Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

I spent the better part of today feeling miserable. I’ve got a head cold, and there is little that’s less convenient than having a sneeze interrupt your train of thought. Of course, I went to the convienice store to get some medication. I bought the Sudafed, hopeful that I’ll soon be on the road to feeling better. But of course not, because they only sell the fake stuff. I bought it anywa and took two doses to no avail.

On the way home, I stopped by Rite-Aid (formerly Eckard) and got the real stuff. Now I can breath through my nose again. Without George Bush, the U.S. Congress, and Sonny Perdue protecting me from the horrors of cold medication, I really don’t know what I would have done. I might have been more productive at work today. I might not have conducted what amounts to biological warfare on my workplace (thought I took care to wash hands often). Or even better, I might not have gotten sick. I really thank our wonderful leaders for the opportunity to suffer from a head cold again.

RIA is becoming a hot buzzword in the web development world. RIA vendors promise a lot. They’re meant to be as easy do develop as web-pages, but have all the functionality of a desktop app. However, when you really think about it, an RIA can pretty much be anything that uses the internet for communication and has a graphically widget that can be modified in someway. Everyone stuck at a mega-corp writing a Swing application that talks to something via SOAP can rejoice about being part of the modern wave of application development.

Of course, people who consider themselves RIA developers are jumping at the bit to disagree. But lets analyze this for a second. A java application needs a dedicated, and specific, runtime on the client to execute. Ditto for Sliverlight and AIR. Silverlight supports json based communication, but if you want to talk to your Flex app in AIR (reliably), be prepared to shell out for Flex Data Services. But you can’t run your java app from a browser!, you say. Well I recall running these things called “Java Applets” in my browser back in 1995.

The bottom line is Microsoft and Adobe have been bandying around the term RIA, trying to convince you that they’re providing you an Rich Web App (tiny print: in a plugin in your browser). The plugin approach sucked in 1995, and it still sucks 2007. So I have a hard time figuring out what the hype’s all about.

What’s far more exciting is an honest-to-goodness, cross-browser RIA. Something that can work on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, in Opera, Firefox, Camino, Safari, and even IE. All without a lot of third-party junk.

This is what makes me excited about working for Appcelerator, Inc, because our client engine is written in Javascript. In other words, we don’t help you build RIA’s, we let you build RWA’s. Applications that run in web browsers, that can be developed on anything, powered by code that is free as in speech and beer.

For more information on how to build your next rich web application quickly, head on over to the Appcelerator Community. Or if tracking via blog is you thing, just add the appcelerator blog, Appcelerant, to your feed reader.

So I rolled on over to my blog reader and came across Mark Finkle’s post about the release of Prism for something other than windows.

Back when Prism was still called WebRunner, I gave it a try, since I’ve been looking for a way to have Zimbra have it’s own little icon in the doc. At the time, WebRunner was just a little bit too buggy for daily use. Hopeful that the major issues were resolved, I pulled down Prism, fired it up, and entered the address of my Zimbra install.

Does the Zimbra client work better in Prism? I can’t tell. They changed the way security settings work to completely disallow self-signed certs. Needless to say, I’m not buying a certificate so that the two people using my mail client can feel all warm and fuzzy because Thawte says it’s safe. Of course it’s safe, the two of us administer it.

Even more troubling is that there is a forum thread about this issue, but without any response on how to get around it.

I understand that users need to be protected from themselves at times and many blindly hit ‘okay’ to any dialog box they see. However, Prism is not an end user product yet. By it’s own admission, it’s a prototype. Therefore, it only follows that it should be easy to use for developers. Which means allowing non-fully trusted certificates.

Forum thread’s been updated, too

All ranting aside, the way around the in-built limitation is to copy your firefox certificates over your prism ones. The file’s called cert8.db and you’ll find it in the directory of your firefox profile.