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.
Read the rest of this entry »
2007 has been a great year for the Web. On the one hand, there has been an upswing in the number of Web 2.0 start- ups globally, while on the other hand, popular Web 2.0 start-ups like Facebook, jaiku, feedburner and others have been acquired or invested in by the giants of the Web like Microsoft and Google. Closer home in India, the trends have been similar, though still in a nascent stage, as social networking became a buzzword with Orkut. That led to start-ups like Minglebox (which obtained funding from Sequoia Capital), BigAdda (backed by Reliance), Desimartini (recently acquired by HTMedia), and many others. Though launches occurred at a lower frequency than in the US, India has seen over 150 Web 2.0 start-ups launched during this year (according to internal research at WATConsult) in different spaces from social networking, social bookmarking and blogging, to media sharing, local search, etc. Let’s take a look at some of the…
Read the rest of this entry »
Ten years ago, many managers of small professional practices were wondering if they needed their own company website. Many still get by without one today, but most consider a website essential for practice development. Doubts about whether to have a website seem quaint now. Ten years from now, the issue of whether to engage in the “Web 2.0 conversation” will seem quaint.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you are new to programming in the Java TM language, have some experience with other languages, and are familiar with things like displaying text or graphics or performing simple calculations, this tutorial could be for you. It walks through how to use the Java® 2 Platform software to create and run three common types of programs written for the Java platform—applications, applets, and servlets. You will learn how applications, applets, and servlets are similar and different, how to build a basic user interface that handles simple end user input, how to read data from and write data to files and databases, and how to send and receive data over the network.
Read the rest of this entry »