in this issue

The Zope Book

R.I.P. WYSIWYG

Open source software development: Some historical perspectives

Digital Divisions: There are clear differences among those with broadband connections, dial-up connections, and no connections at all to the internet

Measuring the Benefits of Ajax

Hard disks: the autumn years

Amos Latteier
Michel Pelletier

Amazon's book description:

The Zope Book is an authoritative guide to Zope, an open-source Web application server. Zope goes beyond server-side scripting languages like PHP by providing a complete object framework, a built-in Web server, a Web-based management interface, and load-balancing through ZEO (Zope Enterprise Objects). That's a considerable punch, and Zope is attracting increasing interest from developers looking for an alternative to heavyweight commercial application servers. Zope is implemented in Python, an object-oriented scripting language, and runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Written by Zope developers, this title is concise and to the point. It is aimed at people new to Zope as well as current users, although some existing knowledge of Web technology is necessary. The book is organized into three parts. The first part is introductory, outlining how Zope works and explaining basic DTML (Document Template Markup Language), a tag-based language for server-side scripting. The second, and longest, part tackles users and security, scripting with Python or Perl, using Zope's built-in search engine, and connecting to relational databases. Part three covers scaling and extending Zope, with a short chapter on ZEO and information on creating your own custom Zope classes. Reference material is contained in two appendices, one for DTML and the other for the core Zope API. The Zope Book offers an excellent, high-level view supplemented by more detail for the most common development tasks. The authors refer you to Zope's documentation or other resources for the most advanced or specialist topics. The result is ideal for evaluating Zope, and also useful for getting started with Zope projects. --Tim Anderson, amazon.co.uk
 

Greetings!

I am often surprised when asked about the value of performance support and the performance-centered design methodology. Why? Because, globally, organizations spend $300 billion a year on training, yet studies show that only 17% of what is learned in advance is transferred to the job. This translates in billions of dollars spent annually on training without a performance outcome.

PCD is about developing solutions that enable immediate, sustained and improved performance without training, specifically around computer mediated tasks. We must ensure organizational competency (the ability to accomplish tasks and engage activities properly) by reducing complexity while ensuring knowledge as a consequence of doing.

What is required?

• Enable immediate task completion
• Embed knowledge and guidance in the task
• Reduce the complexity of tasks and activities
• Integrate disparate systems without disrupting infrastructure
• Substantially increase accuracy and completeness of data and tasks
• Provide workflow-enabled human-computer interfaces.

What is the bottom line? It's the bottom line: Increasing net revenue for organizations by fostering a more focused workforce that is better able to accomplish the organizational mission while eliminating wasted expenses.

This week I am attending the VNU Training / Online Learning conference in Long Beach, California, to recognize the recipients of the 2005 PCD Awards and to deliver a popular session, The Latest and Greatest Tools for Developing Performance Support.

Kindly look forward to special issues of .infoREADER in which I will report on the conference. Specifically, where and how are trainers making the shift to the performance imperative? What can does the conference offer that is of value with respect to performance?

Regards,

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

Abstract: In this paper we suggest that historical studies of technology can help us to account for some, perplexing (at least for traditional economic reasoning) features of open source software development. From a historical perspective, open source software seems to be a particular case of what Robert C. Allen has termed "collective invention." We explore the interpretive value of this historical parallel in detail, comparing open source software with two remarkable episodes of nineteenth century technical advances.

Sixty-eight percent of American adults, or about 137 million people, use the internet, up from 63% one year ago. Thirty-two percent of American adults, or about 65 million people, do not go online, and it is not always by choice. Those who are currently offline have had varying levels of exposure to the online world. One in five American adults say they have never used the internet or email and do not live in an internet-connected household. At the other end of the spectrum, 53% of home internet users have high-speed access, creating a new divide among internet users.

There's a lot of hype surrounding the latest Web development craze, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and a considerable amount of skepticism about its usefulness in the business realm.... Ajax is a method of employing JavaScript, DHTML, and the XMLHttp behavior in the browser to provide truly dynamic content on a Web page without a page refresh...does away with the traditional "Click-and-Wait" Web-application architecture of yesterday, making it possible to provide the responsiveness and interactivity users expect from desktop applications.