Web Programmers

Ten years ago, Netscape issued a press release announcing plans to make available the Netscape Communicator source code for free on the Internet. Citing an installation base of 68 million users and a desire to spread the browser further while encouraging community-driven development, Netscape declared that its bold new strategy would involve full publication and disclosure of the browser’s source code under the Netscape Public License, a GPL-inspired license that would facilitate modification and redistribution—a move laid the foundation for the emergence of Mozilla.

Acknowledging the historic milestone, former Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has published a copy of the original 1998 press release and wrote a blog entry reflecting on Mozilla’s decade-long effort to bring freedom to the web.

“2008 is a year to celebrate our history, our accomplishments, our community and our future,” wrote Baker. “We have laid the groundwork for another great 10 years—years where we can influence the web for the better, demonstrate what openness, transparency and broad participation look like, marvel at the distributed excitement and fierce dedication to the Mozilla vision for the Internet, and do things we haven’t even dreamed up yet.”

Baker intends to launch a year of celebration to commemorate the original release of the Netscape source code and all of the hard work that the open-source software community has invested in the past decade to make Mozilla what it is today. She encourages members of the Mozilla user and developer community to provide suggestions for inclusive and participatory activities that Mozilla can coordinate as part of the celebration.

Today, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has well over 125 million users and steadily climbing market share. Meanwhile, Netscape has vanished into the mists of temporal obscurity and is scheduled to be completely decommissioned next month by AOL, its current owner.

During the past decade, we have seen the Internet transform to become an essential part of day-to-day life. The Mozilla organization has grown and evolved with the web and will continue to influence its future. Although much has changed, many things are still the same—like Mozilla’s commitment to freedom and innovation. With an impressive Firefox 3 release right around the corner, we can expect another decade of great things ahead of us.

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a public draft of the first major upgrade to HTML in over a decade.

Released on Tuesday, the first working draft for HTML 5 is a result of work carried out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group, which brings developers, browser vendors, and content providers together.

In its final form by 2010, HTML 5 is intended to bring the markup language forward into today’s richer Internet environments, with new application programming interfaces to control audio and 2D video content.

“HTML is of course a very important standard,” said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML, and W3C director. “I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web. To integrate the input of so many people is hard work, as is the challenge of balancing stability with innovation; pragmatism with idealism.”

The W3C HTML Working Group studied the Web’s evolution and was driven by developments, such as the Ajax development process, to draw up the new standard for a Web that is now far beyond a collection of static pages. New features in HTML 5 will mean that elements of today’s most popular Web sites can be standardized to promote interoperability. Ultimately, these elements will then proliferate as they begin to show up in authoring tools, experts have claimed.

HTML 5 will focus on client-side data storage to enable users to edit documents interactively. It will also address costs by providing concise rules on handling HTML documents correctly, alongside instructions for how to recover from errors. In line with these augmentations, new features are also planned to help bring familiar page sections and navigation elements to the screen. Written in either “classic” HTML syntax or an XML syntax, HTML 5 is also intended to extend Web-application interoperability outward to the mobile platform.

“A huge amount of data is recorded on the Web in HTML, but often encoded to work for a specific program, rather than following the existing specifications. In order to preserve this information, we need to know how to process it even if the particular programs it was designed for disappear,” said Charles McCathieNevile, chief standards officer for mobile-browser company Opera. “The new HTML 5 drafts clarify how existing HTML can be parsed in a reliable way according to a specification that others can freely implement in the future. They also add specifications for a number of important Web features that have been implemented and found acceptance over the last decade.”
 
News of HTML 5 comes at a time when vendors such as Microsoft are becoming increasingly vocal about browser interoperability. In December, Microsoft claimed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) correctly passed the Acid2 browser test, a part of the Web Standards Project. “Successfully rendering Acid2 is an important landmark for IE8, as it highlights the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release,” said a Microsoft representative.

However, some experts have claimed that Microsoft’s Acid2 assertions may be premature. The company has attracted some criticism from developers over its approach to render modes in IE8.

HTML 5 will be the first implementation under the W3C’s royalty-free license scheme. The HTML Working Group is made up of around 500 participants, including AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera.

For more information visit W3C HTML 5

Blue Wave Data LLC, a web applications developer based in Connecticut, has introduced the newest version of it’s M.E. Fieldware System, a Coroner case management system that helps Coroners and Medical Examiners manage their caseload on the Web.

We gave this system a top rating last year when it was initially introduced. The newest version is written in PHP 5 and is married to a robust MySQL 4+ database. Unlike the initial version where images were uploaded as binary files into the database, this one features directory based file uploads for images and forensic documents that are appended to individual cases thus making an already fast system even faster.

The new version includes 15 addendum reports that cover the gamut from Air Crashes to Work Related Deaths. Documents are all generated in .pdf format and, like the initial version, Death Certificates can be populated and generated on-the-fly. The system allows image uploads directly from the digital camera in the field, as well as file uploads for drawings and forensic files. This new version of M.E. Fieldware also does real-time statistics, billing, cremation authorization, and just about everything else a Coroner/Medical Examiner could wish for in a Case Management System. It is by far the best Coroner Case Management System we’ve seen and certainly leaves it’s .NET based competitors in the dust.

The M.E. Fieldware system is deployed on a secure Linux based server and is available on a year-to-year subscription based account for an annual fee that we’re told is less than $3,000 dollars.

For more information visit the M.E. Fieldware website, or the Blue Wave Data LLC website.

PHP

Arriving on the scene in 1994, PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. However, it can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. The PHP Group also provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.

PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.

