IT Professional

Hi,

my name is David Voňka, I am the chief developer at Semanta. I joined Semanta 2 years ago and started to work on the implementation of knowledge base user interface.

What technologies are we using

Semanta develops Web 2.0 applications for knowledge sharing and collaboration. We program our technologies in Java EE. Usually, this includes building new plugins for Atlassian Confluence platform. For more (technical) information about Confluence, have a look on the architecture.

Lately were into XML technologies, especially on the platform of XML database eXist. For a quick check what this database can do for you, please see the fact sheet.

We have written a confluence-eXist connector, so we are busy combining the best of the two worlds (or the worst, depending how good we are on a particular day ).

Semanta and Confluence

We have in the first place implemented modifications and extensions to Confluence front-end. These extensions have so far been supplied as an integral part of our projects. Now we are about to release them to the market of commercial plugins to Confluence.

Semanta and XML

All our solutions explicitly separate front-end and back-end, in case the application of XML database does not meet the customer's wishes, we are usually able to use relational DB as the back-end. We have used eXist for Wikireporter technologies and for some of our custom project management solutions.

Our interest in XML technologies is logical since Semanta focuses on solutions in the enterprise metadata field. This field features:

• quite low volume of stored information. Even in large companies the amount of data is not higher than a few gigabytes. eXist has no problems with such amounts of data.
• high demands on the structure of the stored data. XML databases are much more fit for very structured, hierarchical data than than relational db's. Also, we use xml and xhtml on both front- and backend, which removes the need for transforming xml into other formats.

Security in Semanta solutions

All our solutions work with SSL(HTTPS), if needed. Semanta also has experience with performing security audits. In such audits we do

• server security checks (stuff like ssl, reasonable firewall, connections to databases unavailable to external connection and so on)
• dangerous plugin checks (some confluence plugins open the installation to for example SQL injection or cross site scripting attacks)
• permission checks (basically, we check if not too many users have too many rights in the system)
• backup & recovery tests (is there a backup policy ? Can we really rebuild the system from the backups ?)
• other actions, depending on particular situation.

Development and testing infrastructure of Semanta

Semanta has a set of servers, which we use for testing of our solutions.

These systems are hosted on Amazon EC2 infrastructure and include installations based on several underlying databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL server 2005), several operating systems (Windows, Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD) and a range of confluence versions (from 2.10 to 3.2 in April 2010).

This infrastructure is used to make sure that we deliver reasonably stable and tested software to our customers.

Support

Of course, we offer support for our solutions. For a list of options, see our support page.