Web Development Live

Hyderabad, India-based Goose Technologies has recently come up with Procon, a risk management solution. Procon enables global enterprises to have real-time visibility and predictability of key performance indicators (KPI) at different levels and function areas. It also provides associated risk exposures by real time risk alerts and risk grid. Goose Technologies founder and CEO Debasish Pattnaik told a news conference that Procon was uniquely designed to offer real-time visibility of KPIs across all levels and also offers aggregation at both organization and enterprise levels. It has a built in prediction engine that offers future trend of potential risk factors. Apart from this, once the current and future challenges are known, Procon offers an advance analytical engine for the risk management/mitigation through ‘What if scenarios, added Pattnaik.揋oose Technologies is a pioneer in this space and the first product company to offer global delivery risk visibility, predictability, aggregation, comprehensive risk framework and mitigation at various organisation levels, he said.The prime focus of Goose Technologies is to design and develop products that help organisations to manage their global risk as they expand or outsource operations.揥ith Procon we can now have a near real-time consolidated view of our performance indicators at the organizational level. Procon fits in the strategic project management space as we scale our operations, said J. Satyanarayana, CEO of NISG, said.NISG is a project development and management company working with the central and several state governments.

IBM has launched its Jazz.net development platform to the open-source community. Earlier the Web 2.0-based platform was only available to IBM customers, academics and partners. But now any developer can contribute to software under development at Jazz.net.IBM with an open Jazz.net and commercial community will allow companies on a global level to cooperate transparently and also communicate with each other, thereby overcoming the barriers.In addition, the Company also announced, IBM Rational Team Concert Express. The software is the first offering developed on the Jazz.net platform and will be available later this year. The beta 2 version includes Web dashboards, so that team members can see project status data like progress on work items and project health. It also allows teams to use DB2 and other databases to host the IBM Rational Team Concert repository. The software is based on open-standard middleware, including IBM WebSphere, IBM Lotus Sametime, Apache Tomcat, Apache Derby and Jabber.

JetBrains, creator of Java IDE - IntelliJ IDEA, has released Java IDE 7.0.2. The new version 7.0.2 is a bug fix release. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2 comes with Spring and Hibernate support, Web Services, Maven and ClearCase integration, and improved support for EJB, JSP, HTML, CSS and XML. IntelliJ IDEA has tools for the development of Web applications, Web services support and enhancements for dynamic languages.New features in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 include: Spring and hibernate support Web and enterprise development Performance improvements Eclipse and maven integration VCS integration Dynamic languages Debugger Dependency structure matrix (DSM) Other productivity %26 usability features

IBM and Fair Isaac have expanded their cooperative efforts into a joint strategic and global marketing alliance. Under an agreement announced recently, Fair Isaac’s enterprise decision management (EDM) solutions, which typically support decision-making in industries such as finance, insurance and healthcare, will be centered on IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) products.”Both Fair Isaac and IBM fully embrace and support SOA to deliver open-standards business applications to any number of users regardless of their existing technology infrastructure” said Mark Hanny, vice president of strategic partnerships, IBM.Both companies will work together to build the next generation of Fair Isaac’s enterprise decision management applications on IBM’s DB2, WebSphere, Rational, and Lotus product lines. The two companies will also focus their development on applications running on IBM’s Portal and System z and p platforms.”Our joint clients can now more easily overcome one of the key challenges of implementing an SOA infrastructure to deliver Information on Demand (IOD) managing, integrating, and unlocking value from their business information and become more flexible to better compete globally,” added Hanny.The new strategic alliance agreement also grew out of a need to integrate four of Fair Isaac’s products, including Capstone (origination), Finance (account management), Debt Manager (collections and recovery) and Falcon (fraud prevention).The agreement includes joint development and co-marketing and sales of applications aimed at financial services. IBM’s Global Business Services division will provide systems integration support.

Aaron Houston, Program Coordinator for JUGs and Java Champions, pointed out that there is a new Student Portal on the Sun Developer Network, and could be a helpful resource for both high school and college students.Sun SPOT kits are available for price down to USD 300/kit for students and teachers/professors. The discount can ask about on the Sun SPOT Forums. There is a competition to submit a proposal for a Sun SPOT idea and you could receive a Free SPOT to implement it.The Sun SPOT Device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform. It is programmed almost entirely in Java to allow regular programmers to create projects that used to require specialized embedded system development skills. The hardware platform includes a range of built-in sensors as well as the ability to easily interface to external devices.Rick opined on this advancement by saying that nvesting in resources for students is the best way to ensure another generation of well-equipped young developers and extend the lifetime of a platform like Java.

