Friday, October 26, 2007 6:40 PM/EST
Salesforce.com (again) showed off Force.com, its platform-as-a-service application development platform, just one month after unveiling the offering. Everyone was brimming with pride and joy and talking of "developer happiness." Salesforce.com Vice President Adam Gross was joined by James Ward from Adobe and Natan Zaidenweber of StakeWare, an AppExchange incubator partner that uses the Force.com platform, on Friday, Oct. 25, for a chalk talk in San Francisco. Ward showed off a Flex-driven, offline pharma selling app that allows sales agents to call on doctors and log notes that can be uploaded to Salesforce.com later. Ward also showed an application that would enable a conference attendee to pick sessions and build a customized schedule. Zaidenweber related that he had dumped a two-year Java J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) development project designed to help companies track corporate responsibility policies and compliance after he saw a Force.com demo. Now in the Salesforce.com incubator...
Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:00 PM/EST
Hosted applications, including Salesforce.com, make sense if they get enough customers to buy in. The ability to "socialize" -- or spread out the costs of a top notch data center including security, availability and scalability among a large group -- makes business sense. But now I'm wondering if it would be a better idea to aggregate these hosted services so that enterprises could consolidate access to the growing variety of hosted apps and services. I started thinking about this after attending a Dreamforce session on integrating Google Adwords with Salesforce.com to process leads. Salesforce.com users can get a lot of specific information about leads that come from Google Adwords. Leads that come from Yahoo or Ask are logged as coming from those search engines and also what words resulted in the search, but that's about it. In other words, it makes a difference which hosted services you use if you...
Monday, August 13, 2007 6:41 PM/EST
Security consultant Christopher Wells has just written Securing Ajax Applications, $49.99 from O'Reilly. While the book is written for Ajax developers, I think it's more appropriate for business analysts who are specifying Ajax projects. Security Ajax Applications has a lot more to say to technically literate project managers than to hot shot programmers. Don't get me wrong, developers will get a fundamental grounding in creating secure applications. However, until security is specified as a program requirement by the people paying the developers' salary, Ajax apps will be developed as quickly as possible with little regard to security. Over the last two years there has been much heat in the security community about the insecurities of Ajax application development. Case in point was the presentation on Premature Ajax-ulation at Black Hat Las Vegas in August. The presenters, Bryan Sullivan and Billy Hoffman of SPI Dynamics (acquired the same day the presentation,...
