Web Development Live

Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the Web Development JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

Road maps were detailed for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 7. Java SE serves as a base Java platform, with the Enterprise version adding enterprise-level capabilities.

With Java EE 6, Sun seeks to increase flexibility in implementing the platform.

“For EE 6, the theme is what I like to call ‘rightsizing,’ which essentially means making the platform the right size for you,” said Roberto Chinnici, Java EE platform lead at Sun.

With version 6, profiles will be created based on specific needs, such as a Web profile focused on Web developers, Chinnici said. The Web Development profile is not fully defined yet, but will feature technologies that appear in the vast majority of Web applications. Other profiles are expected such as a telecommunications profile that features SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) services.

Profiles can be created by filing a Java Specification Request as part of the Java Community Process, according to Chinnici.

Also planned is a pruning process by which certain parts of the Java platform can be made optional. “The typical candidate is those technologies that have been Web Development superseded effectively by new ones,” said Chinnici, citing JAX RPC and Entity Beans as candidates for pruning.

Scripting languages will be made first-class citizens on the Java platform as well. Web development will be made easier through annotations across Web APIs. Developers should see a reduced need to edit web.xml descriptors. Third-party libraries will self-register, removing a common source of errors for developers.

Another feature of version 6 is an API for REST-ful (Representational State Transfer) Web services. “We felt we need a new API entirely focused on them,” Chinnici said.

Enterprise JavaBeans can go inside a Web application via version 6, removing the need for Web Development nested packaging.

There is no specific release date yet for Java EE 6, although it has been anticipated for later this year.

Big-D Construction, a Salt Lake City-based construction management company, named Gifford Briggs project development manager of its Lindon office. Briggs will oversee all marketing and project proposals, management of project pre-construction, and will be involved in all other aspects of business development.

Briggs, who holds a bachelor’s degree in construction management with a minor in business management from Brigham Young University, has worked in many different areas of the construction industry for the past 10 years — five of which have been at Big-D. He had served in the commercial construction sector as a project engineer, estimator, marketing manager, senior project manager and project development manager.

SLC advertising firm adds two workers — Love Communications, a Salt Lake City-based advertising agency, added two employees to its interactive services division. Jared McPherson was hired as its motion graphics designer and Mike Dodge, its Web developer.

McPherson will specialize in developing Web sites, banners and CD interfaces in media campaigns as well as in front-end Web development. Before joining Love Communications, McPherson was a motion graphics designer for McCann-Erickson. Dodge will be responsible for Web and IT solutions for the agency’s clients. Before joining the agency, Dodge was the Web developer for Clear Link Technologies, where he built Web application servers and managed highly sensitive and complex information relating to upcoming company projects. Prior to that, Dodge taught Web development at Brigham Young University.

BYU’s Romney Institute honors humanitarian — Carolyn Grow Dailey, president and CEO of Ascend Alliance, a Holladay-based humanitarian group, was named 2008 Administrator of the Year by Brigham Young University’s Romney Institute of Public Management. The award is given annually to an individual who has achieved distinction after many years of management in the public or nonprofit sector.

In her 17 years as an international humanitarian executive, Dailey has organized community development programs and leading internships. As president and CEO of Ascend, Dailey helps combat poverty in developing countries by implementing programs in education, enterprise, health and technology. She has previously served as CEO of Choice Humanitarian.

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75 per cent of
net surfers (although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has
never been close to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s
poor standards compliance causes significant extra work for web
designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75% of net surfers
(although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has never been close
to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s poor standards
compliance causes significant extra work for web designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

Danny Beckett and Sarah La Fave have busy lives. They’re both full-time college students—he at Cornerstone, she at GVSU. And together they run a thriving web development business that has expanded from two to ten people and garnered $250,000 in sales in just seven months.

The business, Spearia, focuses on web development and online marketing for clients, and their own product development.

“We don’t just build you something and let it sit there. We’ll help you take your product to market and build a marketing strategy around whatever you’re creating,” Beckett says.

Beckett, 24, bought the business two years ago. He and La Fave, 22, began building it last August with two employees who worked out of Beckett’s house. By September, they staff had doubled, so they moved into a small office at 6231 West River Drive. Soon the company had doubled again, necessitating a move to a larger space in the same building.

Spearia is developing its own product called Schwagon that will engage teens in competitive events on the web. Users will post videos of themselves doing, say, their biggest skateboard or snowboard jump, and will win “schwag” from different companies as prizes.

Beckett and La Fave expect to hire more web developers and other staff in the near future as the company continues to grow. Beckett expects the jobs to pay between $15 and $30 an hour.

“Our vision is to grow at the rate we’ve been growing, and to structure new partnerships and get good people,” Beckett adds. “Without each and every person we wouldn’t be at where we are today.”

Using state-of-the-art technologies you will develop dynamic online experiences to expand the global reach of our premiere publication, the New England Journal of Medicine.

Working in partnership with our online team, you will play a key role in our ongoing efforts to continue to inform and educate physicians around the world about the latest research and advances in medicine.

Google will hold a developer confab in May, called Google I/O, to discuss the challenges of writing applications for the Web.

