Touring the SD East expo
It's a tough job: Tour the SD expo the day it opens, dodging food
stands and avoiding marketroids while still trying to find out what's new
and interesting -- all while filing this report before midnight.
When editor J.D. Hildebrand suggested that 10 Nov. be Developer
News's special SD'99 East issue, we all agreed. It would mean a long
Tuesday night and tight deadlines but we're no strangers to long nights and
tight deadlines. No problem!
Then I learned that I'd be Developer News's on-site reporter and it hit me: The expo opened at
4 p.m. on
Tuesday; our show issue was Wednesday. I'd have an office full of
co-workers anxiously awaiting my draft. These three facts are incompatible
with a fourth: The best way to for an editor to enjoy a trade show is to
start serious socializing-on-expense-account by the time the sun goes down.
But I'm a professional. I have a deadline. That means I start by
researching the expo.
This year, there are three pavilions and more than 50 exhibitors. The IBM
Partner Pavilion is sponsored -- unsurprisingly, at least to my keen
journalistic intellect -- by IBM.
The Distributed Object Computing Pavilion is sponsored by the Object
Management Group. The XML Pavilion is sponsored by Xmlu.com.
Knock, knock
The exhibitors are a mix of print and online media, ISVs, and services
companies.
Publishers of print magazines are well-represented:
There are also several training companies:
Want more ads?
A two-member gaggle of exhibitors is showcasing adware --
components that let you embed advertising in standalone applications, not
just Web-based applications. Aureate
Media's AdSoftware SDK is available for download, and comes with
examples and support for Delphi, Borland C++, Visual C++, and Visual Basic.
Aureate's tools support is thorough: The Delphi support includes a
component similar to TImage that automatically downloads and displays ads,
and lets you control how and when they appear. Similar support is available
for MFC, OWL, and -- through an ActiveX control -- other
environments. Aureate supports Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.
Conducent goes
several steps further: In addition to advertising, Conducent's toolkit
supports chat, e-commerce, and search services. Conducent's SDK supports C and
C++ out of the box but the product lacks the easy classes and components of Aureate's
SDK.
Both Aureate and Conducent support offline ads, too. Ads are cached, as
are impression statistics, and updated when the user is online.
Bugs on the Web
Teamshare's Teamtrack
is a bug-tracking system that uses a pure Web client. That means that unlike other bug-tracking
systems, it doesn't require a client app for full Web functionality. That's pretty neat, and Teamtrack looks
configurable and powerful on top of that. But the most interesting aspect of
Teamtrack is that
Teamshare has gotten into the application-hosting business. Rather than
installing, maintaining, securing, and backing up the Teamtrack server on
your network and paying the US$499-per-user license
fee
for Teamtrack, you can pay a much lower monthly fee, access Teamtrack over
the Internet, and let Teamshare take care of the server issues. Because
Teamtrack, even in its "native" mode, is Web-based, the
functionality is the same.
In an article previously published in Developer News, editor J.D. Hildebrand talked about companies
that are offering free use of their software over the Internet, supported by
banner-ad revenue. It looks like Teamshare has hit a good
middle ground: Offer both standalone applications and Internet-based
services, letting users decide which is best.
But now they're found
Lost Boys Media Lab is an Amsterdam-based development organization that has been doing some very impressive
work with multimedia. The company's flagship technology is a C++ multimedia framework that currently supports Windows, MacOS, Linux, BeOS, IRIX, Windows CE, and
EPOC, all of which are featured running identical source code in the
Lost Boys' show booth.
Lost Boys staffers demonstrated games
along with kiosk-style educational and virtual-reality applications with impressive real-time rendering speed. One demo that
excited me shows how few lines of C++ code it took to provide a "bubble" view of a 360-degree MPEG movie.
The only drawback? Lost Boys isn't currently licensing its technology
publicly -- though the company said licensing schemes are in the works and may
be announced
soon.
XML everywhere and not a drop to drink
OK, so you've been reading how great XML is and you've started accumulating
data in XML format. Can you find it? Sequoia
Software Corp. has an answer: Xdex
is an XML indexing engine with "spiders" that search files, Web
sites, and databases for XML data. Sequoia claims Xdex doesn't require
DTDs but can use them if they're available. Xdex offers a developer
interface via the XQL query language and it supports XSL.
And don't let the door hit you...
There are more exhibitors to see and more products to investigate. But a
few burly security guards escorted me out the door when the exhibit hall closed. Who am I to
argue? After all, the best way to for an exhibitor to enjoy a trade show
is to start serious socializing-on-expense-account by the time the sun goes
down.
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