Romulus Project

Romulus Mashup Builder is a web application that provides a graphical user interface for building mashup easily. In few minutes you can combine information obtained of REST services, this information can be modified with operators and later presented with a wide variety of renders. For example, Flickr, Google, Yahoo or Delicious services can be mixed to get a mashup.

The mashups can be exported in several formats:

• HTML
• JavaScript
• Google Gadget
• Netvibes Gadget

All this process is developed with a graphical user interface and it is as easy as to drag and drop some components and to combine it. The time of develop a mashup is reduced considerably thus the productivity is noticeably improved. This application is based on Afrous.

In the following video is shown a demo of Romulus Mashup Builder

In the demo is shown a simple blog web application developed with Roma Meta Framework. Using a REST service the information of this application is recovered by Romulus Mashup Builder. This information is processes with a sorting operator and it is ordered and later is rendered using a Pie Chart Reder. Finally the mashup is exported as Netvibes Gadget and the demostration finishs with the gadget shown into Netvibes page.

In the last weeks, we have added some interesting new improvements to the Wapiti project as new html reports, an important internal refactoring and improvements of the existent algorithms. This project, written in python, allows to audit the security of web applications with a black box testing approach. Now, we launch a new page about this open-source project, created byNicolas Surribas, under Romulus Project domain: http://www.ict-romulus.eu/web/wapiti This page contains different useful sections for users and developers (now, attacks can be extended). The principal page contains an overview about the use of this security testing tool. In the wiki page, this information is explained in detail. Here, you can find information related with the use and extension of the project. There are other typical sections of this type of projects: a forum, where users and developers will discuss the related topics, a features page and a roadmap page. One of the most interesting sections is the Online demo, in this page, you can check the security of your applications (only a url per request). A detailed report page with information about the founded vulnerabilities will be shown as result. Another announcement about wapiti project, this night will be release the new Beta Wapiti 2,0 version with the new integrated functionalities: report generation, improvement of algorithms...  This version is a beta of the next 2,0 final version.The detailed features are specified in the wapiti page.

This week (September 23rd - 24th) took place in Frankfurt (Germany) the first Liferay European Symposium. For two days there was intense interchange of knowledge and experiencies of many portal applications developers (near 200) from many european companies and groups.

In the agenda there was time for a talk about Romulus, and its efforts and developments for helping developers to be more productive. The talk was a general overview of the project, but also showing the progress and some of the latests achievements.

DERI's Pipe's Project (formerly Semantic Web Pipes) has been awarded 3rd prize at the Triplification challenge

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML.

DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed.

DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use, thus making it an innovative integration component for data level mashups. 

DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results.

Wapiti is an open source Web application vulnerability scanner that scans applications with a black box approach, it realizes different test with a fuzzer strategy in order to discover a wide set of the most common vulnerabilities. Now, it can detect File handling errors, code injections (SQL, XPath and LDAP), persistent and non-persistent XSS attacks, external command execution and HTTP Splitting attacks.
This project, created by Nicolas Surribas under General Public License is a good starting point for our target in the security testing because it is focused on the application layer and checks the most common vulnerabilities, so Romulus has started to contribute with its development. In the first phase of our contribution we have implemented the report functionality, now, Wapiti can show a report with a visual chart, a summary table and a list with every found vulnerability detailed. We have planned other improvements to this software, and we are going to work together with the project creator. As Wapiti is programmed in Python, it will be integrated in Romulus using jython, an implementation of Python language written in Java and maven, tool that simplify the management of Java projects. In future versions, Romulus will provide a complete security testing toolkit and Wapiti will be a part of it.

Two screenshots of the report:

Report1

Report2