Web Development Live

Search engine friendly websites is one of those often heard phrases, both from web site development companies and from their clients. Everyone knows that this is important to have, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked.

Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of site to get right though are database driven websites . Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.

When we found we were going to be relocated to the Houston area several years ago we tried to get as much information as we could on Houston neighborhoods in general and Kingwood specifically. It was difficult as few area businesses had web sites and the handful of existing Kingwood information web sites had limited, and often out-of-date, information.

Luckily we had a great Realtor who was able to answer a lot of our questions. But our experience when we were new to Kingwood was the reason that I started the Kingwood Connection. I wanted to create a site that people who were new to the area could find the answers to these frequently asked questions.

Symantec has opened up a beta program for Norton Safe Web that puts the company on course to challenge a similar offering from security rival McAfee.

According to Symantec, Norton Safe Web is available starting today, July 28, as a plug-in for the beta version of NIS 2009. Safe Web functions as a Web site rating service, providing visual safety ratings of search results from engines such as Google and Yahoo by assessing Web security and leveraging information from members of Norton Community Watch.

For example, if a site that has traditionally been considered safe is suddenly flagged as suspicious, Symantec will go back and reanalyze that quickly, Rosenkrantz said. On the other hand, if it is a known bad site, the priority of going back and reanalyzing it is low, he added.

While Symantec is entering the secure searching fray with Norton Safe Web, its main security rival has already started down this trail. McAfee offers similar capabilities in its SiteAdvisor product, and recently teamed with Yahoo to extend its capabilities to help make Web searching more secure. Google has also made some strides on this front of late, with the development of a Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page for Web masters interested in additional information on sites Google determines are malicious.

Like SiteAdvisor, Safe Web uses the colors green, yellow and red in its site ratings. Safe Web also marks both organic and paid links on search pages and warns users if they attempt to visit rogue sites.

Symantec officials also disclosed other plans they said they felt would take Safe Web a step beyond rival products, but declined to discuss them publicly. In addition to the beta, Symantec has created a free community site where anyone can look up the safety rating of a site and submit Web site reviews.

XMOS Semiconductor Ltd. (Bristol, England) has introduced a development kit for its XS1-G4 programmable device. Designs are created using a C-based software development flow, which the company claims shortens the time required to build electronic products and systems.

The XS1-G development kit features the XS1-G4 target device, a QVGA touch screen display, RJ45 10/100 Ethernet port, a stereo audio interface and XLink connectors for connecting multiple kits together. The XS1-G4 can be booted from JTAG, an SD/MMC card or on-board SPI boot PROM. In addition to the integrated multi-media I/O, designers have access to on-board switches, status LEDs and IDC expansion ports. A set of design examples is accessible on startup through a soft-key menu system.

The XS1-G4 device is programmed using web-based XMOS development tools which include C and XC compilers, simulator and debugger. The kit includes a tutorial on XC, which is the XMOS-originated programming language supporting parallelism, concurrent and real-time programming using channel-based communications, and event-driven control. Programs can be evaluated using the simulator, or loaded into the XDK for hardware verification. A GDB debugger is also provided to simplify program development.

The XS1-G4 programmable chip features four XCore tiles connected by a high-performance switch, with each tile containing an XCore, which is a 400MHz 32-bit event-driven processor. The four XCore tiles together execute up to 32 concurrent real-time tasks, provide 1600-MIPS of performance, and service up to 400 million events per second. Data and code is stored in 256-kbytes of RAM and 32-kbytes of ROM. Tightly coupled to a highly flexible I/O pin structure, the XCore processor can implement a range of hardware and software functions including I/O interfaces, state machines, application programs, DSP and cryptographic algorithms.

XMOS devices are general-purpose programmable chips. The device features and software-based design flow make the XS1-G product family well-suited for applications such as Ethernet audiovisuals and audio, intelligent LED display control, IEEE-1588 network time keeping and chip-level security systems. Additional information on how XMOS technology supports these applications can be found on the XMOS website.

Web hosting is a sort of Internet facility that permits organizations and individuals to have their own website accessibility through the World Wide Web. The companies that offer space on a server with Internet connectivity are known as Web hosts or Web hosting providers.

Among the wide-ranging exploits of web hosting, web page and small-scale file hosting has been rated as the most basic one, wherein files are uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web Interface.

