SE News

Landing page optimization for your mocks and wireframes.

Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design. It presents your mock up to a group of randomly chosen visitors who give feedback on what they see, recognise or remember.

http://fivesecondtest.com/

Stashboard is a status dashboard for APIs and software services. It’s similar to the Amazon AWS Status Page or the Google Apps Status Page. Stashboard is designed to provide a generic status dashboard for any hosted service or API. The code can be downloaded, customized, and run on any Google App Engine account.

http://www.stashboard.org/

The all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation (ASF) develops, stewards, and incubates nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, many of which power mission-critical applications in financial services, aerospace, publishing, government, healthcare, research, infrastructure, and more. Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source products are Apache projects? Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built using Apache? We are pleased to showcase Apache Pivot, the full-featured, professional-grade Java development platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_asf_asks_have_you

Activiti is a Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow system targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It’s open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.

http://activiti.org/

The Prediction API enables access to Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google’s infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/

Logstalgia is a website traffic visualization that replays or streams Apache web-server access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and an never ending torrent of requests.

Requests appear as colored balls (the same color as the host) which travel across the screen to arrive at the requested location. Successful requests are hit by the paddle while unsuccessful ones (eg 404 - File Not Found) are missed and pass through. The simulation can be paused at any time by pressing space. While paused, individual requests can be inspected by passing over them with the mouse.

Andrew Caudwell

http://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/

Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

Michal Zalewski

http://code.google.com/p/skipfish

A tool that provides a quick and easy way to view the messaging performance statistics for WebSphere Application Server (6+) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.

The tool is written entirely in Java™ using the PMI (Performance Monitoring Interface) APIs provided by the WebSphere® Application Server. The look and feel of the GUI is provided by the Standard Widget Toolkit, which was developed by the Eclipse foundation.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sibperf

Deadlock immunity is a property by which programs, once afflicted by a deadlock pattern, develop the ability to avoid future occurrences of that deadlock pattern. Over time, programs with such an “immune system” progressively increase their resistance to deadlocks.

Dimmunix is a tool for giving software systems such an immune system against deadlock, without any assistance from programmers or users. Dimmunix is well suited for general purpose software (desktop and enterprise applications, server software, etc.) and a recent extension allows application communities to collaborate in achieving enhanced immunity.

http://dslab.epfl.ch/proj/dimmunix

Until the 1980s, using a computer program meant memorizing a lot of commands and typing them in a line at a time, only to get lines of text back. The graphical user interface, or GUI, changed that. By representing programs, program functions, and data as two-dimensional images — like icons, buttons and windows — the GUI made intuitive and spatial what had been memory intensive and laborious.

But while the GUI made things easier for computer users, it didn’t make them any easier for computer programmers. Underlying GUI components is a lot of computer code, and usually, building or customizing a program, or getting different programs to work together, still means manipulating that code. Researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab hope to change that, with a system that allows people to write programs using screen shots of GUIs. Ultimately, the system could allow casual computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language.

http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/

Codility is an automated test of programming skills necessary in recruitment of software developers. It enables recruiters without specialized IT knowledge, to quickly run automated assessment tests for programming skills. It’s aim is to verify how well the candidate will perform in a day to day job. To test employee with exactly the same tasks he needs to deliver.

With Codility you get:
* Reduced cost of recruitment by up to 90%
* Increased quality of hires
* Statistics comparing your candidates vs market averages

With Codility you can:
* implement first line of candidate screening
* substitute at least one technical interview
* setup tests in 7 programming languages
* set 3 levels of difficulty of programming tests

http://codility.com/

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.

Dmitry Baranovskiy

http://raphaeljs.com/

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we’ve built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We’re happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.

Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more. Closure Templates grew out of a desire for web templates that are precompiled to efficient JavaScript.

Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That’s why we’re particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google. We want to hear what you think, but more importantly, we want to see what you make. So have at it and have fun!

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html

Amazon Relational Database Service is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Once the exclusive domain of academics and corporations with large research budgets, intelligent applications that learn from data and user input are becoming more common. The need for machine-learning techniques like clustering, collaborative filtering, and categorization has never been greater, be it for finding commonalities among large groups of people or automatically tagging large volumes of Web content. The Apache Mahout project aims to make building intelligent applications easier and faster. Mahout co-founder Grant Ingersoll introduces the basic concepts of machine learning and then demonstrates how to use Mahout to cluster documents, make recommendations, and organize content.

Grant Ingersoll

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mahout/