Google releases Dart programming language
Google unveiled the working version of Dart today. It looks to me that one of the primary selling points is that it’s designed to be run both on the server side and the client side (browser). I love my PHP but it has to depend on other client-side code (HTML / JavaScript / Flash) to do anything.
What’s also interesting is that Dart code runs in Javascript right now – so no plug-ins necessary if I understand it correctly.
I’ve been looking at a lot of different languages and how to apply them lately and i think my next big project is going to be done in Python. That said, I’d love to take a peek at Dart and see what it can do. I’d be hesitant to use it for anything large-scale right now (it has been out less than a day) but I’d love to see if there is a groundswell of curiosity around it in the next few weeks.
Take a look at Dart for yourself.
PHP and Flash teaming up together
This via TechCrunch:
Adobe and Zend Technologies, the PHP distribution company, are announcing Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP software, a new integrated product aimed at helping PHP developers create rich Internet applications for mobile, Web and desktop leveraging the Flash Platform.
Zend, which has been working with Adobe since 2008, offers its own distribution of PHP, the popular open-source scripting language for Web applications, and sells software and support services around the language.
The Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP gives developers a single code base for applications for Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and iOS while sharing code from Web applications. Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP includes an integrated copy of Zend Studio 8, which allows developers to develop Flash based applications within a single environment. Specifically, the integrated software offers a single UI framework to create Flex and PHP projects for desktop and mobile and the ability to connect to PHP services and generate ActionScript value objects.
The combination of the two frameworks in one suite is powerful, says Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. Adobe says that more than 131 million smartphones are expected to have Flash Player installed by the end of the year. And PHP is the leading language for public facing web applications, says Gutmans.
This could be interesting… I still think Adobe sat on it’s dominance with Flash far too long and let other companies / technologies catch up.
Adobe demos multi-platform app created using single code base
Christian Cantrell, a technical product manager at Adobe, has created an app for multiple platforms including OSX, Windows 7, Linux, Android, iPhone OS, iPad OS and browsers – no biggie, right? But here’s the cool bit, all the apps use the same code base. In other words, Cantrell wrote an app once and didn’t have to change it to get it on other platforms, he just needed to apply slightly different platform "wrappers".
From Cantrell’s blog: "The app is called iReverse… Although iReverse is fun to play, the most amazing thing about the project is the fact that it runs in all these different environments completely unchanged. In other words, the exact same code base is used to build versions for five different environments. There’s no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility – not even close." Check it out in the video below
Digg Says Yes To NoSQL Cassandra DB, Bye To MySQL
After twitter, now it’s Digg who’s decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Cassandra, an open source project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database.
Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008 and is licensed under the Apache License. The reason for this move, as explained by Digg, is the increasing difficulty of building a high-performance, write-intensive application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.
For back reference, MySQL was recently purchased by corporate database giant Oracle and that has a lot of developers very nervous to commit long-term to MySQL.
Google urges Web adoption of vector graphics
Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.
The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.
New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.
"First they’re ignored, then they’re hyped, then they’re written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.
Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That’s good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.