Personal web site hosting comes generally free, while the business web site hosting entails comparatively higher expense. For personal web pages, a single page hosting is more than enough. On the contrary, a complex site necessitates a more intense package that offers database support and application development platforms like PHP, Java, and ASP.NET.

The web hosting client can expect to comprise the services, like email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. Besides, a customer might well make up his/ her mind for having Windows for its hosting platform. The customer would have PHP, Perl, and Python, and also go with ASP .Net or Classic ASP for the purpose of facilitating website development. Generally, a Web Content Management System is included in Web hosting packages. This reduces the worry of the end-users about the more technical aspects.

The Security Clan’s readership will comprise senior IT security professionals and CIOs working within large enterprise organizations. Site users will receive access to exclusive, in-depth intelligence about the future of the Internet and its impact on the enterprise and their jobs.
The Security Clan also features an active social networking component with household names in IT and Internet technology bloggers who interact daily with readers via message boards on the site.

“Security consistently tops IT spending categories, and with good reason: The nature of the underlying threats is constantly changing,” says Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief of Internet Evolution. “Our Security Clan’s bloggers collectively bring several decades of experience in virtually every aspect of security, from software to networks and personal security and beyond. That’s critical for IT departments, since the value of corporate data only continues to increase and has never been more vulnerable.”

Paul Doyle Doyle is a security consultant who was most recently CEO of security startup Proofspace, which is focused on authentication and data integrity. Doyle is an active participant in the Sedona Group.

Rob Hansen Hansen is a freelance hacker and self described “dabbler in the black arts of information security.” He’s also a doctoral student at the University of Iowa’s Department of Computer Science and is working on hacking of voting system technologies.

Greg Hughes As an independent IT security consultant, Hughes brings experience as a chief security executive and as a former law enforcement officer. He focuses on forensic security in IT and software development projects.

Ira Winkler Winkler is recognized as one of the world’s experts in Internet security, information warfare, and industrial espionage. He’s the founder and president of the Internet Security Advisors Group (ISAG) and also worked at the National Security Agency (NSA).

Such constant tweaking called a “perpetual beta” in the Web 2.0 world — is common for companies like Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Flickr that build applications for a consumer market that’s always in flux.

Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of an emerging software development paradigm championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups.

The new process, which some champions call “application development 2.0,” contrasts markedly with the traditional corporate waterfall process that separates projects into several distinct phases, ranging from requirements to maintenance. Nonetheless, application development 2.0 could significantly cut development costs and improve software quality if managers and developers are willing to make some hard changes.

“Sometimes enterprise organizations tend to look at these [Web 2.0-focused] places and say they are not very disciplined,” said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “That is not the case. They have built discipline into the process that allows them to be very reactive a [good] lesson for IT organizations.”

Based on interviews with analysts and executives of Web 2.0 firms, Computerworld compiled a list of five ways that corporate IT managers can benefit from Web 2.0 development processes. Here they are:

1. Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes.

Wesabe Inc., which runs a personal finance Web site, doesn’t have a formal internal quality assurance group. Instead, the San Francisco-based company relies on users and founder and CEO Marc Hedlund.

Wesabe’s developers work with users to come up with new features, and then Hedlund tests them before rolling them out to Wesabe.com.

Hedlund said that before launching Wesabe two years ago, he studied many of the common development techniques put into place by Web 2.0 companies. He said he concluded that applications are inherently built better when developers are not insulated from the people who use their applications. Direct user complaints or compliments are far better motivators for developers than PowerPoint slides with bar charts representing user desires.

William Gribbons, director of the graduate program in human factors at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., said that large companies can benefit financially by using Web 2.0 techniques to develop applications for employees.

“Companies often think their [internal] applications are different because they’re used by employees [who] are compensated for the pain and suffering they are enduring,” he said. That pain and suffering, however, can lead to increases in training costs and employee turnover and cut productivity all a hit to the corporate bottom line.

Corporate development teams should focus on close interaction with internal users to gather requirements, and to create a controlled, systematic way to observe users interacting with prototypes, Gribbons suggested.

New Bamboo, the Web Development Specialist warns against limiting web changes during development.  By taking a rigid and inflexible approach to web projects, businesses inadvertently risk delivering online products or services that do not fully meet stakeholder requirements.

In an independent survey of 100 senior IT managers and directors, 59% of respondents believed that by minimising the number of changes during web development they could avoid web project failures and reduce costs.  Furthermore, 45% of respondents felt that a greater focus on scoping requirements at the start would help the process.