From PHP 4, the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor. PHP 5 uses the Zend Engine II.

Microsoft .NET Framework

Microsoft needed an answer to what they probably viewed as a losing battle for web API supremecy. Although they conquered home computing, they were falling far behind the vast amount of  Internet friendly programming languages popping up left and right. Programmers were dropping their studies of Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++, and opting to focus on writing code that would be useful on the ever emerging Internet (like PHP…).

Born in 2000, Microsoft .NET Framework is a software component that is a part of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It has a large library of pre-coded solutions to common program requirements, and manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a key Microsoft offering, and is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform.

The pre-coded solutions that form the framework’s Base Class Library cover a large range of programming needs in areas including: user interface, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications. The class library is used by programmers who combine it with their own code to produce applications.

Programs written for the .NET Framework execute in a software environment that manages the program’s runtime requirements. This runtime environment, which is also a part of the .NET Framework, is known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides the appearance of an application virtual machine, so that programmers need not consider the capabilities of the specific CPU that will execute the program. The CLR also provides other important services such as security mechanisms, memory management, and exception handling. The class library and the CLR together compose the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is included with Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, and can be installed on most older versions of Windows. Applications built using .NET Framework must be deployed from a Windows based server.

Why PHP Is Better

In a managed environment such as the Microsoft framework’s CLR or Java’s JVM, the .NET Framework regularly occurring garbage collection for reclaiming memory suspends execution of the application for an unpredictable lapse of time (typically no more than a few milliseconds). This makes such environments unsuitable for some applications, such as those that must respond to events with sub-second timing.

PHP is usually deployed and most at home on a Linux based web server. Deploying a web based application on a Linux server offers significant advantages over Windows servers in the areas of security, speed, and overall integrity of the application.

.NET Framework applications must be deployed from a Windows based server which, because of all the well known Windows vulnerabilities, are frequently targeted by unsavory individuals seeking unauthorized access. If you use Windows at home or in the office, you’ve probably been prompted to update your software every few days to protect it from recently discovered vulnerabilities. A Windows web server requires the same updates, however many hosting providers don’t bother to update the servers as frequently as they should (and sometimes not at all). Why? Because to upgrade the webserver, they have to download the update and restart the server. Restarting the server causes the server to go down for a few minutes, and all current users on the .NET application lose any data they entered if they are unlucky enough to be working when the server was restarted.

In the end, PHP is less expensive, faster, more secure, and able to be deployed from a Linux server that is also less expensive, faster, and more secure than their Windows based counterparts.

Timetotrade, a platform/website developed by Sensatus, a provider of portfolio and tax management products to financial institutions and retail investors, has introduced a web-based tax management tool that helps investors calculate and manage their capital gains tax (CGT) and income tax liabilities for all their share-related transactions.

Enabling private investors to manage their investment affairs, timetotrade claims to enable investors to generate tax forms, track company performance, maintain a trading journal, access professional trading tools and create alerts to avoid missed trading opportunities. It aims to give investors a collective insight into their tax position, and facilitates easy disposal of investments, thereby enabling users to enjoy tax breaks.

Sensatus states that the product has been developed keeping in mind the January 31, 2008 tax return deadline. Based on the HMRC Share Identification rules, timetotrade calculates the investor’s gains and losses.

Other features it supports are Indexation and Taper Relief, and also compares the current gains and losses against the carried forward investments. Based on the results, the tool determines the individual’s tax liability. It offers similar features to investment clubs.

According to timetotrade, the tax tools help investors complete the Self Assessment CGT and income tax returns and generate the information required to complete the UK Inland Revenue Form 185(new). It also enables users to access tax and investment information through their mobile phones.

Dary McGovern, MD, Sensatus, said: “We have been working closely with private investors and the UK Shareholders Association during the development of timetotrade. In doing so, it quickly became apparent that a solution was needed that would help investors quickly determine their tax liability. Using timetotrade, investors can now do this.”

US-based Alltel Wireless has launched the SalesNOW, a contact and deal management software designed for the BlackBerry and the web.        

According to the company, the SalesNOW application allows the professionals to track and manage their contacts, deals, activities and e-mails as well as access and share information with their entire sales team. Customers can perform these activities on their BlackBerry or on the web through an individual, secure SalesNOW account.

The company also claimed that the changes made by the user within SalesNOW on the BlackBerry are automatically synced to SalesNOW on the web and vice versa. The application also allows sales teams to provide up-to-date information on sales activity, view and print weekly activity reports, collaborate on team forecasts, track sale details and next steps on business deals.

“SalesNOW allows our small business customers to better manage their workload no matter where they are,” said David Maddox, director of advanced data solutions at Alltel Wireless. “This innovative solution is the ultimate sales tool for the mobile professional and demonstrates Alltel’s commitment to deliver the most beneficial business applications available today.”

The software is available for $25 per month for individual users and for $40 per month for enterprise users with qualifying smart choice data plan on all Alltel Wireless BlackBerry smartphones.

Alltel recently launched several products to assist its customers in their daily tasks, which includes Alltel WiFi and TimecardGPS. TimecardGPS, launched in December 2007, is an application that enables users to track an employee’s location, record shift time and capture job or work order information from location based services (LBS) enabled wireless phones.

We’ll we’ve unloaded the last two years of blogging and updated our Wordpress version. One of the main themes for 2008 will be government applications. There are a growing number of government agencies that are seeking true web-based programs to manage their data and allow for a more mobile platform from which to deploy it. Stay tuned, because their are already some forward looking programmers that have been poised to jump on this lucrative market and we’ll be pulling them out of the weeds very soon.