Web/Portals
- Newsgator Declares RSS Readers Free
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1/16/2008
Newsgator, one of the earliest entrants into the RSS and aggregated content reader business, has decided to offer its latest generation of client tools for free. That includes NetNewsWire 3.1, a Mac reader; FeedDemon 2.6, a PC reader; and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0, a mobile reader. The company is also offering a free version of NewsGator Inbox, which delivers RSS feeds to Microsoft Outlook folders.
- Wireless Grids Software Goes into Beta
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1/15/2008
A Syracuse University associate professor introduced a new program that gives people a simple way to do file sharing among digital devices. Syracuse University School of Information Studies Associate Professor Lee McKnight debuted Innovaticus during the International Consumer Electronics Show last week. The software lets users set up a grid of devices--computers, cell phones, printers, and even MP3 players--to collaborate and share files and hardware using devices across multiple networks, wired and wireless. Users with access to that grid could drag and drop files from one device to another, whether it was local or around the world.
- New Free Platform Aims To Ease Sharing of Digital Collections
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1/15/2008
A new Web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online got a nod of fame last week when it was referenced in The Washington Times profile of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, which the paper called "at the forefront of the new wave of collecting history." The free, open-source platform is named Omeka, a Swahili word meaning "to display or lay out goods or wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack."
- Creating Life-Size Molecules in Second Life
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1/9/2008
The debate continues over just how useful virtual worlds like Second Life are for educational purposes. We spoke with Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley, who is e-learning coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences, and an associate professor of chemistry. Despite his initial skepticism, in 2007 Bradley helped establish Drexel's presence in Second Life, Drexel Island, and used Second Life last semester to augment portions of his Introduction to Organic Chemistry course. He has blogged extensively about his use of the medium. Here, he discusses the benefits--and drawbacks--of the much-discussed virtual world.
- SpringSource Offers Spring.NET 1.1
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1/9/2008
SpringSource is offering the final release of Spring.NET 1.1. The framework, which apparently was released early last month, lets .NET developers use some of the features that are currently available in the open source Java-based Spring Framework.
- First Look: Project Zero
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1/4/2008
Project Zero (an IBM incubator project) is an extension of the Eclipse open source Java programming IDE. It allows Java programmers to use a familiar development environment to create dynamic Web applications. While the project is supported by a "community," much like open source efforts, the aim of Project Zero is commercial, with IBM counting on getting feedback from developers in the mean time.
- Component Assembly Service Has Its Head in the Cloud
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1/4/2008
Eclipse and Java coders are being offered a helping hand with their component assembly challenges from a new company with a fledgling free service. The Web-based Cloudsmith service, from the company of the same name, is designed to streamline component assembly across multiple sources. It helps developers cobble components directly from the Internet, or "the cloud"--that global pool of connected computers drawn as lump on countless whiteboards.
- GWT: Advanced AJAX Security
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1/3/2008
Billy Hoffman gave a talk on advanced AJAX security at the recent Google Web Toolkit (GWT) conference in San Francisco. Hoffman manages HP Security Labs, which was SPIDynamics until HP acquired it this year, along with Hoffman. He focuses on automated discovery of Web application vulnerabilities and Web crawling technologies.
- WaveMaker Unveils Visual Web Dev Tool and Framework
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1/2/2008
WaveMaker Software unveiled two new developer solutions this week: WaveMaker Visual Assembly Studio and WaveMaker Rapid Deployment Framework for Enterprise Web 2.0. The former is designed to provide enterprise departmental developers with a visual dev tool for building data-driven Web apps. The latter enables those apps to be deployed to industry-standard Java app servers.
- IBM alphaWorks Expands Web Services
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12/12/2007
IBM has added two new Web services to its alphaWorks Web site, which provides "sneak previews" of the kind of technologies that are being contemplated at IBM research and development labs. The new Web services include IBM Sharable Code, a platform for managing Web 2.0-type mashup applications, and IBM Web Highlights.
- Red Hat Bundles Tooling and Runtime in New JBoss IDE
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12/11/2007
Red Hat today began shipping a new application integrated development environment (IDE) that combines both tooling and runtime. JBoss Developer Studio Eclipse is an Eclipse-based IDE bundled with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Network. It also includes tooling for Java EE, the JBoss Seam app framework, AJAX, Hibernate, Persistence, JBoss jPBM, Struts and the Spring IDE.
