Akamai boosts Web application services
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The company fills out its hosted application lineup with four products designed for e-commerce Web sites.
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New developer program invites closer integration with search AOL functions.
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Davey Shafik's weblog has a new posting today - the third part of his Automatic Web Services series.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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This project automates Http-requests i.e. all browser activities can be logged/written to XML-formated files and redone by using simple methods. This is very useful for automating http-server-requests e.g. queries to search engines, external databases..   Binary and source code of HTTP-Analyzer is online now. With this program web requests can be logged easily and saved into a comprehensive XML file. The logged web actions can be automated using the Httpbot libraries of this project.
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, Akash Mehta has written up  a review of a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP Web 2.0 Mashups" (by Shu-Wai Chow):    As it's title suggests, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a demonstration of the various techniques available for developing mashups in PHP. Through a highly practical format, Shu-Wai takes the reader through a series of projects utilising different web services and APIs, while carefully exposing the reader to a wide variety of technologies and data formats.   With careful selection and shaping of language, the book is an extremely effective introduction to the world of mashup development with PHP.    Akash talks about the contents of the book (the different projects it covers) and how the book provides a version useful resource to those just getting into the mashup world - a reference guide to some of the popular data transfer methods/formats out there.
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Application developers are getting a raft of new options this week with Sun updating J2SE, Borland upping its CORBA ante, and Compuware detailing products that will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 toolbox.
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(InfoWorld) - Don't expect much to be added to Ruby On Rails this year. When David Heinemeier Hansson gives an update on version 2.0 of his Web application framework at its user conference in September, he's as likely to talk about what's coming out as what's going in. The goal is to keep Ruby on Rails fast, lightweight, and easy to use, characteristics that have helped it become a trendy alternative to Sun's Java and Microsoft's .Net and led to a raft of companies offering Rails development services for businesses. "We're going to pull out a fair number of elements, features that aren't a good fit for what people want to do most of the time, and make them plug-ins instead," HeinemeierÂ Hansson said in an interview. "If your application absolutely depends on them, you won't be stranded, you'll be able to get the plug-ins easily." Among the elements to go will be Action Web Service, for creating Web service APIs using SOAP, Heinemeier Hansson said. It's a way of steering developers towards using REST (representational state transfer), his preferred method for linking applications in Rails. "We don't want to turn into Java -- this pack rat that just holds onto any possession. We're not afraid to take out stuff that's not relevant or that we plain don't like," he said. There will be some additions -- the Rails team has some "pent up stuff" in the repository that it's keen to push out, he said. But the focus of Rails 2.0 is to "consolidate and sharpen" what's already there. Keeping the framework light and simple comes at a price, however, and many companies are jumping in to offer Ruby on Rails packages that bundle tools and plug-ins to make the framework more suitable for demanding business needs. Many of those products will be on show at RailsConf 2007 in Berlin in two weeks. Borland Software's CodeGear division is expected to release its Ruby on Rails Java IDE at the show, Heinemeier Hansson said. The product is based on the Eclipse platform and has been in beta since May. Sun will likely give an update on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby for Java environments. The vendor support helps quell jitters among corporate users that Ruby on Rails is not backed by a large company. If the prominent support of Oracle and IBM helped get Linux in the door at big enterprises, the support from Sun and IBM for Rails could do the same. Java and .Net have become "bloatware" as vendors add features for every possible business need, causing companies to look at alternatives, according to Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios, which offers software and services for Rails development. The rise of Rails is as much a matter of timing as anything, she said. "This bloatware stuff has just ground to a halt and the alpha geeks are veering away from anything they don't need to get their work done. At the same time, the IT business cycle is picking up, and people are willing to invest again in new things," she said. Her clients are telecom, media, and finance companies looking for a fast turnaround for new applications. Most are deploying in native Ruby environments, but it helps that Sun is supporting JRuby, she said, which lets companies deploy Rails applications on existing Java servers. Jonathan Siegel, founder of Rails consulting company ELC Technologies, said applications that would take eight to 10 months to develop in .Net can be up and running in four to six months using Ruby on Rails. Still, at three years old, Rails is a young platform and has limitations. One high-profile user, the Twitter social networking site, caused a stink earlier this year by complaining that Rails didn't scale well across multiple databases and that the underlying Ruby language is slow. The open-source community responded by developing a plug-in to address the scaling issue. Some also say that both Ruby and Ruby on Rails need a stronger hand to steer them to prevent multiple implementations leading to compatibility issues. "The major risk for the future and longevity of Ruby, and by association Rails, is whether or not the platform gets splintered," Mitchell said. Siegel said: "I believe Ruby on Rails will overcome a key milestone when the deployment teams at larger organizations feel at home with the deployment side of a Rails application. In my view, that's having a deployment procedure that's as easy to maintain and monitor as for a .Net or a J2EE application." Heinemeier Hansson is nonchalant about the demands. He developed Rails for his own use and not to make money, he says, and if enterprises want to use his framework, it is they who should adjust, not he. "We're not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails," he said. "Come if you like it, stay away if you don't."
