Borland Delphi is known to be a great environment for the development of stand-alone and client-server applications on the Microsoft Windows platform. Its virtues range from full OOP support to visual development, in a unique combination of power and ease. However, the new frontier of development is now Internet programming. What has Delphi got to offer in this new context? Which are the features you can rely upon to build great Internet applications with Delphi? That’s what this paper intends to reveal. We’ll see that Delphi can be used:
• For direct socket and TCP/IP programming;
• In conjunction with third-party components that implement the most common Internet protocols, on the client or the server side;
• To produce HTML pages on the server side, with the WebBroker and Internet Express architectures;
• As well as to work with Microsoft’s core technologies, including MTS, COM, ASP, and ActiveX.
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Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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As the desire to deliver rich web content and functionality has increased over the last decade, Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies have become increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, many of these technologies have been out of reach for many client application developers because of the non-trivial learning curve involved. In addition, with the number of RIA technologies available, where do you even begin? In many cases, there was not a “one size fits all” solution, so RIA development would involve a mix of HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, and perhaps a little AJAX thrown in (just to name a few possibilities).
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Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 introduces a whole new set of .NET technologies that will revolutionize, once again, the way you develop smart client and web-based applications; the most notable being LINQ, WPF and, of course, Silverlight. For most of us working in and around web application development in the business world, Silverlight is a big step forward; especially if you consider that it provides clean coding practices with extensible languages (e.g. XAML and C#). It also provides some of Visual Studio’s rich programming model that we have become accustomed to and can no longer live without; such as class libraries, debugging capabilities and IntelliSense among many others.
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Google Earth is a popular and widely used geographical browser. It is a standalone application that enables spatial data from a variety of sources to be displayed, explored and visually compared. Google Earth has the following important characteristics:
• Free
• Easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. Data are displayed on an interactive globe that can be rotated and zoomed to visually explore data in different regions of the world and at different spatial resolutions.
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An emerging trend in Social Networking sites and Web portals is the opening up of their APIs to external application develop- ers. For example, the Facebook Platform, Google Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets allow developers to design their own applications, which can then can be integrated with the platform and shared with other users. However, current APIs are targeted towards develop- ers with programming expertise and database knowledge; they are not accessible to a large class of users who do not have a programming/database background, but would nevertheless like to create new applications. To address this need, we have developed the AppForge system, which provides a WYSIWYG application development platform. Users can graphically specify the components of webpages inside a Web browser, and the corresponding database schema and application logic will be automatically generated on the fly by the system.
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Yahoo! is taking the lead role in enabling the global mobile ecosystem to bring compelling mobile Internet experiences to consumers. Yahoo! delivers its services throughout the world from its own network as well as through partnerships with mobile operators and device manufacturers around the world. Yahoo! recently opened up the company’s mobile platform to allow the world’s developers and publishers to mobilize their own offerings.
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Blogs, by their very nature, are search engine friendly and give you built-in advantages in optimizing for the Search Engines. For a variety of reasons, nearly all SEOs agree that WordPress provides optimization benefits other blog platforms do not. By following our simple tips and using our recommended plugins, you can have an easy-to-use content management system which also ranks well in the Search Engines.
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