In the past, the US has held a near monopoly not only in ColdFusion-based user groups, but also conferences, with CFUnited, cf.Objective() and the more general Adobe MAX leading the way. Read more – ‘ColdFusion Is Hotting Up in the UK’.
Adobe is slowly but surely increasing its online presence with the addition of four web-based tools; Buzzword, Share, Photoshop Express and Brio. Although these four applications currently function independently from each other, they have very similar user interfaces and with a small amount of work, these tools could be tied together, offering a new and unique online suite worth noticing. Read more – ‘Adobe's Expanding Online Empire’.
In the late 1990s, a large multi-national technology corporation, hoping to become a major force in online advertising, bought a small start-up in a sector that was believed to be the "next big thing". That corporation was Microsoft and the start-up was Hotmail. Hotmail and Microsoft established web-based email as a must-have application for personal use. The addition of Hotmail to the Microsoft inventory promised to increase the companies online revenues that were being dominated by Yahoo!, Google and AOL amongst a host of others. Read more – ‘Online Social Networks: Everywhere, Yet Nowhere’.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is to expand its scope of collaboration with Adobe to advance web standards. Having successfully completed its initial goals for assisting Adobe's Dreamweaver team in supporting Web standards, the Web Standards Project's Dreamweaver Task Force will be renamed the Adobe Task Force to reflect its widened scope. The Adobe Task Force will collaborate with Adobe on all of the company's products that output code or content to the Web, and will continue to advocate compliance with Web Standards and accessibility guidelines by those who use Adobe's products to design and build Web sites and applications. Read more – ‘Web Standards Project Expands Collaboration with Adobe’.
Download the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2, a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition).
This release of the JDBC Driver is JDBC 3.0 compliant and runs on the Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.4 and higher. It has been tested against all major application servers including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, and Sun. Read more – ‘Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2’.
Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems' JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight. Read more – ‘Why Silverlight? Microsoft Explains…’.
Microsoft is finally making real efforts to woo the designer community who have traditionally worshipped the Adobe and Mac product ranges. One new product that addresses this previously overlooked community is Silverlight, which uses the XAML technology and is touted as Microsoft’s Flash killer. For anyone who is keen to listen, Microsoft proposes that Silverlight will achieve similar results to Flash, but it does so in an entirely different way and has different aims. So, the big question is, will Microsoft be able to break the dominance of Adobe’s Flash platform, that is available on the PC, Mac and mobile devices alike? I’m sure the jury is out on that one, but it can be said it is an uphill task. Read more – ‘Web 2.0 and Beyond with Silverlight and XAML’.
A few months ago I posted an article on Installing Apache on Vista, and it proved to be extremely popular. It appears that I was not the only one who found it a non trivial matter.
Now it is the turn of ColdFusion 8. ColdFusion 8 as we well know is the latest and greatest incarnation of the ColdFusion platform from Adobe. It has a lot of great new features such as cfimage, cfzip, cfexchange, some contentious features such as cfthread and cfinterface, and some not-so-necessarily-cool new “Web 2.0″ features such as cffeed and cfajax. Read more – ‘Installing ColdFusion 8 on Vista’.
Following the purchase of a spangly new Toshiba laptop running Vista, and not one for making life simple, I decided not to run my development environment on IIS7, but rather, I wanted to install the latest version of Apache. The installation process was not a trivial matter! Read more – ‘Installing Apache on Vista’.
Rich Internet Applications are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture. This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Read more – ‘Future Directions for Rich Internet Applications’.
