Web Development Live

The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

The scheme is the result of a meeting of 30 open-education leaders in Cape Town, organised by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation ?the philanthropic organisation set up by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

“We have seen over the last 20 years how open-source software, which is produced collaboratively, has been used to solve individual problems but then shared to solve everyone’s problems,” said Shuttleworth. “Today, I hope we will launch a process that will build something similarly compelling but for the educational field. It will be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to create documents that will be used by learners in South America.”

According to the declaration, publishers and governments should make publicly funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students access to constantly updated course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials, the organisers claimed.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Wikipedia founder Wales, one of the authors of the declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

Veracode, which was established by former Symantec employees and launched its initial service in February, is seeking to distinguish itself by focusing on backdoor detection and on-demand services.

Companies such as Fortify, whose products only scan program source code, aren’t able to find certain classes of security flaw, according to Veracode. The company argues its approach of scanning compiled, binary code is more accurate and complete.

“The binary represents the actual attack surface for the hacker,” said Veracode’s chief executive officer, Matt Moynahan, in a statement.

Backdoors, which are often included in programs by developers for legitimate purposes, nevertheless can pose a serious threat to companies, Veracode argues.

Financial services firms, which increasingly assemble their software from reusable binary components or rely on third-party development work, originally requested the ability to detect such backdoors, Veracode said. The company is also focusing on military software, but said any organisation could be under threat from backdoors.

Veracode’s research has found that backdoors are typically eliminated from open-source software in weeks but could exist undetected in commercial applications for years.

The company also cites research from the US Department of Homeland Security pointing to a significant risk from backdoors. The research found that 23 software packages that US government employees might download for tools or development had backdoors within them.

Metallect, provider of software analysis tools and services for software development professionals, has announced the availability of an early beta release of its new architecture modeling software, XMuddle for Java developers.XMuddle for Java is a desktop tool based on open source technology that gives Java developers and QA the capability to take a collection of Java .jar files and create a searchable diagram of dependencies. The XMuddle for Java allows reverse engineer dependencies in Java byte code, visually navigate unfamiliar applications and also, see the impact of patches to production systems.The pre-release software is available to anyone without program registration. XMuddle is scheduled for public beta later this year.

The Apache Tuscany team has announced 1.1 release of the Java SCA project. Apache Tuscany provides a runtime environment based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA). SCA is a set of specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development. These specifications are being standardized by OASIS as part of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA).Apache Tuscany project is a community that is working to create infrastructure that simplifies the development of service-based application networks and addresses real business problems posed in SOA.The Tuscany SCA Java 1.1 release adds a number of features including a JMS binding, improved policy support and an implementation extension for representing client side JavaScript applications as SCA components.

Global chip maker Intel will invest more than USD one billion in India over the next three years as it seeks to prepare light-weight personal computers in partnership with Indian and foreign hardware firms.Intel is said to be collaborating with foreign and Indian computer hardware brands like Asus Technologies, HCL, Wipro and Zenith for the development of lightweight and easy-to-use Internet platforms.”We have committed to spend over a billion dollars spread over next three years plus. We are focusing on a number of new initiatives for enabling easy availability of personal computers (PCs) and broadband Internet in India,” Intel Technology India Director- marketing and operations John A McClure said.Intel is also working on different designs for specific market segments. It is also preparing to introduce Wimax technology in India, the fastest wireless BB technology available at lower cost than optical fibres.

Sun Microsystems announced that a division of Reuters has selected the Sun Java Real-Time System to develop and deploy market-facing services.The Sun Java Real-Time System (Java RTS) is a software product that provides a development platform for creating applications, which require execution predictability. Compliant with the Real-Time specification for Java, it uses the power and scalability of the Solaris10 Operating System (OS) and the flexibility of the Java platform to provide the environment necessary for predictable computing applications in industries such as financial services, aerospace, industrial automation and scientific research.揥e wanted a Java technology-based solution that could address our demanding, and growing, requirements for predictability and low-latency, as well as enable us to leverage our existing code base and Java technology expertise, said Andrew Cunningham, Global Head of Transactions Platform Group, Sales and Trading Division at Reuters.Sun Java Real-Time System enables hard, soft, and non-real-time functions to be combined in one system while keeping critical latencies as low as 20 microseconds. Developers can differentiate processes based on their importance and can take advantage of new memory models. They can continue to take advantage of familiar development tools, such as the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment or Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).When executing on the Solaris 10 operating system, Sun Java RTS runs on over 900 standard x86 and SPARC technology platforms and can also leverage the real-time capabilities of Solaris 10. Solaris 10 enables Java RTS applications to take full advantage of multi-core and multi-processor environments. The upcoming release of Java RTS will also be available on real-time Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell.

Graphics card maker, Nvidia has announced it is acquiring gaming physics company Ageia to bring the latter’s PhysX solution to Nvidia’s GeForce graphics hardware cards.Ageia developed PhysX, a hardware and software engine that adds physical reality to existing games, like smoke billowing from an object after an explosion, or the behavior of a rock after it hits a target. Developers can also use the PhysX software development kit to create interactive middleware for games. Ageia recently provided a kit to developers to create physical experiences in Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament 3.Ageia will add features to Nvidia’s graphics products that will boost the physical reality users experience while playing a game, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.According to AGEIA, there are 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii and Gaming PCs. In August 2007, AGEIA announced first PhysX Mobile processor, the AGEIA PhysX 100M, for high performance gaming notebook PCs. AGEIA PhysX Mobile Technology features low power and thermal design with power dissipation of nearly 10W under gameplay conditions. Company president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said of the deal, “The Ageia team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are梒reating the most amazing and captivating game experiences. By combining the teams that created the world’s most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.”Dell XPS 1730, launched in September 2007, is one of the first laptops to integrate Ageia PhysX 100M processor. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed, however Nvidia said more details about the acquisition will be provided during the company’s quarterly conference call, to be held in mid February.

J2EE Spider has launched a new version of SPIDER at sourceforge. This version has several important features and even a new look. An important feature of the tool includes the generation of CRUDs. The added feature is the reason for 搄umping from version 0.0.3 to 1.0.0-M1.The main concerns of the project are usability, integration with development platform, freedom to choose which code needs to be generated, incremental development generation and customization of code templates to better fit the needs of the development team.J2EE Spider project is directed for construction of a plugin for the Eclipse, for generation of code, utilizing resources of the IDE, Java and Velocity.

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.