Web data server supplier Kapow Technologies which produces tools to produce mashups of data elements pulled from multiple web sources has put out a new version of its flagship platform.
Stefan Andreasen, CTO and Founder of Kapow Technologies told us the product betters other on the market because it can handle data held in dynamic JavaScript and AJAX powered sites, just as well as it can deal with static HTML pages.
Kapow offers a web application integration platform that allows for non-intrusive creation of adaptors to any on-line application, content or data source. Formerly known as the Kapow Mashup Server, the new Kapow Web Data Server version 7 is claimed to provide the fastest and most reliable access to enterprise and public web data. The system serves web data with 100% reliability, Andreasen claimed. The vendor also claims its tools has 100% browser engine compliance.
“We leverage the fact that everyone has a browser and we can use that to access any data stored across multiple databases and multiple networks, so long at the data can be viewed in a browser.”
Andreasen explained the Kapow tools use so-called robots to crawl the web and navigate a website to expose objects from one or more target web pages as REST-style services.
These are web services for fetching data that are requested using a mechanism that is much simpler than fully-formed SOAP messages.
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These robots use standard web protocols and security mechanisms to automate the navigation and interaction with any web application or website, in ways that are said to provide secure and reliable access to the underlying data and business logic.
As a result, the company claims new applications for web and business intelligence, service and web oriented architecture, portal generation and content migration can be completed and deployed in just a tenth of the time and cost associated with traditional software development methods.
Kapow’s web data server toolset has three main functions. It carries out ETL (extraction, transformation and load) processes on web contents, it service enables any website content, and it serves as a web clipping tool.
As such, it competes with other providers in different niches: from companies like QL2 Software and Connotate Technologies in ETL, to suppliers of web clipping data tools used in WebSphere and Oracle portal environments.
More than 300 companies are said to be using Kapow to build new applications for accessing, enriching and serving enterprise and public web data source. They include names such as Audi, Cisco, AT&T and Morgan Stanley.
The company began life as a web screen-scraping concern, with technology which pulled data from across the web so it could be aggregated onto a web page. The Danish software startup moved headquarters from Europe to Silicon Valley and started to capitalise on some of the higher level capabilities of its software, not simply to pull data together, but to expose it as more dynamic services or data feeds.
New features and enhancements in Kapow Web Data Server 7.0 include an Intuitive point-and-click IDE for accurate data extraction without coding, URL blocking features that eliminate the loading of unwanted content such as ads to improve runtime reliability and CPU performance, and some scalability Improvements which allow for large file downloads directly to disk.
