Web Development Live

All these languages and their associated tools and frameworks are fine and respectable tools. However, for this article, I’d like to focus on Adobe ColdFusion, an alternative language that actually predates most other web development languages. And, though ColdFusion predates many languages, it is far from being a lumbering dinosaur. In fact, ColdFusion has been whipped mercilessly by the forces of technological change and has evolved into a scrappy and tenacious survivor of a language.

ColdFusion has always focused on making complex and difficult tasks easy. The classic example of this is the ease of querying databases. In most languages you need to have several lines of code to establish a connection to a database server, several lines to build your SQL statement, a couple lines to send the request, more to close the connection and then several more lines of code just to output data from the query into an HTML list However, early versions of ColdFusion consolidated most of this tedious process into one tag that wraps the SQL statement you’re running and one tag that iterates over results.

Helpstream, a leading provider of on-demand collaborative customer service solutions, today announced the general availability of the Helpstream Summer 2008 release, which contains over 130 enhancements to help companies understand customer attitudes, tap into community knowledge, and build winning relationships. By further integrating case management, knowledge management, and community collaboration, companies can leverage the power and familiarity of the Web to engage their customers in a rich, collaborative self service experience.

“Many companies turn to call deflection as a way to deal with increasing service demand, but in doing so they fail to engage the customer at a point where their attitudes and needs are conspicuously obvious,” said Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. “By placing Community at the forefront of customer service, Helpstream enables anyone in a company or its community to be an effective customer service agent. This truly modern approach significantly expands the pool of knowledge available to each user by leveraging the Internet for what it does best connecting people to information quickly and effectively.”

The challenge for many companies is that their interaction with customers is too often one dimensional centered on resolving issues and ending the interaction. Consumer familiarity with Web 2.0 tools has led to higher expectations. Helpstream provides a convenient and affordable alternative to this one-size-fits-all service approach and helps companies embrace the web-enabled world to build customer loyalty through relationships.

Helpstream is an approachable application designed to engage users in a company’s customer community with an easy to learn and use interface, while offering internal service organizations the same benefits combined with ease of administration and a low cost deployment model.

The Helpstream Summer 2008 release continues to build on this idea by leveraging end-user familiarity with common office productivity tools, such as email and calendaring software.

Brigham Young famously wanted streets wide enough to turn a team of horses and wagon in, and the superblocks were designed to be neatly divided into plots that would give the settlers enough land to grow crops, have an orchard and sustain themselves.

Few wagon trains are pulling U-turns in downtown Salt Lake these days, and the office buildings and parking lots don’t leave much room for fruit trees. And even the most meticulously planned community loses its luster over time and needs some modernizing especially if the alternative for new investment is not unsettled wilderness but the growing suburbs and towns strung along the Wasatch front.

So Salt Lake is embarking on a major redevelopment effort under an umbrella plan called Downtown Rising in which nearly $2 billion will be invested in new offices, residential and retail buildings, arts, culture and governmental facilities and transit projects.

There’s a Seattle component to this. Seattle-based architecture firm Callison is a participant in one of downtown Salt Lake’s biggest projects, City Creek, a 20-acre mixed-use project across the street from Temple Square.

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom was one of the drivers behind the redevelopment effort generally and City Creek in particular.

“Frankly, the heart of downtown has for the last 20 years been slipping into a worse state of repair,” says Callison principal Stan Laegreid. “It was turning into quite a liability. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.” As a downtown tenant with a lease nearing its end, Nordstrom was “watching the value of a downtown and a commercial market just steadily slip away.” The retailer was reluctant to stay unless “there was a larger commitment to turn downtown around.”

Beyond those specifics, Salt Lake’s efforts to rejuvenate its downtown have some interesting parallels and contrasts for Seattle as it considers its own redevelopment efforts in places such as South Lake Union, south downtown and Sodo.

Salt Lake and Seattle are hardly alone among western U.S. cities considering large-scale redevelopments that involve millions of dollars in investment and years of planning and wrangling. Some cities get a blank canvas to work with in the form of abandoned rail yards that cover acres of potentially prime developable real estate. Sacramento, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Spokane are in varying stages of rail-yard redevelopment projects. Renton is working with former Boeing property near Lake Washington. Yakima is looking at what it can do with a former sawmill.

