It is Alive in the Lab

Cloud Services You Need

[This is Ben Cochran again writing for Scott while he is on Sabbatical.]

For years now, languages, tools and platforms have been making the creation of web-based services easier and more robust. Some of these are IIS, Apache, Tomcat, Java, .NET, WCF, PHP, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on and on and … 

Until recently deploying and hosting these services had been difficult and expensive. This is because any service of value needs to be dependable.  Otherwise, who would use it? I personally have come to expect web services to be highly available. For example, I love on-line banking, but if my bank had flaky on-line services, I would change banks without thinking twice. Thankfully, that is not the case for my bank.

Cloud based services are generally a collection of connected dependent systems that include storage, databases, security, auditing, monitoring and more. The whole system is only as reliable as the weakest link. Traditionally, making these services reliable required lots and lots of hardware. Each server needs to have redundant power supplies, redundant disks, redundant network, redundant load balancers and redundant storage. Then the data-center that houses all this equipment needs to be redundant. Does this sound a little redundant?  With all this equipment, hardware failure is inevitable, requiring teams of IT people to keep everything running smoothly.

The result is that many companies think twice about building scalable reliable services. Companies that do have the needed IT infrastructure are often times not flexible enough to try out new ideas. They require a retooling to support different and out of the box services.  All of this makes the cost of exploring new web based services expensive and risky, for many too risky to try the next crazy idea.

This is changing! With cloud hosting services from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing the backend systems on an as-needed bases the initial cost is a fraction of what it was. For example, servers, load balancers, network, reliable backed up storage and databases are rented by the hour or gigabyte. Instead of buying truckloads of expensive redundant hardware in hopes that a new cloud service idea is successful, companies can spend almost nothing to try out new ideas. If the new idea takes off, the backend systems scales up for the demand. Companies need only pay for resources that are actually used.

Labs had been experimenting with new and interesting cloud services like:
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/dragonfly/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/draw/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/freewheel/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/showroom/
and more recently http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/trials/

What new cloud services are useful to you?  What are your crazy ideas?

- Ben Cochran

Autodesk Single Sign-On System Maintenance

Project Draw, Project Freewheel, Project Showroom, and Project Twitch rely on the Autodesk Single Sign-on login. This provides the convenience of having one user name and password for all things Autodesk. The other side of the coin is that when the Single Sign-on login is down, capabilities on these Labs services are reduced.

1. You cannot save your diagrams on Project Draw.
2. You can view your designs on Project Freewheel but cannot upload or delete designs.
3. You cannot save rooms on Project Showroom.
4. You cannot evaluate AutoCAD, Inventor, or Revit using the internet via Project Twitch.

The scheduled maintenance window will last until Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific time. Enjoy your weekend. Read a book.

Project Draw down time: 9 AM to 12 PM Pacific Time

One of our developers, Frederic Loranger, is visiting our Petaluma Data Center this morning to upgrade some of our DELL PowerEdge servers. He will need to power off the physical server running the virtual machines that host Project Draw.

The downtime will happen between 9:00 am and noon on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009.

We thank you for your patience and continued interest in Project Draw.

Advanced Physics: Measure Hunt Extension

We were happy to see Project Draw used in education:

http://sites.google.com/a/penncharter.com/advanced-physics/Home/outline/unit-2-the-physics-toolbox/measure-hunt-extension

Cheers to Advanced Physics Instructor, Ms. Lorre L. Gifford, for using Project Draw in this way.

Project Draw 0.7.9 Now Available

Project Draw is our technology preview for creating designs using just a browser. It follows a software as a service model in that you don't need to install anything. You want to take advantage of the service - you use the service. You create diagrams by dragging and dropping a variety of resizable shapes. Recently we had a minor update to our Project Draw servers:

• Our support for Google Gears was updated to support the Firefox 3 browser. Now even those using the latest release of Firefox can work offline.
• Our email processing has been streamlined to make it more efficient. Messages that took one second to send now only take a fraction of a second. (OK, maybe we're the only ones excited by this.)
• Our copyright statements were updated to include 2009. (Autodesk Legal is probably the only one excited by this.)
• A few defect corrections were included. Thanks to all who provided the useful test cases and reported their issues. (Now this we can all be excited about.)

Updating one of our long standing software as a service technology previews is alive in the lab.

TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw

A Project Draw diagram embedded in a Wiki.

TiddlyWiki is a wiki-modeled software as a service application that people can use as a personal notebook. Project Draw is our technology preview of a software as a service application that people can use to create simple diagrams. Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, found this:

TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw

We are excited to see Project Draw mashed up this way. You can get more info at:

Software as She's Developed

Thanks to Michael Mahemoff for this informative video.

Celebrating the interoperability of software as a service solutions is alive in the lab.

Choosy Homeschooler: Free web-based vector drawing application for older homeschool students

Project Draw is a hit with older children who are home schooled:

Free web-based vector drawing application for older homeschool students

We are proud to be part of America's diverse educational system. If our marketing department gets wind of this, I can see the slogan now: Choosy Homeschoolers choose Project Draw. (OKAY, maybe not everyone remembers that JIF peanut butter commercial on American TV.)

I wanted to post a comment of thanks on the Choosy Homeschooler blog, but try as I might, I got into a "you must be logged in to leave a comment" infinite loop. So thanks for spreading the word Nikki Phipps.

