businessMart AG announced it has accelerated its entry into new business markets thanks to a new Web-based trading platform built on IBM's service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technology. Combining a flexible infrastructure with mashup technology, businessMart empowered its marketing and IT functions to better communicate and share ideas, streamlining the traditional product development process and cutting deployment time.

Software development tools-maker Iron Speed has released Iron Speed Designer Version 5.1, the latest version of its popular Web 2.0 application generator. Iron Speed Designer generates rich interactive data entry and reporting applications for .NET. The addition of multi-level menus and enhanced application security helps IT departments generate productivity-enhancing applications in just a few hours.

Nexaweb Technologies announced Nexaweb Advancesm - a technology-enabled modernization solution that allows enterprises to transform legacy business applications from 3GL/4GL technologies to rich, composite web applications with less risk, in less time, and at less cost.

TopQuadrant announced SPARQLMotion,a visual scripting language that allows people without programming skills to create semantic web applications. With SPARQLMotion, end users can integrate data sources, run queries on the combined data, and create information mash-ups and reports on an as-needed basis - all without assistance from the IT department. Additionally, SPARQLMotion is compliant with and utilizes the W3C standard SPARQL.

Kaazing Corporation unveiled its new enterprise real-time solution . Kaazing Enterprise Edition enhances scalability of real-time Web solutions and can power the largest marketplaces in the world. With Kaazing's solution, customers can create and deploy mission-critical real-time Web solutions, such as trading systems, online betting applications, performance monitoring, RFID/GPS tracking systems, sports and news broadcasting applications.

WaveMaker announced the release of its WaveMaker Visual AJAX Studio version 3.1.1 for building Enterprise Web 2.0 applications. WaveMaker's Visual AJAX Studio lets users create database-driven AJAX Web applications without having to write complex code. New WaveMaker features significantly reduce development time while enabling increased participation, feedback and collaboration.

Blogging and coffee go hand-in-hand. There are more than 51 million instances of the word 'coffee' in the blogosphere, according to a Google blog search, and many top bloggers are known to write from coffee shops or brew a cup of java at home to fuel their inspiration for new posts. Bloggers are also participating in a significant number of beta tests posted on the Internet.

Fueled by the explosive growth in digital media and user generated content, the demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current 'in house' storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Factoring in time-to-market pressures as well as power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, load balancing and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand. Bottom line, companies must take a new approach to storage. Companies need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of 'do everything yourself' to a new storage 2.0 model. The storage 2.0 model delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the Web applications.

jMaki is an AJAX framework that provide a wrapper over rich widgets from multiple toolkits such as Yahoo!, Dojo and many others. jMaki-wrapped widgets can be easily used in a JSP, Rails, PHP and Phobos app. This session will explain what jMaki is and show using live code demos how easy it is to embed jMaki widgets in different pages.

AJAX isn't just for rich UIs and mashups anymore. Web 2.0 has infiltrated the enterprise workforce, and IT departments all around the world just like yours are feeling the pressure to make every back-office, call center, trading blotter, inventory management, and systems performance application look and feel like iGoogle or MyESPN.com. Simply slapping on a few AJAX widgets will make these applications look cooler, but what about business logic, data integration, and replicating the business processes? Join Coach Wei, CTO and founder of Nexaweb, and Bob Buffone, Nexaweb's Chief Architect, for a candid, fast-paced discussion anchored by real-world customer examples demonstrating how you can use AJAX and RIA technology to truly take your business applications to the next level!

If you have not been introduced to the concept of the 'Comet programming', then now is the time to become acquainted. Comet is a revolutionary technology that replaces the old request-response driven Web development model and the use of polling. With this new client-server communication technique, developers can now build real-time Web applications that implement a true event-driven model with little need for third-party plug-ins. But is this a technique for every developer and for every Web application? How easy is it to create a real-time Web application that goes beyond 'chat'? What is needed to successfully create and deploy a real-time Web application?

The Web 2.0 movement has created a paradigm shift in enterprise platforms - the emergence of Web-based platforms that let developers build innovative, revenue-generating applications for targeted demographics. Developers will capitalize on these platforms to build applications based on users' identity, context and presence. Rearden Commerce offers developers this platform today, harnessing Web 2.0 technologies that help people find services and goods they need based on preferences, location and previous searches. Rearden Commerce's CEO, Patrick Grady, will discuss the future of Web-based enterprise platforms and ecosystems, and how developers can reap rewards from building personalized applications for these environments.

