Web Development Live

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.

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.

The future of application development might be becoming a little more social. Sun certainly hopes so, and has launched zembly, a new collaboration platform for writing small, and lightweight web applications. It’s a promising start, squarely aimed at small, long-tail developers, and a new approach to collaborative development over the web. Challenges remain, such as the long-term reliability of third-party application hosting and the findability of small long-tail applications on large platforms.
 
I was able to demo zembly, which attempts to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets and came away impressed with its focus on ease of use and belief in a new development process.  zembly is working to create a social setting for developers to share components between applications a “wiki for live, editable code that is more than just about trivial widgets, but rather about full-fledged social applications that can tap into the social graph and reach millions of users”.
 
Applications are written in javascript, rely on a widget / web service development model, and have an extensive architecture for securely managing developer credentials so that you can share outbound service calls without sharing your credentials.  These widgets and services can be shared, or cloned (forked) from other developers and carry a full change log with them, so you can freeze your dependencies to a given version.  The system makes source control and component sharing simpler for the uninitiated than tools like Git and Subversion that can be difficult to learn.
 
zembly hopes that network effects will kick in, as the service will be most successful if users trust others on the system, and share components freely - something that has been hard to accomplish even in large corporate development teams.  If successful, it will be this feature that distinguishes zembly from Google App Engine and other competitors.

Despite these concerns, as someone who sometimes needs a little peer pressure and social support to get started on development projects, I’ll be following zembly as they build out their community-oriented features and work to deliver on their promise to wiki-fy web development, and I’ll be looking forward to sharing code with friends online.

Google has been courting software developers to entice them into a money-making relationship built on turning its array of online widgets into a global infrastructure.

At a conference in San Francisco, said to be the biggest yet for net developers, the search giant made clear that the Web is the future for application development.

It wants its own bit of web infrastructure the Google Cloud to be more accessible to developers and spent two days wooing them to build and run applications on it.

To encourage them aboard, Google invited the 3,000 developers to mash-up Google’s online services, like Gmail, Docs, Maps and Search, with their own applications.

To show client-cloud connectivity, it showed off Google Gears, a browser add-on in the Adobe Flash mould that allows for richer browser experiences, to improve search in MySpace email.

It then showcased the new Google Web Toolkit, so rich net applications can be Java-built, and the hosting of new Ajax libraries, which enhances applications via JavaScript tagging.

Top of its agenda, Google wants the web browser the enabler of its cloud to have more functionality, interaction and to evolve so it becomes as powerful as its desktop counterpart.

“These diverse tools and technologies might seem loosely unintegrated and targeted at different areas,” said Ovum analyst Madan Sheina.

“In fact they’re all cogs and wheels of a more meaningfully connected web that hosts Google web services powered by the Google App Engine. Importantly some of these web services and applications aren’t written just by Google, but by an entire market of independent developers.”

The analyst believes most of these third-party developers no longer build ‘cool’ web applications just for the sake of it; rather they want a slice of Google as a lucrative advertising business.

“Google likes to separate its web development technologies from its advertising. But the two are inextricably linked,” Ms Sheina said.

“Google’s monetisation strategy is simple. Invest in advancement of the web by allowing users to do more on the internet. That makes the Web a much bigger market for Google to monetise services like search.”

Website Pros has released NetObjects Fusion 11, an enhanced version of the Web site design application .

In addition to an intuitive drag-&-drop functionality that the company says makes NetObjects Fusion 11 a fast, easy way to plan, build and manage Web sites, along with its standard e-Commerce capabilities, NetObjects Fusion 11 includes more advanced functionality for those looking for more technical development options.

The code generation engine of NetObjects Fusion 11 has been completely re-engineered to support the generation of Semantic XHTML code, allowing a tighter utilisation of CSS that Webiste Pros says produces leaner code, making it more accessible and search engine friendly.

Users can integrate data into Web pages from any local or remote XML data source, such as an RSS feed. NetObjects Fusion 11 automatically identifies the XML structure allowing drag & drop insertion of data fields directly into the page design.

