It's all about getting users signed into your website as quickly and efficiently as possible. The ID Selector achieves this by providing a simple, consistent, provider neutral interface, and by educating the user about OpenID during the sign in process. In short, it makes OpenID easier for the end user and benefits both the relying parties and OpenID providers.
Link: ID Selector – Making OpenID easier
CTO of Gigaspaces Nati Shalom explains some of the benefits of his XAP platform over those provided by Google App Engine. For a more complete list of Google App Engine alternatives check out: http://codecrafter.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/alternatives-to-app-engine/
Link: GigaSpaces as Alternative to GoogleAppEngine for the Enterprise
At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company’s future plans to open up almost everything.
Link: The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!
For those who are not familiar, FreshBooks is a great time tracking and invoicing tool for individuals and small business. As a FreshBooks customer I'm looking forward to digging into this new offering.
With the release of FreshBooks Report Cards, FreshBooks will provide an ongoing series of publicly accessible quarterly reports, detailing the financial performance of these workers through metrics like amount invoiced, average time to collect, amount invoiced per client, percentage of revenue from new clients, and percentage of revenue that is recurring.
Link: FreshBooks Provides Unique View into Small Business Finances – ReadWriteWeb
While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release:
Link: Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release now available
Jason Fried is something of a contrarian, his tiny, Chicago-based company 37signals has been a major force in the tech industry over the past few years. Sure, it doesn't have the market cap of a Google or a Sun Microsystem, but it also doesn't have the overhead, and a company like Sun would have gladly paid a few hundred million for the sort of reputation Fried's 37signals has developed from nothing.
Link: Jason Fried of 37Signals on Business, Focus, and Avoiding Interruption – O’Reilly Broadcast
1. The semantic barriers won’t be as important as the languages rush to steal good ideas from one and other.
2. Frameworks are becoming even more dominant.
3. Applications are becoming their own worlds.
4. Communities will be more important.
5. The Web and the cloud are the ultimate platform. 6. Better language technology will make a difference.
7. Emulation and cross-compilation will extend the life of dynamic code.
8. All of the embedding makes it simpler for programming to escape the command line and start appearing in Web applications themselves.
9. The rise of the amateurs may make much of dynamic programming irrelevant.
10. Adaptability for modern architectures is key.
Link: 10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting
Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers.
Link: Install FLIR – Typography Solution For The Web » DivitoDesign
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr’s Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queueing system to do the rest.
Strategy: Flickr – Do the Essential Work Up-front and Queue the Rest
Obfuscated TCP is a transport layer protocol that adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
