Stormseed » Middleware / tech

Adobe demos multi-platform app created using single code base

Chris Benjamin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:20:00 +0000

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

See the original article at recombu.com.

Digg Says Yes To NoSQL Cassandra DB, Bye To MySQL

Chris Benjamin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:10:00 +0000

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.

See the original article at Slashdot.

Google urges Web adoption of vector graphics

Chris Benjamin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:10:58 +0000

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.

But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer, can’t handle them. "It’s hard to deploy this when you can’t use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.

Google and various allies are working to change that–its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG–and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.

Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.

SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don’t, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.

See the full article at CNET News.

Android platform v1.5 highlights and new features

Chris Benjamin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:03:54 +0000

Four months of discovery and hearsay later, the Android build that we’ve all been waiting for is near. The Android Developers Blog announced today the availability of an “early look” Android 1.5 SDK. This release seems like a mostly complete version of the final release, though Google warns that some of the APIs are bound to change.

Beyond the features that v1.5 brings to the end user (see below), the new SDK carries a few key changes:

The SDK now supports multiple versions of the platform, so developers can continue to work on applications for the current release (v1.1) while preparing their apps for the next one.
Developers can now install SDK add-ons. This allows carriers, OEMs, and other third-parties to easily expand the SDK for their needs without Google having to hold their hand.

Some important new features:

On-screen keyboard support, with support for auto-correct, text prediction, user dictionaries, and third-party keyboard layouts
Live folders (Auto-updating folder shortcuts for things such as YouTube favorites, Starred Contacts, and, with the API now available, whatever else developers conjure up)
Video Recording
MPEG4 and 3GP Video Playback
Stereo Bluetooth
Browser enhancements: New ultrafast “Squirrelfish” javascript engine, search within a page, copy and paste, UI changes
New Linux Kernel
Google Application enhancements: View Google Talk friend statuses in contacts, SMS, MMS, Gmail, and Email
New frameworks for developers to build upon: Widget creation, Live Folder creation, Raw audio recording/playback, Video recording, Speech recognition
Faster GPS, Faster camera startup, faster Gmail scrolling, and smoother browser scrolling

See the full article at MobileCrunch and the full feature list at Android.com.

Facebook makes new push for more apps

Chris Benjamin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:11:48 +0000

Facebook is looking to unleash a new wave of applications to get its users creating and sharing more content.

The social-networking company has launched a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will let developers access content and methods for sharing in Facebook apps including Status, Notes, Links, and Video.

In announcing move toward greater openness, Facebook says it has seen "increasing engagement" among its users, more than 15 million of whom are updating their status daily and who are sharing more than 24 million links per month. The social network has 150 million active members.

Earlier this week, Facebook gave another nod toward openness, rather unexpectedly joining the board of the OpenID Foundation, whose designs on a universal log-in standard are something of a rival to the similar Facebook Connect.

See the full article at Webware.

Facebook Lets App Developers Swap Content With Custom Tags

Chris Benjamin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:21:47 +0000

Facebook took a step today to increase the cross-pollination between the more than 40,000 social apps built on top of its platform. Those apps are written in Facebook Markup Language (FBML, it is Facebook’s version of HTML). FBML has something called “tags” which call up Facebook content inside each app. Now app developers can add “custom tags” to expose their own content to other app developers, and thus spread it programmatically. Some examples include adding playlists from iLike to other apps, a badge from Causes, or a list of the most popular books from Visual Bookshelf.

The Facebook Blog has more details:

If you’ve built an application with a lot of rich content, and you want to extend its reach and share that content with other Platform applications, create some custom tags and share this content with the community. Custom tags are easy to use and are a great way for you to extend your application’s distribution.

There is no need for app developers to reinvent the wheel if other apps have already gathered great content and data that can be used in an existing app.

Read the full article at TechCrunch