Featuring a collection of AJAX Widgets, NetObjects Fusion 11 eliminates the complexity of designing Web 2.0 pages with dynamic user interactions by making it easy to quickly add customisable page elements, such as accordions, tabbed panels and toggle panes to make dynamic web pages that provide a richer, more interactive experience for Web site visitors.

Sophisticated animation of any Web site content, such as video, text, images and graphics, can now be easily created from within the drag-&-drop editing environment of NetObjects Fusion without coding or the purchase of additional software.

The database functionality implemented in NetObjects Fusion 11 fully supports the creation of data-driven, highly interactive Web sites turning NetObjects Fusion 11 into a Web Application Development System with broad appeal to enterprise Web developers. NetObjects Fusion 11 now supports all commercially relevant databases, Web servers and server-and-client side technologies and ships with support for PHP.

NetObjects Fusion 11 provides a suite of components that add advanced functionality to any Web site design. Flash Photo Galleries, Flash Calendars, Flash Web Charts, Password Protection, Guestbook, Google Analytics, SiteMaps and many other components are pre-built and easily integrated into any website.

To encourage the creation of more Web-based applications during the next several years, Google Inc. will invest in three key areas for developers, including opening up its servers to host their applications, encouraging pervasive connectivity to the Web, and making the browser more powerful, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, who gave the opening keynote speech at this year’s Google Developer Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“Google was born in the era of the Web,” Gundotra said. “It’s the only platform we’ve known. It was a platform that was formed by consensus. It was all of us collectively that agreed to a few standards. We feel a debt of gratitude toward that community.”

Gundotra conceded that Web developers working atop Google-provided development tools and servers would lead to remunerative opportunities for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. “As the Web gets bigger and enables better Web apps, it attracts more users. For us, more users means more Google searches, which leads to more revenue. But the money we make will get dumped back into the platform.

Developers praised the programming experience and the potential of Google’s Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference as the company emphasized its flexibility and showed cool new features.

There was a lot of buzz around Android at the conference, which covers all areas of Google development, and an “Introduction to Android” session was full. Google wants the technology to open up the mobile industry, where developers have faced hurdles getting applications ported to many different operating systems and approved by carriers. But Android will enter the fray as just one mobile platform among many, including the Apple iPhone SDK.

The latest prototype version of Android drew comparisons to the iPhone after it was demonstrated during a keynote session Wednesday morning. Google showed a home screen with colorful widgets similar to the Apple iPhone’s, plus a compass and a status bar that can be pulled down in any application to view messages. The compass, which could be built into a handset along with an accelerometer, would be able to orient maps according to which way the user was facing. As demonstrated with Google Maps Street View, it could show the exact view that a user was looking at, with street-name and address information built in to the map. Videos of the demonstrations were posted by the Android Community blog.

Aside from features on high-end phones, Android will reach far more people than the iPhone platform, if it meets its potential, said Atif Iqbal Chaudhry, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who attended the conference. The platform could be extended to inexpensive phones with a smaller set of capabilities for average consumers, he said.

Android is an easy way to begin developing a mobile application, because Google provides all the pieces required, unlike some other platforms, such as PalmOS, Chaudhry said. He has been developing location-based applications through the PC-based emulator software for Android and said he is looking forward to trying out the software in the field on a real handset.

Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance are pushing Android as more open than other mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Developers won’t need to get Android applications certified by anyone, Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen told the Android breakout session. In addition, there won’t be any hidden APIs accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators, he said.

Developers will also be able to modify core elements of the interface and come out with replacements for the basic building blocks that come with Android, such as the address book, Chen said. Even the look of the home-screen widgets will be customizable. For users, that will mean being able to control their own experience by downloading their favorite third-party versions, Chen said.

Google expects the first Android-based devices to hit the market in the second half of this year and will make the finished software platform available to developers after that, so anyone can create their own phone platform, Chen said. The core elements of it will be released under the Apache open-source license.

Until all parts of Android are complete, Google won’t start translating the platform and documentation into languages other than English, Chen said in response to a question. The team doesn’t want translations to lag behind the current information, he said. But he welcomed an attendee to help Spanish-speaking developers by translating materials or participating in message boards.