Happy Holidays

Since I had a turkey for Thanksgiving, I figured I might as well do a Christmas tree for today.

Christmas Tree DWFx. Zoom in!

This tree brought to you by Project Draw and Project Freewheel. No trees were harmed in the creation of this diagram. Happy Holidays to all.

David Falck: Consolidated Login - More Wacker Drive than Big Dig

Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, sent me this for the blog. Since the mass translation of old Project Draw users to the new system resulted in no loss of Project Draw data, I was happy to post it.

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Wacker Drive in Chicago is my absolute favorite place to drive in the United States. Besides being a picturesque double-decker road, it snakes in every direction - much to the chagrin of many Chicago visitors. It is an essential artery in the middle of downtown. If you need to get somewhere quickly by car, you're best route probably involves going underground on Lower Wacker. Wacker Drive has been featured in a lot of movies - everything from the Blues Brothers to the recent Batman films (this handy guide from the team at Everyblock http://chicago.everyblock.com/the-dark-knight-film-locations/). While my Honda looks nothing like the Bat Mobile, I can't help but pretend. ;)

Wacker Drive underwent a huge reconstruction effort a few years ago. I spent many a lunch hour peering into the construction pits, wondering how it was going to all turn out. The reconstruction was considered one of the most complex downtown transportation projects, yet was completed on time and under budget. And then you never heard about it again. Such is the price of a successful engineering project. Contrast this with Boston's "Big Dig" which was admittedly a bigger and more ambitious project, but nonetheless made national news by being 5 years late and billions of dollars over-budget.

Why is it we hear so little about the successful engineering implementations? Take our consolidated login project we recently completed here at Autodesk. I had a very small role in this massive project, but I got to work with several key engineering and QA teams that worked tirelessly day and night for months to tie all of the disparate accounts across Autodesk into one seamless login system. The project was managed and implemented successfully - so much so, that most users saw little difference when they logged in after it went live. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, just lots of happy users (with a fewer login accounts to manage), getting to where they want to go faster and more efficiently.

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Our consolidated login project was very successful. We have received very few problem reports at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com and labs.draw@autodesk.com. We were able to manually correct the handful of "victims" of the mass processing. We are happy about that.

Project Draw 0.7.8 Now Available

In a previous release of Project Draw, we began the work of integrating Project Draw with Project Freewheel. This allows you to publish your designs as DWF files, manage them with Project Freewheel, and include them as shapes in Project Draw. You can use Project Freewheel to select a desired model or sheet, pan, zoom, or orbit to get the desired view of your design. You can use Project Draw to reference that design as a shape that is part of a larger workflow or any other diagram you create with Project Draw. It's a match made in heaven.

Project Draw 0.7.8 includes:

1. When working with your 2D designs as shapes in Project Draw using Project Freewheel, Project Draw allows your designs to have a transparent background and maintains the correct aspect ratio of your design as you resize the containing shape:
   
   
   
   Project Draw adds the proper "white space" to avoid distorting your design that would occur if it were stretched to fill the shape.

2. At Autodesk Labs Marketing Manager, Amanda Collins', urging, we've added some getting started pages for Project Draw. Though the select a shape and drag and drop interface is pretty easy to use, it never hurts to get people off on the right foot. This includes a list of what's changed and what's new in each release. For those of you keeping score at home:

   Date	Release	New or changed
   10/21/08	0.7.8	improved Project Freewheel integration, getting started pages, revamped file menu, improved DWF property control
   09/21/08	0.7.7	integrated the Autodesk consolidated login
   07/24/08	0.7.6	Project Freewheel integration, API Key Generation web site, Draw API samples
   06/26/08	0.7.5	deleteAllSessions API
   05/31/08	0.7.4	added API
   04/08/08	0.7.3.1	install cleanup. DWFx, help file, defect corrections
   04/03/08	0.7.3	DWFx, image links, connection pooling, Ctrl-s, help file, defect corrections
   03/06/08	0.7.2	no Google Gears for Firefox 3 Beta, easier color palette, alpha export to DWF, bug fixes)
   02/15/08	0.7.1	better Google Gears, international server locations, bug fixes, gallery submission link)
   01/30/08	0.7	Google Gears, multiple selections, color palette
   11/20/08	0.6.2	metric grid size, email dialog box size, email instructions, My Diagrams
   11/19/08	0.6.1	email drawings, better connectors
   11/08/07	0.6	rotational grid, IE popup blocker workaround, minimize properties pane
   10/31/07	0.5.2	file deletion fix
   10/26/07	0.5.1	login changes
   10/24/07	0.5	technology preview launch

   The team has been quite nimble.

3. The File menu has been updated to make working with DWF files easier to find. Thanks for the feedback that using the DWF ball as an icon was not the best choice.
   
   BEFORE:
   
   
   NOW in Project Draw 0.7.8:
   
   
   Feedback like this is exactly why we preview technologies on Labs.

4. Software engineer, David Falck, updated the Project Draw UI to allow easier ways to work with DWF files once you have included them in Project Draw.

   

   In addition, you can now see your design embedded in the shape as you manipulate it using Project Freewheel:

   

David Falck sent me a great graphic that summarizes what's in this release:

To take a test drive of Project Draw, see:

http://draw.labs.autodesk.com

Extending software as a service technology previews at a fast and furious pace is alive in the lab.