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Java package BEAWorld BEA Systems is teaming up with Adobe to help developers build and serve up rich internet applications (RIA).â¦
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The developer of Ruby on Rails looks to remove certain features from the Web application framework in order to keep it nimble and easy to use.
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The Grails 1.0 open source Web application development framework was announced this week by G2One, which specializes in Groovy and Grails technology, and the Grails development team.Grails is built on Java and the Groovy language. It leverages APIs from the Java enterprise sphere including Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, G2One and the development team said. With Grails, Java and Ruby developers get convention-based rapid development while leveraging existing knowledge and capitalizing on APIs Java developers have used for years."What we?re trying to achieve is really to fundamentally simplify Java EE [Enterprise Edition] development," said Graeme Rocher, creater of the Grails project and CTO at G2One.Grails is different from other dynamic language frameworks because it embraces Java and leverages Spring at its core, Rocher said. Spring's role in Grails is akin to being an enterprise application toolkit that features ease of use, he said. Hibernate is used for object-relational mapping in Grails, he said.Used mainly for Web applications and available previously in point releases, Grails also can be used for desktop applications and Web tiers. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) support is built in through a prototype library, Rocher said. Plug-ins enable Grails to work with technologies such as Adobe Flex, Google Web Toolkit, and the Yahoo UI library.The 1.0 version has been in the making for two years and eight months. New features including an ORM DSL (Object Relational Mapping Domain Specific Language) for advanced mappings, support for easy-to-use filters, and content negotiation. REST (Representational State Transfer) also is leveraged, as is JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface).ORM DSL allows Grails to support legacy databases in applications. "Essentially, it?s a declarative way to say that this object maps on to these tables," Rocher said.Filters apply cross-cutting behaviors to Web applications to apply capabilities such as security, tracing, and logging. With REST support, Grails allows for existing Web objects to be converted to XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), with tasks being automated.With JNDI, Grails provides the ability through Spring to look up existing programming objects such as a data source.Grails 1.0 is downloadable here. The Grails project receives 5,000 to 10,000 downloads per month, Rocher said.
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SAP is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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On prowebdeveloper.info, Marcel Esser has posted the first in a series of articles looking at functionality to reduce database load in applications, specifically those using secure client-side sessions.   Scaling web applications is easy. Generally, if a web application is designed to store all of its session information in a database, it can be easily scaled by adding more servers in a load-balanced setup. This is tried and true, and it works very well - until your database server runs out of capacity.   He lists the common ways most developers solve this problem (four of them) but notes that thay are more of a temporary solution rather than a long-term fix. Instead, he outlines what the requirements for a library to correctly handle the connections should be and explains how each of them would be implemented. He's been following this kind of mentality in the development of his own package - proWebComponents.
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Electronic forms capabilities added to application server.
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(Source: Symantec) This white paper demonstrates how the Symantec APM solution helps organizations keep SOA applications running at peak performance to improve interactions and enhance business agility, flexibility and productivity.
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OCTOBER 07, 2004  - Looking to penetrate further into the software infrastructure market, applications vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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InfoWorld - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft&#39;s .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday.