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May 14, 2008

Alpha Five Platinum Brings AJAX to the Enterprise

Alpha Software is now shipping Alpha Five Platinum Edition, the ninth major release of the company's Web database development platform. It's a development tool that can visually build AJAX-powered applications, integrate SQL databases with drag+drop, and deliver enterprise-scale availability, without having to write pages of computer code. And while coding is optional, Alpha Five's integrated development environment (IDE) still gives developers full access to forms, interactive reports, browsers, Web components, APIs, XML, and more. It includes 200 reusable ActionScripts, "Supercontrols," HTML and CSS builders, the full Xbasic/Xdialog language, Portable SQL, and "Genies" that generate editable code for any custom requirement. There's also a custom report generator (with drill-down support), a role-based Web security framework, and native SQL support for every major database, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, and EnterpriseDB/Postgres Plus. In all, Alpha Five Platinum has 85 new or enhanced features. Alpha Five Platinum Edition is available now. Pricing starts at $299.00 for an upgrade. http://www.alphasoftware.com

May 7, 2008

MindTouch Releases Deki Wiki v8.05

MindTouch announced the release of MindTouch Deki Wiki "Jay Cooke" v8.05, the latest version of its open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform. MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05 includes finctions for internationalization/localization, search, user management, integrated scripting, automation, mash-ups, user experience and more. Specifically, this new release enhances multilingual content management. Deki Wiki v8.05 introduces a new polyglot feature that allows customers to host all languages as a single site. Now language can be specified by sections and pages automatically adapting the user interface of Deki Wiki to the appropriate language. Also, users may search across all languages and search results are prioritized by the user's default language. Lastly, Deki Wiki v8.05 supports OpenSearch. http://mindtouch.com

April 24, 2008

Bungee Labs to Offer Federated Hosting for PaaS

Bungee Labs announced federated hosting to expand adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) among enterprises and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Organizations developing interactive applications on the Bungee Connect PaaS can now elect to host those applications on self-managed infrastructure running the new Bungee Application Server, or on the multi-tenant Bungee Grid at datacenters in the United States, Europe, and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Beginning in June, organizations will be able to self-designate the hosting location for their Bungee-powered applications from within their online Bungee Connect development and management account. Development, testing and deployment of non-production versions of Bungee-powered applications are free. Fees begin only after a deployed Bungee-powered application is used by end users. Bungee-powered applications deployed on the Bungee Connect multi-tenant grid in the United States, European Union and at Amazon EC2 are billed at an aggregate rate of US$0.06 (six U.S. cents) per user-session-hour rounded down to the nearest second per user-session. During the Bungee Connect public beta, there are no fees for these options. Federation pricing for the self-hosted Bungee Application Server starts at a flat monthly subscription license fee of $500 per month, per server. Bungee Labs also announced plans to make community source code available for the Bungee Application Server under several software source code licenses. http://www.bungeelabs.com

April 23, 2008

SnapLogic and WaveMaker Partner to Deliver Open Source Enterprise Mashup Solution

SnapLogic, Inc. and WaveMaker, a provider of open source tools for rapid Web application development, announced a strategic partnership to deliver a complete open source solution for creating enterprise mashups. Enterprise mashups aggregate data from sources within and outside the enterprise, including databases, SaaS applications, SOA Web services, enterprise applications, XML documents, files and Web pages, and present it to business users via a rich, customized, interactive interface. The SnapLogic data integration framework will provide data services to WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio, enabling enterprise application developers to build enterprise mashups. Under the partnership, the companies will collaborate on product development roadmaps and also conduct joint sales and marketing activities. The SnapLogic data integration framework enables "Really Simple Integration," that leverages RESTful Web technology to provide agile data integration solutions for business IT groups. SnapLogic makes data from a variety of data sources available to application development tools, such as WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio. WaveMaker's drag-and-drop interface enables users to create database-driven Ajax Web applications without having to write complex code. The latest WaveMaker platform features reduced development time while enabling increased participation, feedback, and collaboration. Applications developed in WaveMaker can then be deployed to a Java Application Server. The SnapLogic data integration framework and WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio are available as free downloads. http://www.snaplogic.com, http://wavemaker.com

