Web Development News & Articles

It's official. Yooba Studio, a Flash-based content management system from Yooba (news, site), is officially available for commercial use. If you want to have flash-enabled websites without the cost of a creative agency, then this CMS is definitely worth a first and second look.

Microsoft made its first ever keynote at the JavaOne Conference last week reports eWeek, touting their desire for increased interoperability between .NET and Java.

In an interview with eWEEK, Steven Martin, senior director of development platform products at Microsoft said interoperability is important to him, "[Seventy-three] percent of professional developers rely on .NET or a combination of .NET and Java.  In that sense, both Java and .NET have won in the enterprise and it is incumbent on both Microsoft and Sun to ensure that interoperability for the platforms is real, available and as easy to implement as possible."

We've seen and heard many times that many organizations, particularly the larger ones, don't have a single technology stack in-house and there's often a mix of .NET and Java solutions to support. Microsoft knows that and have for the last five years been working closely with Sun on interoperability projects like Web Single Sign On, the Interop Vendor Alliance and virtualization.

Although they have been involved in the JavaOne conferences for a few years, this is the first time they have keynoted. It would have been interesting to see how the Java audience responded to their keynote.

The keynote, conducted by Martin and Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business Development, discussed what is happening today in regards to interoperability between .NET and Java and where it is headed in the future.

Interested in hearing exactly what they said? Watch the keynote.

O'Reilly Media has released a new book on Web 2.0. Called Web 2.0 Architectures, this book should help you understand better the inner workings of Web 2.0 from a technology perspective and how some online services today have been successful with this model.

The book was written by James Governor (founder of RedMonk), Dion Hinchcliffe (Hinchcliffe and Company) and Duane Nickull (tech evangelist for Adobe Systems), all three strongly versed in the workings of enterprise architecture.

If you want to understand how Web 2.0 applications are built and how you can take advantage of this type of architecture, then this book should provide you with a lot of information to build on:

• A Web 2.0 model: The evolution of the Web 2.0 model.
• Web 2.0 reference architecture: Understand the breakdown, or components, of basic Web 2.0 patterns.
• Specific Web 2.0 patterns: Understand how your business can take advantage of Web 2.0 patterns such as SOA, mashups, RIAs, SaaS, Semantic Web, Folksonomies and more.

The book includes reviews of some of the most successful Web 2.0 ventures today including Flickr, Akamai and Napster. It also looks at more generic technologies like blogs and wikis, content management systems and directories and tagging.

If you are looking to understand Web 2.0 from a marketing perspective, this may not be the book for you. But if you are a web architect, business analyst or someone who wants to build your own Web 2.0 website or solution, there is bound to be some information in this book to get you started.

The hard cover version of Web 2.0 Architectures costs US$ 34.99, but you can also get a e-version for a little less and maybe save a tree. Get more information here.

Internet Simplicity (site), a Silicon Valley-based company who launched a visual web editor last year has just moved into the world of web content management systems with the launch of a suite offering, you guessed it, simplicity of use and ways to solve common content management problems.

The company describes the entire solution -- web editor and CMS -- as a user-friendly platform requiring no technical skills and comes in two versions: TypeRoom Lite and TypeRoom Professional.
 

Seeing as how SharePoint (news, site) is so widely used within the enterprise today, it's not a stretch to think that employees would want to access their SharePoint sites and content from their mobile devices. But out of the box, mobile functionality isn't all the great.

To the rescue comes Mobile Entrée, a server side plug-in for SharePoint that will let you access your SharePoint data from your iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.

Search Engine Optimization is a key element of any website design these days. Now you can hire an agency to help you improve your website's SEO or, you can do it yourself with a new toolkit for IIS: The IIS SEO Toolkit.

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites.

Only 6.6% of web users who participated in a similar 2007 online poll indicated ‘poor visual presentation” as the main reason to abandon a website. That equates to a 267% increase during the two-year period.

IBM and Microsoft will be forever entwined if Mainsoft (news, site) has anything to do with it. The provider of Java EE-Microsoft SharePoint integration software is constantly coming out with new ways to integrate SharePoint functionality with IBM solutions.

This time, they integrate SharePoint's social networking capabilities with IBM's Rational Team Concert.

The crew over at SharePoint Solutions (news, site) isn't one to sit around and do nothing apparently. It's been a little over a month since they released their Data Zoom Web Part for SharePoint, enabling developers to create dynamically driven content.

Now, they've gone and extended that Web Part one step further offering integration between SharePoint and Salesforce.com.

Bamboo Solutions (news, site) knows SharePoint. They dedicate their days and probably nights and weekends (on occasion) to designing and developing web parts, Solution Accelerators and other solutions that either enhance SharePoint or help you work better with it.

Think back to MashPoint, a data integration platform, custom, personalized navigation and the hack to run SharePoint on Vista. Add to that the number of Project Management components they offer and you know these guys have dug deep into the SharePoint platform and found gold.

Now they offer the first complete solution to ever come out of Bamboo and it's based on a topic they seem to know and love well, Project Management.

Not all products are built with loads of venture capital in the coffers. Many are grown slowly and painstakingly over a number of years. A labor of love? Maybe. Some unseen driving force pushing them? Most likely.

During the work for our recent Umbraco CMS Review we stumbled upon the story of how this product came to be. It struck us as notable and inspirational, so we thought we'd share it more broadly.

In this article we bring you the history of the Umbraco Web CMS, from a .NET toolkit used as part of founder Niels Hartvig's consulting business to being one of the most popular .NET open source web content management systems in the market.

ASP.Net AJAX is Microsoft's free framework for developing rich internet applications (RIA) that work across all browsers. It includes four components: Server-Side ASP.NET AJAX, Client-Side ASP.NET AJAX, the AJAX Control Toolkit and the jQuery library.

The AJAX Control Toolkit that has just been updated with some new functionality. Let's have a look.

We are all interested to see how SharePoint will implement CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Specification (news, site). We got a bit of feel for how it could speak to a CMIS compliant repository earlier this year.

But it's not just SharePoint that we want to know about when it comes to Microsoft and CMIS. We also want to know how any .NET based content management system can implement CMIS. And we'd like to see it in a similar fashion as the work that's happening now with Chemistry, the proposed Apache Incubator Project whose goal is to create a generic, open source Java-language implementation of CMIS.

We may have the start of the happening now with a new CodePlex project in the works. Called the NCMIS: .NET Content Management Interoperability Services, this project has been created to develop a DotNet library that implements the core requirements of the CMIS spec and a toolbox to help you build your own implementation.

It's still in the planning stages, but the CodePlex site outlines a number of items that could be put into the toolbox including things like Business Classes and related enums for all CMIS entities, Protocol handlers, Sample Producer, .NET CMIS Explorer and more.

This project is just getting off the ground and they are looking for volunteers to contribute to the project. If you are dying to get your hands dirty with CMIS and .Net, head over the CodePlex project site and let them know you want to help.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Webcredible has noticed that governmental types aren't all that bright when it comes to technology (Barack Obama and Al Gore excepted) and has developed a highly accessible content management system for those in power at all levels.