Thalasar Ventures

I wanted to give a little background on Xao, a project very near and dear to my heart. The Xao software project began on Xao Inc, a company I used to work at landed a largish (for a small software firm)contract to develop a order system linking 3M, Brady, Loctite and several other manufacturers with a mid market distributor. While much of the project is not web viewable, the public web site portion is viewable RS Hughes – industrial distributor.
One of the interesting challenges we faced with the project was the distributor’s need to incorporate content from a number of manufacturers. This meant taking data in widely varying formats, data structures and building a system that could normalize that data into a single structure.
Out of the work of for that system came a system initially called Clearingpoint. This little gem of software then got buried in the acquisition of Brave New Worlds by VA Linux Systems. When Xao was spun off from VA Linux we began work again on Clearingpoint. This eventually evolved into the Xao Software Suite. Since Xao Inc is no longer doing active development, Ejelta has taken over the project. Thalasar is currently actively involved in the Xao Software suite. Our current project is the forum object – which will add our own unique twist on forums. The initial forum object is due in mid June.

We use a wide range of technologies in our effort to bring new information to the web. Because of the licensing costs, typically we use open source software. Our typical hosting platform for a web site is Apache running on Linux.
As far as the database portion of our systems, we run MySQL using InnoDB to provide transactions, row locking, hot back up for MySQ, all without compromising the high read performance of MySQL.
We currently support a number of open source projects in order to leave the world a little better than we found it. For example we recently made a donation to the Perl Foundation. Perl is a one of the core languages of the net and most of our projects tend to get written in Perl.
We also contribute to the Xao Web Development Suite currently maintained by Andrew Maltsev. We are currently extending the suite to include a new Forum object and blog platform.
Whatever technology we continue to develop, we will endeavor to open source those elements we feel that will benefit the community at large. Once again, trying to leave the world in a better place than we found it.