Web Development News & Articles

Nstein (news, site) recently stepped up their relationship with evolve24, an analytics research firm in St. Louis. The collaboration gives evolve24 access to Nstein’s handy Sentiment Analysis module, allowing them to quickly determine an article’s overall tone for key insight into a company’s representation.  

"Reputations are built over time and are the response to actions taken by a corporation,” explained Scot Wheeler, Vice President of Strategy & Client Services for evolve24. “For example, reputation can be hurt by unaddressed negative responses to products and services, including poor customer support, regulatory or legislative issues, insensitive ad campaigns, or any perceived affront to an audience, while a new product announcement, a viral campaign or launch of user groups may create highly positive coverage in influential publications and blogs which will help build reputation.”

Wheeler estimates that one person at peak performance can detect the tone of 25 articles per hour. Nstien's technology will reportedly boost that number to tens of thousands of pieces of content per day and still require only one person to manually test and verify results. 

“We are thrilled that evolve24 continues to expand its relationship with Nstein”, said Nstein CTO Jean-Michel Texier, “This collaboration allow us to deepen our knowledge of marketing decision support systems and accelerate the reinforcement of our technological offering in opinion mining and automated brand monitoring.”

Want your reputation measured? Check out evolve24's site here. 

Microsoft has opened up 5 of their Web Specifications as part of the Open Web Foundation's new legal framework agreement

It seems that Google Chrome is (still) slowly but surely moving in the frills direction. This spring Google announced the simple browser's first official extensions, and then in September they removed the developer flag, opening up the doors for higher volume participation. 

This week it was announced on Google's blog that the Chromium team is officially accepting submissions from third-party developers. Big G provides information for writing an extension here, and once it's ready to go all a developer has to do is upload a zip file of the code and an icon for easy recognition. Descriptive information in the form of text and screenshots or YouTube videos is also welcome. 

Once an extension is uploaded, Google takes care of packaging and signing, and if a developer wants to update their baby, all it requires is a new file uploaded to the gallery. Additionally, over the next few days Google plans to open up the gallery to a select group of testers in order to provide insights and bug reports. 

And all of this is happening before the beta launch in hopes that things will be extra polished for the real release. 

"We can't wait to share all the great extensions that you'll submit with all of Google Chrome's users," writes Lei Zhing of Google Chrome. And honestly? We're pretty curious ourselves. Let us know what you'd like cooked up, or check out what people are already asking for here.

CloudBerry Lab (news, site), a young player in the cloud computing game, has just announced some updates for helping users manage and backup their files in their Amazon S3 accounts. 

Saying there’s been a lot about web analytics of late is an understatement. After several fresh sandboxes, shocking acquisitions and curious new approaches, we think it’s safe to say that 2009 will go down as the year that jump-started our understanding of these data.

Webtrends (news, site) is taking the delivery reinvention route, highlighted back in August by their release of Webtrends Analytics 9, a platform that likes to tell stories, literally. The company is taking it a step further by adding real-time alerts and updates via popular vehicles like e-mail, Twitter, RSS and even an iPhone app. Welcome to yet another way to stay constantly connected. 

Salesforce's Chatter (news, site) adds social features and collaboration for the enterprise.

Microsoft may not be first to the cloud, but they are making every effort to become the best option. It certainly helps that companies like Automattic are plugging Windows Azure (news, site).

Just what you need -- really, you probably do -- another tool to help you develop Microsoft .NET applications. Telerik (news, site) brings you JustCode, a code analysis and refactoring tool for Visual Studio.

A great way to finish up my Friday. Taking a look at a third party SharePoint Multilingual Module. This one comes from a Quebec based company called AlphaMosaik.

Now we know that SharePoint 2007 offers us multilingual capabilities in the form of Variations, but this module goes farther, offering more languages and more functionality.

A little Microsoft based development news to kick start your weekend. CollabNet, a provider of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions, has just announced the second version of CollabNet Desktop—Visual Studio Edition.

All the potential advantages of a service-oriented architecture are out the window if developers lose sight of the forest for the trees. Adjoovo has come up with an ingenious registry solution to keep businesses out of the potential pitfalls of the service-oriented approach: metadata cataloguing and Web 2.0 visualization.

Following the developmental environment trend, IBM (news, site) recently gave the green light on their own pair of public and private services targeted at building cloud applications.

Platformic has gone social. The online web development environment (OWDE) that mixes content and design has launched SocialSite, a social media platform.

Designed as an integrated social media creation environment aimed at helping companies build highly customizable, complex user communities, SocialSite can be set up to combine social networking and social media functionality into any Platformic Enterprise website without requiring code, ftp, manual style sheets or JavaScript.

For those of you who run a Microsoft web environment built on IIS (Internet Information Server), but still would like to run some open source applications and/or websites, there's good news for you.

Helicon Tech, a provider of web server enhancement tools, has released an Apache emulator for IIS 7. Called Helicon APE, it implements .htaccess configurations within the IIS web server. This includes almost all of the major Apache modules (35+ to be exact).

The Helicon APE offers modification-free transition of Apache websites to IIS, simple configuration of PHP and Apache compatible URL rewriting syntax.

Helicon APE
 

The Helicon APE is installed on IIS 7 as a managed module, but can also work for other versions of IIS that support ASP.NET when installed as an ASP.NET module.

APE costs start at US$ 25 for a website and US$ 95 for a server license. There's also a free version for up to 3 websites on a single server.

Now this one isn't from Microsoft, but is another step towards interoperability between Microsoft and open source. There are likely many who would love to have this product.

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

• An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project.