Mashup Camp Dublin or bust, Office Live Workspace (or bust), Laszlo's Switzerland of RIAs, Outlook '07, JGE, etc.

We here at ZDNet have been working on some podcasts and reviewcasts today and I've been trying to clear out my inbox as I prepare to jump on an Aer Lingus flight tomorrow to Dublin, Ireland for Mashup Camp's first foray into Europe. I've been working with the developer community over there to make sure Camp meets their informational needs and, in addition to the traditional instructional and unconference components, we've got three keynotes lined up -- speakers that the community members I've been working with specifically indicated interest in: Yahoo! Developer Network senior director Chad Dickerson, ProgrammableWeb.com founder/editor John Musser, and salesforce.com EMEA regional marketing chief Woodson Martin.

Unlike the American editions of Mashup Camp which typically run for four days during the week, Mashup Camp Dublin is a 3-day event that crosses the weekend (another request of the developers I've been working with over there). As usual, there will be a party on one of the nights -- this one Sunday night at The Bankers, a pub in Dublin. Mashup Camp itself is taking place at the world famous Guinness Storehouse. Feel free to join us for any or all of Camp by registering on the camp Web site or just showing up (even at The Bankers!).

In terms of what we've been working on today, we finished some video takes for our forthcoming coverage of the beta release of Office Live Workspace. There's been a lot of reporting on Office Live Workspace (for example, see Mary Jo's coverage) since it was announced last month, but no decent previews of it. Microsoft has been pretty tight-lipped about the user interface. But once it opens the kimono, we'll have the goods in video here on ZDNet with one of our review/democasts.

Speaking of reviewcasts, I should be publishing one tomorrow that features a demo of two solutions from Laszlo Systems -- one is the OpenLaszlo suite of development tools, the other is Laszlo Web Top. If you know you want to go rich with your Web development -- rich as in Rich Internet Application or RIA -- but aren't sure which of the RIA platforms out there to go with (DHMTL/Javascript, Flash, Java, or Silverlight), Laszlo's RIA description language might be the better way to go since, by the time Laszlo is done, you'll be able to deploy your app to one or more of the four primary RIA platforms in write once, run anywhere fashion. In his demonstration of the platform, Laszlo co-founder and CTO David Temkin shows me how, with one code-base, he can deploy the same application to DHTML/Javascript or Flash and the end-product in both cases looks and works the same way.

Rather than think of Laszlo as a Switzerland that allows you to switch targets (if at some point you want to move from DHTML to Flash or one of the others), I see it as a possible way to build apps that work the same on a variety of targets: for example ... with one language, being able to deploy in DHTML/Javascript for the iPhone, Flash for the PC, and Java for something like the BlackBerry. The Laszlo Webtop is a different beast altogether ( you'll see more tomorrow) but its related to the dev tools in that any app that's built in the OpenLaszlo description language will run on the Lazslo Webtop.

Also today, I've been taking screenshots of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Outlook 2007. I've finally migrated to Office 2007 and now that I'm using it every day, I've got some likes and dislikes that I've been sharing with Microsoft and will be sharing with you. There are no deal breakers. I think Outlook 2007 is a big improvement over Outlook 2003 and am glad I finally made the move (I'll share why with screen shots). But Microsoft left room for improvement too (I'll share screenshots). One major bugaboo dating back to Outlook 2003 -- I know it's doing what it can to stop spam and phishing attempts -- but I wish it would tell me more. Both Outlook '03 and Outlook '07 yielded and is yielding a significant amount of false positives (legitimate mail getting miscategorized as spam) but it doesn't tell me why. If it did, I'd write back to the senders and tell them "Hey... Outlook hates your mail.. here's why" so that they in turn can tweak their outbound e-mail to escape Outlook's overzealous filtering.

I've been thinking a lot about the Google Open Handset Alliance announced earlier this week. The more I think about it, the more I believe that, to the extent that it's a Java/Linux platform, Google will be releasing its own implementation of a mobile Java that's neither fish (JME -- Java Mobile Edition) nor foul (JSE -- Java Standard Edition). JSE (the version of Java that runs on PCs) is more robust than JME due to the handset horsepower limitations that JME respects. But the truth of the matter is that many handsets have outgrown JME and are ready for something that's more JSE-like, but maybe not JSE. I'm calling this new edition of Java "JGE" or Java Google Edition. JGE will probably be a spec (one that in combination with Linux forms the Android platform) much the same way that JME, JSE, and JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) are also specs.  The code that Google will be releasing under the Apache Software License v2 will be Google's implementation of that spec.

I talked about this a bit on the Dan and David Show today, but, if you look back on Google's history of deploying its content and services into the mobile world, you can almost feel the company's pain. Recreating the religious experience that Google created on the BlackBerry Pearl (Google Maps running on the BlackBerry's implementation of Java) on other handsets like the Motorola Q (a Windows Mobile 5-based device) is simply not doable. This leaves Google (or any other online content provider) in the ugly position of having to rewrite their applications for every handset that they want to support. Apple's release of the iPhone could not have done more to reinforce that pain. So, what's a company with great developers and boatloads of cash to do? What else but look to create a more predicatable target in handset land through the release of an open platform that any handset manufacturer and carrier can consider for inclusion.

And, if you're a handset manufacturer or carrier, you're thinking, "Yes, I definitely want my customers, all of whom probably use Google for something, to have a great experience with that something." Why, if you're a manufacturer or carrier wouldn't you want to take advantage of the fact that Google is willing to do most of heavy lifting? Enter Android. I guess we'll know more soon enough.