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 already mentioned in the short summary above the scenario used for this collaboration brief deals with two key components: Microsoft Active Directory and SAP Central User Administration. Active Directory, being the integrated, distributed directory service included with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, provides a central user repository used to centrally maintain user data, thus avoiding the redundant, error-prone maintenance of user information in several systems. Most organizations already use Active Directory to organize and manage information about all kinds of their different resources like users, computers, applications and so on.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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Google’s announcement that it will include in its search database the full text of books from five of the world’s leading research libraries has provoked newspaper editorials, public debates, and two lawsuits. Some of this attention can be attributed to public fascination with any move taken by Google, one of the most successful companies in the digital economy. The sheer scale of the project and its possible benefits for research have also captured the public imagination. Finally, the controversy over copyright issues has been fueled by Google’s willingness to pursue this ambitious effort not with standing the opposition of the publishing industry and organizations representing authors.
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Google Earth is a virtual globe program, allowing viewers to visualize data on top of displayed satellite images of the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2005 and released to the public in 2006, Google Earth fast became a household name hailed as a revolution for humanitarian development, much as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were several decades ago. According to MapAction, “There seem at present tobe two distinct groups of humanitarian practitioners: those who are already, albeit tentatively,exploiting Google Earth and related geospatial methods in their work,and those whowill be, as soon as they see their first demonstration of its potential.” (MapAction, 2008: 9)
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BioTeam first became interested in Univa UD’s software efforts after hearing Univa CTO Steve Tueckespeak in Regensburg, Germany at the 2007 Grid Engine workshop. Shortly after that event Univa formally became Univa UD after merging with United Devices. At the time, Steve’s company seemed to be one of the few companies positioning themselves to offer full support and professional services encompassing commonly used open source products such as Sun Grid Engine that BioTeam often works with in the field. Individually these popular open source resources are relatively easy to acquire but Univa UD seemed to be making an interesting effort to become the one stop shop for a fully supported and integrated set of commonly required tools and technology.
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So - you are wrapping up development of yet another Web app. The database is in place, CRUD functions are working, user interface and reports have been signed off. Now your thoughts are turning to access control. Just enough time to splice in that trusty user authentication and roles module, make a few tweaks and move on to the next project. Wait! Do you really want to contribute yet another authorization stovepipe to the growing forest? We all curse the proliferation of authentication and authorization “solutions” on the Web. Yet we continue to treat access control as an after thought.
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In general, the World Wide Web has a high potential as a platform for distributed groupware systems. Authors create and change documents locally and upload them to a Web server, where they can be accessed by their collaborators. However, Web browsers and servers which implement the protocol HTTP are mostly limited to provide reading access to Web documents. For this reason, existing Web-based groupware systems (e.g. the BSCW system) are implemented using client/server side scripting. These scripts are used to implement the basic operations needed for this kind of applications.
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