The glitzy, interactive abilities of Web 2.0 have led to a profusion of new applications, but the technology also is bringing a new era of security vulnerabilities, a security researcher warned Wednesday.”Security was a challenge to begin with, but if anything it’s getting harder in the Web 2.0 world,” said Jacob West, manager of the security research group at Fortify, a company that helps companies make sure their software is secure. He made his comments during a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco here.

A big culprit is JavaScript, a language that’s widely used to control Web browsers and enable more sophisticated operations. JavaScript has been around for more than a decade, but new risks are emerging since it’s a major component of Ajax, a Web 2.0 technology used to build richly interactive sites. Read more…..компютри втора употреба

Here are some Knowledge Links for today,

Five Best Instant Messangers

Figure out why an Application hangs

Forget Facebook everyone’s a Twitter

Protect your Privacy while Downloading

yahoo-puts-all-the-chips-on-the-table-time-for-somebody-to-fold

Open Social goes live on Orkut

Socialtext makes Wikis social Announce People and Dashboard

Product Pulse: Baidu Startpages, Sina Space And Community Search

Pageflakes Acquired By Live Universe

MindMeister - Collaborative Mind Mapping

AOL and Yahoo plan to strike a deal, Microsoft retaliates

To achieve the main cost saving advantage many companies are outsourcing their IT related work. Companies are outsourcing the project work either onshore or offshore or combination of both. According to many surveys in 2006 India is the top outsourcing destination and will remain on top position at least for next few years.

Companies try to slash the development work and time by outsourcing the complete or part of the project work. Cost saving is the key consideration besides all other factors. But some companies are now outsourcing the work more strategically. This would be beneficial for outsourcing companies in long future run.

All the surveys like outsourcing survey from diamond consultancy 75% of the companies participated in the survey are outsourcing their work to India. From overall buyers 79% buyers are satisfied with their decision of outsourcing and they are not thinking to stop their outsourcing work in future.

The work mainly outsourced to low cost countries is software development, maintenance, Quality assurance, software testing, and software architecture work.

China is main competitor to India for outsourcing work. According to study many companies are also willing to enter into Chinese market by any means. Chinese strict government policies and their leaned attitude towards the local companies is the main concern for global investors in china.

India is also facing some challenging of increasing employee wages, affecting the overall work cost. Strong Rupee value against Dollar will also be a main concern of Indian companies. But if the Indian engineers are costlier then they must be putting their efforts more for quality work.

So in future top 5 outsourcing destinations could be India, China, US, Brazil and Russia.

In future the outsourcing trend will continue to soar. Companies outsourcing their work need to build strong strategies for more benefits in terms of productivity and profits. Before taking outsourcing decisions if they do a little study of risks and benefits of each country they can get more benefits.

Gone are the days when Internet was only a bunch of static web-pages. Today, it’s a live and happening place, full of interactivity, thanks to a set of technologies collectively known as Web 2.0. It’s become so popular that now, even enterprises want to use them. In this story, we explore these technonolgies, and how they can power next-generation enterprise portals. Plus, we take a peek into the future of Web 2.0

In order to understand and appreciate the next generation of web technologies, it’s important to understand what the current generation has to offer. For a long time, websites were nothing but a bunch of web pages put together for people to click and browse. While it proved to be a terrific source of information, there were many limitations in it. For one, people couldn’t interact on it. There was just one sea of pages to go through. If two people were browsing the same site, they had no way of knowing that. If you wanted to modify a web page or a part of it, then you had to be familiar with HTML coding. Plus, you had to modify the complete web page. There was no way to change parts of it. Over a period of time, websites started springing up like mushrooms on a rotting log. The situation became that ‘if it moves, then it must have a website’. With so many websites offering the same set of static pages, life became rather boring on the Internet. Something was needed to break this monotony.]

