Our Technology Focus

Web 2.0

In recent years, a shift has taken place in how Internet applications are percieved and used. With Web 2.0, user expectations have been re-oriented towards a greater focus on community-based, participation oriented, social networks. Rich interfaces have made possible by a set of technologies that comprise AJAX. With these tools, enterprises can now cost-effectively deploy highly usable, desktop-like applications on a broad scale. Modular, flexible architectures enabled by "service oriented architectures" have created opportunities for achieving software development objectives for rapid assembly and reuse. Businesses can now employ the Internet not as a tractable and monitorable marketing channel, but also as a viable applications development platform.

Content Management

Zaium has extensive experience in both open source and proprietary content management systems. We can help your organization formulate the best open source CMS solution for your needs. Open source CMS platforms and its components can be used to solve a variety of business requirements including web publishing, news sites, and collaborative intranets.

Customer Relationship Management

Zaium can help you define and implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) solution that will support your marketing, sales and customer service efforts. We implement solutions that will meet your goals in enabling customers to interact directly with your company through self-service and e-commerce channels. From among the many potential open source platforms available, we can install, configure, and customize a CRM solution that best fits your needs. We can also help you integrate these applications with your current installed systems to ensure seamless customer interactions.

Core technologies

AJAX Programming and Development Support

AJAX or "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" refers to a set of web technologies that together allow for the creation of interactive web applications. AJAX programming involves the use of a combination of:

• HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for presenting information
• The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
• The XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server (commonly using XML and XSLT).

Apache

The Apache HTTP Server Project is long-standing effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of the project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996, and it has become the dominant web server today.

The Apache HTTP Server is a project of the Apache Software Foundation. Another related web server technology that Zaium provides support for includes Apache Tomcat - JSP/Servlet Server: Java Server Pages (JSP) is one of the most widely used technologies for delivering dynamic web content. The Apache Foundation has developed a popular implementation of the JSP standard in an open source product called Tomcat.

MySQL -- Relational database system

The MySQL database server is the world's most widely used open source database. It has become the most popular database for ISVs, VARs, hardware vendors, and network appliance manufactures. Its software architecture makes it extremely fast and easy to customize. MySQL acts as the database component of the LAMP, MAMP, and WAMP platforms (Linux/Mac/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). Its popularity as a web application is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often favored for the ability to reuse code and employ a simplified approach to producing functionally rich features. MySQL has developed a reputation as a database management system that excels in speed, compactness, stability and ease of deployment.

PHP

PHP has become one of the most popular general-purpose scripting languages that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP was principally designed to support server-side scripting. The PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework. These platforms have in common that they all provide dynamic content to the client from a web server.

The LAMP architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. PHP is a key ingredient (ie, the P) in this bundle of technologies alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL. PHP can be used with a large number of relational database management systems, runs on all of the most popular web servers, is available for many different operating systems, and has one of the widest installation bases across the Internet with approvimately 19 million Internet domains currently PHP installations.

JBOSS & J2EE

In a well known industry analyst report, it has been estimated that of the approximately one billion dollars that American companies spend yearly on Java middleware applications, over half has been effectively wasted. Added credence can be placed on this when one considers that JBoss is available to the public for free. As a full featured, J2EE compliant Java application server, it has been downloaded over 150,000 times per month and is the leading Java application server used by developers today, preferred by many over IBM's WebSphereand BEA's WebLogic.

But beyond simply encompassing the functions of an application server, JBoss offers a rapidly expanding collection of middleware platform technologies including products such as Hibernate (O/R Mapping and Persistence), JBoss Cache (Replicated and Transactional Caching), JBoss jBPM (BPM and Workflow), JBoss Portal (Portal and CMS), and JGroups (Multicast Communication).

OpenLaszlo

The OpenLaszlo platform enables the development of applications employing a "rich Web" interface often associated with desktop client software, as well as the no-download Web deployment of HTML. These applications run on all leading Web browsers and desktop operating systems. The OpenLaszlo platform is part of the  world-wide open source initiative.

OpenLaszlo applications, much like the older DHTML, are written in XML and JavaScript. However, these applications encounter none of the portability issues across browsers. Although the framework has been designed in an "open" fashion, the OpenLaszlo platform currently targets the Flash Player as its run-time environment framework.

RSS and RDF

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an increasingly popular XML-based format for distributing and aggregating Web content such as news headlines, pictures, and articles.

RSS facilitates the process of Web content syndication for content providers. It enables them to easily create and allow users to select and accept feeds of frequently updated Web content such as news, weather, and sports information.