Web Development News & Articles

This year's Persuasive Technology conference in Copenhagen -- a conference dedicated to new insights, research and practice into how technology may change and influence our behavior, thoughts, and feelings -- has extended their deadline for paper submissions to February 19th. 

The conference takes place June 7-10, and is expected to gather any and all interested in networking, presenting, discussing and reflecting on themes associated with persuasive design and technology. 

Some of the themes to be covered include: 

• Motivational technology and design
• Mobile persuasion
• Motivational information behavior
• Social and organizational issues
• e-Interventions for addictions
• Persuasive Technologies in inclusive ICT
• Persuasive Technologies in Library and Information Science.

For more information, including formats and previous submissions, head over here. For information on other events in your area, check out our events list. 

Facebook and Google just can’t stop one-upping each other. Late last month Google took a small slice of Facebook's pie by tossing their Social Search feature into beta, but this week the popular social network took the upper hand with rumors of a fully featured webmail product.

Underlining what it says is its commitment to open source communities and developers, Oracle (news, site) has just announced the release of a new enterprise pack consisting of a number of certified plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform.

The new Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse supports development with technologies including Database, Java SE, Java EE, Web Services, XML and the Spring Framework, and comes with a new feature called AppXRay, which allows Java developers to work in team settings and reduces run time debugging and code quality.

The bottom line, Oracle says, is that this new pack will provide for shorter, faster release cycles that better keep pace with the underlying open source Eclipse platform, or more simply put -- higher quality development in less time.

And the benefits? There are four main ones including:

• Enables WebLogic developers to combine their expertise in Eclipse with the capabilities of Oracle Fusion Middleware.
• It is enterprise ready and includes capabilities that enable the development, assembly, build, deployment, debugging and testing of Java SE, Java EE, Web Service, ORM and Spring applications.
• It plugs into your existing Eclipse app, preserving configuration and customization work.
• Supports multiple platform revisions.

This new enterprise pack is available already, but if you want to find out more you can check out this introductory video, or download it from the Oracle website.

Wouldn't it be nice if analytics were easier to understand? Quantivo thinks so, and their missing-link type solution – Quantivo 4 – attempts to achieve this by reducing data down to child’s play. 

For dotCMS (news, site), eCommerce + Web CMS seems like a match made in heaven. Reason #1: Everyone wants to do eCommerce nowadays. Reason #2: Java+Java == Eternal love in the marriage of two Java-based software companies: KonaKart (eCommerce vendor) and dotCMS (open source Web CMS provider).

Google has challenged popular networks like Facebook and further blurred the line between social networking and search by graduating their Social Search tool to beta for all Google users.  

Right now, in a far off cubicle, someone is designing an e-commerce checkout application. It’s not unusual. There are thousands of existing e-commerce sites with their own checkout applications. And I can bet in the future there will be thousands more.

After some recent compliance moves on Bing’s part, it appears that Microsoft (news, site) may care more about protecting your privacy than Google.

In a recent survey conducted by Sitecore (news, site), the .NET Web Content Management software company discovered that the number of organizations implementing Web analytics has risen to nearly 90 percent. For a market that’s expected to hit US$ 953 mil by 2014, we can’t say we’re surprised.  

At this year’s annual Lotusphere conference, IBM (news, site) announced the arrival of LotusLive Labs. The new development combines Big Blue's hosted Lotus services with the resources of IBM Research, yielding fertile ground for business-driven collaboration ideas for the cloud.

Why waste all that time creating an account on a website when you can login with one click of your mouse? Such is the beauty of Facebook Connect. And, if we’re lucky, soon the same will go for Twitter (news, site) as well.

Word on the street is that the microblogging champs are planning to release a set of tools that will enable third party websites to integrate Twitter features directly into their websites and services.

Not to be mistaken for Twitter’s Simply Buttons with a new look (the buttons let users on third party sites sign into Twitter), the new features will reportedly allow websites to authenticate users, pull data and publish it back to Twitter. Though it’s true that all these functionalities currently exist, they’re not wrapped in the neat little package that Facebook Connect offers.

Facebook Connect has gained massive popularity since its release in 2008, currently extending to 80,000 websites with a monthly 60 million users. And let’s not forget a recent and fairly significant move from Myspace. Once thought to be the king of social networks, the site bowed pretty low when it integrated Facebook Connect into its Fan Video service last week.

Will Twitter’s upcoming tools catch on? Towards the end of 2009 our fine feathered friend saw an unexpected leveling out in their growth rate, causing many to wonder the site would do next. Perhaps these connectivity tools are one their tricks for an explosive 2010. 

In an act that could possibly bring them up to par with some of the better known CDNs in the market, Amazon Web Services (news, site) has tossed cheap audio and video streaming support into the mix with CloudFront, their typically low-key service for content delivery.  

We like really short and sweet posts about project updates. They get to the point very quickly and leave no room for misinterpretation.

At least that is what we get from Microsoft's Rob Caron. He's the Marketing Communications Manager for Developer and User Experience Runtimes and Tools at Microsoft -- which includes of course Visual Studio. He recently presented a quick update on the new release date for Visual Studio 2010 (news, site).

Originally scheduled for late March, Microsoft withdrew the delivery date saying they needed more time for testing due to performance and virtual memory issues.

The new date? "Short but sweet, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010."

According to Mary Jo Foley, an unplanned Release Candidate will go out in February to testers, which will hopefully ensure that the issues mentioned above are resolved.

In the meantime, have another look at the new product lineup, the cloud support and a few other things in our look Visual Studio 2010: On Beta 2, New SKUs and Cloud Support.

And if you are still trying to figure out how to convince your boss that you will need the new version when it does arrive, do some comparison views of the different versions of Video Studio.

Visual Studio Comparison Tool on MSDN
 

Amazon (news, site) Web Services is bursting at the seams with a raft of new features and services that will make it easier and more affordable to work in the cloud.

Here’s some food for thought: A recent Cloud Development Survey reported that 61% of the developers in Evans Data Corp (news, site) believe that a portion of their IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year.

But how much of those IT resources exactly? The portion size is up for debate, as over 87% of the 400 developers surveyed in November and December of 2009 believe that only half or less than half of their resources will move.

Meaning? The hybrid cloud is what you might want to watch out for.

“The hybrid Cloud presents a very reasonable model, which is easy to assimilate and provides a gateway to Cloud computing without the need to commit all resources or surrender all control and security to an outside vendor, "said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data."Security and government compliance are primary obstacles to public Cloud adoption, but a hybrid model allows for selective implementation so these barriers can be avoided."

Some other tidbits from the survey to think about:

• MySQL is the preferred database for use in the public cloud cited by over 55% of the developers
• Almost two-thirds (64%) expect their cloud apps to extend to mobile devices
• VMWare is the favorite hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud (28.6%) followed by Microsoft and IBM

For a preview of the 113 page report, head on over to EDC's site.