Social networks offer various tools to make our social lives easier and even help to extend it. Online communities like the VZ-networks - schuelerVZ, studiVZ and meinVZ - allow their users to stay in touch with their friends and to make new contacts. With more than 16 million members, the VZ-networks are currently the biggest social network in german-speaking Europe.





VZ-networks recently relaunched their chat application called "Plauderkasten". For this purpose, Lovely Systems engineered and implemented the complete frontend logic in AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Server communication is realized by the XMPP standard (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The new chat application "Plauderkasten" is online since Easter 2010. The next extensions are already scheduled.

And not just because Apple is investing about one billion dollars into a new data center in North Carolina to its iTunes music store to transfer to the realm of cloud computing.

Manfred Schwendinger, our CEO at Lovely Systems, puts some light into the thicket of Cloud Computing services and describes the available services, their advantages and disadvantages and how to find the right suppliers, in the latest edition of the weave , the new magazine for interactive design, conception & development from the publisher PAGE.



The edition #2.2010 can be purchased since March 15 on every kiosk.

Many thanks to the publishing team and especially to the Managing Editor Ilona Koglin for the great cooperation.

weave and PAGE were also co-sponsors of this year's Innovation Workshop Snow Sprint 2010

Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, USA, Ireland and Austria - these nations were represented at this year's Snow-Sprint, the innovation workshop, or X-treme programming event in the Alps (Bürserberg, A).

Juergen Kartnaller, our senior developer, gave us deep insights with his talk about PyJS - a Python framework for Rich Internet Applications in Ajax as well as our special guest Nick Johnson, the GAE Core developer at Google Inc. in Dublin, with his presentation about AppStats - an analysis tool for performance optimization in the Cloud.

The following interesting projects have emerged during the week:

With Tweet Engine http://www.tweetengine.net/ teams can now share twitter accounts, without passing the password. For example, a corporate twitter account can be set up where different users can post onto. The project was implemented on Google App Engine. The source code is available for free under http://github.com/Arachnid/tweetengine ready for download.



The GAE logger is designed to log events on the Google App Engine. The logger can be accessed via Python, JSON-RPC or HTTP POSTS. With the UI, the logs can be filtered and sorted accordingly. Users can register for notifications, so they are informed when certain events are logged - for example, if an item on the portal was published. The subscriptions can
also be activated, disabled and monitored via a Jabber client. This suits GAE loggers for developers as well as content managers who want to be informed in real time when certain events occur. The source code is available under http://code.google.com/p/gae-logger for free.

OpenDropbox is a project initiated also on the Snow Sprint. This is a sync client, where folders can be shared by different clients. Through a web interface authorized users can choose, what projects / folders they want to have available locally. Whenever a user changes something in the project folder, it will also update all the other clients.

http://code.google.com/p/opendropbox

Moreover intensive research and testing with Google Wave was done, resulting in examplebots for communication between an application and the Google GAE Wave.

http://waveomat.appspot.com/

http://code.google.com/p/waveomat/

Apart from all the projects the participants had an extensive know-how transfer. We are excited about the upcoming GAE applications.

Some impression can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/snowsprint2010/

Thank you to everyone who participated this year's Snow-Sprint. We are pleased with the output and hope that you all enjoyed it too!

Special thanks to our sponsors Chip Communications, Weave and Freihof.