Over the past ten years or so, concepts such as Web 2.0, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and the Semantic Web have all pushed HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to and beyond their limits, often relying on plug-ins such as Adobe® Flash to power components such as video and audio, as well as highly graphical and interactive applications. The Adobe Flex development framework, Microsoft®’s Silverlight platform, and JavaFX have all looked to provide support where HTML’s weaknesses made developers’ lives difficult. With HTML5, however, the markup language is striking back, with full multimedia support, local storage and offline application support, a native 2D drawing API, and a host of new application development APIs, all provided with the intent of proving that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can provide a rich front end to your Web sites and applications.

Read the tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/tutorials/wa-html5/

JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language that has long been the client-side scripting interface of choice for Web browser applications. JavaScript lets Web developers programmatically work with objects on a Web page, providing a platform for manipulating these objects on-the-fly. When JavaScript was first introduced, it was commonly used to provide trivial features on Web pages such as clocks and scrolling text in the browser status bar. Another common feature was the “rollover link,” where an image or text color of a link would be changed when the user rolled their mouse over it. In recent times, however, JavaScript has evolved to become far more useful, with the concept of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) bringing a whole new level of interactivity to Web-based programming. Prior to Ajax, any server-side processing or database access would require the entire page to be “refreshed” or a new page to be rendered by the browser. Not only is this slow and frustrating for the user, but it is also a waste of bandwidth and resources.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-jsframeworks/

IBM® DB2® pureXML® allows you to store XML data natively in a relational database management system, giving you the power and flexibility to report on this data without disturbing the advantages that its XML format offers. In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect to a DB2 database from the Python programming language, importing data about population from the United States Census Bureau. You will use Python to convert this CSV file into XML, before inserting this XML data natively into DB2. Finally, you will use Python to create a command-line application that produces some informative tables that you can access through a menu system.

Read the tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-csvdb2pytut/

We live in a connected and open world, one where data flows freely and where a vast amount of useful information can be found on the Web. In the past, if you wanted to find where the nearest store for your favorite retailer was located, you would probably look it up in the telephone directory, find the company’s phone number, call them, and ask for directions to their nearest outlet. This method is a recipe for getting lost, wasting time, and a general frustration for the customer. Today, however, this has all changed. Now you simply open your Web browser and visit the company’s Web site, where you can usually find a “Store Locator” feature that will help you find the store nearest to you, and conveniently plot it on a map to make it easier to find. In this tutorial, you will learn to develop such a feature using C# ASP.NET and an IBM DB2® database.

Read the tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-purexmlasptut/

Thanks to the native XML support that pureXML® offers IBM DB2® database developers, you can load XML data directly into your database, freeing up development time to add functionality to your application. Follow along in this tutorial to import an XML file with Euro foreign exchange rates into an IBM DB2 database and use special XQuery and SQL/XML functions to split this XML into separate database rows. You will also create a PHP script that pulls down new rates from the European Central Bank (ECB) Web site each day. Then you will extend the script to send update alerts to a Google Talk user using the XMPP protocol, and to a cell phone by SMS text message using the Clickatell SMS gateway service. Finally, you will create a PHP script that generates a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) graph of this data.

Read the tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-alertxmpptut/

This tutorial gives you step-by-step instructions on how to use PHP to create a Support Knowledge Base system that stores its data using a combination of traditional DB2 relational columns and pureXML columns. The application uses the power of SQL/XML to map XML data as a relational column. This allows you to use PHP to retrieve the data as though it were stored in a relational manner.

Creating applications that use a hybrid of relational data and XML data is easy thanks to the pureXML® feature of IBM® DB2® database servers. In this tutorial, you use PHP to create a Web application that connects to an IBM DB2 Express-C database and stores some of its data in traditional relational database columns, and some of it in native XML columns. You also learn how to use SQL/XML queries to retrieve, insert, update, and delete data from this database. Beyond the hands-on, project-based training, the tutorial equips you with the skills and conceptual knowledge you need to develop your own hybrid applications.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/tutorials/dm-0911db2purexmlphp/

First you will allow users to create a Profile Badge in HTML, which permits them to generate a piece of HTML code to paste into their blog or Web site. This will pull the latest status updates from the pureXML database and present them in a pre-defined format. Users will be able to customize the design of the badge, choosing from a selection of sizes and color schemes, and define the number of updates to be displayed. Next, you will create a PHP script to publish the latest status updates in the database as an RSS Feed. Finally, you will create a script that presents all of the status updates in the database to the users with a Post to Twitter button alongside each update. When a user presses this button, the Twitter API will take the specified post and add the update to the Twitter stream of that user.

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe® Flex® applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter. In Part 1 of the series, you learned about Web Services and how they are enabled using DB2 pureXML as you created the microblog database and tested it. Part 2 tapped into Adobe Flex and ActionScript to create the user interface of your application. In this article, the final part of the series, you will learn how to use your pureXML Web Services to publish your microblog entries to an HTML page.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog3/

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe® Flex® applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter. In Part 1 of the series, you learned about Web Services and how they are enabled using DB2 pureXML as you created the microblog database and tested it. In this article, Part 2 of the series, you will tap into Adobe Flex and ActionScript® to create the user interface of the application.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog2/

The pureXML® capabilities of IBM DB2® allow you to store XML natively in a database without modification, while Adobe Flex applications can read XML directly and populate Flex user interfaces. In this three-part article series, you will create a microblogging application that takes advantage of pureXML, Web services, and Adobe Flex; and even allows you to publish your microblogging updates on Twitter.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-db2mblog1/index.html

Django is a Python-based open source Web application framework that focuses on making the process of creating database-driven Web sites and Web applications easier. Getting started with developing Django applications is simple, as a development Web server is included with the framework. However, this server is not suitable for use in a production environment, so further steps are required to deploy your Django application to the Web. In this article, you will learn about the Django framework and how to install it on your local machine. Discover how a Django application is made and about the automatic administration interface created for your application. You will then find out how to deploy your Django application to the Web on a server running Apache and mod_python. Finally, learn how Django applications can and should be scaled as your application’s requirements grow.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-django/