Salt Lake differs somewhat in that it’s trying to work a somewhat coordinated plan into and around an existing downtown, although Laegreid says there’s actually considerable open property in the downtown core.

But the biggest difference between Salt Lake and Seattle is the influence and participation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temple Square is at the physical heart of downtown, drawing visitors as both a religious center and tourist destination.

“They have deliberately spearheaded this effort,” Laegreid says. “That introduces a dynamic and a patronage in the process that very few cities have. That was a big trigger in allowing this to happen.”

Contrast that with development efforts in Seattle. One striking feature about Downtown Rising is the breadth of business sector and governmental participation in a shared plan for downtown. With Seattle’s fractious political scene, very little gets done in a coordinated fashion unless, of course, a private developer such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan in South Lake Union has the size and drive to come up with a large-scale redevelopment plan on its own and push it to reality.

Not that having such an influential partner meant immediate unanimity in Salt Lake. “There still were a lot of vested parties that collectively had to share a vision,” Laegreid says. Once the first ideas were floated, human nature took over. “Everyone’s got opinions,” he says. “There was a certain amount of compromising, everyone getting their voices heard.” Although Salt Lake isn’t as consensus-crazy as Seattle, “given the high profile of the project, it started to feel much more like a Seattle” process.

Announced IBM Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web with which non-technical business people can use to experiment and build customized mashups following the success of early corporate adopters Boeing Corporation (NYSE: BA) and Carrefour Group (PARIS: CA).

On schedule for mid-year delivery, the IBM Mashup Center allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively. Using IBM’s mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

In the coming weeks, IBM will offer customers the opportunity to experiment with IBM Mashup Center and gain hands on experience for free through IBM Lotus Greenhouse. Lotus Greenhouse is a Web site where anyone can register and try out IBM Mashup Center, and many other collaborative products, such as IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and WebSphere Portal. IBM Mashup Center will be hosted on Greenhouse, giving customers a safe environment to try the technology and evaluate mashup potential without installing anything in their own environment. The hosted version of IBM Mashup Center will include widgets from IBM, and a growing network of IBM Mashup Center Business Partners, like StrikeIron and Kapow Technologies.

This comes at a time in which innovative companies of every size are beginning to realize the possibilities of Web 2.0, but require security, management and governance capabilities to responsibly take advantage of these possibilities. IBM Mashup Center gives users the freedom to create new, light weight applications on the fly and get customized views of disparate information, but with the stability corporations require. IBM’s deep history in open standards, information integration and emerging Internet technologies, make the company an undeniably strong partner in a new technology era.

“As an established innovator, Boeing believes in the power of Web 2.0 and embraces it not only for collaborative work, but also for the heavy lifting of enterprise planning and execution,” said Paul Comitz, Program Manager, NEO Demonstration, Boeing Corp. “The IBM Mashup Center is playing a key role in our visionary approach to strategic asset management. It’s critical to know where your major assets are and how to use them at any given time, situation or condition.”

IBM Mashup Center breaks new ground in ease of use and speed at which business users can solve everyday business problems in any size enterprise. It includes an intuitive browser based tool to easily assemble of new mashups, thus allowing non technical users anyone in a business to literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to easily create, deploy and share customized Web applications in minutes.

This upcoming offering includes a set of out of the box, business ready widgets, as well as a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups. To create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center includes an easy-to-use development environment to construct new widgets from enterprise systems and the Web. Users can also take advantage of built-in Web 2.0 community features like ratings, tagging and commenting to guide users the to the most valuable and useful widgets.

IBM Mashup Center also provides extensive and powerful capabilities for managing information feeds from enterprise sources. Information from a wide variety of sources can be mixed, filtered and mashed together to create new information sources and output in many different forms, such as RSS, ATOM or XML. With the ability to merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats, IBM Mashup Center helps create a single view of disparate sets of information in a highly re-usable manner. Feeds are an easy way to service-enable systems that do not natively provide RESTful interfaces, and thus provide an on-ramp for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

As enterprise mashups continue to climb in popularity and deliver more value for business, IBM is working with an ecosystem of Business Partners to help customers get the most out of situational applications. IBM Business Partners such as Jibes, JustSystems, Kapow Technologies and StrikeIron are introducing solutions that, when combined with IBM Mashup Center, enable rapid access to information and new and compelling uses for new types of data.

