Joe Danziger

Keeping up with the latest Web technologies is tough nowadays. Every week it seems new sites are launched that push the envelope further and further in terms of what can be accomplished using just a Web browser. The rise of AJAX over the past several months has taken over the development world and breathed new life into the Web. Although these techniques have been possible for many years now, the maturity of Web standards like XHTML and CSS now make it a viable alternative that will be viewable by all but the oldest browsers. It's also been possible to accomplish many of the same things using Flex or Flash, but the development cycle with those applications is typically more involved and the overhead often not justified. We're going to harness the power of the Scipt.aculo.us JavaScript library to provide our interaction. As their Web site states, this library "provide... (more)

Visualize Your Visitors with Google Maps

The availability of the Google Maps API has opened up a slew of new development possibilities and spawned a bunch of web sites that rely on this data to function. Example applications include jogging trackers, subway map overlays, and other cool ideas all made possibly by the public availability of the mapping API. Geolocating by IP Address Geolocation refers to the ability to locate a user's geographic latitude and longitude from his IP address. There are several ways of doing this each with its own benefits and drawbacks. The most cost-effective source of this data is one of th... (more)

Defeating DoS Attacks

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt by a single person or a group of people to disrupt an online service. It is designed to bring the server and network to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic. A DoS attack is the most common type of Internet attack and can be launched against your site at any time with relative ease. This can affect you by eating up your bandwidth and server resources to service these bogus requests while leaving no resources to fill legitimate requests. So how do you know if you're being attacked? There are many variations of DoS attacks, a... (more)

Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering on the Web has existed for a long time, dating all the way back to the original incarnations of sites like CDNow and Amazon.com. Recommendation systems are a powerful tool for businesses to extract additional value from their e-commerce and customer databases. They benefit customers by enabling them to find products they like, and help businesses by generating more sales. We're going to look at some of the basic principles of predictive systems and introduce some methods you can utilize to make recommendations in your own applications. Along the way, we'l... (more)

An In-Depth Look at Mapping APIs

Back in the November 2005 issue of CFDJ, we looked at how to create a live map of your Web site visitors using Google Maps and other freely available services. Now that Yahoo! and Microsoft have joined the fray and released their own mapping APIs, we'll revisit our example while learning about each implementation along the way. All of these APIs are extremely powerful, but each has its own advantages that may work better for your particular solution. We'll take a look at each in detail and outline some of the benefits and drawbacks of each. Geo-locating by IP Address Let's go o... (more)