With its newly released Windows Phone SDK 8.0, Microsoft is offering a better story for smartphone software developers, but the SDK itself may force some developers to undergo system upgrades.
Kopin engineer Stephen Pombo wears the Golden-i computer headset for use in field workforce operations. (Photo by Matt Hamblen / Computerworld) LAS VEGAS -- At the Verizon Wireless booth at CES, engineers demonstrated a headset computer called Golden-i for use in public safety and other field workforce applications.
Microsoft Communities New Zealand (MSCNZ) has launched a new online community portal this week.
Dennis Ritchie, the software developer who brought the world the C programming language and Unix operating system, has died at the age of 70.
In a move that seemed like a veritable blast from the past, the World Wide Web Consortium has announced that a group of web services technologies, including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) 1.2, were accepted as international standards by ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission).
W3C made the announcement along with a joint technical committee from the other two standards organisations, emphasising that the technologies would derive interoperability benefits gained from formal recognition of national standards bodies. But is anybody really listening to standards organisations all that much anymore?
SOAP, as you recall, was considered red-hot as a web services mechanism around eight years ago. Among the other W3C Web services technologies being endorsed by ISO/IEC is MTOM (Message Transformation Optimisation Mechanism), which also dates back to the middle of last decade.
The problem with SOAP and the so-called WS-* (remember those?) standards was so many of these started emerging that it became pretty much impossible to keep up with them all. But W3C still sees value in SOAP even if others have moved on to the more-palatable REST (Representational State Transfer) mechanism for web services. SOAP, like XML, is widely used, especially in B2B communications, says W3C representative Ian Jacbos.
Still, we're hearing more about REST these days than SOAP. That's why Ruby on Rails framework founder David Heinemeier Hansson and the Rails development crew dropped SOAP from the framework in December 2007 in favor of REST. "SOAP fell out of favor years ago. The only people left on that scene are the people paid to design or use it," Hansson says.
Jacobs also points out the use of SOAP in SOA, but these days, SOA has taken a distant backseat to mobile computing in the minds of IT connoisseurs. iPads, iPhones, and Android are trendy; SOA is not. That's the way it is.
SOAP is not the only example of people not necessarily listening to a standards body. With HTML5, a W3C official last year had advised caution in implementing it in websites, arguing it was not quite ready for prime time. But HTML5 already had caught fire. The endorsement of Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs, who had championed the HTML upgrade for use with Apple's iOS devices, probably did more to make it a standard than all of W3C's efforts combined.
Although standards bodies like W3C focus on noble and difficult efforts, the marketplace is the ultimate decider of standards themselves. It certainly moves faster.
Hewlett-Packard's surprise announcement that it would end production of its WebOS smartphones and tablets left a lot of developers in a lurch (although exact numbers are hard to come by). As of now, the WebOS development community is effectively an ecosystem in search of a platform.
What next? The smartphone OS market is consolidating, with the lion's share divided between Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Either one of those would be a fine choice for WebOS developers looking to jump ship, but neither offers a development environment that much resembles the WebOS SDK. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been actively wooing WebOS developers to come over to Windows Phone 7, with promises of free smartphones, training, and tools.
Maybe all this talk of abandoning WebOS is premature. Chances are most WebOS developers are already writing apps for more than one mobile OS. That could buy WebOS some time. Despite all the doom and gloom, it may turn out that WebOS developers' best strategy might be the one that most pundits were quickest to dismiss: Stick to your guns, bide your time, and plan to remain WebOS developers once the platform finds a new home — because it's highly unlikely we've heard the last of this promising mobile OS.
Developers with dedication
Developers who make apps for Android have a lot more to worry about than just building great software.
Oracle on Monday announced a sneak peak at features slated for MySQL 5.6, the next version of its open-source database, that focus on improved scalability, integration and performance.
CA Technologies plans to acquire Interactive TKO, which offers a simulation platform designed to reduce the time it takes to develop and test complex applications, for US$330 million in cash.
Should you build mobile applications in native code or deploy them using web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript? Developers have long been divided.
Steve Jobs originally suggested iPhone developers would be able to deploy any applications they needed through the device's built-in browser, but that was before Apple saw the light and launched its iTunes App Store.
Since then, even established websites have often chosen to deliver their content to mobile devices using native apps, rather than trying to shoehorn it into mobile browsers. Despite the improvements introduced in HTML5, many developers feel web technologies are still inadequate for the unique needs of smartphones and tablets.
If that is true, it is time for a rethink of how online information services are developed and deployed. In the past, developers built websites first, then adapted the same content for mobile apps. But in today's market, where mobile devices are increasingly the primary means by which users interact with online content, that approach is arguably backward.
What is needed is an evolution in mobile development, similar to what we saw in the early days of web applications. The first enterprise web apps did little more than screen-scrape legacy mainframe output and pretty it up for the browser. But as browser-based computing became the norm, application logic moved off the mainframe, and HTML output became the primary target. Mobile applications are undergoing the same shift. The next generation of information services will treat desktop browsers and mobile app clients as equal citizens, and the same application logic will serve content to both.
Equally important, this transition comes at the same time as another significant sea change in the IT industry, which is the move toward cloud computing. As platform-as-a-service offerings mature, it makes less and less sense for information service providers to host application logic on their own private infrastructures.
Linking devices to the cloud
The next edition of Java has been approved by a Java Community Process executive committee, but not without some acrimony.
After two brief demonstrations of Microsoft's next-generation operating system, third-party Microsoft Windows developers are expressing frustration over what they consider a lack of clear direction on how to develop applications for Windows 8.
Microsoft is building two new additions to its .Net framework that should make it much easier for programmers to utilise all the cores of a multicore processor.
Having irked the open source community with its handling of the Project Hudson continuous integration server inherited from Sun Microsystems, Oracle abruptly changed course earlier this week and handed Hudson over to the open source Eclipse Foundation. Oracle's move is being viewed by proponents of Jenkins, a fork of Hudson, as a validation of their own efforts. But a reunification of the two projects appears doubtful at the moment, and Jenkins advocates wonder if Oracle has legal clearance to donate Hudson.
Having closed its $US2.2 billion acquisition of Novell, Attachmate now is eyeing cloud service providers as potential customers for the company's newly acquired Suse Linux platform. The company also plans to continue promoting Suse for deployment on mainframes and as a Unix replacement.
In an interview on Wednesday afternoon, Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn noted Suse would be its own separate business unit under the Attachmate umbrella, as would Novell. "We're making Suse its own business unit so it'll be on par with the other three business units." The other two include the Attachmate and NetIQ business units, all under the auspices of the Attachmate Group.
"Basically, for the service providers and enterprises that are building out the cloud environments, we think we've got a terrific solution for them," Hawn said. Asked about any new features planned for Suse Linux, Hawn said he had nothing specific to say yet but that announcements would be made in coming weeks and months.
Attachmate also takes control over Novell's Mono business, which has placed Microsoft software development technologies available on non-Windows platforms, such as Linux. The company's Moonlight version of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plugin platform falls under the Mono domain. Hawn was not yet ready to comment on any development plans for Mono. "I haven't sorted through all of that yet."
For legacy Novell Netware customers, Attachmate expects to restore commitments to support Netware versions in which support was due to be discontinued. "Our philosophy is not to force customers to move from anything," Hawn said. Netware, he said, has "still got a very large, a very loyal installed base and we intend to continue to focus on meeting their needs whether that's in additional offerings on the roadmap, additional support offerings and the like."
"We are not discontinuing any products," Hawn said. Existing Novell roadmaps remain intact, he said. Attachmate announced its Novell acquisition in November.