The Merapi Project / The Roundarch Merapi Platform - Open Source Release and other Information "from the source"

Update: Adam Flater's Blog post on the subject of Merapi and joining the team at Roundarch.

There has been a lot of discussion about Merapi over the last week, most of which was the result of a press release that we put out last week around the Roundarch Merapi Platform being used within the Tesla Motors Model S prototype car.

Today, I came across a post on the Adobe Forums about how to call a DLL from an Adobe Flex software application. In this message thread, someone mentioned using Merapi. There was a fear that The Merapi Project had died, stalled out or was inactive. There was also a reply that pointed folks to a possible "light at the end of the tunnel", a blog post I put up on the Roundarch Blog about the project and some of our plans.

I responded on the forum, and part of the way through writing things thought that it probably made sense to post my response here as well, so that there was no miscommunication around Merapi. It also makes sense to explain what we (Adam Flater, myself, our employer (Roundarch) and the community are doing with Merapi.

The following should answer your questions about the status of the Merapi Project, our personal involvement in the project, Roundarch's sponsorship of the Merapi open source effort, our ongoing process to create a more robust commercial platform (The Merapi Platform) and other items that we've, quite frankly, have been too busy to share with the Flex, Flash and Web development community.

The post started out with me answering the question about how the Merapi open source project has died and that ever since Adam Flater left the project, things haven't been released, and the project had died. Let me start there, and as you will read... I explain the rest.


What is going on with the Merapi Project?

Adam didn't leave the Merapi Project, however with workload for client projects and doing the engineering of Merapi pretty much solo, he didn't have a tremendous amount of time to dedicate to the project and getting releases out, not to mention all of the other "business stuff" that goes along with developing a technology. That's where I got involved to help him out.

Together, we've been cranking on maturing Merapi over the last year, and a few months ago, Adam found a way where he could dedicate his time to building out the Merapi open source project, and also work to develop a platform for Merapi-like things (Connecting web technologies and desktop/hardware).

Recently, Adam took a position at Roundarch (Where I also work). In his position as Evangelist and Architect, his responsibilities include focusing his time and effort on getting the open source project in a place where it could be released, and working with the rest of our clients who have some "outside the box" types of needs for projects.


What Does this Mean for Merapi?


What does this mean? It means that after almost a year of working on Merapi in his spare time, that Adam can now focus on making Merapi what he had always intended.

We recently helped the folks at Tesla Motors with the prototype Model S car (which will change a lot in the next 2 years). In order to do this, and to also enable a couple of other projects, we had to do a ton of custom development and move Merapi to other platforms outside of just AIR and Java. This is great news for the overall community. Why? Because Adam and I have convinced Roundarch to sponsor the open source project, and to allow us to forge ahead with some of our own proprietary "version" of Merapi that includes additional functionality, etc. I, personally, have been working with Adam on Merapi for a year and a half and have had countless conversations, meetings and reviews with Adobe, Microsoft and other major players in the Web and desktop software business.

I was doing this prior to joining Roundarch, and now that both Adam Flater and I are employed by the company, it made a lot of sense to use some of our time to focus on the project as opposed to trying to build out something that we feel is this important in our nights and weekends. A lot of folks have commented that the project stalled, was dead, etc. That was never the case. The issue was time: We didn’t have enough to dedicate to doing things right.

Roundarch is sponsoring the project, meaning they are paying to have our team members work on things that can be leveraged by the community. Merapi is a very cool thing, and as Jeff Maling, president of Roundarch told me "It is important to get the open source stuff out there so that the industry as a whole can use it to move forward".

There has been some confusion in the community about what Roundarch's involvement in Merapi means. We published a press release about "Roundarch's Merapi" being used to power the connectivity between the vehicle hardware and touch-screen of the Tesla Model S. A handful of people took this to mean that Roundarch "owned" Merapi and that nobody else would be allowed to use it. That is absurd and simply not the case. What it means is that the work that Roundarch is sponsoring has finally given us the time to put our heads down and finish up our open source release code, which will be put on Google code in the coming weeks. (by June at the latest). The final tasks for us are to do a code review and to figure out how to license it, both things that are in process right now.

