Web Development and Infrastructure

Cast Technologies provide collaborative web software development projects dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and always available web Portal related software on a wide variety of platforms and programming languages. Modern software is complex and expensive, which has motivated many companies to invest in enterprise portals as a mechanism by which they can manage information in a cohesive and structured fashion.

e-Portals offer many advantages over other applications. First, they provide a single point of entry for employees, partners, and customers. Second, they can access Web services transparently from any device in virtually any location. Third, they are highly flexible; they can exist in the form of B2E intra-nets, B2B extra-nets, or B2C inter-nets. Fourth, portals can be combined to form a portal network that can span a company’s entire enterprise system, allowing for access both inside and outside the firewall.

e-Portals have many advantages, which is why they have become the de facto standard for Web application delivery. In fact, analysts have predicted that portals will become the next generation for the desktop environment. Other attributes are

• Coexist and interoperate side-by-side with your existing J2EE solutions (EJB, JMS, ...)
• Build your Portals based on Cocoon
• Scheduler - Run background tasks for maintenance, etc.
• Caching on many levels
• Integrated search engine (using Lucene)
• DELI (detect client configuration)
• Catalog Entity Resolver to map to local copies of DTDs and other resources
• Publish your own WebServices (Apache Axis is integrated)
• Java Mail support
• Easy integration of object-relational frameworks (OJB, Hibernate, ...)
• I18n support (translation support)
• Easily extensible by clear interfaces (write your own components following Avalon patterns)
• Many, many examples and samples
• Configurable build mechanism based on Ant (you decide which parts of Cocoon you need)
• Integration of Java data binding frameworks (Castor, Betwixt)

• Enhanced form handling with strong validation through Cocoon Forms
• Easy integration of (future) XForms clients

• Can be run in every servlet container or J2EE application server that supports Java Servlets 2.2 and above, e.g. Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, Resin, Websphere, Weblogic, ...
• Command line execution, without requiring a servlet container
• Embeddable in any Java application

• Single, integrated, browser-based console
• Access anywhere through standard web browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer)
• Secure, role-based access to views and controls
• Powerful path-based navigation scheme
• Easy to customize and extend
• Relationships between devices and components
• Management of system rules and settings through class-based hierarchy

• SNMP
• WMI
• Telnet/SSH
• Standard profiles for HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP, SSH
• Event Management
• Centralized event collection, correlation and management
• Network, Servers, Applications, etc.
• Event collection protocols
• Windows events gathered through WMI or with assistance of syslog conversion agents (such as NTSyslog or evtsys )
• Event are stored and managed in a MySQL database
• Self Healing
• Automatic service stop/restart based on event conditions
• Automatic script execution based on event conditions