Web Development

One day, you might be doing your holiday shopping from your car. Elastic Path believes the future of digital commerce will follow the shopping experience, going beyond websites to a new era of smart devices, even ones inside your car. The Vancouver-based ecommerce company just received $8 million in financing, which will go toward supporting the company’s Cortex API, a hypermedia platform that extends the shopping experience to multiple devices. Toronto’s Wellington Financial provided the financing. Elastic Path, which has served as an ecommerce company since 2000, has more recently been focused on developing and marketing its API. Designed for the business person or front-end developer, the ecommerce API handles backend complexity, letting the user embed components such as profile, entitlements, and payment processing into websites, mobile apps, and other smart devices. “Cortex technology is uniquely positioned to link resources from incompatible business platforms into one payload, which solves a major headache for enterprises,” said Sal Visca, Elastic Path’s chief technology officer. “With this investment, we plan to increase our lead in API-enabled ecommerce solutions.” Elastic Path believes that fueled by the API economy, digital commerce is entering a new era, where the shopping experience will take place on a variety of smart devices, letting people buy things anywhere. Google, Pearson, Symantec, Time Inc., Virgin, and Western Union are among Elastic Path’s customers, using the company’s products to drive billions of dollars in digital commerce annually. According to TechCrunch, Elastic Path will also use the funding to integrate with content management companies such as OpenText, with which it recently announced a partnership. Sponsored byRelated ProgrammableWeb Resources ElasticPath API Profile

Vidyo’s VidyoConferencing 3.0 is a major release including a new desktop conferencing system, a sharing and collaboration system,  and two new room system form factors. One of the most interesting features is Vidyoweb that works in browsers to include users of IM clients such as Skype and Google and streamlined experience for guest users on the system. According to the press release, the room systems are built on top of the Intel® NUC (next unit of computing): “Companies can now confidently invest in enterprise-wide solutions that add intuitive and viral end-user experiences to the industry’s most scalable video communications system,” said Ofer Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Vidyo. “We have seen customer growth explode to an unprecedented level; one customer’s usage has peaked at 750 concurrent calls, another purchased a 1,000 rooms systems in a single deployment, and a third purchased capacity that will support 500 million minutes a year. The lessons from working with these huge use cases have made the Vidyo offering more robust and user-friendly than any other solution on the market.” Vidyo has a suite of APIs that developers can use to integrate its new platform. Its APIs include the one for Vidyoweb mentioned above, and a set of desktop client GUI APIs. The vidyodesktop platform is compatible with Mac, Windows and certain versions of Linux. Sponsored by

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Practical Management Solutions and Insights (PMSI) has launched an open-source API project for business analytics: dimple. Dimple aims to open up the flexibility and power of d3 to analysts. With little d3 knowledge needed, the dimple API gives analysts access to the tools capable of creating dynamic graphical representations of datasets. With over 20 years experience, PMSI continues to consult and build tools that advance the analytics, business strategy, and transaction industries. Dimple represents another arrow in PMSI’s analytical quiver as data visualization and cutting edge graphical representations have taken a significant role in the big data movement. PMSI remains dedicated to giving clients an unparalleled view into ever facet of their business. The dimple API is an object-oriented, JavaScript API targeted for data anlysts that do not necessarily have an extensive JavaScript background. The fundamental objects used for chart creation include chart, axis, series, and storyboard. Developers must include d3.js in any pages for which dimple is used. For more details, visit the dimple GitHub page. Big data has developed into a household term in the Web 2.0 world. Titles such as data scientist and data analyst continue to pop up on job boards. However, the skill set needed to excel in the big data world does not necessarily require computer science capabilities. Dimple aims to bridge the gap between data analyst and computer scientist with a tool that empowers the programmatically-challenged analyst. Dimple could become a common tool for a burgeoning industry. Sponsored byRelated ProgrammableWeb Resources dimple API Profile

This extension is especially developed by Adobe Dreamweaver Team to substitute the unavailability of server behaviors in Dreamweaver CC. Once installed it allows you to get access to the server behaviors and data binding panel and use any DMXzone server side extension in Dreamweaver CC.

With the official release of Dreamweaver CC earlier today, now each extension on DMXzone is fully Dreamweaver CC compatible and has an MXP file for Dreamweaver CS+ and ZXP for Dreamweaver CC, available for download on product pages. Adobe Dreamweaver Team also made an extension that enables the server behavior and data bindings panel support in Dreamweaver CC, that can be downloaded in our free extensions section. Check out the details below and see how to use all the server behavior, bindings and databases functionality in Dreamweaver CC.