As more traditional sites adopt Web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, Web Services, SOA and PHP to perform online transactions one thing is certain--- these new technologies bring security issues and ignoring them could lead to serious breaches. Watchfire will demonstrate and discuss the most common Web 2.0 attack vectors, analyze the specific security issues of AJAX, especially cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and cross-site scripting (CSS), and explain techniques for exploiting and protecting web services including secure coding practices and how to properly secure web applications.

Project Zero is an agile development and execution environment which leverages REST and scripting runtimes to speed and simplify development of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces. Project Zero is being developed openly using a Community-Driven Commercial Development process at http://www.pro jectzero.org. In this session, the audience will get an overview of the Project Zero Platform and learn how to develop, assemble, and run Project Zero applications.

Enterprise mashups - the convergence of Web 2.0 mashups and service-oriented architecture (SOA) - can create a world of opportunities for enterprises to come up with internal and customer-facing self-service, composite and 'situational' applications. These applications can be created just-in-time by empowered enterprise business users and by simply combining SOA-enabled information sources and services or SOBAs (service-oriented business application) on the intranet and Internet.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

Nexaweb announced its Winter 2008 eConference Series aimed at helping software developers, enterprise architects and executives learn best practices and strategies for building and deploying enterprise-class composite, ?mashup? and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

As the momentum for the new class of SOA middleware continues to grow, developers are looking for simple yet scalable solutions that can integrate disparate data across a variety of on-premises, on-demand and Web 2.0 information sources and applications. With many of such data integration problems being relatively small in scope, companies can't justify bringing expensive middleware to solve small problems. Some of the projects are built using work-arounds and custom coding. The result is prone to operational risk, high maintenance costs, and is inevitably inefficient. After this session you will: Understand the impact of data mashups on developer community, Find out how to select mashup technologies and tools for your next data integration project, Discover tips, best practices, and strategies for leveraging these tools and solving most common challenges.

Project Insight has released new upgrades in 7.1 that feature the ability to create Project Insight tasks and issues from Outlook e-mails, an AJAX-enabled, team member customizable time entry grid; portfolio, project, and task snapshot reports; project profitability and recovery reports; and new time/expense configuration options.

I met Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows just after Thanksgiving as they pitched their product for inclusion at DEMO. Having helped launch the first Web server at DEMO more than 10 years ago, I understood immediately the importance of what they are providing in this technology. On the spot, I invited them to come to the conference. Where, John asked, would DEMO 08 be held? Palm Desert, I answered. 'That's great. Our families will love it there.'

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

There are 8,909 books listed on Amazon.com with the word 'Investing' in the title; there are(!) 27,146 books with the word investment in the title. Without having looked at a representative sample, I can be confident that Sturgeon's Law applies - I suspect if I sampled enough of them I would find that 90% greatly underestimates the amount of junk in this particular area.

Trolltech has integrated its Qt cross-platform development framework with WebKit, the web browser technology used in Apple's iPhone and millions of Nokia smartphones. The integration of Qt and WebKit will enable mobile operators and handset manufacturers to create a customer experience that enriches mobile phone applications with live web content. Google Earth and iTunes are examples of such services currently available on the desktop. With Trolltec's Qt WebKit Integration, these type of applications - along with services such as social networking, instant messaging and real-time financial updates - can also be delivered to mobile phones.

Netconcepts announced the launch of GravityStream 2.0 - a powerful enterprise level automated natural search advertising platform for online retailers. GravityStream 2.0 automatically converts a retailer's millions of website pages into optimized landing pages to match its branded products with a consumer's generic queries. Since consumers conduct approximately 40 times more niche searches than branded ones, this capability gives retailers a major competitive advantage in answering generic searches with their own website landing page results.

WSO2 announced the debut of the WSO2 Registry, the industry's first registry to combine service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance with Web 2.0 collaboration. The open source WSO2 Registry features a structured registry and repository; Web-based interface; and Web 2.0 community features such as tags, rating and comments. Together, these capabilities enable users to store, catalog, index and manage enterprise metadata in a simple, scalable and easy-to-use wiki-style model-making the WSO2 Registry equally accessible for business users, developers and administrators.