So, there you have it. The open source Merapi project is due for release very soon. As some of you may know, we've had things in a closed-source private alpha stage for about a year. We did this so that we could get things perfect before opening it up to the community. Right now, several folks (not from Roundarch) are also going to be involved in the "steering/oversight" committee for the open source project. It is our intention to give back to the community in the same way that Roundarch sponsors conferences, the community, local user groups, etc, etc.


The Merapi Platform - What is it?


To clarify things, we have also developed "The Merapi Platform". You might also hear this referred to as "The Roundarch Merapi Platform".

This platform pushes far beyond the open source Merapi Project. At Roundarch, we work on many interesting and challenging technology and design problems. We have a need for a technology that our clients can use that provides the simple object bridging that Merapi has (for AIR/FLEX and Java), along with other capabilities that we've realized make a ton of sense.

I am the Co-Director of Roundarch "Labs", where we are developing this stuff, and we plan to contribute back to the open source Merapi Project as appropriate. We also plan to continue to develop out the full platform, which will include tools, libraries, and other things that will make building these next-generation applications faster and easier, and will provide some value for our own clients. This also includes the ability to integrate other platforms/technologies such as .NET (VB/C#, etC), Python, AJAX, Flash, MS Silverlight, etc, etc.

The long story made short: The Merapi Project is alive and well. Adam Flater and the rest of the Roundarch Labs team are working diligently on things and the open source Merapi Project will be available on Google Code sooner than later. We've invested a very hefty amount of time, effort and money in this, and based on the needs of our clients, have decided to move beyond just sponsoring the open source project by creating a full commercial platform that can be used to push way beyond what the open source code will provide.

All things evolve, and at Roundarch, we are dedicated to making sure that the Merapi open source effort gets the support that it needs to be successful. Until we finalize our own roadmap and answer our own questions about how we will license, sell, use, or do services around the fully integrated platform... stay tuned. I don't have those answers yet, and trust me.... I wish I did! We are working out all of the details and as soon as we have them, we will release that information to the community.


Answering some Questions

A couple of other questions have surfaced about Merapi, including "Is Merapi the same things as "Artemis"? For those not in the know, Artemis was an early prototype of software code that would could pass data between the Adobe "Apollo" Alpha (which became Adobe AIR) and Java. The Artemis project died when Adam and I both left our previous employer. Nobody picked it up. They could have done that, but the passion behind the technology remained with Adam. When Adobe released AIR, it was time to throw out the old and start fresh with a new approach and a full re-write of the framework.


And Especially Thanks to our Friends and Supporters

First off, I'd like to thank Roundarch for their generosity, understanding of why the support of open source is so important, and for giving us the ability to help push the concept of bridging the Web and desktop / software and hardware. Roundarch has provided Adam and I an opportunity to not only support the release of Merapi as open source (finally!), but given us the opportunity to develop additional technology that we believe will help change the way that we use the Web and develop both Web and desktop software.

We'd also like to publically thank Andrew Powell who works at Universal Mind. Andrew has been working with Merapi since Adam pushed out the first alpha code and has been a great advocate for the technology by speaking at conferences, blogging, creating sample applications, etc. Andrew will work with Adam on the open source AIR/Actionscript Merapi Project and help to steer those efforts.

In addition, we should throw a huge digital hug over to Andrew Trice, who works for our friends at Cynergy Systems. He has also been working with Merapi for quite some time and has created some of the most talked about Merapi demos out there. He's a fantastic guy, good friend and absolutely brilliant.

Juan Sanchez created the original Merapi Project logo. Juan is a key player on the Degrafa open source project and works for our friends at EffectiveUI. Juan is a very talented jack of all trades and and really nice guy.

Lastly, when we started to make Merapi something real, we ran ideas past a whole slew of folks in the industry. Forgive me if I forgot you, and email me if you'd like to be added to the list. This list includes Rich Tretola (O'Reilly insideRIA/Herff Jones), Josh Holmes (Microsoft), Louie Penaflor, Mike Labriola, Jeff Tapper, Mike Nimer, Ryan Stewart, Greg Wilson and Holly Shinksy (Who are using Merapi in the Tour de Flex application by Adobe), Ted Patrick, Rhazes Spell, and others.


