DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for September, 2008

Tim Berners Lee (often heralded as one of the founders of the internet) today announced the establishment of the World Wide Web foundation. In a speech to members of the Knight Foundation, TBL outlined the objectives of the new organisation

• to advance One Web that is free and open,
• to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
• and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.

TBL is already a director of the W3 consortium who efforts have concentrated on unified technology standards (such as XML and HTML) to promote the freedom of the web. The new foundation will aim to address the social impact of the web along with finding ways that to distinguish between reliable and non reliable sources of information.

More information is available at www.webfoundation.org.

The quickest way to get an appreciation for why Inrule is such a revolutionary bit of kit to think about business logic as a set of rules or conditions that are held in a centralised repository, (for the sake of argument) similar to the way that content is stored in a content management system. Rules are managed by non-technical business users in a collaborative, organisational fashion. Software engineers no longer need to be engaged in the management of business logic and so the business benefits both from cost saving as well as the reduced time to market to deploy the rules. The software engineer is freed to work on more challenging tasks.

In short the BRMS does for business logic what CMS does for web content (ie puts the business in control) .The company is now enabled to ‘think in rules’. This is a unified collaborative approach to the way that rules are controlled and managed within an organisation.

Such technology calls for an entirely different approach to software development, one that InRule call ‘dynamic decisioning’. In essence, Software can now be designed in such a way that business technology could be changed ahead of a change in the business environment.

For example, if a change in legislation is thought to occur which had a knock on effect on the business processes within the organisation, those changes could be written in advance, tested then activated on the passing of the legislation so that that the business transitions seamlessly.

How would your business benefit from ‘thinking in rules’?

Starting on Friday a mixed group of professionals from the start up scene will be attending Australia’s first ‘start up camp.’

The ideas is to come up with a concept, and research it, plan it, implement it then pitch it and market it all in one weekend.

Obviously, we will be atking some serious shortcuts so the product will be discarded at the end of the weekend but the process that we will follow is important.

You can follow our progress at

http://www.startup-australia.org/startupweekendschedule

http://www.startup-australia.org/startupweekendcoverage

Yesterday Google launched its latest venture in its bid to (take over the world) cement its brand into the internet users brains for ever.

Chrome the new web browser was launched and made available for download. Suprisingly, there was little fuss or fanfair around what may people consider to be a bold move and a move with high significance for the billions of people that use the internet.

Internet Explorer currently holds around 90% market share over its competitors. The second most popular is my browser of choice; firefox. Google has been instrumental in the rise in popularity of the firefox browser by entering into a partnership whereby advertisng was offered to firefox from google pages.

So what can Chrome offer that the other don’t?  Well on first impressions, its a simpler and cleaner interface than firefox and IE. If you think about the amount of time many people spend in their web browsers these days, that may be a welcome relaief for many. It also works with the apple webkit so if you site renders in Safari, chances are it will in Chrome too.

Word is that each tab is running on a seperate thread so if one tab crashes it doesnt bring down all of the other pages. (Why has no one done that one before).

Lastly, it could just be my imagination but tabs and pages appear to load significantly faster. I would love to hear from security experts before I login to my internet banking however.

A download is available from http://www.google.com/chrome/ and more info can be found at SMH