

Interestingly this week NEON offered zPrime for IMS for just 1 dollar to customers. You can find the announcement at www.neon.com/neon/news_070110_1.shtm.

On a completely different note, IBM has a new White Paper entitled “Enterprise and Web 2.0 Application Support in a Modern Mainframe Environment”. It can be found at http://images.tmcnet.com/tmc/whitepapers/documents/whitepapers/2010/2629-enterprise-web-20-application-support-from-ibm.pdf. It discusses how IBM WebSphere Portal allows mainframers to make applications available on the Web.

IBM WebSphere Portal Enable for IBM z/OS leverages z/OS resources (eg RACF and z/OS Workload Manager technology) and the White Paper discusses how to add Web-facing workloads. By using WebSphere Portal, organizations provide added value to their customers and employees while at the same time enjoying the advantages of mainframe performance, scalability, and quality of service.

As web applications certainly continue to become the way of the future for programming, many within the industry are becoming more and more interested in what the top apps currently are so that they can build to suit future consumer demands.
Here are some of the top web apps currently:
1. Last.fm (Audio) This social music directory provides users with the ability to listen to full tracks online and to create custom stations around their music interests.
2. Elance.com- This freelance platform brings service providers and buyers together under one roof; web programming, web design, graphic design, editing, writing, translation, transcription, legal, engineering and sales are among their most popular categories.
3. Gmail- This communication platform is rapidly becoming the most widely used online by individuals and businesses.
4. Amazon Web Services- This web service platform powers many of the largest web services and storage companies.
5. Google Maps- As navigation systems become more mainstream, users are searching for the best available online tools. This system offers users the ability to find and print driving directions and to locate updates on things such as local traffic.
6. Flickr- In alignment with the growing popularity of social media platforms, this Yahoo format for photo and video sharing is being taken by storm by users worldwide.
7. Google Docs- For individuals and small business who are in search of an easy and free document sharing solution, Google docs is the system of choice.
Web programmers should become familiar with these popular web apps when searching for enhancements, additions and even completely new apps to begin developing.