Form Tools: Form Processing, Storage and Access Script (Review)
Jun 15, 2009 by Srikanth AD Miscellaneous
Introduction
There are many web services for easy form building like jotform, Wufoo etc. Most of them can serve handy for creating forms. But, if you are looking for a perfect solution for form processing, entries storage, management and access, then Form Tools is at your rescue.
Form Tools is designed for people who work on online registration sites and require any mode of information gathering from their online visitors. In short, its a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL.
It’s designed to work with any existing web forms. It allows you to store form submissions in a database, provides your clients with a user-friendly interface to manage their form submissions. It includes options such as mass data export via excel, printer-friendly pages, data sorting, form submission editing and optional email notifications.
You might want to check out a demo of Form Tools here.
Key Features
- It’s freely available for anyone to download and modify under the GNU General Public License.
- It’s Re-usable, you can use Form Tools to handle multiple forms – even from different websites. Multiple user accounts can be setup with edit / view permissions based on your requirement.
- Form Tools is Multi-lingual. It provides full internationalization and localization support. Click here for a list of currently available translations.
- Its user interface is simple and easy to get started. Every aspect of the user interface including color, fonts and the logo can be customized.
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Tags: form processing, form tools, forms, mail, management, mysql, php, review, storage
OpenGoo, an easy to use Open Source Web Office Software (Review)
Jun 2, 2009 by Srikanth AD Miscellaneous
OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office software that allows a group of people to collaborate by sharing information over the Internet. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents (kind of Microsoft Office but on the web).
Members of an organization can create and collaborate on:
- Text documents
- Presentations
- Task Lists
- E-mails
- Calendars
- Web Links and
- Contacts
OpenGoo provides you with all the tools to manage the work of all the divisions of your company. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task, set milestones, pending tasks, personal notes etc.
OpenGoo can run on XAMPP installations. It can be installed, configured and used with Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+. It currently requires:
You might want to check out a demo of Opengoo here.
Step by Step Installation Guide
Here, I’m test installing Opengoo on localhost using XAMPP (an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.).
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Tags: collaboration, document sharing, information, management, mysql, open-source, opengoo, php, software, web office
JobberBase: Open Source PHP/MySQL Job Board Web Software (review)
May 13, 2009 by Srikanth AD Miscellaneous
JobberBase is an Open Source job board software written in PHP/MySQL. It’s a great web software for adding a simple job board to your existing website. You can check out a demo instance of JobberBase here. A couple of noted websites using JobberBase are jobjob and ecommjobs but you can check also www.jobber.ro out of which jobberBase was born (a popular Romanian IT job board).
jobberBase is a great solution for single-industry recruitment, for job boards focusing on one niche.
Features
- Post jobs without creating an account.
- Search for jobs.
- Administration control panel.
- Supports RSS feeds.
- Site-widget to show jobs on other sites.
Step-by-Step Installation Guide
Note: Before starting, make sure you have PHP 5+ and MySQL 4.1+ installed on your server. Also, Apache module mod_rewrite has to be enabled and overriding default settings with .htaccess need to be allowed.
See the steps on the next page…
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Tags: job board, Jobberbase, mysql, open-source, php, recruitment, review, web software
Platform virtualization – top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined)
Dec 29, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
In the article about cloud computing/utility computing/grid computing we’ve presented the most important companies which offers cloud computing hosting.In this article we will present the companies which offers means (mainly, the software and hardware) which powers most of the cloud computing hosting providers.
As Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_virtualization puts it:
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In computing, platform virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users. The term has been widely used since the 1960s.
Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by host software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment, a virtual machine, for its guest software. The guest software, which is often itself a complete operating system, runs just as if it were installed on a stand-alone hardware platform. Typically, many such virtual machines are simulated on a single physical machine, their number limited only by the host’s hardware resources. Typically there is no requirement for a guest OS to be the same as the host one. The guest system often requires access to specific peripheral devices to function, so the simulation must support the guest’s interfaces to those devices. Trivial examples of such devices are hard disk drive or network interface card.
Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.
Virtual machines can be used in disaster recovery as “hot standby” environments for physical production servers. This changes the classical “backup-and-restore” philosophy, by providing backup images that can “boot” into live virtual machines, capable of taking over workload for a production server experiencing an outage.