Microsoft’s schedule for shipping SQL Server 2008, the upcoming new release of the company’s database software, is slipping from June 30 into the third quarter. Microsoft recently disclosed the schedule change, described by the company as a “clarification on the roadmap for SQL Server 2008,” in “The Data Platform Insider” blog on the company’s Technet Website for IT professionals.Microsoft also revealed that SQL Server 2008 would still be celebrated at the company’s big launch gala in February, along with Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. However, it won’t actually be finished until the third quarter of the year. Instead, what Microsoft will deliver at its “Heroes Happen Here” event in Los Angeles next month will be a “feature complete” community technology preview or CTP of SQL Server 2008, according to the blog. “Microsoft is excited to deliver a feature complete CTP during the Heroes Happen Here launch wave and a release candidate (RC) in Q2 calendar year 2008, with final release to manufacturing (RTM) of SQL Server 2008 expected in Q3,” the post, by Francois Ajenstat, director of SQL Server marketing, said.Once considered a technology that could only handle smaller databases, SQL Server is now running data warehouses larger than 20 TB in size, according to Microsoft. Among the areas of improvement in SQL Server 2008 besides the business intelligence capabilities are better scalability and an easier way to develop against the database via technologies like LINQ, a new querying syntax.SQL Server 2008’s delay is relatively minor, especially compared to the two-year delay for its prior version, SQL Server 2005. Development of that database was slowed by numerous security fixes. Windows Server 2008’s RTM has also been postponed several times, though it is currently expected to ship around the time of the L.A. launch. Visual Studio 2008, by contrast, was released in mid-November.

Publishing label Rockstar Games has said the latest in its Grand Theft Auto franchise will be released worldwide on April 29th, following last year’s high profile delay of the franchise to concentrate on its multi-platform release. GTA IV, which was originally slated for release last year, is expected to be one of the top-selling games of 2008 and is likely to revive debate over the series’ depictions of sex and violence. The game will be released worldwide on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. After the date was announced, publisher Take-Two Interactive’s share price rose by more than 10 per cent. “We are so excited to be releasing ‘Grand Theft Auto IV,’” Sam Houser, founder and executive producer of Rockstar Games, said in a statement. “We’ve pushed ourselves very hard to make something incredible, and hope the game sets a new benchmark for interactive entertainment.”The game, that is one of the most anticipated titles of 2008 for Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation was initially scheduled to be launched on October 16, 2007, but in August the Take Two officials decided that there is no way the development team could meet the goal of perfecting the engine in time to meet the deadline.Strauss Zelnick, chairman, Take-Two, then said, “Certain elements of development proved to be more time-intensive than expected, especially given the commitment for a simultaneous release on two very different platforms As for the story of the game, Rockstar has released so far three trailers. GTA IV is taking us to Liberty City (a fictional city based on New York city). There are several references to Liberty City on buildings and objects, as well as several distinct features that make the city a replica of New York, including the Statute of Liberty, Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge.The game though is looking like it is continuing to shape up with a great deal of polish to it, we will surely find out everything in April.

The Apache Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Components project, has released the first BETA version of HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0-beta1. This release marks the end of API instability in HttpCore. As of this release the API compatibility between minor releases in 4.x codeline will be maintained. It includes several major improvements such as enhanced HTTP message parsing API and optimized parser implementations, Java 5.0 compatibility for HttpCore NIO extensions.The focus of the development efforts will be towards providing better test coverage, documentation and performance optimizations. The HttpCore components implement the most fundamental aspects of the HTTP protocol. They are sufficient to develop basic client side and server side HTTP services with a minimal footprint and no external dependencies. HttpCore NIO extensions can be used to build asynchronous HTTP services based on non-blocking I/O model capable of handling a great number of simultaneous connections with just a few I/O threads.

Microsoft is giving itself high marks in its first year Vista security report, at least when comparing the OS first year vulnerability and patch statistics to its Windows OS predecessor and other modern workstation operating systems, such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Apple Mac OS.Microsoft employee Jeff Jones has published a Windows Vista one-year vulnerability report in his Security Blog that includes analysis of the company’s newest operating system alongside Windows XP and several competitors.During the Vista’s first year of availability, 17 security bulletins, patching 36 vulnerabilities, were released for the OS on occasions, according to Jeff Jones, security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group. Jones also found that a change to the way Microsoft handles patching has resulted in less work for system administrators on Vista compared to Windows XP.atch events [distributions of one or more bulletin] are an indirect measure of how the combination of product security quality and vendor update release policies and processes impact security administrators specifically, how many days in the year did the administrators have to mobilize to deploy one or more security updates, Jones said on his security blog. y analysis found that administrators were required to mobilize much less often for Windows Vista than any other product examined.The report has been criticized for not taking into account factors like software quality, administrative controls, physical controls, or just how damaging each exploit can be.Jones notes, however, that the report is not an attempt to prove which operating system is ore secure than the others, but rather an analysis on how Microsoft improvements to the security update process and development process have reduced the impact of security updates to Windows administrators significantly compared to its predecessor, Windows XP.Microsoft released Vista for enterprise clients, along with Office 2007, in November 2006. The home version was distributed two months later.

Visual WebGui, developer of the AJAX enterprise application development and deployment platform, has announced the availability of their browser-based solution.Visual WebGui is an open source framework, which is available for graphical user interfaces used for web applications. Visual WebGui, which is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET framework, is expected to launch a Microsoft Silverlight compliant solution, supported by Microsoft.Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), is a combination of Javascript and XML technologies that allow the content of a web page to be updated without reloading the entire page, thereby enabling browser-based applications to behave like software applications.Visual WebGui solves the development setbacks associated with AJAX by providing developers with a Rapid Application Development solution with full Win Forms support. Visual WebGui is delivered with a designer, the application interfaces (WinForms designer), instead of Word documents (ASP.NET designer). This enables interfaces using drag-and-drop editing. Visual WebGui is available under LGPL.