“In my world, design and development go hand in hand. Of course it doesn’t hurt that what I do for a living also happens to be my passion – second only to my wife!
“It started years ago with Basic, Cobol and JCL, moved on to dBase, Clipper, and FoxPRO, (with a brief stint involving LISP and Prolog) and then settled in for the long haul in the world of “C.” I love “C” – its pure power, awesome flexibility, and extreme efficiency is only contrasted by its complexity, unforgiving nature, and a few bizarre quirks. Nevertheless, add object orientation, data manipulation, and web interaction and you have geek nirvana.
“Over the years, the collection of tools, libraries, and pre-compiled objects grew, and eventually they manifested themselves into the ultimate front-end for “C.” This front-end would later evolve to become the full-fledged programming language and integrated development platform known as FGL (Fifth Generation Language), sometimes also referred to as open5G.
“Together with my longtime friend and fellow technologist, Steve Muccione, the FGL platform would ultimately grow to become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of advanced application development -- and be responsible for the creation and implementation of a number of advanced products.
“The crown jewel of my development career (so far!) is Zude. Zude started as a JavaScript library that I wrote designed to provide advanced windowing, messaging, ajax, and event handling for browsers. There were a number of commercial and open source solutions that did bits and pieces, but no single solution that provided everything I needed -- and I needed a solid base client-side platform that could be evolved into the next generation. Six months later, Zude began to take shape and would ultimately result in significant technological acclaim – and the filing of a patent based on the underlying technology.
“Zude is more than a pretty face or the ultimate customization platform – it is the leading technology player in the social computing space. In its short existence, some of Zude’s significant achievements include:
First social network to go live with Google’s OpenSocial platform
First to inject OpenSocial into MySpace and Facebook
First to support Data Portability with more than 50 exportable data variants
First to include full-blown windowing API for developers
First to create web-based referential object resolution
NOTE: Mr. Repetti was the architect, designer, and chief developer of Zude, having personally written more than 95% of all the code. FGL/Open5G was written by Mr. Repetti and Steve Muccione. Mr. Repetti is the co-founder of Zude parent 5G/Fifth Generation and originally served as the company's CTO and Chairman.
In the news
Steve Repetti,
“The crown jewel of my development career (so far!) is Zude. Zude started as a JavaScript library that I wrote designed to provide advanced windowing, messaging, ajax, and event handling for browsers. There were a number of commercial and open source solutions that did bits and pieces, but no single solution that provided everything I needed -- and I needed a solid base client-side platform that could be evolved into the next generation. Six months later, Zude began to take shape and would ultimately result in significant technological acclaim – and the filing of a patent based on the underlying technology.
Zude is unquestionably one of the killer sleepers of 2007...Robert Scoble liked it so much, he called it his Demo of the Year (and Scoble sees a lot of demos)...One of the cool things about Zude is how you can pull all your points of social presence on the Web into a single page and then give the URL to that single page out so that your contacts don’t have to go all over creation to experience your virtual persona...
This year's most promising social computing platform has beefed up everything from server capacity to social reach...Zude was and is even more so now - what MySpace should have been all along. Zude extends personalization and creativity to the website level and incorporates Web 2.0 tools for really gripping function...I covered Zude for ReadWriteWeb back in June and the Killer Startups version on Profy revealed a very useful and powerful utility also. If Zude was the “mashup of mashups” back then - it is a mashing machine now...
Cross-domain drag and drop has been a hallmark feature of Zude...The underlying technology, Open5G, probably serves as the best case study for understanding what Web 2.0 actually means...