Final Words?

Adam, the management team at Roundarch and myself are the types of folks that embrace new technology and believe that the Web can provide so much more than it currently does, including providing new and interesting ways to publish and consume data. We think it is the future, and that's why have been working so hard at making this happen.

If you’d like information on The Merapi Platform, or what our plans are with the open source Merapi Project, email Adam (aflater@roundarch.com) or myself (dmeeker@roundarch.com). We’d be more than happy to discuss them with you.

Also, check out the Roundarch Blog for updates over time. There is a lot of great stuff up there.

We can do better! SxSW, Social Media, Defining Intent and Putting it all in Context

I am going to be jotting down a variety of thoughts in the coming weeks, as my brain is about to spill over with things inspired by the hundreds of conversations I've had in the last week at both the South by Southwest technology conference in Austin and the Microsoft MIX conference in Las Vegas.

There is a lot happening in the industry right now. There is a major battle that is about erupt between Adobe and Microsoft around user experience-based technologies (Flash Platform vs. Silverlight/WPF). Augmented reality is becoming real (ish). Location-based information has grown from "what if" to "must have". Mobile devices are everywhere, even to the extent that the mobs in Austin last week brought down AT&T's network with their iPhones, and I am really starting to love my Android device.

A lot is going on, but I don't feel a wave of mind-blowing innovation. Most of what it seems people are talking about is simply extending the status quo. It almost seems that most people are just making marginal improvements to things that already popular or widely accepted.

It seems as if most of the people I've talked to at both events are also feeling the general lack of forward motion attached to many ideas that are being produced en masse. It almost seems that many ideas that are being presented are almost mass-produced... rip offs of things that already exist.

Don't get me wrong. There is indeed a lot of really innovative stuff in the works. But most of it isn't ready for prime-time. Most of it is under wraps. Most of it lives as ideas, prototypes and behind closed doors where teams (like mine) are working out the kinks before revealing things to the industry.

Ideas like this are great, but you can't log in to an idea. There is not a lot of tangible stuff being released that really blows my mind. (But I really like what is happening at the MIT Media Lab)

Because of this, it almost seems as if most of the public buzz around interactive, web, online (however you want to phrase it) technology is mostly about cleaning up what we currently have (i.e. - Facebook redesign) and making marginal improvements to what already exists (APIs?).

I went to Austin to see if perhaps I could bump into the next big, amazing thing that would make me smile and tell everyone I know about it. I had a great time. It was great to see that the work we do at Roundarch was as good as anything else out there, and that people were blown away by some of the conceptual work that is being done by Roundarch and by folks working on "Roundarch Labs" projects.

It made me realize that we really do "think big" and that we are doing very sophisticated work. We are doing truly next-generation application design and development. Our design team is second to none, and our engineering folks are solving incredibly hard problems.

I was expecting to encounter a lot of this in the last week. I had planned on being overwhelmed by a blizzard of thinking by people I've never met. I thought that perhaps there would be huge ideas floating about, that would make me question what I thought was happening and would make me change strategic direction on one or more ideas that I've been brewing in my head.

Instead, I found that 80% of the conference in Austin was focused on "Social Media". I get it. I love it. I understand it. And all the same, I am really over hearing about it.


What is it really? (Social Media).

I had a conversation with a couple of peers the other evening about this, and we came up with the following. The term "social media", seems to be encompassing everything from user-generated original content, remixed content that is redistributed, and content produced by businesses that grabs the public fancy, therefore "going viral".

You can argue that Web applications like twitter are a hub for the creation and distribution of social media, but that would then require us to also include "tweets" and random thoughts captured in text to also be social media content.

Backing up, let's just rip the term apart: Social = Between individuals or groups / Media = Content.

So, is it true that social media is any type of content that is created and shared by individuals or groups (assuming we are still talking about digital content, ie - delivered online).