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There are several methods of platform virtualization:
- full virtualization
- hardware assisted virtualization
- partial virtualization
- paravirtualization
- operating system-level virtualization
Below we’ll be trying to present most of these platform virtualization and software providers (next page).
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Tags: hardware, platform, providers, services, software, virtualization
SQL Server 2008 Database Performance and Scalability – the Microsoft approach
Oct 13, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
These are excerpts from the Microsoft whitepaper “SQL Server 2008 Performance and Scale” published here (MyTestBox.com got the permisison from Microsoft to reprint it here).
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 incorporates the tools and technologies that are necessary to implement relational databases, reporting systems, and data warehouses of enterprise scale, and provides optimal performance and responsiveness. With SQL Server 2008, you can take advantage of the latest hardware technologies while scaling up your servers to support server consolidation. SQL Server 2008 also enables you to scale out your largest data solutions.
Introduction
Today’s organizations need easily accessible and readily available business data so that they can compete in the global marketplace. In response to this need, relational and analytical databases continue to grow in size, embedded databases ship with many products, and many companies consolidate servers to ease management concerns.
Companies must maintain optimal performance while their data environment continues to grow in size and complexity.
This white paper describes the performance and scalability capabilities of Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 and explains how you can use these capabilities to:
- * Optimize performance for any size of database with the tools and features that are available for the database engine, analysis services, reporting services, and integration services.
* Scale up your servers to take full advantage of new hardware capabilities.
* Scale out your database environment to optimize responsiveness and to move your data closer to your users.
Optimizing Performance with SQL Server 2008
Because your corporate data continues to grow in size and complexity, you must take steps to provide optimal data access times. SQL Server 2008 includes many features and enhancements to optimize performance across all of its areas of functionality, including relational Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases; Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) databases; reporting; and data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes.
Relational Database Performance
In most business environments, relational databases are at the core of business-critical applications and services.
As volumes of data increase, and the number of users and applications that are dependent on relational data-stores grows, organizations must be able to ensure consistent performance and responsiveness from their data systems.
SQL Server 2008 provides a robust database engine that supports large relational databases and complex query processing.
Measurable, Real-World Performance
SQL Server 2008 builds on the industry-leading performance of previous versions of SQL Server to provide the highest possible standard of database performance to your organization.
Having demonstrated the high performance capabilities of SQL Server in the past with the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark, Microsoft was the first database vendor to publish results for the newer TCP-E benchmark, which represents more accurately the kinds of OLTP workloads that are common in modern organizations.
Additionally, SQL Server demonstrates its performance capabilities for large-scale, data warehousing workloads through TPC-H results in the 3-terabyte and 10-terabyte categories. (For current benchmark results, see the TPC Web site at www.tpc.org.)
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Tags: database, microsoft, performance, scalability, solution, sql server 2008, whitepaper
Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing – list of top providers
Sep 22, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
Everyone can build a website, but not not everyone can build a good and popular website. If you can pull it off, you can enjoy benefits like building something people are using, recognition and – sometimes – money. It can be a good business, even your full time job. But bad things can happen, and you should be prepared for it. One of those things (well, actually this is not a bad thing!) is to have spikes in traffic… maybe as a result of getting on Digg.com, Reddit.com, Google News, or another major media outlet frontpage… or getting reviewed by Techcrunch or another major technology blog.
You want to be prepared for this, but you don’t want to spend tons of money on it. For example, having your own dedicated server costs more than a shared hosting account and requires you to have knowledge to administer it. Maybe you don’t have the knowledge or you don’t want to become a server administrator…and don’t have money to hire one. Even having your own dedicated server doesn’t guarantee it will survive the hordes of visitors coming from those major media outlets (having more than one dedicated server would help tremendously, but the cost also increases).
Imagine having the power of tens or hundreds of servers for the cost of a several shared hosting accounts. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, now it’s possible.
Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing).
What is “cloud computing?”
As Wikipedia describes it in technical terms:
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Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing (a form of distributed computing whereby a “super and virtual computer” is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks), utility computing (the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity) and autonomic computing (computer systems capable of self-management). Indeed many cloud computing deployments are today powered by grids, have autonomic characteristics and are billed like utilities, but cloud computing can be seen as a natural next step from the grid-utility model. Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralised infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever including Peer to peer networks like BitTorrent and Skype and volunteer computing like SETI@home.
