After being in development for around 9 months, we are proud to announce the first release of the PaySwarm Developer Sandbox. This release includes a working implementation of the PaySwarm universal payment platform, an OAuth-based REST API, and a WordPress plugin that allows articles to be sold in a standards-compliant manner.
PaySwarm Developer Sandbox Launched
Published May 5th, 2011Towards Universal Web Commerce
Published January 31st, 2011The PaySwarm Reference Platform uses the Semantic Web. That means that it understands the information it reads in a web page and uses that knowledge to accomplish its tasks, for example, performing financial transactions. Machines understand what is in a web page by reading meta-data embedded in the page. The meta-data is expressed using a machine-readable vocabulary to describe human concepts. Vocabularies are basically dictionaries for computers – telling them more about each concept described by a particular term. In our push toward the first public release of the PaySwarm Reference Platform, we have released two of these vocabularies. One of them is for describing Commercial exchanges and one is for describing Digital Signatures. This blog post discusses what each one of them does and how they fit into the greater PaySwarm ecosystem.
Making Payments Frictionless
Published September 12th, 2010We always strive to make using the PaySwarm web platform as simple as possible for developers. With that goal in mind, we are launching a new PaySwarm Developer API and a development website today. We are also releasing a demonstration of the PaySwarm web platform as it applies to bloggers, journalists, newspapers and magazines…
WebID – Universal Login for the Web
Published August 7th, 2010If there is one thing that is universal to all websites, it is the login process. Almost every website requires you to create an account, enter your e-mail address, verify your account, and log in before you can use any of the advanced features of the website.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a universal login mechanism for the web? One where you just had to click a login button and your browser would take care of filling out your account details? What if you didn’t need to remember different passwords to log into websites? What if we could do all of this and ensure that only you and the website you are communicating with would be able to see the data you are sending?
The good news is that there are some very smart people working on this problem. The solution is called WebID. The bad news is that there remained one problem that would take the browser vendors years to solve. That is, until Dave Longley (our CTO), discovered a way to make WebID work in all the current browsers in use today, including Internet Explorer…
A JavaScript Implementation of TLS (Part 2/2)
Published July 20th, 2010In the previous article that we did on a JavaScript implementation of TLS, we explained why we created Forge, which we released as open source software. To summarize, before Forge, there was no easy way to access a home computer using just JavaScript and Flash – technologies that exist in 98.9% of all browsers. With Forge, application providers such as Google Docs can now provide access to your home computer in a way that is safe and secure…
A JavaScript Implementation of TLS (Part 1/2)
Published July 20th, 2010Digital Bazaar has written a pure JavaScript TLS client implementation and released it as open source software. The project is called Forge.
To our knowledge a JavaScript implementation of TLS has never been done before. But, if you are a developer, you might be thinking: Wow, that sounds completely inane. Is this just another case of a bored developer engaged in an esoteric demonstration that something crazy is possible? It is useful. We promise.
If you are not a developer, you might be wondering what TLS is and what JavaScript has to do with it at all. Well, first, TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and is just the fancy name behind what makes “https” websites secure. You may have heard of SSL (Secure Socket Layer) before. TLS is the latest version of SSL and is more appropriately named because data does not have to travel over a “socket”; it can be transported in many different ways. So why would someone think a JavaScript TLS implementation is useful?
Bitmunk 3.2.3: Speed Improvements
Published June 9th, 2010It has only been one month since our last release, either we are getting good at building and releasing software, or we got lucky. We’ll let you decide. Improvements in this release include:
- Networking Speed – We have improved Monarch’s already impressive HTTP networking stack by greatly improving the number of simultaneous requests we can process per second. This not only improves the Bitmunk website, but all of the PaySwarm peer-to-peer software. Performance results will be published soon.
- Website Responsiveness – A number of changes have been made to reduce page load times. We have focused on Javascript minimization, resource caching and compression.
Read on to find out the details…
Bitmunk 3.2.1: Video and Data Sales
Published January 31st, 2010Bitmunk 3.2.1 was released this weekend, which included several bug fixes and the basis of two new really cool features.
While we were polishing the Bitmunk 3.2 release, we spent the time to make Firefox integration a bit cleaner:
- We now support Firefox 3.6.
- Only one tab is created for the Bitmunk Personal Edition software. That tab is focused whenever you purchase anything via Bitmunk
- Firefox will now auto-discover the page that you use to control your Bitmunk software.
- The interface has been made a bit more responsive.
Read more…
Monarch: Next Generation REST Web Services
Published December 14th, 2009Network-centric computing has been gaining significant mind-share over the past decade. We have started to shift our thinking of our computing environment from applications and documents that strictly reside on our personal computers to applications and documents that may reside on a variety of websites on the Internet. From Gmail, to Dropbox, to Facebook, to Twitter – the landscape of how we interact with computers is changing.
