Web Development Live

Announced that performance and availability views from F5 Networks, Inc. devices are now available in the NetQoS Performance Center. The integration provides real-time performance metrics in a single Web-based management console supporting multiple devices from F5, the global leader in Application Delivery Networking. In addition to ease of access and strengthened security, joint customers will benefit from the NetQoS Performance Center’s analysis and alerting capabilities to more quickly address network problems and improve application delivery across the network.

“F5 devices are a critical component of the application delivery infrastructure that network, operations, and infrastructure personnel must optimize to keep their businesses running smoothly,” said Jim Ritchings, vice president of business development at F5. “By integrating with F5, NetQoS can help simplify the increasingly complex challenge of monitoring network and application performance across an organization. For joint customers this means a single view into an unlimited number of F5 devices and detailed performance metrics delivered in real time through the NetQoS Performance Center.”

The NetQoS Performance Center delivers the most comprehensive performance visibility available for the F5(R) BIG-IP(R) Local Traffic Manager(TM) and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager(TM) solutions. The combination enables IT professionals to better plan investments in new content delivery hardware, accurately size and configure new IT deployments, verify the impact investments have on application delivery, and solve performance issues in complex data center environments.

“Customers have been requesting that NetQoS integrate F5 statistics into the NetQoS Performance Center for a more comprehensive view of network and application performance across an organization,” said Gordon Daugherty, senior vice president of corporate development for NetQoS. “By incorporating the performance and availability metrics from F5 devices, the NetQoS Performance Center will help joint customers solve problems faster and make more informed decisions in infrastructure changes and capacity planning.”

Texas’ community colleges offer more than just basic classes for students hoping to enter the technical workforce or transfer to a four-year university. The colleges also offer capstone courses that prove a graduate’s expertise in a particular field.

A mandate issued by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires students studying workforce-related industries such as business studies, health sciences, advanced technologies and applied technology at Austin Community College and other Texas community colleges to enroll in a capstone class.

The class consolidates two years’ worth of education in a particular field at a community college into a class, group, portofolio or individual project, or a final exam that is completed during the student’s graduating semester, said Mike Midgley, ACC’s vice president of workforce education and business development.

ACC video game development students are required to complete a capstone project in the form of an art portfolio or design project pertaining to the student’s field, Zuzolo said.

He said the gaming program’s capstone courses allow students to show their proficiency and capability in developing video games. The projects produced in the course make up a portfolio and help secure positions in the industry, Zuzolo said.

For his capstone project in Webmaster design, ACC alumnus Bob Million showcased his skill in Web page design by launching two Web sites.

Million received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and management from ACC before entering the school’s Web site design program. Million owns Million Design Group, an Austin-based Web site design company.

“I wanted to learn specific skills from the program,” Million said. “From the courses I took and the projects I completed with ACC, I had the skills to start my own business.”

Capstone courses are also a common requirement for undergraduates and graduates at four-year universities and institutions, which officials and professors say help culminate students’ academic experience.

UT School of Information graduate students must complete a capstone class in their final semester, which integrates the students’ professional education and specific area of study.

Information studies graduate student Adam Knowles said the program is similar to an internship. Graduate students find positions at an institution where they can assimilate into their vocational environment.

Jaduka has expanded its enterprise, voice and transaction services team with the appointment of telecommunications and Internet industry veteran Patrick Murphy as Vice President of Business Development.

Mr. Murphy has eighteen years of business development, sales, and management experience in the telecommunications and Internet industries. In 2007, he co-founded and served as chief operating officer at The Thomas Howe Company, the industry’s first voice mash-up consultancy. At Thomas Howe, Murphy advised clients on the integration of real-time communications technologies into business processes. During his tenure, Thomas Howe was recognized as one of the most influential voices in the VoIP industry.

Jaduka President Jack Rynes said, “Jaduka technology innovation, network reliability and telecom experience are driving rapid adoption of our voice and transaction services. Patrick Murphy brings those same qualities innovation, reliability and experience to our business development team. We’re delighted to welcome him to Jaduka.”

Jaduka Vice President of Business Development Patrick Murphy added, “I’m delighted to be working at Jaduka. Their APIs and carrier-grade telco infrastructure, in my view, represent the defacto standard for integrating voice mash-ups and communications enabled business processes (CEBP) into enterprise applications.”

Mr. Murphy shares his expertise through blogs and speaks at industry events on topics including voice mash-ups, CEBP, and enterprise 2.0. He also serves on the Boards of several companies.

THIS week MySpace will unveil the biggest website redesign the company has ever undertaken.

