Mollom is a new initiative launched by Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and Benjamin Schrauwen, to provide a complete solution to prevent spam and helps improve overall content quality. Mollom provide a set of features including :

• Accurate spam filtering
• Eliminate your moderation queue
• Detailed statistics
• Image and audio CAPTCHA challenges
• Content quality assessment
• and more ...

Tijs Verkoyen have written a PHP5 class to communicate with mollom's open API. Very simple and easy to use. You can find solutions for your languages also available including Java, Ruby, Python, .NET, in addition to a drupal module to integrate Mollom in your community's CMS.

Posted by Hatem at 10:32 AM to Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Packt is pleased to announce a new book "SOA Approach To Integration" which shows how to define SOA integration architecture, what technologies to use, and how to best integrate existing applications with modern e-business solutions.

This book focuses on the SOA approach to integration of existing (legacy) applications and newly developed solutions, using modern technologies, particularly web services, XML, ESB, and BPEL. The book shows how to define SOA for integration, what integration patterns to use, which technologies to use, and how to best integrate existing applications with modern e-business solutions.

Continue reading "Service Oriented Architecture and it's Approach To Integration." »

Posted by Hatem at 8:32 AM to SOA | Permalink | Comments (0)

Facebook launched a new API for its web application platform called Data Store API which aims to help developers store data on Facebook's servers. Now not only you can develop applications for Facebook, but you can even store data on their servers. An interesting move, but not sure how profitable this could be for Facebook. The API still in closed beta, member interested can leave their application name and ID on discussion board.

Posted by Hatem at 7:59 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amazon have some interesting services for Storage, bandwidth, computing... but many don't even consider it because they find the way to calculate fees complicated. I heard many feedbacks from developers and companies who launched their service with S3, EC2 or SQS, and all of them positive feedbacks. Now if you have a service and wanted to use one of these services, it's more easier to estimate fees with the new AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Whatever you are looking for Storage, computing, or just a queue service, all services are in-demand and can help you start your business and make it grow slowly without any changes. If your website don't use much storage and bandwidth you will find yourself paying very small fees in the beginning, and the time you need more, you won't have to change anything in your service. Best of all you can use this tool to estimates your monthly bill in the best or worst cases, if you get Dugg, Slashdotted or other.

Pictogame is a service which recently launched and using S3. In three weeks and after several Dugg, the site served 75GB, and 1 million of widgets. The total bill was less than $20 for both storage and bandwidth. The service use PHP, Flash and XML coupled with Amazon S3. Now best feature of the service, is that S3 will take care of Scaling the service, no more post-production headaches. Anyone else had an experience with S3, good or bad ?

Posted by Hatem at 11:59 AM to General | Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

White paper - May 2007 - This white paper examines the technology behind Web Services, how the system is made available to the user, and the way connections are made to back-end (and therefore sensitive) data. These different elements come together to make Web Services a portal for users to access data, but also provide different entry points which may be exploited for illegitimate purposes. These security flaws bring about the need for an added security-assessing component in the Acunetix WVS solution. Support for Web Services vulnerability scanning is now provided by a dedicated component which is specifically designed to detect exploitable entry-points in a Web Services system.

1. The Web Services Building Blocks

1.1 The Web Service architecture comprises different technologies which enable a client to obtain data from a server, using the SOAP protocol. SOAP originally stood for Simple Object Access Protocol; however it is now a free standing acronym since the W3C body deemed it as misleading. A Web Service provides a web API (application programming interface) which enables two applications to communicate using XML over the web, or a network connection. This system was created to act as a middle agent when application-to-application integration was an issue which required a solution. A Web Service may be developed in any language and deployed over any platform, but most importantly it may be accessed by any other application regardless of the language used to develop it. SOAP serves as the entity which uses XML to collect the specific message, the service, the interface or port type, and the service binding (the binding contains information about the service such as its hosting redirector and access point).

Continue reading "Web Services, The Technology and its Security Concerns" »

Posted by Hatem at 6:25 PM to Articles | SOAP | XML-RPC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeff pointed over the AWS blog to phps3tk, by Edoceo, inc., an open source command line S3 Toolkit written in PHP. The toolkit requires the PEAR package Crypt_HMAC and the SimpleXMLElement extensions for PHP. phps3tk differ from other packages by using Curl functions to reduce memory usage for adding and getting large files. A sample usage of the main S3Connection object :

$s3c = new S3Connection($key,$secret,$config); s3c->set_bucket($b); $s3r = $s3c->ls('/some/object/key/here',null,'/'); $s3r = $s3c->get('/some/object/key/here','/path/to/local/file'); $s3r = $s3c->put('/path/to/local/file','/some/object/key/here'); $s3r = $s3c->stat('/some/object/key/here');

Posted by Hatem at 7:36 AM to Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)