The architecture:
The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on compute and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing.
Characteristics:
As customers generally do not own the infrastructure, they are merely accessing or renting, they can forego capital expenditure and consume resources as a service, paying instead for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. A side effect of this approach is that “computer capacity rises dramatically” as customers do not have to engineer for peak loads. Adoption has been enabled by “increased high-speed bandwidth” which makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.
___________________________________________
Or, put more simply, (Om Malik’s way), cloud computing means that the applications are running somewhere in the “cloud” (whether an internal network or the Internet). We, as users, don’t know and don’t care. Done right, cloud computing allows developers to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow in capacity (scalability), work rapidly (performance), and never – or at least rarely – fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.
One pioneer who helped tremendously in developing the concept of virtualization/cloud computing was VMWare (now a public company). Others followed soon after (including Microsoft).
In a previous article we have presented a list of content delivery networks from around the world.
Let’s now present a list of companies which offers cloud computing/grid computing/utility computing.
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Tags: cloud computing, grid computing, infrastructure, low cost computing, scalability, utility computing, virtualization
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) – a comprehensive list of providers
Sep 10, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
Yes, we build web applications…and there are plenty of them around. Some are or will be presented here on MyTestBox.com. Now, if we hit the jackpot and our application becomes very popular, traffic goes up, and our servers are brought down by the hordes of people coming to our website. What do we do then?
Of course, I am not talking here about the kind of traffic Digg, Yahoo Buzz or other social media sites can bring to a website, which is temporary overnight traffic, or a website which uses cloud computing like Amazon EC2 service, MediaTemple Grid Service or Mosso Cloud Hosting service.
I am talking about traffic that consistently increases over time as the service achieves success. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plentyoffish.com, Linkedin.com, Youtube.com and others are examples of services which have constant high traffic.
Knowing that users want speed from their applications, these services will always use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver that speed.
What is a Content Delivery Network?
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers.
You can find more about CDNs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Delivery_Network
Some large services use their own Content Delivery Networks, but sometimes it is more effective to use a third-party CDN provider. Plentyoffish.com, for example, uses a third-party CDN (it can’t afford to have its own CDN). Both Myspace.com and Friendster.com also use a CDN.
You can see in the image below how Peer1 Networks from Canada has its own CDN setup. This kind of setup is applicable to most of the Content Delivery Networks infrastructure.
There’s an inflation of services which offer content delivery solutions and venture capitalists still pump money into more CDN solutions.
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Tags: CDN, content delivery networks, content delivery solution, infrastructure, list, storage delivery
OpenX – free open source ad server software solution
Jul 3, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
OpenX is a free open source ad server software developed in the past years by a devoted open source developer community. Their website is www.openx.org . For now, they have the software as downloadable and installable on your server but they are beta-testing a hosted version of it (so you can use it without being necessary to download and install it).
It was started in 1998 by Tobias Ratschiller, the creator of also popular phpMyAdmin (a MySQL database web administration tool). Scott Switzer continued his work building on Tobias’ code. Today he is the co-founder of OpenX Limited, the company behind the ad server software.
OpenX was known as OpenAds, phpAds, phpAdsNew and MaxMediaManager but finally the company settled down for the OpenX name in 2008. The company which is behind OpenX got two rounds of funding: 5.5 Million dollars in 2006 and 15.5 million dollars in 2008 and this means it will have plenty of cash to improve its product and make it top-notch (not that it’s not already).
Over 30,000 publishers and advertisers around the world uses this ad server software platform to maximize their online advertising results. The current version of OpenX is 2.4 with a 2.5 beta version in the works and now they’ve released the 2.6 version (this review is for 2.4 version mainly).
You can download the current version here: www.openx.org/download
OpenX let you choose banners, campaigns and terms that fits you best. It has a sophisticated tracking system which let you gather statistics and optimize the results.
In short, you can take the control of your advertising without having to pay big bucks to big boys.
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Tags: ad management, ad server, advertising, maxmediamanager, mysql, open-source, openads, openx, php, phpads, phpadsnew, software
MyTestBox.com widget launches! Get our web software reviews on your website or blog!
May 8, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
We’ve discontinued the widget for now due to weak demand. I guess there are other better solutions out there for content syndication.
Thank you!
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Tags: blog, mytestbox, tech news, web software reviews, website, widget
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