Developers praised the platform, in which applications are written in the Java programming language and then compiled for the Dalvik virtual machine.

“It’s sweet,” said Free Beachler, owner of Longevity Software, in Boulder, Colorado. Beachler wrote an entry for the Android Developer Challenge, a competition to find the 50 best Android applications. His software, designed to store itineraries, contacts, destinations and other travel information for users on their phones, didn’t make the top 50. But he’s working on two projects for Android Developer Challenge 2, which will take place after handsets are out and the platform are complete.

Beachler, a Web developer, said it took time to learn to use Android but once he did it was logically organized and easy to use. He compared it to languages such as PHP for Web development.

Enterprises are asking R Systems International, a software services company in El Dorado, California, to write applications that work on any mobile platform, said Harsh Verma, vice president for global innovative research at R Systems. One way to do this is on browsers, but there are problems with that, including differences among mobile browsers and the need for a network connection, he said. Verma hasn’t yet started working with Android but believes it could reach a broad range of devices.

The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.

Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.

In other words, the browser war the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the ’90s is heating up again.

“The typical browser for today’s consumer doesn’t look all that different than it did 10 years ago,” said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser start-up. “That is an unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war, which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation.”

America Online, which acquired Netscape, spun off the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Its Firefox browser soon inspired an open-source movement backed by computer enthusiasts. Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

Firefox now has 170 million users around the world and an 18 percent share of the browser market, according to Net Applications. That is especially impressive given that most of its users have made the active choice to download the software, while Internet Explorer is installed on most PCs at the factory.

In addition to giving Microsoft a kick in its competitive pants, Firefox has also reinforced for the high-tech industry the financial and strategic value of the browser. In 2004, Google struck a deal with Mozilla to include a Google search box tucked into a corner of the Firefox browser. According to Mozilla’s most recent tax documents, in 2006 Google paid Mozilla $65 million for the resulting traffic to its search listings.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Internet Explorer 8, from Microsoft, promises its own set of tricks. One new tool, Web slices, allows a user to bookmark a dynamic piece of a Web site, like an online auction or a sports score, and save it in the margin of the browser, where the user can watch as it changes.

Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping, e-mail or blogging service.

Asked whether Firefox’s increasing popularity had motivated these and other improvements, Mr. Hachamovitch of Microsoft said only, “We love to compete.” But he did say that amid the new competitive pressures, “the quality and quantity of my team has gone up significantly.”

His group will have one other company besides Mozilla to keep its eye on: Apple’s Safari Web browser has a little over 5 percent of the market, according to Net Applications, and subsists mostly on the loyalty of devoted Mac and iPhone owners.

But in March, deploying the kind of strategic jujitsu more commonly associated with Microsoft in the past, Apple began using the automatic update software that is packaged with its iTunes music player to deliver Safari onto the computers of people who use Windows. (Users had to specifically decline the Safari offer if they didn’t want the browser to be downloaded to their computers.)

The tactic irked even Apple fans in the blogosphere, along with Apple’s browser rivals. But it was at least partly successful: Net Applications reported that Apple’s market share on Windows computers had tripled since March.

In a statement released last month addressing the comments about the maneuver, Apple said it had made it easier for customers to distinguish minor updates from new programs delivered through the update software.

Apple’s boldness underscores the new importance of the Web browser in a world that is increasingly shifting online.

Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, which is developing a browser that helps users share photos, videos and blog entries more easily, said consumers would ultimately benefit from the new browser battle.

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Everything’s ready to go. Piles of 11 different kinds of shirts and pants for girls ages 5 to 12 sit stacked on shelves in RealKidz’s office in Ypsilanti’s Depot Town. Boxes, envelopes, tissue paper and clear plastic bags are nearby.

As of Friday, the company had made only one sale, to a Michigan woman who bought a pair of capri pants and a T-shirt. Though the company’s Web site, www.realkidzclothing.com, went live the evening of April 30, it has been plagued with glitches.

Only since Monday has it been operating trouble-free. Initially, the Web site will be the key driver of sales for the company.

Getting to this point wasn’t easy.