After a year of development and planning, the social network will roll out a series of new features designed to simplify the user experience, starting this Wednesday.

Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand, said a lot of the changes were based on user messages sent to MySpace founder and first friend of every new user Tom Anderson.

Domains in Hong Kong, China and the Philippines have been named as the most potentially dangerous on the web.

A recent report by security firm McAfee found that the three nations had the highest percentage of malicious sites within their domain suffixes.

Researchers estimated that roughly 19 per cent of all sites ending with the .hk suffix posed some sort of security threat. Second place was China’s .cn with 11 per cent posing a security risk.

“Just like the real world, the virtual threats and risks are constantly changing,” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of product development at McAfee.

“As our research shows, sites that are safe today can be dangerous tomorrow. Surfing the web based on conventional wisdom is not enough to avoid risks.”

The .com domain, the most popular on the internet, was ninth riskiest overall, while .gov was the safest among the generic domains.

Finland’s .fi was ranked as the safest on the internet, with .05 per cent of sites posing a possible threat. Japan’s .jp and Norway’s .no rounded out the list of the three safest domains.

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.

7strategy, a Kansas City-based full service web design and development firm announced today that 7strategy has been honored as the Top 10 Most Dependable Web Design Firms, by Goldline Research.

Goldline made the announcement with a feature of 7strategy in Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine. Firms were first selected and pre-screened using private and public sources. Research of the initially chosen web design companies took place over several months and the final list was later refined using specific criteria including: customer satisfaction surveys, number of clients, productivity measurements and client references.

Ted Paff, Goldline Research President says, “Being selected for The 10 Most Dependable list clearly sets these companies apart from their competitors. Companies on The 10 Most Dependable list are considered high-quality companies that have achieved a level of excellence in customer service and professionalism.”

7strategy Vice President of Business Development, Rasvir Mustan says, “We’re proud to have received this award - and is a real testament to our team’s capabilities and the trust we’ve established with our clients. This kind of ranking,” continued Mustan, “will help strategically position 7strategy for future growth and competitive advantage.”

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.

Speaking at the annual Thinking Digital IT conference in Gateshead, representatives from handset manufacturers and mobile operators argued that flat rate tariffs, greater interoperability and new technologies like GPS have accelerated usage and spurred the a new dawn for the mobile web

“This is the second chance for everyone to deliver on the promise of the late 90s,” said mobile strategist and ex-O2 executive, Bradley de Souza.

“Then, it was premature from a technology perspective, the marketing didn’t line up with what was being delivered and although there was collaboration from the developer community, the stars didn’t align.”

Mark Selby, vice president of sales and industry collaboration at Nokia, argued that the operators’ walled garden approach to browsing is also collapsing, leading to greater take-up of the mobile web. Some Nokia figures point to data usage on smart phones nearing 90 percent of total usage, he added.

“Our research shows that the amount of time people are browsing, accessing and uploading content is incredible,” said Selby.

Others commented that good content holds the key to the success of the mobile web. Vikesh Patel, European general manager for products at Motorola, said that uptake will rocket “if you get the content right and people want it”.

“There are a lot of people [in the industry] with different opinions,” he added. “The network operators don’t want to be just bit pipes but it really needs developers to feed the ecosystem to grow it.”

De Souza argued that mobile platform providers and other stakeholders need to be more open in order to facilitate and encourage the developer community.

“On the Symbian platform the developers can’t even get their test apps onto users’ phones to gauge their usability,” he added. “Microsoft has done well to [encourage openness] but it’s not well structured.”

Gerhard Grech, director of strategy and business development at Orange, agreed that content is king on the mobile, but argued that simplifying the presentation and accessibility to that content will be key to its popularity.

“You need to do something completely different in the way you present that content,” he explained. “Widgets are a good hybrid [technology] to catch people’s imagination – it’s where the interface, browser and service all comes together in a very compelling way.”

Motorola’s Patel added that widgets are a “great way to cut through the layers of menu” and open up the mobile web to users.

The Denison Development Alliance has partnered with another industry, helping it relocate to the city this week.

Scott Smathers, DDA vice president, said Fattowels Inc. will move its production and its five employees from Dallas to Denison, locating in a building off FM 84 at Juanita Drive. Fattowels, Smathers said, is a small industry that provides embroidering on towels for large corporations, such as the Hilton hotel chain. Their product is sold through their Web site, and by contract, but could someday have a retail operation in Denison.

The company has signed a two-year lease on its building, Smathers said, and will look toward building its own facility shortly after. The industry will begin its embroidering work in August or September.