Vitria announced a Web 2.0 BPM suite that empowers business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes -- Vitria's M3O. Business analysts can now model and execute business processes in a rich web-based environment in direct collaboration with their IT counterparts, significantly reducing the development cycle, saving companies millions of dollars and enabling a truly agile enterprise.

Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign have all become the OpenID Foundation's first corporate board members, giving a push to the seven-month-old group's ideas about portable web identities or OpenIDs and how personal information is shared online, something that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all caught flak for. OpenID is a free decentralized sign-on technology that eliminates the need for multiple user names across Internet sites and is supposed to give people more control over their digital identities and what exactly is shared. There are so far 350 million OpenID-enabled URLs in existence. Microsoft has donated legal resources to the cause.

Live by the Web, die by the Web - we look at what the blogosphere is saying about Microsoft's $44.6BN offer. Among blogs mentioned are those by David Kirkpatrick, Patty Seybold, Mark Anderson, Jon Fortt, and Marc Andreesen.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Kentico software has just released a major upgrade to its web content management solution. Kentico CMS 3.0 now supports Visual Studio 2008, allowing developers to build powerful WEB 2.0 sites. Kentico CMS 3.0 now supports development in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. The administration interface now also supports Safari 3.0, allowing Mac OS users to edit content. The new version introduces many improvements, including new Booking system and Geomapping modules, AJAX image gallery and support for Authorize.NET and PayPal payment gateways.

OpSource announced that Nets to Ladders (N2L) has selected OpSource On-Demand to deliver its groundbreaking Benefits Enrollment Network (BENtm). By delivering this innovative Web application with OpSource, N2L has gained the critical reliability and security it needs to help social services organizations transform the lives of America's working poor through easily accessible and cost-effective benefits enrollment and savings-assistance processes.

Hyperic announced that CNET Networks will standardize its systems and application management on Hyperic HQ Enterprise across all its web properties. When the CNET implementation is complete, Hyperic will be deployed across thousands of live Linux servers throughout CNET's data centers. CNET Networks builds brands for people and the things they are passionate about, such as gaming, music, entertainment, technology, business, food and parenting. The company's leading brands include CNET, GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, CHOW, ZDNet and TechRepublic.

Optaros announced its design and assembly of a new online shopping concept for Wonderbox, a leading international Internet and retail company that sells the 'Wonderbox', which is a themed gift box containing vouchers for 6000 experiences from which the recipient can choose. Optaros redesigned and re-platformed Wonderbox's online store, creating a Web 2.0 experience that drives excitement, usability and conversion rates.

Vitria Technology has announced a Web 2.0 BPM suite that enables business users to model, manage, monitor, and optimize their business processes - Vitria's M3O. Business analysts can model and execute business processes in a Web-based environment in direct collaboration with their IT counterparts.

'We are committed to lowering the barrier to entry for developers around the world to build a more collaborative and dynamic Internet,' said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, 'while empowering our members to take control of their online presence in new and exciting ways.' DeWolfe was speaking as MySpace today announced the launch of the MySpace Developer Platform Site, which he described as 'a place for developers to connect and learn about, build, test, and deploy MySpace applications.'

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, March 18-20, 2008, in New York City will provide an overview of Canoo's RIA technology as compared to its other European competitors. Upcoming AJAXWorld Conference is demonstrating a stronger interest and participation from delegates around Europe. Canoo announced a new release of its Java library for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), UltraLightClient (ULC). This new 6.2 version offers addons to test UltraLightClient-based applications more easily.

Within the past few years, Web 2.0 has become a major technology trend, dramatically impacting the way consumers interact with information and applications. This consumer trend is now extending into the enterprise; however, businesses have been more reluctant than consumers to adopt these new technologies.

After a process of careful evaluation, eZ Publish from eZ Systems was selected to help the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Controller's Office meet its primary objectives - to provide easy-to-find, relevant information for the MIT user community, and to offer a secure, efficient, user-friendly tool for content maintainers to control the website's contents and design.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.