This year’s two-day event in San Francisco is larger than last year’s Google Developer Day, its first organized conference aimed specifically at Web developers.

While the format is different–there will be more in-depth technical sessions and tutorials for newbies who want to write mash-ups–Google’s developer strategy remains the same.

Why do they court developers? To encourage creation of more and better Web applications, said Tom Stocky, a senior product manager at Google, on Tuesday.

“We’re trying to get more users, in general. We want to increase the number of users and the amount they use the Web. And improving the platform is the best way to do that, we’ve found,” Stocky said.

What will be different this year is an increased focus on developing social applications, reflecting Web development in general. Google will have sessions on social applications, including ways to use OpenSocial, which is designed to let people share information on social networks among different applications.

There is also a track on mobile development, including ways to use Google Gears for Mobile and Android, the mobile phone platform Google and its partners introduced last November.

But, if the pressure’s getting to him, it’s not showing. Plus, he believes, Adobe’s got the web at large working for him.

Adobe makes the bulk of its money from packaged software in its Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and other creative design tools.

As it looks ahead, Adobe is trying to diversify into online services for consumers and businesses, and it would like to keep its audience of web developers and designers loyal and not lose them to Microsoft, which is increasingly competing with Adobe.

That’s where Adobe’s platform group comes in. It designs the plumbing that will allow Adobe product groups to offer online services and other companies to write cutting-edge applications.

For web developers, it has made more sophisticated tooling with Flex. More significant is the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), cross-platform software that enables web applications to run on a desktop.

During the company’s MAX 2007 conference, Lynch, who came to Adobe through its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, spoke about Adobe’s strategy and its big bet on the web.

Q: The big announcement from the first day was that you bought the company that made Buzzword, a web word processor. Why are you getting into that business that Microsoft Office is in?A: We thought that [Buzzword] was just a great example of potential of the runtimes that we are working on and also a great application in its own right. So it’s not so much getting into the Office market space as it’s just seeing a great web application that has a lot of potential and shows what the technology can do. And I think it’s a good example of the direction that we think that application development is really having now.

But Buzzword is also part of your whole services push. Give us an idea of where you’re going with services and how you intend to make money on them. Well, services is a new area for Adobe. We’ve been doing some services for a while, like Connect, which enables you to collaborate online. What we’re working on now, however, is a number of new services for designers and developers. So the Share beta is a way to store documents that you are working on with other people. And that’s a gigabyte of space ?it’s a free service. We’re also providing APIs [application programming interfaces] so you can build your own rich internet applications around that service. We think that’s going to be kind of a foundation service for us and a lot of other services and tools that work with that. Buzzword of course will be one of the first applications that will be hooking up to Share so you can work on documents on Share or you can work on them locally.

Mike Downey, Adobe’s group manager for platform evangelism, hinted on Wednesday that the company might be about to develop such software.

Downey clarified the situation in an interview with ZDNet.co.uk’s sister site CNET News.com on Friday. He said that Adobe would focus primarily on providing its development platform, AIR, rather than creating online Office-style applications.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) would allow start-up companies to develop their own web-based applications which could rival Microsoft Office.

Adobe’s Flash Player is widely used on the web, and AIR lets web developers create desktop applications.

“Our primary focus is building a platform that allows developers to build great web-based applications,” Downey said. “AIR is the ideal platform for building these types of web applications that are robust and powerful.”

Adobe is itself using AIR to build some applications. The Adobe Media Player, which it announced earlier this year, is designed for watching internet videos. Even though it is an application, Adobe considers the media player part of the platform it provides to third parties who have the ability to customise it, Downey said.

In this case, the spoofing meant the hackers displayed a parody of a

Herald article to users, rather than a real one, when surfers called up an article on the future of the internet.

“Metlstorm”, one of the organisers of Kiwicon Wellington, says it’s

comparable to taping a fake article into a printed copy of the Herald,

before giving the paper to a reader.

The bogus article was marked

clearly as “a joke”, he says, and contains “wildly unreasonable comment

that no sane person would believe.”

He is at pains to explain that the stunt is harmless and wasn’t a real

hack, in the sense of breaking into any systems.

Web developer Dylan Reeve of Bunker Media in Auckland says the hackers

used an XSS, or cross-site scripting, bug to display their own content.

“After the page loads, the XSS bug is used to inject Javascript %26#91;a type

of web-page programming language%26#93; that rewrites the article.”

The spoof doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 7, but Firefox 2.0 displays

the bogus page, Reeve says.

The real page loads when accessed with Internet Explorer 6 too.

“Everything you see in the page is created in the user’s web browser,”

Reeve adds. “Nothing on the Herald server has been changed.”

Herald.co.nz’s multimedia editor Jeremy Rees said the incident was “a cheap visual stunt, rather than a hack”.

“The people who did it did not intrude into our system.”

Asked if such a stunt can be dangerous, Reeve says at worst it can trick

users into believing they’re seeing something on a site that isn’t in

reality there.

The risk is limited however, according to Reeve, who says

the URL or web link address that users follow has to be formatted in a

very specific way.

Earlier this month, the Computerworld newspaper, part of Fairfax Business

Media, was spoofed in the same way by the Kiwicon hackers.