I am having a hard time with someone telling me that they are a social media expert. I don't really know what that means. What do you do? What makes you an expert? Are you a sociologist? Do you have expertise in the creation of media? Delivery of content? The taxonomy of online conversations around specific subjects? Do you have expertise in everything? Anything?


HELP!!!!!!!

I probably sound cranky. I probably sound upset. I'm not either of these. What I am is concerned that the expertise that so many people that I am close with in our industry is being diluted by made up words and "in-the-now" terminology. (as opposed to in-the-know).


What would I rather see?

Instead of talking to no end about how a person or business can leverage social networking Web sites to advance themselves, I'd rather us all be engaged in a conversation about how we can learning from the behavioral patterns that we see being developed. We should be learning from them, understanding the gaps between the needs and wants of users and focusing our energy on what we can do to design and develop future experiences that address these gaps.

If "the community" were to reallocate 40% of the time that they use talking about twitter, skittles, Facebook, and Zappos (which I think is an awesome company) we could make major waves in terms of really solving problems and advancing the Web forward.

I am not a hater. I think these Web sites are great, and I rely on my Facebook account to stay in touch with old friends and I often toss out random thoughts to my pals on Twitter. I get it. I like it. I think it is relevant, but I don't think it is the end game.

I want to work with people to get closer to that end game. And yes, I realize that it is always going to change, push forward and be out of reach... but at least we should be thinking about how to improve upon the existing patterns that surround us.


For example: Intent

Saurab Bhargava, another Director at Roundarch, is passionate about the idea of defining intent. How can we, from a technical perspective, create applications that understand the intent of a user and therefore the intent of content created or distributed by that user?

I've been hearing a lot of social media experts talking about the pros and cons of Cheerios, Cheetos and Chi-Chi's having a social Web site presence. I guess, in my own mind, are these things not obvious? Is it experience that makes me feel this way? Or is it something burning inside me that knows we can do better.

It reminds me of Tim O'Reilly's feelings about "fart" applications for mobile phones. Millions have been made by developers in their quest for a better mobile fart machine. Really? Can't we redirect the energy of developers to do something more important?

Likewise, in the social media space, I think we can do better. We can start to get aggressive in the mission to improve the shortcomings of content creation, sharing, measurement and meaning. We should be thinking less about "who to make a friend" and instead focus on how we can reclassify our online "Friends" into hierarchical groups that identify more than a 1-to-1 relationship.

We should be thinking about creating applications that think like we think, that group things like we (as humans) group things. I want to move towards a world where the content that is posted by users can be distributed to "friends" based on context and my own intent instead of forcing me to assign permissions or tags to that content manually.


Yes, I know...

These aren't simple problems. These are hardcore computer science challenges. But I believe that these are the conversations that we should be having as top-tier professionals in the Web, interactive, mobile, internet, etc industry.

So there you have it. A challenge. Stop being complacent with having conversations about how we can leverage the tools of today. Start thinking about tomorrow. Start inspiring yourself to do better. Start thinking about next year, or 3 years out. Better yet, don't put a time frame to your innovation!

I think we as professionals need to step up and define where this is all going. I am hoping we lean towards changing the world for the better. I believe we can use design and technology to make the infinite amount of information that lives in the cloud relevant to each of us, individually, all the time.

We can do better. Can't we? ...... (please)?

To prove I'm not just a hater... you can find me on twitter: http://twitter.com/dmeeker

FASTForward Interview with Geoff Cubitt, CTO of Roundarch

I just returned from 3 days in unexpectedly cold Las Vegas, where I attended the Microsoft FASTforward conference.

At Roundarch, we do a lot of work related to search, and have established ourselves as thought leaders in how "search" continues to adapt to next-generation experiences. We aren't talking about the "type in the box" search metaphor that we've all grown accustomed to. Instead, we are using products like Microsoft FAST to back up our applications' user experience to provide contextual content to users, including being able to mash up structured and unstructured data in a way that helps users not only receive relevant content, but be able to use the information that is delivered to them to make actionable decisions.

Without going to much into all of that in this post, I will defer to this interview on the FASTForward blog where Geoff Cubitt (Roundarch Co-President and CTO) gives an overview of some of the things that we've been working on.