Jim Rapoza

If youre a company that uses Web-based advertising—either to promote products and services or to generate revenue—theres been good news and bad news lately. At the recent Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit, Web marketing company DoubleClick discussed the increase in online advertising and predicted double-digit growth for next year. Now, youd expect a company […]

Ive been writing about the Semantic Web since I first read about it in the late 1990s in World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lees book “Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web.” So for several years, I have been eagerly waiting for it to arrive and transform the […]

Web services have become vital tools for many corporations, handling everything from business-to-business connections among partners to integrating vital back-end systems to driving diverse data to corporate portals. Click here to read the full review of Cape Clears Data Interchange 4.7. 2 Web services have become vital tools for many corporations, handling everything from business-to-business […]

For IT administrators, one of the toughest and most thankless jobs is securing a server that will run vital enterprise applications. No matter what operating system the server is running, effectively hardening the server requires long hours and painstaking effort. Even if you do the best job possible, however, it may be for naught if […]

RoboHelp X5, the first version of the popular help-authoring system since eHelp was acquired by Macromedia, gains welcome features that greatly expand the audiences that can be reached through help documentation. It also includes some integration with Macromedia formats such as Flash. One of the big features in RoboHelp X5, which was released last month […]

Unlike Curl, DreamFactory is a brand-new player in the rich Internet application space. The company is less than a year old, and DreamFactory Enterprise (despite its 6.0 status) is the first version of the product. Although it is a newcomer, DreamFactory Enterprise, which shipped last month, has a lot of strengths and could be an […]

With all the big-name vendors in the J2EE server and development market—not to mention the popularity of open-source options—a relatively small vendor might not seem to have a chance. However, Pramati Technologies provides a good blueprint for how small vendors can compete in this environment. In Pramati Studio 3.5, the company provides a high-quality, intuitive […]

Do any of these integrated, multifunctional products sound like good ideas to you: A computer mouse thats also a neck massager and text scanner, a laptop with a built-in paper shredder and espresso maker, or a digital projector/cocktail shaker? They dont sound like good ideas to me. For the most part, Im in the a-gadget-should-do-one-thing-and-do-it-well […]

Started in the late 1990s by prominent Web and development technologists, Curl is a relative old-timer in the rich Internet applications arena. The Curl platform comprises essentially two components: the Surge run-time environment and the Surge Lab IDE (integrated development environment). Click here to read the full review of Curl. 2 Started in the late […]

Im very, very sorry. it appears that I, Jim Rapoza, am one of the worst virus spreaders in the world, and you can lay a large portion of the recent virus outbreak at my feet. Youre thinking, “Jim, how could you? Arent you the one who called people idiots for opening obvious virus attachments and […]

Testing company systems for vulnerabilities to known security problems and for regulatory compliance can be a daunting task for small companies with limited resources. Large server-based solutions are often beyond their means, and inexpensive or free client-based tools are usually not up to the task of testing all their systems. An interesting option for these […]

Many companies have been searching for the perfect platform to deliver highly interactive Web-based applications that work well with Web services, but theyve had a hard time finding something that fits the bill. Java applets provide a capable application platform but can be difficult to develop. Web applications based on scripting languages lack the interactivity […]