That something was web 2.0. It didn’t spring up over night. In fact, it has been there for many years now, gradually getting into our lives. It comprises of many technologies that we’ve all heard of already, like JavaScript, XML, ASP.Net, PHP/Perl, MySQL, etc. These gave the web a different way of dealing with data. Using these and other similar technologies, software companies started giving a web front-end to all their existing applications. Others started building applications solely for the web. We’ve all heard of Intranets and knowledge management solutions, online CRM packages, etc. All of these have in some way or the other contributed to building the next generation web technologies. Unfortunately, they’ve all gone by relatively unnoticed.

It was only after some one put these technologies to some real creative use that it started getting noticed. All of us have heard of blogging, wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, etc. All of these have converted the web into more of a platform rather than a static source of information. Blogging allowed ordinary users to post their thoughts on websites without knowing a word of HTML. Wikipedia allowed users to edit what others have written online. YouTube and Flickr need no introduction. They’ve become the torch bearers for the world of social networking. Their names are the first to come to mind whenever someone says ‘web 2.0′. All these applications have given the web a new identity. Users can now, not only access data, but also participate and add value to applications. Integration of applications in the browser, freedom for the user to modify content in real-time, interaction between several users, accumulation of content from other sites and feeding of the same into one’s own site, having the desktop hosted on Web, watching video on a Web browser, blogging-all these are possible now, thanks to major development in the Web technologies.

The emergence of Web 2.0 offers several opportunities for enterprises as well. With the integration of several applications, like Wiki, blogging, RSS feeds, they can make their portal solutions much more interactive and useful for users. When ever reference to technologies behind Web 2.0 is made, AJAX is the first name that comes up. So, let us start with it and as we move on, we will cover some other essential technologies that are shaping up the new Web.

AJAX

Today, every second Internet user has a Gmail account, most of us use flickr to upload and share our pictures on the Web, and some of us use Google Maps to locate the area we are travelling. Surely, you must have realized that a completely new variety of dynamic Web applications are emerging. Most of these applications have looks and feel similar to that of desktop applications. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the technology that has enabled this. It makes webpages more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server, behind the scene, so that the entire webpage doesn’t need to reload every time the user makes a request. This helps

improve the overall interactivity, speed, functionality and usability of the webpage. JavaScript is the main programming language wherein AJAX function calls are made and using XML the asynchronously retrieved data is formatted and kept. Being a cross-platform technology enables it to be used across different operating systems, computer architectures and Web browsers. Web apps always had more benefits than desktop apps. They were easy to use, install, and develop, but interactivity was lacking. AJAX solves that problem as well.

AJAX is a combination of several technologies each thriving in its own right, gelling together in a powerful way. We can incorporate a standard-based presentation using XHTML and CSS. Dynamic display and interaction can be incorporated using Document Object Model. Data interchanging and manipulation is mainly the work of XML and XSLT. Data is retrieved asynchronously with the help of XMLHttpRequest and finally JavaScript, residing on client side, binds everything together and dynamically displays and interacts with the information. XMLHttpRequest object has been the key to the success of AJAX, as it enables asynchronous data exchange with servers.

An enterprise can also implement AJAX in its portal. With AJAX you can build applications with rich and dynamic content, by offering simple features like drag and drop and auto-completion. AJAX is a framework model and is now relishing support from both Java and .NET. After the introduction of Microsoft’s ASP 2.0, the things have become still easy for developers working on Web 2.0 compliant Web applications. To the extent that you don’t even need to be an expert in AJAX to use it. With ASP 2.0, a Web developer can compose a page out of separate working parts that communicate independently with the server.

Online spread-sheets spell a new era where desktop applications being overtaken by browser-based applications

There was an interesting article in India’s Economic Times that confirms what a lot of people know already: mobile web is fast becoming the primary means of accessing the web for many people, specially in developing nations. India has 9 million internet subscribers against 31 million mobile internet users who use the mobile internet “to read and reply to mails, download content and for online transactions”. About 54% of new handsets sold in 2006 were internet-enabled according to the same report. The figures come from the Indian regulator, so presumably they are reasonably accurate. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com