Jim Rapoza

For a few years during the height of Internet Explorers dominance and the depth of Netscapes follies, Opera was the clear choice as the alternative Web browser. But given the recent and rapid rise of Firefox, Operas status has greatly diminished. Opera is still a very good Web browser and, with the April release of […]

If you go to the open-source development site sourceforge.net and search on the term “portal,” youll get hundreds of hits. In fact, you could reasonably argue that, when it comes to open-source enterprise applications, portals have been the biggest success story. In addition to being highly effective and capable on their own, open-source portals have […]

Exo Platform 1.0 is the latest entry in the increasingly crowded and increasingly capable field of enterprise-class open-source portals and publishing systems. Released in February by The Exo Platform SARL, Exo Platform 1.0 provides extensive (and relatively low-cost) development and customization features for building corporate portals. Click here to read the full review of Exo […]

So here I am, head of a large corporation, and its time for me to pick a few top people to help run the company. But who should I pick for key positions such as CFO and CIO? My first pick is Marty, a person who cant track or control his spending, who is completely […]

WINNER Unify Corp.NXJ 10.5 In the complex and developer-oriented world of BPM (business process management), Web services and SOAs (service-oriented architectures), usability and ease of deployment often can be overlooked. But Unifys NXJ 10.5 does such a good job of making it simple and fast for companies to create, model and deploy business processes that […]

WINNER Epiphany Inc. Epiphany Interaction Advisor E6 While CRM products are often concerned mainly with managing lists of current and potential customers, the key elements of retaining customers and increasing sales at the moment of purchase are often left out of many customer relationship management offerings. But this clearly is not the case with Epiphany […]

Finally the long winter is over, and our thoughts turn to warm-weather pursuits. Some people will plan beach vacations, while others will turn to hiking, fishing and other outdoor activities. Me? Im planning that truly American experience of going to a big amusement park. But which one? The quality of rides and the cost are […]

Like most knowledge workers, I spend a lot of time searching for information on Google. And it can be frustrating when a results link looks to be useful, but when I click on the link, it turns out to be a site aggregator or something not even related to the search topic. In these cases, […]

Most people tend to agree with the old adage: Knowledge is power. But there are some groups that think knowledge is a bad thing—knowledge on the part of others, at least—and these groups work hard to keep people in a state of blissful ignorance. Many software makers actively try to keep data under wraps—information about […]

In the enterprise, when talk turns to application servers and Web scripting languages, it often seems as if the entire world consists only of Java servers and .Net. But there are several other prominent technologies available for building Web applications, and businesses are well-advised to keep them in mind. PHP, used widely across the Web […]

PHP was designed from the ground up to be a scripting language for Web applications and to be easy to understand for anyone used to Perl, JavaScript or most other scripting languages. This short learning curve, along with the fact that PHP runs on any platform and installs easily with the popular Apache Web server, […]

The release last month of ColdFusion MX 7 is by far the biggest since the original MX release almost three years ago. That release saw ColdFusion move from a stand-alone server to one that ran on top of Java-based application servers. Click here to read the full review of ColdFusion MX 7. 2 The release […]