In late April, after an Illinois manufacturer had shipped the clothes, Guerra discovered that the inside bottom seams on one product, a pair of crop pants with cuffs, had not been sewn correctly. That meant sending back 100 pairs of pants.

Then, every time she thought her Web site was ready to go live, Guerra found things that needed to be fixed.

Late one evening, her babysitter called to tell her that the site had opened for business and was selling clothes for $0. Guerra frantically called a local Web site development company RealKidz had hired. Thankfully, no one had placed any orders.

And shortly after Guerra had sent out 219 e-mails to potential customers, someone tried to make a purchase and got an error message instead.

The Web site trouble “has been the big frustration of the last few weeks,” she said with a sigh. “I’m really frustrated with my Web developer.”

But the mishaps haven’t got the best of Guerra, RealKidz’s founder and chief executive. She plans to look for a new Web site development company and a new manufacturer.

“It’s stressful,” Guerra admitted in early May, days after she had graduated from the MBA program at the University of Michigan.

Aside from a onetime eBay sale of an outfit her son wore at a wedding, the 37-year-old has never sold any clothing online. Like other entrepreneurs, she is learning firsthand that simply putting up a Web site doesn’t mean customers will come.

To generate sales, RealKidz put flyers touting its clothes in the packets picked up by nearly 800 preteen girls who ran in a 5K Girls on the Run race in Grand Rapids on Thursday. Many participants were plus size.

RealKidz would like to develop a line of clothes for Girls on the Run, an international organization that helps preteen girls develop self-respect and healthy lifestyles through running.

The company also has begun to advertise on Google’s search engine, a marketing tactic used by many businesses.

So far, only a small number of people are landing on her Web site, but those who do are clicking on it.

In the long run, Guerra hopes the Internet won’t be the company’s biggest sales avenue. She plans to set up a network of independent sales representatives for her brand, which she said she believes will generate higher profit margins than going the wholesale-to-retail route.

Guerra knows network marketing. She worked as an Amway sales representative for five years and currently sells Silpada jewelry. She sees RealKidz’s clothes as a good fit with this sales method.

“My product has an extremely high emotional connection with people,” Guerra said, referring to the common struggle with weight issues. “Products that have an emotional connection work best.”

She dreams of the day when her network will be creating business opportunities for women, helping to change lives.

“I can’t wait to see stories like that,” she said.

Guerra is now trying to develop a compensation agreement for an experienced network marketer in Grand Rapids. The potential hire may become the company’s director of consultant development.

By June, Guerra hopes to begin recruiting sales representatives. Her business plans call for 18 representatives by the end of RealKidz’s first year.

To get her network off the ground, Guerra would like to hire a California consulting company that helps start-up network marketing companies with financial models and compensation agreement materials.

But the firm’s service initially costs about $10,000, money that RealKidz can’t afford to spend right now.

Guerra continues to hunt for more capital for her business. In mid-April, she spent 5 1/2 hours talking to the lead investor at BlueWater Angels, a group of wealthy individuals in the Midland area interested in investing seed money in promising start-up companies.

She met again with this investor Monday. This week, she will travel to Midland to make her second presentation to the group, hoping to persuade it to invest $200,000 in her business.

On Wednesday, Guerra met in Ypsilanti with a Chicago-based group of angel investors that focuses on women-owned businesses and is interested in RealKidz. But she’s uncertain whether they will be able to reach an agreement.

“I’m still stressed. It’s definitely hard for me to shut my brain at night,” Guerra said.

“But every week something really big and exciting happens that will help move this business forward.”

The company’s cash cushion has shrunk to $12,000. To keep her business going, Guerra hopes to quickly sell at least 200 pieces of clothing. That way, she will have enough cash to order more clothes and possibly add a line of shorts.

Her shirts sell for $22.50 for a short-sleeve T-shirt to $32 for a mock turtleneck jumper combination, with the pants going for $30 to $32 apiece. These aren’t Wal-Mart prices, but Guerra said she thinks mothers will be willing to pay a little more for clothes that fit their daughters.

Will she be right? Consumers are already reeling from soaring prices at gas pumps and supermarkets.