MindTouch 2009 backs composite apps to connect teams, applications, and systems MindTouch is releasing on Thursday MindTouch 2009, extending the development platform’s collaboration capabilities through a bidirectional message bus, the company said.With the bus, push-based e-mail notifications can be sent. MindTouch is an open source platform for building enterprise collaborative applications and communities. It offers a development paradigm for composite applications to connect teams, applications, and systems.“This is the most significant [MindTouch] product release in two years,” the company stated in a video presentation on the product. “And with this release, we’re taking a huge step forward in reinventing enterprise collaboration.” The bus lets users set up and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or applications plugged into the platform, such as databases, enterprise systems, and office productivity applications.Also featured in the 2009 product is an auto-complete suggest capability that displays existing tags when a user wants to add tags to a page.Developers can build rich Internet applications taking advantage of integration between DekiScript and JavaScript utilizing JEM (JavaScript with Events and Messages) technology. DekiScript is a scripting language for mashing up data from Deki, which serves as a base platform for MindTouch. With JEM, developers can leverage DekiScript and JavaScript technology to build AJAX-based composite applications, mashups, and interactive portals. JEM also enables visualization of data sources and supports XML literals and better URI string manipulation for building dynamic page links. Dynamic list and map construction is supported as well. The list and map capability enables, for example, listing of customer orders above a certain amount and sales by region.A plug-in architecture in MindTouch 2009 enables developers to extend the product’s front end without affecting the ability to upgrade. Developers can write applications in PHP to add features or services. Metadata management in MindTouch enables access to local data stores. Metadata can be used to aggregate pages or content in the front end or in any external client application using the MindTouch API.Other features of MindTouch 2009 include: * Office document editing and write-back without having to save a local copy to a desktop. * More efficient administration of MindTouch deployments through control panel enhancements. * Improved editorial control over pages through advanced permissioning. * Updated revision comparison between versions of page content.MindTouch has been a user of the Mono runtime enabling .Net applications to run on Linux. Technology Industry