Office 2007: Add-In to Convert to PDF and XPS

I am sure we all need an add-in to convert Microsoft Office documents (word, excel, powerpoint etc) to PDF when we have to send them out to clients.

For all Office 2007 users, there is some good news... We now have a long awaited add-in from Microsoft itself. Its called SaveAsPDFandXPS

We all know what is PDF(Portable Document Format) from Adobe. I was wondering... now what the heck is XPS, so I looked up google and this is what it gave me. Check this out.

Download

With Regards,
Naveen...

Project Zero from IBM

I have been working with a Framework from IBM called Project Zero. This seems to be an interesting framework which is soon going to be a part of IBMs WebSphere Portfolio. Although still in its development stage, it seems very promising for speed and agile development. This is what their website definition says:

Zero complexity. Zero overhead. Zero obstacles.
Project Zero, an IBM incubator project, is an agile development and execution environment which leverages REST and scripting runtimes to speed and simplify development and deployment of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

Project Zero is now being developed openly using a Community-Driven Commercial Development process. That is where you come in, so welcome!

Watch back as I would be posting some more information about this platform.

Cheers,
Naveen...

The Javascript Frameworks

Owing to the Web 2.0 era and AJAX playing an important role, many companies and communities are focusing on bringing the Desktop Experience on to the Web Browser and this has given rise to many Javascript Frameworks which help developers to build AJAX based applications quickly.

I was scouting around the internet trying hard to search for Open Source Javascript Toolkits till I stumbled upon an excellent link where a comparison is given among different toolkits.

The ones featured in this comparison are:

1.Google’s GWT

2. Yahoo’s YUI

3. DOJO

4. Prototype (inspired by Ruby on Rails)

5. Mochikit

6. JQuery

Among them the ones that stand out in terms of features, popularity, support according to me are Google, Yahoo and DOJO, but the others too are good.

There is also a mention in that comparison (although not compared) about the following toolkits

1. Kabuki AJAX toolkit from Zimbra. They have a Network and an Open Source Edition.

2. DWR AJAX Toolkit

I was rather surprised that they did not mention about Script.aculo.us which seems to be a very mature Javascript framework. If I am not mistaken, Prototype uses the script.aculo.us framework.

Just today I heard about another Framework jMaki, now this Framework too is impressive and it has integration with Netbeans and eclipse where developers can drag and drop jMaki widgets into their JSP pages. They also have some sort of integration with DOJO , YUI and GWT. Check them out.

I also see that GWT has a developer tool called gwtDeveloper (a WYSIWYG tool to design your GWT applications) which is an extension for JDeveloper. Check them out too.

Good luck and happy AJAXING and AJAXIFYING the WEB.

Hi Bloggers...

I was very excited about Blogging, but never got a chance to do one. After reading through my friends and other bloggers blogs,it became exciting at first and now an addiction, so I could not stop myself and decided to put one up.

Since I am working as a Sr. Solutions Architect in the N-Tier computing space, I will keep blogging about different technology aspects. But hey, I will also start blogging about any other stuff apart from work.