April 22, 2008

Google Executive to Provide Opening Keynote Address on Search Quality at Upcoming Gilbane San Francisco Conference

The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars announced that Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will kick-off the annual Gilbane San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google's search quality and continued innovation. Now in its fourth year, the conference has rapidly gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry experts that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. The conference takes place June 18-20 at the Westin Market Hotel in San Francisco. Gilbane San Francisco helps attendees move beyond the mainstream content technologies they are familiar with, to enhanced "2.0" versions, which can open up new business opportunities, keep customers engaged, and improve internal communication and collaboration. The 2008 event will have its usual collection of information and content technology experts, including practitioners, technologists, business strategists, consultants, and the leading analysts from a variety of market and technology research firms. Topics to be covered in-depth at Gilbane San Francisco include: Web Content Management (WCM); Enterprise Search, Text Analytics, Semantic Technologies; Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs; "Enterprise 2.0" Technologies & Social Media; Content Globalization & Localization; XML Content Strategies; Enterprise Content Management (ECM); Enterprise Rights Management (ERM); and Publishing Technology & Best Practices. Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found at http://gilbanesf.com/conference-grid.html

Kapow Rolls Out OnDemand Enterprise Mashup and Web Harvesting Service

Kapow Technologies introduced Kapow OnDemand, giving companies the ability to create enterprise mashup applications that provide structured "web intelligence" in a matter of minutes. The company's new hosted service is designed to be the fastest way to deliver real-time data from the web into Excel spreadsheets. Kapow OnDemand is based on the Kapow Mashup Server. Kapow OnDemand provides access to the underlying data sources and services to be mashed up. In addition to Excel spreadsheets, companies can also import web data into existing applications and IT infrastructure via XML. In conjunction with the Kapow OnDemand announcement, the company unveiled Kapow Connector for Excel. When used in combination with Kapow OnDemand or the Kapow Mashup Server Web 2.0 Edition, Excel users can find and execute web services that deliver data directly to their spreadsheet. The Kapow Connector for Excel automates and extends the value of spreadsheet-based applications, and makes it feasible to collect and analyze web intelligence in real-time at the user's desktop. Analysts can automate the combination of massive amounts of market data related to competitive pricing, product mix analysis or financial metrics. Kapow OnDemand includes a Robot Designer to construct custom web harvesting feeds and services in a flexible role-based execution runtime. Additionally, a full set of tools is provided that allows monitoring and managing a portfolio of services and feeds to provide Kapow OnDemand site administrators with control and insight into their OnDemand environment. Kapow OnDemand is available now. Product pricing is based on a flexible subscription offering starting as low as $3,400 per month. http://www.kapowtech.com/

April 21, 2008

Curl Provides Desktop RIA with 'Nitro' Product Release

Curl, Inc. announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is a platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, and support for large data sets. Nitro offers the essential capabilities of the Fit Client such as support for rich user interfaces, complex application logic, and agile development. Curl applets can be installed on the desktop for online and offline operation in a secure sandbox. The installer creates shortcuts on the desktop and start menu with customizable icons and a skinnable user interface. Nitro enables developers to build applications with local databases using SQLite combined with Curl techniques for data presentation and manipulation. Curl's initial Nitro Beta demos include a Salesforce.com Dashboard and a Social Network Visualization application. Desktop applications use the same security model as Curl applets. They run in a secure sandbox with local data access but limited system privileges. Curl applications can also be fully privileged applications, which require a standard digital signature provided by an established certification authority. Nitro supports Windows platforms as well as Linux and Mac. The public beta of Curl Nitro is currently available for download with the full release scheduled to be available later in the year. http://www.curl.com