For example, IBM Mashup Center users can easily connect to data in the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace to reduce the complexity for developers or business users who want to integrate live data from a number of sources. In addition, by connecting to StrikeIron’s Lite services, users can create demos to show how easily live data can be integrated with a mashup to create powerful Web applications without having to register or purchase the service.

Jibes demonstrates the business value of mashups in the enterprise market by providing industry-specific information fabrics for the semi-conductor, airline and media industries on top of IBM Mashup Center. JustSystems provides a rich presentation layer for information accessed by IBM Mashup Center, allowing users to interact with dynamic, or living, documents that combine static and dynamic information. Together, this enables new uses for enterprise mashups such as the sharing of design and development information across collaborative research, or for use by development teams for reconciling supply and demand among trading partners.

An on-premise version of IBM Mashup Center is expected to be delivered mid-year, and pricing details will be made public at that time.

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.

Sitting on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The two camps, known as WiMax and LTE, for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

Undeterred, Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

“Our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing a signal,” he says. “We believe WiMax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.”

Varsavsky has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, California, last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

Hosted by Informative Research, the Garden Grove, Calif.-based credit reporting agency responsible for engineering and supporting OriginatorDirect, the demonstration will give attendees an opportunity to “test-drive” the technology and experience its functionality from both administrative and customer perspectives. Donovan Williams, a board member of the National Credit Reporting Association, will lead a question and answer session following the demo.

Launched in early 2008, the OriginatorDirect platform enables mid-sized, credit reporting agencies (CRAs) to access and share advanced credit reporting technology through their own private-label Web portal, without paying licensing fees or altering their workflow.

It also provides CRAs with a direct credit connection to Fannie Mae(R), and lets them give their broker customers instant, direct access to tradeline verifications, flood determinations, mortgage fraud insurance, automated property valuation and other mortgage-related services, while virtually eliminating associated development costs.

Highlights of the June 18th demonstration will include a complete tour of Originator Direct’s back office processing system, and a “customer’s-eye view” of the CRA’s ordering interface. The session will conclude with a breakout during which attendees can analyze potential cost savings of the new technology.

Environmentally friendly technologies are being developed to address a myriad of global challenges, including the need for alternate fuel sources, better drinking water treatment, and air quality improvements. Investment in the cleantech space is indicative of the increased attention to green innovation venture capital investment alone in this category has been estimated at $5 billion. Therefore, the Web Development Prices advancement of these technologies is of significant interest to business and the public at large.

When the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) launched the Eco-Patent Commons, it appeared to be a win for the “green movement.” IBM, Sony, Pitney-Bowes and Nokia are among the companies who have already donated patents to the initiative, doing their part to protect the environment by aiding and promoting innovation in this sector.

For those unfamiliar with the Eco-Patent Commons, it is an initiative to build an online, searchable repository for patents that are donated by companies for royalty-free use by anyone, without need for a license or purchase. The only limitation for the donated patents is that they should provide “environmental benefit” either directly (such as an air emissions treatment technology), or indirectly (such as a more energy efficient manufacturing process). The objective is to promote technology and innovation sharing and environmental improvement through the free use of these inventions.

However, the Eco-Patent Commons itself is in need of some innovation if it truly hopes to accomplish its goal: sharing useful environmental technologies for “the Web Development Prices greater good.” The current initiative consists only of patented technologies, which, due to the lengthy patent process, are minimally several years old and may no longer be cutting edge. As an illustration, the most recent patent of the 31 currently offered in the Eco-Patent Commons is 7,251,458, from Nokia: “Systems and methods for recycling of cell phones at the end of life.” Although this patent was issued on July 31, 2007, it was actually filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on May 23, 2003. This invention, the newest of the Eco-Patent Common offerings, is almost five years old already.

How can a recently issued patent possibly be “old technology”? It is simply a result of the overwhelming number of inventions the USPTO reviews annually for patents. Statistics available on the USPTO Web site reveal that approximately 426,000 utility patent applications were submitted in 2006, representing nine percent growth over the previous year’s submittals. A patent application routinely requires at least two years to go through the examination process, and can require much longer depending on specific patent prosecution issues.