- Roxbury CC Looks To Boost Enrollment with Portal Solution
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12/11/2007
Roxbury Community College is beefing up its enrollment and constituent relationship management efforts. The college, located in Roxbury Crossing, near Boston, has signed on to use portal and CRM solutions from Jenzabar, as well as the Informz Text Messaging solution.
- Snapshot: Firefox, IE Vie for Popularity Among College Students
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12/10/2007
To better understand the views, attitudes, and usage of various technologies and brands among college students, Eduventures conducted research of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled full-time at a four-year college or university via a Web survey.
- Microsoft Rolls Out Office Live Workspace Beta
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12/10/2007
Microsoft has begun a full rollout of the private beta of its Live Office Workspace. OLW, unveiled earlier this year, is a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. The technologies included in OLW have already been rolled into Microsoft's Live@edu, a portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education.
- Facebook Founder Loses Court Battle Over Personal Docs
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12/10/2007
A federal judge has denied a petition by Facebook Inc. to force a Harvard alumni magazine to take down documents pertaining to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, the Associated Press reported. The documents, including Zuckerberg's Harvard College application, a personal diary, and an e-mail he wrote to the college admissions office, are part of a court battle between Facebook and ConnectU, a social networking site founded by Harvard students where Zuckerberg worked before he went on to found Facebook.
- Educational Network Provides Free Environment for Course Content
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12/6/2007
ChitChat has launched a new online tool for educators. Dubbed the "Educational Network," the service provides free online hosting for class Web pages and multimedia content and allows educators to share materials with one another.
- Open-Source NetBeans Beta 2 Gets Dual-License
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12/4/2007
The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.
- First Look: The Popfly Development Environment
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12/3/2007
For nearly a decade, Macromedia's Flash (now an Adobe product) has been the de facto standard for Web animation. It's in widespread use across the Web. Recently, Microsoft introduced its Silverlight platform, a competitor to Adobe's Flash and a few similar technologies.
- SpringSource Adds Annotation Support to Java App Framework
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11/29/2007
Enterprise open source software provider SpringSource (formerly known as Interface21) has released Spring Framework 2.5, the latest upgrade to its Java/J2EE application framework.
- IBM and Mainsoft Ink Deal To Integrate .NET Apps
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11/27/2007
It just got a little easier for developers using Microsoft's .NET Framework technology and SharePoint to integrate their .NET applications with IBM's Java-based portal technology. In a global reseller deal, IBM agreed to sell Mainsoft Corp.'s .NET Extensions solution with the IBM WebSphere Portal solution.
- Continuing Education Sites Lacking, Researchers Say
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11/20/2007
Continuing and professional education (CPE) sites are somewhat effective at helping students with their enrollment decisions, but they're lacking in some key functionality areas: content, search capabilities, and multimedia. In the second of its three-part series of research reports, "Optimizing School Web Sites as a Marketing and Recruitment Tool," education consultancy Eduventures found that prospective continuing education students in large part think these sites come up short in areas they consider crucial and made specific recommendations for the types of content that should be added to these sites to boost their effectiveness.
- Baltimore County College Takes Health Care Programs Online
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11/15/2007
The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) is expanding its e-learning activities by developing online and hybrid programs in health care. The move will help alleviate what the college described as a "backlog of potential students who previously were prevented from enrolling due to limited classroom space." The initiative includes new online nursing, paramedic, and medical lab technician programs.
- MIT Researchers Advance Lecture Capture with Search Capabilities
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11/14/2007
Researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new Web-based technology that's designed to take recorded classroom lectures to the next level. The technology, developed by a team led by MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Glass, provides search functionality for classroom video recordings. At present, the prototype only works with MIT's online lectures made available to the public through the university's OpenCourseWare initiative, but it may be made available to other institutions in the future.
- Natural Language Gets AJAX Support
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11/13/2007
Software AG recently unveiled Natural for AJAX, a variant of Software AG's Natural 2006 programming language. Natural 2006 is typically used at the enterprise level for transactional systems running on mainframes.
- Gallaudet Brings Accessibility to Classroom Capture
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11/7/2007
Students at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the only liberal arts university in the world for the deaf and hard of hearing, are benefiting from lecture capture software that includes closed captioning. That lets students view videos of lectures on demand, complete with text captions along the bottom of the screen.