“Changes are an inevitable part of the web development process. Those managing web projects are often under the impression that by limiting changes you can save money and time.  This is a false economy as the resulting software is often a poor fit for what is actually required. People also fail to think about the real cost of a badly produced web product.  This could potentially result in reduced sales or poor customer service,” argues Damien Tanner, Co-Founder and Director of New Bamboo.

Linux is set to make a major impact in the mobile computing realm, the executive director of the Linux Foundation stressed at a conference Monday morning.

Speaking at the Open Mobile Exchange portion of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., Jim Zemlin, executive director of the foundation, touted the trends and technologies pushing Linux into a leadership position in mobile systems. He was followed by Jason Grigsby, Web strategist at mobile and Web design firm Cloud Four, who emphasized the coming influence of the mobile Web but countered that developers are not ready for it.

“It’s clear that Linux is going to be a leader in the mobile space,” Zemlin said.

Linux, according to Zemlin, offers a unified product platform, flexibility, and a software stack. It also has experienced an increase in the volume of software content, with the lines of Linux handset code doubling every year.

“Really, what’s happening in mobile is instead of having a hardware-up approach, you’re starting to see a software-down approach,” with the software experience driving the mobile marketplace, he said.

By supporting Linux, developers don’t have to contend with compatibility issues of supporting different platforms. The industry wants to get away from that, he said.

“It’s just a nightmare to support all these different OSes and try to maintain some degree of compatibilty,” Zemlin said.

Different middleware packages and application development frameworks are available for Linux. “There’s a huge freedom to mix the core Linux kernel,” he said.

Business drivers for Linux include reduced deployment costs, room to differentiate, and an ecosystem of development around phone platforms. “It’s obviously a royalty-free platform. That’s a huge business driver, Zemlin said.

“Linux really allows device manufacturers and new people to come in and create their own brand,” he said.

Symbian’s move to open source has had a negative impact on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, leaving it the only royalty-based mobile platform, Zemlin said .

Linux application development is starting to coalesce around initiatives such as Google’s Android and LiMo, he said. Other Linux efforts are afoot such as Openmmoko, to create a smart-phone platform, and Ubuntu Mobile, Zemlin said.

“There really isn’t any major player from a corporate point of view who doesn’t have their foot in some way in the Linux camp,” other than Microsoft, Zemlin said.

Grigsby, meanwhile, emphasized that the mobile Web is coming, but Web developers are not ready yet.

He lauded the capabilities of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and what it has done for mobile computing. “The iPhone is really the Mosaic of the mobile Web,” opening people’s eyes to opportunities on the mobile side the way Mosaic did with browsers, Grigsby said.

But the mobile Web is being held back by UI issues and access to the device characteristics on the phone. Standards and performance also are issues.

Openbravo, the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point-of-Sale (PoS) solutions, has announced today the launch of its updated open source web-based ERP software, Openbravo ERP 2.40.

With the release of Openbravo’s beta version of ERP 2.40, which is available for download from SourceForge.net, Openbravo continues its innovations in user experience. Openbravo ERP 2.40 has updated the product with numerous enhancements focused on two distinct key areas that users care about most: increased user productivity and improved global functionality.

The new release also includes several additional improvements in other areas. The functional scope has been broadened with an enhanced projects and services module, with newly introduced features such as a historical salary category, goods receipt by PO number and purchase requisitions support. Reports have been revamped, including a new payment ageing balancing, budget and Pareto reports with a broadened payments report for more than one business partner at a time. Infrastructure has been upgraded with significantly revised security and more control over user roles, audit to review who created and updated each transaction, additional web services, and better reporting back to Openbravo to help the development process and PostgreSQL 8.3 support.

“The release of Openbravo ERP 2.40 is the product of generous effort from our community to simplify enterprise resource planning,” said Paolo Juvara, Chief Products Officer of Openbravo. “With all the enhancements contained in this update, the fundamental advantage to 2.40 is that it simply makes the end user’s business run more efficiently and effectively. It is with great support and feedback from our community that we have made our best web-based ERP system to date.”

To learn more about Openbravo products and services visit the Openbravo website, and to download and install Openbravo ERP 2.40 beta visit the download page. Openbravo Network 2.40, the commercial subscription service Openbravo offers to clients looking for professional support for a complete solution, is expected to be released in September.