The sluggish nature of the patent system means that even the best intentions of a company that donates environmentally beneficial patents to the Eco-Patent Commons cannot compensate for the age of the invention, which likely has become less relevant with time. As a result, these patents may have little value to any company, despite their free availability through the Eco-Patent Commons. In addition, it is clear that the donating company did not find the patent to have Web Development Prices compelling competitive advantage for them, or they would not have donated it to begin with, so why would any other company necessarily find value in the donated patent?

To compensate for these drawbacks and make the Eco-Patent Commons as useful and powerful as it can be, the initiative requires expansion to offer truly recent inventions that have not spent years in the patent application process. This involves widening the scope of the initiative to include non-patented inventions that have yet to be marketed and made public.

One way to make these inventions available is through enabled invention disclosures. An enabled invention disclosure (also called “defensive publication” or “technical bulletin”) is a written description of an invention that ideally has the same degree of detail as an issued patent. Therefore a well-written invention disclosure provides sufficient information to the reader to understand and use the invention.

Many companies successfully use enabled invention disclosures as part of their intellectual property (IP) strategies. Companies frequently have inventions that they do not wish to patent because the patent process is so expensive, including invention development costs, legal preparation and patent prosecution fees. However, companies also wish to prevent competitors from patenting those same inventions.

By using enabled invention disclosures to publish the invention, companies accomplish both goals: they save the cost of patenting but they also establish a “prior art bar” to obtaining the patent and make it impossible for competitors to claim it the invention as their own. Several Web site forums exist for publishing inventions, including www.ip.com and www.researchdisclosure.com.

The Eco-Patent Commons should be expanded to include these enabled invention disclosures. Many inventions that companies deem non-strategic for patent application and instead decide to publish may be excellent candidates to be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons. These published inventions would be truly new, fresh and useful — a good first step to creating the true springboard for green innovation that the Eco-Patent Commons was meant to be.

Companies wishing to donate inventions to the Eco-Patent Commons can also do their part to move the initiative closer to its goal of widespread environmental technology sharing and innovation. The Eco-Patent Commons is a golden opportunity for companies to “give back” positively to the global community by donating environmentally beneficial inventions — and build a reputation as an eco-friendly brand in the process. To take full advantage of this opportunity, companies could add incentives to their R&D and product development processes to help increase the numbers of environmentally friendly inventions created and considered for use or donation, thus building the company brand and image among both consumers and investors/shareholders as a socially responsible organization.

And developing an environmentally driven invention process is not as difficult as it sounds. Strategies already exist to create new inventions specifically aimed toward environmental benefits, and for the past 10 years my company, ipCapital Group, has been successfully using just such a process. Our Invention on Demand (IOD) process for “directed invention” has been used across a wide variety of technology areas, including the greentech space. By implementing IOD, ipCapital’s client companies have invented unique solutions and technologies that address a myriad of problems. In fact, IOD can even be used to build and improve upon the already donated patents in the Eco-Patent Commons and bring those inventions up to date.

The creative mind has the Web Development Prices capability to develop both the ideas and processes to solve the innumerable environmental problems that threaten our planet, but only through invention-sharing initiatives like the Eco-Patent Commons can we hope to channel environmental innovation to make a lasting impact for future generations. However, the above improvements are needed if the Eco-Patent Commons hopes to have a truly meaningful impact in the greentech space.

Nancy Edwards Cronin is a Principal Partner of ipCapital Group, an intellectual property consulting firm based in Williston, Vt. With more than 15 years of consulting experience, Nancy serves as an advisor to companies that wish to maximize value using IP, optimize the use of IP in product/service development and business transactions, establish strategic IP positions against competitors, and implement intellectual asset management (IAM) programs. She focuses her efforts in industries such as energy and environmental technology, chemical manufacturing, consumer products, electronics, construction and building materials, medical devices, printing, and semiconductors.

Everyone knows the Web has come a long way since its early days, and one of the most changed areas has to be e-commerce. A landscape once dominated by boutique, Web-only shops, sparsely populated with shoppers, is now home to every major retailer and corporation on the planet. Selling goods on the Web has become huge business.