April 9, 2008

IBM Announces Web 2.0 Enterprise Portal Software

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that its new portal software with Web 2.0 support will ship this quarter. IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 is designed to securely combine information from both the enterprise and the Web. The expanded Web 2.0 features of IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 software is intended to help people be more productive and find information faster. Its new live text tagging feature allows a user to click on text, in context of the business process being used, and see supporting information right there related to the job at hand. IBM's new software also has the ability to instantly update any aspect of a web page without the need to do an entire page refresh, for example, when a person makes an update while placing an on-line order. IBM also announced that three of its accelerators and the beta version of a new entry-level forms product will ship this quarter. The first two accelerators are designed to help users respond more quickly to new business opportunities. IBM Dashboard Accelerator 6.1 for WebSphere Portal will integrate business intelligence software from IBM-Cognos and several other companies. IBM Dashboard Accelerator is used for rapidly building a dashboard. The second, IBM Content Accelerator 6.1 for WebSphere Portal, includes simplified authoring templates used for creating quick content like blogs. It also will have richer in-line editing to enable users to easily create folders, sites or site areas. The third, IBM Business Process Accelerator, which has just started shipping, is designed to simplify and improve the adoption of business processes by using the role-based, personalized user interface of WebSphere Portal to improve both implementation and user response time for a range of processes. Lastly, IBM announced today that the company's current forms product, IBM Lotus Forms 3.0.1, now includes out-of-the-box integration with IBM Filenet F8 software. http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus

April 8, 2008

BEA Systems Releases Platform for Enterprise Social Computing

BEA Systems announced the release of its BEA AquaLogic User Interaction suite of products, including new versions of BEA AquaLogic Interaction, BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration and BEA AquaLogic Analytics. These new releases are designed to help companies deliver new workplace strategies via BEA's cross-platform web suite. With the new BEA AquaLogic User Interaction release, customers can create richer, more interactive profile pages, deliver customizable user experiences and multi-channel interfaces, leverage full RSS capabilities, and enable human networks to create social applications that enhance worker productivity, group collaboration and community innovation. The new release of BEA AquaLogic Interaction 6.5 delivers a social computing platform with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business - project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems - that are often shared inefficiently through email. The release also introduces improved usability designed to help knowledge workers more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools. BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration 4.5 extends existing capabilities with enhanced notification options, deeper Microsoft Office integration, enhanced metadata support and general infrastructure enhancements. http://www.bea.com/

March 18, 2008

4D Releases Web 2.0 Pack v11.1

4D Inc., maker of an integrated software platform that speeds up and simplifies the process of developing and deploying business applications, announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 1 (11.1), an extensive toolset that lets 4D developers both create rich Ajax applications and integrate browser technology into 4D desktop clients. 4D Ajax Framework v11 Release 1 (11.1) features the Data Grid 2.0 object, which has been redesigned from the ground up. Data Grid 2.0 offers full control over every aspect of the Grid object, some 80 commands in all, and features drag and drop support, independent cell styling, and many more controls, all of which can be extended through the JavaScript API. In addition, this release increases the power of the Dashboard object used to create business intelligence reporting tools for the web and the iPhone by expanding the charting tool to include support for SVG, PNG, and the Google Chart API. 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 1 (11.1) retails for $599 and includes six months of free upgrades. An additional 12-month maintenance plan is $249. Updates and features are added to the product on a regular basis. 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 1 is available from the 4D web site, http://www.4d.com/

March 14, 2008

W3C Invites Implementations of XQuery Update Facility 1.0

The XML Query Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of "XQuery Update Facility 1.0." This document defines an update facility that extends the "XML Query language, XQuery." The XQuery Update Facility provides expressions that can be used to make persistent changes (including node insertion, deletion, modification, and creation) to instances of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. The Working Group also published two additional documents that will become Working Group notes: " XQuery Update Facility 1.0 Requirements" and "XQuery Update Facility 1.0 Use Cases." http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/

February 27, 2008

Bridgeline Software Releases iAPPS Analytics

Bridgeline Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLSW) announced the release of iAPPS Analytics, the second of four planned on-demand SaaS software products unified by the iAPPS Framework. iAPPS Analytics is a web application management solution that integrates web analytics to help organizations measure and optimize their web properties. When combined with Bridgeline's web content management system, iAPPS Content Manager, iAPPS Analytics enables real-time delivery of targeted content based on user profiles and site visitor behavior. iAPPS Analytics provides deep integration within all levels of a web application, providing business users with ease-of-use through AJAX controls and desktop-like conventions such as drag-and-drop, inline content editing, and right-click context menus. iAPPS Analytics also enhances speed and productivity through dynamic segmentation and auto page tagging, as well as provides visitor behavior intelligence through a full range of reports including click-density analysis. Bridgeline offers iAPPS Analytics in both subscription and perpetual license models with prices starting at approximately $1,000 per month depending on database size and URL requirements. http://www.bridgelinesw.com

