The good news for startups is that the answer seems to be no, Amazon is not unique in their success of their APIs. Certainly eBay has achieved a large measure of success with its open APIs, with over 60K registered developers and a large amount of API use. Salesforce too has been relatively successful with their open platform, and Google has as well with it's increasingly robust set of API offerings. Sigue leyendo...

The defining characteristic of any RIA is that it has a stateful client that is (or should be) platform and browser independent. With the advent of new RIA platforms like Flex, GWT, and OpenLaszlo, developers now have all the reach of a traditional thin-client web application with many of the useful characteristics of thick-client applications, such as the ability to maintain state on the client. Sigue leyendo...