Ruby on Rails is an open source Web application framework that allows you to easily build Web applications using a model view controller architecture. Ruby on Rails is gaining a substantial following in the developer community, and it has been adopted in many commercial and private sites. Its strength is in its ability to quickly and iteratively build Web applications in an agile manner.

IBM Lotus Connections is social software for businesses that includes Profiles to find people, Blogs to present your ideas, Dogear to save and share bookmarks, Communities to work with people who share a common interest, and Activities to organize your work. This article uses Ruby on Rails to build a Web application that communicates with a Lotus Connections Dogear server to retrieve and display bookmark information using REST services.

One of the latest additions to the Domino Web developers’ toolkit of technologies, XPages, is also arguably its most powerful and revolutionary to date. XPages allows for functionality and capabilities previously thought impossible to achieve in Domino application development. With the inclusion of XPages, you now have the ability to easily create Web 2.0 user experiences in your existing applications. To demonstrate the power of XPages, this tutorial shows you how to Web 2.0-enable the personal address book Domino application template.

A security hole in Adobe Flash video server software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com’s video streaming service. The Adobe Flash video server software doesn’t encrypt online content, but only orders sent to a video player such as start and stop play. To boost download speeds, Adobe dropped a stringent security feature that protects the connection between the Adobe software and its players. The Adobe Flash video servers are connected to Adobe’s Flash video players installed in nearly all of the world’s Web-connected PC computers.

This will most likely apply to those of you in the greater New York City region only, but seeing as it’s the most populated metropolitan area of the United States, it should resonate a bit. There are technology jobs in the area with startups, and while that may be attractive to some, it’s not necessarily attractive to everyone who had Wall Street-style perks.

The challenge is in knowing what exactly is happening to IT on Wall Street now. This report out of Crain’s New York Business speaks to the issues going on and says other industries should be able to gobble up technology workers. This has a few issues, but the conclusions are mainly positive.

Cisco has released the results of a global security study. The results, Cisco says, indicate that data loss can result from risky employee behavior. Cisco says that helping workers understand how their behavior affects the risk of data leakage will strengthen security practices. Cisco recommends employee-education programs on preventing data loss.

Reporting failure requires balancing facts with making interpretations about why the failure occurred. Respectable bloggers and journalists temper their comments because inaccurate accusations and sensationalism unnecessarily harm the innocent and provide little value to readers. With this in mind, regarding B&H Photo, a major New York photography retailer, one user started this discussion on Flickr.

Just days after shipping a patch for a dozen serious security holes in Firefox, Mozilla has rushed out another version to fix an annoying password manager bug.

The newest Firefox 3.0.3 basically fixes a problem where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords.

Mick Moignard takes you inside the always-helpful LotusScript Split function. It can do a lot more than you might know, and it’ll save you a lot of time for certain coding techniques.

Read this DominoPower article.

Researchers are beginning to raise an alarm for what looks like a scary new browser exploit/threat affecting all the major desktop platforms–Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Adobe Flash.

The threat, called Clickjacking, was to be discussed at the OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference but, at the request of Adobe and other affected vendors, the talk was nixed until a comprehensive fix is ready.

Make plans now to attend the 10th annual Admin training event held with Lotus Developer2009 in Boston April 15-17, 2009. We’re building an extensive agenda covering all the essential Notes and Domino topics pertinent to your job. One registration gets you into your choice of nearly 100 new and updated technical sessions, one-on-one consultations with top experts, hands-on labs, networking opportunities and much more. It’s the fastest way to update your skills and keep you productive all year long.

99% of attendee evaluations from last year’s events indicated a colleague recommendation to THE VIEW’s Admin and Lotus Developer events. So whether you’re running Notes and Domino 6.x, 7.x, or 8.x, make sure you reserve your seat for the training that consistently gets great reviews from attendees.