You know your product is doing well when most of your early blog posts deal with the status of the waiting list of hundreds of thousands of users eagerly waiting to download your product. That's the enviable position Mailbox, a free mobile email management app, found themselves early in their release cycle. Hasn't email been done already? Apparently not. Mailbox scaled to one million users in a paltry six weeks with a team of about 14 people. As of April they were delivering over 100 million messages per day. How did they do it? Mailbox engineering lead, Sean Beausoleil, gave an informative interview on readwrite.com on how Mailbox planned to scale...

The World Wide Web can be a charlatan’s playground with the potential of accessing reams of personal details and passwords to exploit as they please. Of course, there are secure solutions in place and we can all do our bit to ensure our information remains safe, but in some cases, fraud manages to succeed. Socure is an identity fraud detection service aimed at providing organisations or website owners with the tools to help prevent fraud and ensure that their customers are who they say they are. Socure’s API makes it possible to integrate this functionality into websites and applications. Socure’s Social Biometrics Solution is an artificial intelligence system and proprietary machine that uses social behaviour pattern analysis to learn algorithms and ultimately determine whether the identification used on a site registration is authentic or not. It’s based on the principal that a person’s social behaviour is unique to them, and by focussing on the strength of these social behaviours on various social networks, the solution can determine the authenticity of a user’s identity online. The system also offers users a customised reporting and analytics dashboard that enables them to gain valuable insights and easily monitor the percentage of fraudulent activity on a particular website. Socure provides a JSON/REST and XML/SOAP API in order to easily integrate this data with websites or applications. Using the API will make it possible to verify the authenticity of a new user signing up, verify any fraud risks that an existing user may pose or evaluate any fraud risks on either side of an online financial transaction, thereby protecting businesses and their customers at every stage. Further information is available on Socure’s website. Also, make sure to check out the 265 Security APIs listed in the ProgrammableWeb directory. Sponsored byRelated ProgrammableWeb Resources Socure API Profile

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. Caterina Fake from Always ask yourself, "how does this benefit our mission?"

This is the story of what we learned during a redesign for our most demanding client — ourselves! In this article, I will explain, from our own experience of refreshing our agency website, why we abandoned a separate mobile website and will review our process of creating a new responsive design. At Cyber-Duck, we have been designing both responsive websites and adaptive mobile websites for several years now. Both options, of course, have their pros and cons. With a separate mobile website, you have the opportunity to tailor content and even interactions to the context of your users, whereas a responsive website means better content parity for users and a single website to maintain. Why Adapt To A Responsive Design? Our redesign story starts in August 2012. Until then, our previous strategy of having separate mobile, tablet and desktop websites didn’t exactly perform badly; they drove conversions, and user engagement appeared to be good relative to our desktop website. I should mention that this strategy was borne purely out of the need to quickly tailor our ageing desktop website to the increasing number of tablet and mobile users at the time. We used jQuery Mobile to create our previous mobile-optimized website as a quick fix for the increasing number of mobile users on our ageing desktop website. We produced our tablet and mobile websites specifically with users of these devices in mind — performance was our top priority. We wanted to improve on the loading time of our “desktop” website dramatically; the desktop home page was 2.2 MB, with 84 HTTP requests, and the mobile home page was still quite large, at 700 KB, with 46 HTTP requests. We had also designed the interfaces specifically with touch in mind, using jQuery Mobile to enhance the user experience with touch gestures. Changing Our Approach Despite this, several factors led us to decide that this approach was no longer sustainable for our own website: having to support multiple code bases, content management, the emergence of new mini-tablets and “phablets.” The first two were not ideal, but at least manageable. The third, however, was a deal-breaker. OK, so we could have designed a website optimized for mini-tablets, but with so many more Web-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes entering the market every day, it would have been only a matter of time before we needed to think about optimizing for new form factors. We wanted our new website to be easier to maintain and more future-friendly for the inevitable influx of new form factors. It was at this point that we decided to completely overhaul all three websites and create a responsive design that would provide the best possible experience to all of our users, regardless of how they accessed our website. Setting Goals for the Responsive Design At the very start of this overhaul, we set ourselves some simple goals, or principles if you like, that we wanted to achieve with our responsive design: Speed Performance affects everyone. Accessibility It should work with no styles, backgrounds or JavaScript. Content parity The same content and functionality should be on all platforms. Device-agnostic Leave no platform behind. Future-friendly Cut down on maintenance. Based on these goals, our starting point for the design was to review our existing mobile website and to use it as a base for our responsive design. We explored how we could enhance for wider screens, rather than attempt to squeeze our previous desktop website down to mobile. We started by speaking to some of our trusted customers about what they liked about our website, what they didn’t really like, and what was important to them when searching for a digital agency. We also used analytics data from our previous website, using a mixture of Google Analytics, Lead Forensics and CrazyEgg to help us better understand what existing users wanted and needed from our website. As a result, we were able to streamline and prioritize a content strategy based on how our u