ffrinch - Slashdot User

State of Web Services in 2007

Submitted by bp2007 on Wednesday May 09 2007, @09:37AM

bp2007 writes "After working on a large scale Web services project left me frustrated with the interoperability issues among the various implementations, I am wondering how many people are actually using products like Axis, Vordel, Websphere and others? It was a huge effort to get the WS stacks talk to each other. We abandoned several services as the vendor would not add the features and it was too expensive to fix it ourselves."

Child safety

Submitted by moorhens on Wednesday May 09 2007, @09:33AM

moorhens writes "We all know the internet is full of unsavoury beasts with evil intentions towards children. Or to put it another way, there are manipulative people in every walk of life who will use any means at their disposal to exploit children, and in recent years the newspapers have been full of stories about internet grooming and other horrors. The risks may seem hyped, but however small are real, hence there is plenty of advice for children, parents and teachers about keeping their charges safe online, eg Child Exploitation and Online Protection.

However, what advice is there for developers? When developing, say, moderated discussion or chat areas for children's use, are there things we need to be aware of? And in particular, when I have an audience of teenagers who are screaming for community pages and a Board who are frightened of opening ourselves up for exploitation, is there any "best practice advice" I can point them towards to show that we have done everything reasonable? So far, everything is geared towards protecting the child, but if we have a responsibility to create sites that can be run safely what standards should we adhere to?"