Many companies’ fortes, however, are in brick and mortar storefronts. For others, the only selling they have done is wholesale to retailers; selling direct to end-customers just wasn’t an option. They would love to take advantage of the Web Development Classes additional sales channels the Web opens up, but time and money spent building a e-commerce applications, as well as the high-availability, highly scalable environment needed to run them, is time and money that could be spent on core business processes. If only there was somebody to handle the legwork of building, managing and housing such an application …

For big companies that need enterprise-class e-commerce applications, that somebody is Demandware. Based in Woburn, Mass., Demandware offers an on-demand e-commerce application that customers use to service their consumer-facing needs.  According to Vice President of Engineering and Technology Wayne Whitcomb, the company’s platform is like licensed enterprise software that customers can customize, extend and Web Development Classes integrate as they wish, but without the burdens of development or delivery via computing resources.

As opposed to the old ASP model of hosting applications, though, where everything was individually managed and quarantined, Whitcomb says Demandware’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform allows the company to deliver new features and innovations “all the time, to all customers.” Being able to roll out these updates across the customer board is very important, too, because Demandware’s customers are large retail brands facing substantial competitive pressures. The demands of being a real-time business, finicky customers trends, aggressive competition and the need to drive customer loyalty via the Web site make for a situation where retailers not only need a high-performance, highly available solution, but also one that is constantly evolving.

“Normally in an enterprise application, for reliability, security and stability, you’d want to minimize change as much as possible,” says Whitcomb. “However, the [e-commerce] market demand and consumer demands are exactly opposite that. They push for frequent change, innovation and dealing with unpredictable consumer traffic at the Web Development Classes same time.”

Perhaps this necessary combination of both application and platform innovation is the reason Whitcomb says Demandware has little to no competition in the high-end e-commerce market. SaaS options like Amazon WebStore and eBay ProStores work for the low end, he noted, but just are not designed to handle larger companies’ needs in terms of branding, customer experience and scale.

To ensure it can deliver adequate capacity, scalability, reliability and security, Demandware chose to build a closely coupled grid computing delivery platform for its application. The platform is comprised of a series of PODs (points of delivery), which Whitcomb explains as e-commerce appliances with packaged compute capacity that Demandware deploys to tier 1 datacenters globally. The company directly manages those PODs, as well as the customer environment, sandbox development environments, integrated test environments, pre-production staging and production environments, all of which are isolated from one another within the Demandware grid. “To effectively manage all of those environments requires a lot of automation and a lot of flexibility of the delivery platform that really can only be provided through grid computing techniques,” Whitcomb says.

As for the nuts and bolts of the grid, Whitcomb says blades, each of one of which is imparted with a persona, handle the computing. Each blade’s persona determines how it will participate in the grid, and the persona model allows Demandware to envision how customer environments will utilize that capacity. Customer environments can be flexed to meet significant changes in demand (e.g, 10:1) in a matter of minutes, said Whitcomb. Computing resources within the grid are pooled using Demandware’s internally developed virtualization software.

A flexible, dedicated grid delivery platform is necessary, says Whitcomb, because the alternatives are either economically or pragmatically infeasible. Whereas Demandware can invest heavily in research and development of the platform because the company derives value from the grid across its customer base, it would be difficult for those customers to make such investments individually.

Among Demandware’s most interesting customers, in terms of use, is Bare Escentuals. A purveyor of “healthy” makeup, Bare Escentuals does a lot of marketing through print, electronic media and television (in the form of infomercials). Thanks in large part to the latter, Whitcomb says Bare Escentuals’ Web traffic varies unpredictably and at factors as high as 10x. Bare Escentuals also populates its site with a fair amount of rich media, a practice that is facilitated through Demandware’s use of Akamai’s content distribution technology.

Apparel company Timberland also utilizes Demandware to manage sites across several geographies and lines of business, all without needing to toil with infrastructure or application development. Whitcomb is especially proud that HP, a company with “all the resources in the world,” also sees tremendous value in using Demandware. Other customers include Playmobil, Sally Beauty Supply, Gardener’s Supply Co. and Playboy.com.

Although he believes that all applications that share core or common requirements will eventually find their ways into an on-demand delivery model, Whitcomb acknowledges that such models do bring with Web Development Classes them a certain degree of difficulty for the provider. These challenges include integration with legacy backend systems and third-party services, letting customers have control over the elements they want to control, and keeping the application current and reliable.

“The dimensions of that make it a real challenge to serve the enterprise,” says Whitcomb. “The enterprises certainly want it — they’re crying for it — and I think it’s up to the market to deliver against those strong needs. Demandware proves that, at least in the e-commerce market, it can be done.”