The companies that understand this shift to Web Services and build out technology to track this shift in usage will emerge as the leaders of the computing industry in the next several years. Their infrastructure will be a competitive advantage, specifically – how quickly and efficiently their developers will be able to grow their services while keeping costs down.
To help the industry take advantage of this shift, we have released Monarch as an open source project. Monarch is a state-of-the-art Web Services framework. It is used to build the core web services that a company will provide its customers. Scaling up and out while reducing costs will separate the market leaders from the rest of the pack – Monarch provides this competitive advantage…
Bitmunk 3.2: The Legal P2P Music Network
Published November 30th, 2009Today, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network.
We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale.
This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works…
An Open Digital Media Commerce Standard
Published September 28th, 2009This article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation…
First Editors Draft of HTML5+RDFa Published
Published July 13th, 2009The first public Editors Draft of RDFa for HTML5 was published earlier today. You can view the draft in two forms:
- The HTML5+RDFa Section (small 34K HTML document)
- The Complete HTML5+RDFa Specification (very large 4MB HTML document)
The blog post explains how this draft came to be, how it was published via the World Wide Web Consortium, and what it means for the future of RDFa and HTML5…
Bitmunk 3.1: Browser-based P2P Commerce
Published June 29th, 2009Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Bitmunk peer-to-peer commerce platform. The software release that went live earlier today is the culmination of over 26 months of development, hundreds of thousands of lines of code writes and re-writes and the dream of a small group of us that are trying to fundamentally change the way people buy and sell digital goods on the Internet.
On the surface, Bitmunk looks much like a web-based digital content store specializing in MP3 music sales. People can come to the site and purchase songs and albums for very competitive prices (cheaper than iTunes and Amazon.com).
There is, however, a deeper history and a grander goal for Bitmunk…
Admitting that Javascript was a Mistake
Published May 31st, 2009There was an interesting article that was written by Guillaume Marceau recently about visually expressing the usefulness of programming languages. The article uses star-line plots to show how different programming languages compare with one another in speed and expressiveness, as each is used to solve a number of common problems. It’s always nice to check your gut reaction to different programming languages against empirical evidence. Language choice can be as varied as our food preferences, often not based solely on fact. Like our palate, we may find that our preference for our favorite programming languages change over time. As we learn more and use our language of choice to solve real problems, the initial love affair may turn into a nightmare.
At Digital Bazaar, our initial fondness for Javascript is turning into a deep distaste for the way Javascript has evolved in the browsers…
The Looming Cloud Computing Bubble
Published March 28th, 2009The number of stories in the online media about Cloud Computing has increased sharply over the last six months. There is a great deal of excitement around this new buzz word, but what is it all about?
Read on to find out why Cloud Computing is mostly hot air…
Bitmunk 3.1: Website Launch
Published January 16th, 2009The Bitmunk 3.1 website quietly launched on Wednesday 8pm EST. This release comes six months after the Bitmunk 3.0 release and went a great deal more smoothly than the 3.0 release. The only major hang-up was an issue with IPv6 and DNS AAAA records, both of which we have disabled for the time being. We will bring the IPv6 side of our service back online when we have the time to work on the issue. Apologies for the handful of people that were hitting our website via IPv6…
Fibers are the Future: Scaling Web Services Past 100K Concurrent Requests (Part 2/2)
Published October 21st, 2008In a blog post last month, we outlined why a traditional Apache+PHP setup will inevitably fail the growing needs of medium to large AJAX-based websites. The article is continued this month by analyzing different methods of scaling web services past the concurrency barrier inherent in a basic Apache+PHP setup.
While speaking with the technical minds of several companies in our industry, there were several very good questions raised about assumptions we had made when building our system. The feedback from the first blog post about this topic revolved around the following two questions…
W3C: RDFa 1.0 is Official
Published October 15th, 2008RDFa became an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation today. This means that it has undergone an intense amount of design, feedback, development and scrutiny to become a recognized world-wide standard for the expression of web semantics. Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar’s Founder, has been directly involved with the RDFa Task Force and the standardization work…
POSIX Threads Don’t Scale Past 100K Concurrent Web Service Requests (Part 1/2)
Published September 30th, 2008Hard times are upon our financial sector. The US financial markets are in turmoil. Many companies will be cutting spending as a squeeze is placed on operating budgets over the next couple of months, if not years. This is usually good news to the technology sector as most cost cutting measures depend on technology to…
Thoughts on HTML5, RDFa and Microformats
Published August 23rd, 2008This article was authored by one of our founders, Manu Sporny. He is an Invited Expert for the RDF in XHTML Task Force at the World Wide Web Consortium and a very active participant in the Microformats community. We are first and foremost a media services company serving the music, movie, television and electronic book…