February 26, 2008

Zapatec Launches Enterprise-Class Web 2.0 Calendar

Zapatec, Inc. announced the launch of its AJAX Events Calendar, a single-page, multi-user solution, providing full desktop functionality in an easy-to-deploy calendaring solution. Developers can now embed the Calendar in any application or purchase it as a software package, a hosted solution or a virtual appliance deployable on Amazon's EC2 cloud. The Zapatec AJAX Calendar is available as a pluggable AJAX front-end or with either PHP or Java back-ends. It is cross browser compatible and customizable. Using the virtual appliance option, customers can have the calendar up and running in less than an hour in their own private environment. Companies get all the benefits of a hosted solution while still having full control of the product. The calendar is the first in the series of self contained modules that Zapatec offers. An email module and a contact module are due in April 2008. Pricing for the calendar starts at $2000. The Zapatec Events Calendar is available now at: http://www.zapatec.com/website/main/products/eventscalendar

February 25, 2008

Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex 3 Now Available

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the availability of Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex 3 software, adding to the Adobe technology platform for rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe AIR bridges the real-time, dynamic capabilities of the Web with the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop. Businesses that leverage the Web as a platform can use the latest Adobe RIA technologies to build and deploy more engaging applications across browsers, desktops and operating systems. Adobe is also delivering new applications built with Adobe Flex and deployed on Adobe AIR, such as Adobe Media Player, as well as Buzzword, an online word processor that has built-in collaboration capabilities. Adobe AIR enables developers to create RIAs on the desktop using the skills and Web technologies - such as HTML, Ajax, PDF, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex - they already employ. Applications deployed on Adobe AIR have the advantages of browser-based RIAs, such as speed of development, ease of use, and access from virtually anywhere. Yet they also have the benefits of desktop applications, such as the ability to read/write local files, work with other applications on a user's computer and maintain local data storage on the desktop. Flex is a free, open source framework for building RIAs. Adobe Flex Builder 3, an Eclipse based development tool, accelerates Flex application development and includes new capabilities for deploying RIAs on Adobe AIR. Adobe Flex Builder 3 integrates with Adobe Creative Suite 3 software making it easy for designers and developers to work together. Major portions of Adobe AIR, such as the WebKit HTML engine, Tamarin ActionScript Virtual Machine, and SQLite local database functionality, are open source. Adobe AIR and the Adobe AIR SDK are available immediately as free downloads in English and offered for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Upcoming versions are expected to be available for Linux and other languages. The Adobe Flex 3 product line is available now in English and Japanese, and offered for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The open source Flex 3 SDK is available free of charge and a beta version of Adobe Flex Builder 3 for Linux is freely available on Adobe Labs. Adobe Flex Builder 3 is available as a standalone product or Eclipse plug-in, with the Standard edition priced at US$249 and the Professional edition at US$699. http://www.adobe.com

January 29, 2008

W3C: Canonical XML 1.1 Proposed Recommendation

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of "Canonical XML 1.1." The specification establishes a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Canonical XML 1.1 is a revision to "Canonical XML 1.0" designed to address issues related to inheritance of attributes in the XML namespace when canonicalizing document subsets, including the requirement not to inherit xml:id, and to treat xml:base URI path processing properly. Comments are welcome through 07 March. Learn more about W3C's XML Activity. http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/, http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-xml-c14n11-20080129/

