JBoss Seam - Web 2.0 enabled!

Today, I evaluated the newest web development offering from JBoss named Seam. The philosophy behind JBoss Seam is to provide a tight integration between Web and Transaction (UI-EJB-DB) thereby strives to enable rapid web application development. Tight integration in this context means a single framework for defining business services, DB entities that tie directly to the UI components and allow applications to maintain stateful data through a statful persistence context. This framework inherits and incorporates various technical artifacts/philosophies from some of the most popular exisiting frameworks including JSF, EJB 3.0, DI, Ruby on Rails, AJAX support etc.

This will be a framework to watch moving forward in 2007!

Windows CardSpace for Firefox

Windows CardSpace, Microsoft's newest offering of Identity Management which is bundled as part of IE 7.0. It provides the ability for websites to request user identity. Today, an extension for FireFox supporting CardSpace is released.

Click here to download the FireFox extension for CardSpace.

Flash (SWF) to WPF (XAML) converter

Micheal Swanson, Microsoft Technical Evangelist has put out a very useful tool which can convert Adobe Flash SWF files to XAML, the declarative UI language for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I belive that this tool will definitely ease and aid in adoption of WPF and also help developers understand XAML programming semantics and paradigm.

SWF File Format can be found here, in case you're interested.

ePaper

"The Hindu" - India's National Newspaper has released its ePaper, an online edition of its printed daily. I'm impressed by the simplicity and elegance of ePaper. Its infact a very innovative use of a simple technology -- map on image which brings to the user the feeling of reading "real" newspaper.


In my opinion from an implementation prespective, the scanned images of the printed paper (Digital Assets) must have been annotated with appropriate text links as metadata. The publishing system would have to pull and these together and publish them on the web. The PDF/Text option allows the user to choose his format of choice for viewing.

I installed Times Reader bulit on Windows Presentation Foundation (.NET 3.0) as a standalone application. There is no doubt that this also brings a user experience of reading the real newspaper. I would assume that this will be the future web version of NY Times as WPF-E (Everywhere) becomes available.

Update: Recently I stumbled upon provider of ePaper technology - PressMart

Brightcove ties the knot - Owner, Publisher and Ads

Brightcove, the video syndication startup released its newest offering Brightcove Network -- Video marketplace. The Brightcove Network allows anyone to launch their own Internet TV channel in a self-service manner. The service is free and allows unlimited utilization of Brightcove's bandwidth. Brightcove Network provides the technology platform that allows both individuals and media mougals to get to market rapidly. Their adveritising platform -- Brightcove AdNet is designed to generate revnue for the Publisher (50-50 between Publisher and Brightcove).

For the Geeks, there is Open API --- programming interfaces on top of Brightcove's HTML/JavaScript/Flash platform.