Seeds of Hope plans to build a new 4,200-square-foot community center on Casa Grande’s west side and organizers have begun a capital campaign to raise the $600,000 needed for the project.

The campaign will be a focal point during Seeds of Hope’s annual fundraising dinner on April 25, as the nonprofit agency celebrates its history and future in Casa Grande. John Perkins, president of the John Perkins Foundation and the inspiration for Seeds of Hope in Casa Grande, will be the keynote speaker for the event.

“His message that evening will be on developing self-sufficiency in local neighborhoods,” said Mark Vanderheyden, executive director for Seeds of Hope. “He hopes to inspire pastors, churches, business leaders and individuals to become an active part in what Seeds of Hope is doing on the west side of Casa Grande.”

Seeds of Hope is a faith-based organization with a mission of breaking the cycle of poverty while strengthening communities. It started in Casa Grande in 1992 and operates out of an 1,100-square-foot, single-family house on Melrose Drive, where Web Development Software it runs an after-school program for neighborhood children between the ages of 5 and 12. Seeds of Hope also has a peer leadership program and literacy classes and provides activities and support for grandparents raising their grandchildren. It also operates a six-day-a-week hot lunch program for the homeless, disabled and working poor, serving up about 11,000 meals annually.

A new tax preparation assistance program, VITA, which started this year in partnership with United Way of Pinal County, helped 132 residents with free tax filing services. VITA resulted in an estimated savings of $13,200 in avoided tax preparation fees, according to Vanderheyden.

Through its various programs and services, Seeds of Hope impacts the lives of thousands of Casa Grande residents ranging from the homeless, school children and seniors, Vanderheyden said.

Establishing a facility in a neighborhood where it is needed is part of Seeds of Hope’s success, he added.

“The idea is go to those neighborhoods, rather than having people come to us, and have the people tell us what they need,” Vanderheyden said.

While community needs have increased over the years, Seeds of Hope’s resources have not and its current accommodations have become inadequate to efficiently serve its clients. A small kitchen at its current site makes it difficult to prepare snacks for children in the after-school program. The four bedrooms restrict the number of people who can participate in activities and an awkward layout makes it difficult for too many people to move around the house at one time. As well, being an older house, the current community center is in constant need of maintenance and repair, Vanderheyden said.

The new community center will be in Albert Cruz Park and Seeds of Hope has negotiated a 50-year agreement with the city of Casa Grande that allows the organization to pay a nominal fee to lease the land and construct the building.

It is to be designed with an open meeting area, a large kitchen with an adjoining dining area and four large classrooms, which will allow different programs to operate simultaneously. Its location in the city park will allow children at the center access to the playground and open space areas.

With those features, Web Development Software Seeds of Hope plans to add additional programs to accommodate broader community needs.

“This multigenerational facility will allow Seeds of Hope to expand and collaborate with other churches and organizations in bringing additional services to the west side,” Vanderheyden said.

The organization has raised about $100,000 toward the new building and hopes to raise another $500,000 by June. Vanderheyden knows the goal will be a tough one to achieve.

“There are other campaigns going on, other organizations trying to raise money,” he said. “We’re going along on faith.”

The theme for this year’s fundraising dinner is “Planting Seeds - Building Hope,” which Vanderheyden said illustrates Seeds of Hope’s wholistic approach to community development that not only attempts to lift people out of poverty but encourages young people to stay in the community once they have grown and to use their education and talents locally.

“Seeds of Hope is about building relationships and raising up leaders in the neighborhood,” Vanderheyden said.

To help celebrate the organization’s accomplishments, Perkins will return to Casa Grande and talk about how communities nationwide have come together in addressing community development and racial reconciliation through churches.

Perkins is an international speaker on racial reconciliation, leadership and community development. He has dedicated his life to ministering to the poor and in 1960 founded several community development projects including low-income housing, child care centers, adult education programs, cooperative farming programs, thrift stores, health centers and others. He is the founder and board chairman of the Christian Community Development Association and has written six books and many articles and has lectured at more than 150 colleges.

Vanderheyden said that the keynote speech is aimed at delivering a powerful message and encouraging cooperation in bringing about and sustaining changes in the community.

Music for the dinner will be presented by the Greater Evangelistic Temple Choir and the Seeds of Hope children’s choir directed by Mary Vandervort. Several businesses have donated door prizes for the event.