Apple Computer Inc. has terminated a “seed” program that provided Macintosh developers with early access to development builds of Safari, its own home-grown Web browser for Mac OS X.
Safari was first unveiled to Mac users at Macworld Conference & Expo this past January, and has been released as a public beta. The Web browser is based on KHTML and KJS software developed from the KDE open source project. Apple has lauded Safari as faster than other Web browsers, including the then-current builds of Internet Explorer, Netscape and Chimera (since updated and renamed Camino). Safari features integrated Google search capabilities, a new way of handling bookmarks, and other unique features.
Safari remains under development at Apple, and the v60 public beta is still in distribution and available for download directly from Apple. The company has not yet offered a confirmed shipping date for Safari’s final 1.0 release.
IBM takes aim at retail logic
Trying to ease the developer burden of creating new business logic for a range of different applications, IBM Corp. recently announced a toolkit for WebSphere Studio developers that help them to more rapidly create applications for distributed retail environments. The IBM Branch Transformation Toolkit for WebSphere Studio has a built-in framework that makes it easier for third-party and corporate developers to not only deploy but also dynamically adjust business logic across a range of different applications they are creating.
If developers can create business logic once and be able to reuse it in order to efficiently develop a range of different channel applications, then they can tap into and manipulate stores of mission-critical data more easily and economically and distribute data to multiple sites, IBM officials claim. Essentially the new toolkit is made of a set of Java development tools and components that hasten the construction of high-volume transactional applications capable of accessing core systems and platforms.