January 15, 2008

W3C Opens Data on the Web with SPARQL

W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) announced the publication of SPARQL, the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web. With SPARQL query technology, pronounced "sparkle," people can focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications. Many successful query languages exist, including standards such as SQL and XQuery. These were primarily designed for queries limited to a single product, format, type of information, or local data store. Traditionally, it has been necessary to formulate the same high-level query differently depending on application or the specific arrangement chosen for the relational database. And when querying multiple data sources it has been necessary to write logic to merge the results. These limitations have imposed higher developer costs and created barriers to incorporating new data sources. The goal of the Semantic Web is to enable people to share, merge, and reuse data globally. SPARQL is designed for use at the scale of the Web, and thus enables queries over distributed data sources, independent of format. Because SPARQL has no tie to a specific database format, it can be used to take advantage of "Web 2.0" data and mash it up with other Semantic Web resources. Furthermore, because disparate data sources may not have the same 'shape' or share the same properties, SPARQL is designed to query non-uniform data. The SPARQL specification defines a query language and a protocol and works with the other core Semantic Web technologies from W3C: Resource Description Framework (RDF) for representing data; RDF Schema; Web Ontology Language (OWL) for building vocabularies; and Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL), for automatically extracting Semantic Web data from documents. SPARQL also makes use of other W3C standards found in Web services implementations, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL). http://www.w3.org/

December 13, 2007

Adobe Announces Open Source Technologies for Enterprise RIAs

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced plans to release source code for its remoting and messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS, to help developers connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications, for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences. Previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, the technologies included in BlazeDS, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, are being contributed to open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3). Also, developers can productively connect rich clients to existing server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components. The commercial version of the product, LiveCycle Data Services ES, includes enterprise class capabilities for building advanced customer engagement applications that require massive messaging scalability, advanced client-server data synchronization, conflict detection/resolution, offline data management services for Adobe AIR applications, and RIA-to-PDF generation. BlazeDS and the AMF binary data protocol specification are supported by Adobe Flash Player. Adobe will offer annual subscriptions for Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, Community Edition, which includes access to trusted, certified builds, patches, enterprise support and additional benefits such as product warranty and infringement indemnity. Subscription pricing will be announced at the time of general release of BlazeDS under the LGPL v3, currently scheduled for early 2008. Additionally, new beta versions of Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Flex 3 are now available. The public beta versions are available immediately as free downloads from http://labs.adobe.com

November 29, 2007

Ephox Debuts EditLive! 6.3, Dual Mode HTML Editor

Ephox Corporation announced that EditLive! now offers web content authors a JavaScript editor that enables quick and easy editing. The Express Edit feature is tightly integrated with Ephox's product EditLive!. The combined solution offers editors the speed of JavaScript and the power of a Java-based editor. With its Java applet architecture EditLive delivers a consistent and full-featured authoring interface on all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera) and operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix). The Express Edit mode uses JavaScript so content authors can now edit content even if Java is not installed. Some authoring environments either do not support Java applets or cannot ensure that they are installed, for example interactive websites that allow the public to make edits or highly distributed environments such as online education. Express Edit is for quickly editing small amounts of plain text. For richer editing requirements the HTML editor is available at the click of a button. EditLive! includes the ability to paste content from MS Word, table editing, spell checking and image management while creating pure W3C compliant HTML code. The software is available for immediate download. http://www.ephox.com

October 30, 2007

Curl Announces Open Source Strategy for Enterprise Rich Internet Application Platform

Curl, Inc. announced its plans to release a significant body of code for the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform to the open source community. As the first step in its open source strategy, Curl will broaden its development platform and empower the Curl developer community by establishing a common repository of open source component libraries. As a result, developers will have all of the components required to support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs. Curl's Open Source projects are provided under the Apache V2.0 License and hosted by SourceForge. As part of its first step to support open source technology initiatives, Curl has established three open source projects, which include the following: Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) - This provides components enabling the development of Curl applications that make use of web services such as SOAP/WSDL and an XML document model; Curl Data Kit (CDK) - This library facilitates data-centric application development in Curl. It features support for client-side SQLite databases, which is the same standard supported by Adobe AIR and Google Gears; Curl Development Utilities (CDU) - This provides functions supporting application development, including unit testing and project development. Curl's Rich Internet Application platform is available in base and pro versions. The base versions of each are free and offer a real alternative to developers creating web applications that require rich interactive interfaces. The pro versions enhance the base versions with additional security, performance and maintainability features for enterprise class applications. http://www.curl.com