Ever since it was created in 1995. PHP has been a favorite of developers for server-side web programming. In fact, in some surveys, it now stands as today's most popular web programming language. By most counts, over a million web sites have been written in PHP, including portions of today's largest, most recognizable sites, and often...

OpenAM is an open source continuation of the OpenSSO project that was taken over, and later scrapped, by Oracle. OpenAM is the only commercial-grade, feature-rich web application that provides SSO solutions. It has a variety of features and a powerful Single Sign-On (SSO) capability, but the implementation can be tricky, and the unorganized...

If you’re an application programmer you’ve probably run into a relational database at some point in your professional career. Whether you’re writing enterprise client-server applications or building the next Web 2.0 killer application, you need someplace to put the persistent data for your application, and relational...

Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 is the fourth incarnation of the popular collaboration and content management platform from Microsoft. With each release, the reach and capabilities of SharePoint products and technologies have grown, offering new tools to organizations and new opportunities to developers. With SharePoint 2010, you...

Bento is...

Building WPF and Silverlight applications can be challenging, especially for those new to the technology. Building clean, maintainable, extensible, testable, loosely coupled ones— with no idea where to start—is close to impossible. In late 2007, I was privileged to get a call from Glenn Block at Microsoft asking if I was...

When asked 'who are you?', people in different cultures tend to define themselves fundamentally differently in terms of what their respective culture considers to be most important. In cultures where one's professional and economic status is most important, people say 'I am an engineer', or 'a priest at St...

Remember the Nowhere Man from the Beatles’ classic animated movie Yellow Submarine? He was the nerdy little fellow always going round in circles, writing books, making music, taking pictures, directing plays, and making movies, always so very busy. But he was also very sad because no one could see his work; the Blue Meanies had...

This book is intended to survey the most important computer algorithms in use today, and to teach fundamental techniques to the growing number of people in need of knowing them. It is intended for use as a textbook for a second course in computer science, after students have acquired basic programming skills and familiarity with computer...

We were early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP), testing on XP teams that weren’t at all sure where testers or their brand of testing fit in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the agile (which wasn’t called agile yet) literature about acceptance testing, or how professional testers might contribute. We learned not...

Many years ago, when I had to learn C overnight to make a living as a programmer (this was before C++), I would have given half my salary to find a mentor, a person would say, “Here are the potholes in the road...errors that you are sure to make in learning C. And here’s how to steer around them.” Instead, I had to...

Since the first edition of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist came out in June 2008, we have been encouraged by the reception the book has received. Practitioners from a wide variety of industries— health care, energy, environmental science, life sciences, national intelligence, and publishing, to name a few—have told...