Developer March

OFF THE PRESS

CollabNet Intends to Become No.1 in Agile ALM by Acquiring Danube Enterprise consolidation is the order of the day and here is another piece...

Micro Focus Integrates Visual Studio 2010 in Cobol Tools Micro Focus has announced four new Cobol products to allow developers to...

ODA Open Design Alliance Announces DWGdirect.NET Beta Release The Open Design Alliance (ODA) announces the beta release of DWGdirect.NET,...

WHITE PAPERS

Hot and Safe: a Beginner's Guide to Multithreaded Libraries Most of the discussion of multithreading that emerges from Cilk Arts is...

8 Simple Rules for Designing Threaded Applications Multithreaded programming is still more art than science. This white paper...

Maximizing Digital Media Application Performance using Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives in Microsoft* .NET* Environment Microsoft .NET framework's interoperability mechanisms can be used to create...

Business Technology Summit 2010 on SOA and Cloud Computing

EXCLUSIVES

Will ASP.NET Stop ColdFusion In its Hat-trick Pursuit at GIDA 2010?

The World-Wide-Web has become an important platform for interactive applications. Web-based calendars and forums facilitate collaboration, e-commerce web sites enable the convenient acquisition of goods and services and many other applications address simple day-to-day problems like reserving a room or registering for participation in an event. Because of the Web’s ubiquity and ease-of-access a Web application is often the first choice of technology.

One of the reasons for the popularity of Web applications among developers is the ability to release a version without having to distribute and install the new version on client computers. The browser acts as a universal client and the application exists only in one copy on the server. Managing releases is a laborious and expensive part of traditional software engineering. The situation is dramatically different for Web applications. In a desktop application, adding features and fixing bugs requires either a new version to be installed or a patch to be applied. This upgrade process is cumbersome and expensive. Users have to be notified of the availability of the update any they must apply it. The update may interfere with other applications on the client, for example by installing an incompatible version of a shared library. Then the provider of the application never knows if all the clients have applied the update. At any given time, different clients may be running many different versions of the application. With Web applications, where the application exists in one copy only, all of these problems disappear. Features and bug fixes can be added to a running application by the developer as soon as they are ready, and instantly all users will have access to the upgrade. This allows developers to focus on improving the application rather than dealing with complex maintenance and upgrade issues, and it benefits application users because they get immediate access to the latest version of the software.

Web application development is therefore more open to agile methods because even small units of functionality may be made available to users instantly rather than having to be bundled with other functionality subject to an arbitrary release schedule. As opposed to desktop applications that may have release cycles of several months or even years, it is not unusual for Web applications to be updated several times a day. Clearly, some applications are better suited to being centrally provided as a service rather than being installed on every desktop computer on the planet. For example, as personal computer applications such as word processing have become more and more complex, for many users it is more productive to access a central server for these services. Today, you can manage your calendar, mail, to-do lists, photo albums, word processing, spreadsheets, and bookmarks with the help of Web applications. Once your data is stored on a central sever, sharing and collaboration becomes much easier to do. Another major problem of distributed processing, backing up of dispersed user data also becomes much simpler when the data is centrally located.

Web Development Tool Winner at Great Indian Developer Awards 2008: Dr. Kasturi Rangachar, Worldwide President of IEEE, presents the award for Adobe ColdFusion.

Even though people and enterprises alike are still getting a grip on “Web 2.0” concepts, it is being said that “Web 3.0” is going to be all about semantic processing. Semantic processing is the holy grail of computing. Currently, we consider the Web to contain a collection of documents in different formats. For example, the most successful application on the Web, Google search, does a “simple” textual search without any attention to the context or meaning of the text being searched. The task of semantic processing is left to the human user. But as the amount of information on the Web increases, we will need more and more to rely on computer processing of the information and this will require assigning semantics to the content on the Web. The semantic Web is one of the major efforts in this area. Just as XML has standardized the structural definition of data, the goal of the semantic Web is to standardize the semantic definition of the data. If the data on the Web is semantically defined, we may expect to see a whole semantically-oriented generation of Web applications such as semantic search and semantic Wikis.

Web Development Tool Winner at Great Indian Developer Awards 2009: Hemant Khandelwal, who leads the efforts on the next version of ColdFusion application server, and other Adobe representatives, receiving the award on behalf of the Adobe ColdFusion 8 team

Saltmarch Media's annual Great Indian Developer Awards honors software products across 12 categories, based on their productivity, innovation excellence, universal usefulness, simplicity, functionality and most importantly on the ground feedback from India’s software developer ecosystem. In the web development tools Category, the final shortlist consists of Adobe’s Flash Platform and Cold Fusion, VMLogix LabManager, Microsoft’s ASP.NET and Silverlight and Dojo Toolkit. Adobe’s Coldfusion has managed to win twice consecutively (2008 and 2009) in this category.

If there is a particular change and web development tool that you personally endorse to your colleagues or you evangelize about them at the first opportunity you get, here is your chance to vote for it (voting closes April 10 2010) and see it win this prestigious award. Who knows? You could win along with it too. At the end of the voting process, a lucky draw will be conducted and one person will receive a surprise gift from our prize sponsor. So visit the 2010 Great Indian Developer Awards website and cast your vote. It counts!

VIDEOS

The Entire Game Should Move Onto the GPU, says Rev Lebaredian As the computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years, the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now...

PODCAST&VIDEOS

SOA with SQL Server A key component to any distributed architecture built with SOA methodologies in mind is the database infrastructure. Service Oriented Database Architecture (SODA) is much easier to...

A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System Wonder why 70% of projects are classified as failed projects? Working in silos does not help projects succeed. Learn how Visual Studio Team System 2008 helps break the walls across team...

Busting Common Myths about Developer Productivity Many traditional assumptions about software development have been challenged in recent years. Agile processes and service oriented architectures are two examples of this. An area that has...

.NET Gotchas Workshop by Venkat Subramaniam: Part III Programmers working on the .NET framework know the power and increased productivity that comes with it, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Like any development, however, there are things that...

Silverlight Deep Dive Workshop by Todd Anglin: Part III Do you want to truly understand Silverlight? If so, do not miss this three-hour workshop that will cover everything from Silverlight basics to advanced topics like cross-site XHR. In the...

.NET Gotchas Workshop: Part II There are several things that one should pay attention to while programming on .NET, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Are there things in .NET that, if we do not pay attention to, may result...