Articles about Developer Tool

Several big tech influencers are joining not-for-profit OASIS to standardize REST-based Open Data Protocol. OData is an open web protocol for both updating and querying data over HTTP. It can return back formatted results that can easily be displayed in both web pages and native apps using ATOM, JSON, and plain XML with included pagination, ordering, and filtering of data.

Supporters include CA Technologies, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software and Red Hat. Fifty-seven officers are OASIS OData Technical Committee members. They currently represent SAP AG, IBM, Perficient Inc, Northeastern University and Microsoft. In a recent meeting the current committee welcomed the new supporters to the initiative.

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Second in a series. Three quarters of the bits being schlepped over the Internet today are video bits, so video standards are more important than ever. To accommodate this huge load of video data we’ve developed compression technologies, special protocols like the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), we’ve pushed data to the edge of the network with Content Distribution Networks (originally Akamai but now many others).

All these Internet video technologies are in transition, too, with H.264 and HTML5 video in the ascendence while stalwarts like RealVideo and even Flash Video appear to be in decline. The latter is most significant because Adobe’s Flash has been -- thanks to YouTube -- the most ubiquitous video standard. Flash video was everywhere. But with Flash apparently leaving the ever-growing mobile space, will we ever see another truly ubiquitous web video standard? We already have and it is called ClipStream G2 JavaScript video.

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Adobe Systems has released a new version of Muse, its coding-free web design tool, and the program is packed with significant additions and updates.

A new Forms widget, for instance, makes it easy to add a custom form to your page. Alignment tools help you align page objects in relation to each other, and asset support means you can now link to PDF files, archives, executables and more, ready for your visitors to download.

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Many programs require that you have the correct version of the .NET Framework installed before they’ll work. And so it’s important to understand which versions of .NET are installed on a system before you start installing new software.

Microsoft haven’t provided any straightforward way of finding this out, unfortunately, but that doesn’t have to be a problem: the .NET Version Detector provides everything you need.

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The Commodore 64 celebrates its thirtieth birthday this month. That’s 64 kilobytes for around $600. A massive amount of RAM at the time. And for another $600 you could buy a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which could store 170kB on a disk. Programs loaded completely into RAM so that you could remove the program disk from the drive and insert another one to store data. Where can you get a word processor or database that will run in 64k now? Yes, of course we’re routinely doing things now that were only distant dreams back then. But I began my computing experience running my business on just such a Commodore 64.

By 1986 mass market PC clones featured a colossal 512k of RAM and a 4.77MHz processor. But although that was a massive step forward, in no time you needed to upgrade to 640k RAM, and then find ways of using the extended memory registers between 640k and 1MB. In 1990, Windows 3.0 needed 7MB of disk space -- so you’d need a hard drive to run it, which not everyone had.

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International Data Corporation (IDC), in partnership with mobile platform company Appcelerator, announced results of a global survey of Appcelerator developers on Tuesday, The survey created a detailed profile of developers' outlook on the market, with a particular focus on development for enterprise.

At a high level, the survey showed that developers believe Apple is leading the charge in the enterprise mobile deployment; see Android only as a consumer opportunity; are excited about remote cloud service integration; and are cautiously optimistic about Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets; but see Windows Phone as disappointing.

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Dell must have read my story on “What will it take to make Linux popular?”, agreed with Linus Torvalds' initial thoughts, then thought that it might be a good idea to publicly announce “Project Sputnik”, which despite the name doesn’t have anything to do with spacecraft like Dell would want you to believe. (Okay, so the skunkworks project predates my story by six months, but surely official timing can't be a coincidence?)

What Project Sputnik does is bring “an official developer laptop based on the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS preloaded, available in select geographies”, meaning Linux for the people on the Dell XPS 13 in much simpler words. Dell is taking the project to the next level by officially releasing it this fall. Timing is interesting with Windows 8 launching October 26. Since the laptop comes with Linux, presumably it will cost less than its counterpart running Windows.

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When creating a website you’ll almost certainly want to keep file sizes to a minimum, reducing load times and bandwidth usage. So it’s a shame that some WYWIWYG editors don’t understand this at all, routinely producing bloated code that will inevitably slow you down. Still, don’t worry -- help is at hand from the free HTML Cleaner.

Initially, at least, the program works more or less as you might expect. You can open a single HTML file, or an entire folder; click a button and everything you’ve chosen will be optimised (we typically saved 9-10% immediately); and you can then view the results to confirm that the code works exactly as it did.

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It sounds like a silly question. After all, Android is more popular than ever, with new “hero” phones and tablets arriving almost every week. However, for all of the platform’s success, there’s one aspect that remains a lingering blight on Google’s otherwise shiny success story: Software piracy.

Simply put, the rampant piracy of apps on “rooted” Android devices is killing developer momentum, with many devs resorting to unpopular and often intrusive in-app advertising and other gimmicks to make up for the gap in traditional Google Play revenue. And with the Android enthusiast community seemingly obsessed with “rooting” every new device that comes to market -- thus making it easier for unscrupulous users to pirate apps and/or bypass normal app security mechanisms -- the problem only  gets worse.

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Microsoft engineer Aaron Stebner has released a new version of his .NET Framework Setup Verification tool, with preliminary support for Windows 8 and the .NET Framework 4.5.

The program’s interface remains the same as in previous builds. To use it, just launch netfx_setupverifier.exe and choose the .NET version you’d like to verify from the list (which is also a convenient way to see which .NET editions are installed on the current system).

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File synchronization services like Dropbox have really taken off in recent time. They basically allow you to sync files between devices using cloud storage as buffer. Depending on the service, you get web access, document editing options, photo galleries, media streaming and more on top of that.

All services have in common that they encrypt the connection between your computer and the cloud host to protect the data from third parties that try to intercept or record what is being transferred. Each service has implemented its own scheme, and it is often difficult and sometimes even impossible to find out how the data is protected by the service.

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Yesterday at Google I/O, Recon Instruments announced the HUD SDK. I couldn't get time at the booth until today, they were so busy. Recon is best known for its goggle mods, which put an Android computer inside a heads up display that provides alpine skiers and snowboarder with all kinds of useful information such as speed, navigation and location, among others. Oh, yeah, music, too.

The development kit turns the device into a platform. Now third parties can write their own apps -- it's no longer a Recon affair. Tyson Miller explains what the SDK means for the company, its customers, developers and future products.

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I've covered lots of events over the years, but few as exciting as Google I/O 2012. Seriously, the cloud computing giant innovates in ways that, well, people attribute to Apple. There's a very aspirational quality about presentations so far, right down to the hard-knuckle coding sessions. You can feel a real sense of empowerment in the air -- that somehow these developers, and the customers they create products for, will have better lives for participating in this ecosystem.

Like yesterday, I will liveblog the keynote, which begins at 10 am PDT (1 pm Eastern Time) and post in reverse chronological order, meaning the newest stuff will be one top. But it's hard to imagine how Google could out-do yesterday's stunning presentation. Still, there is much ground to cover -- Chrome, Chrome OS, Google TV and the rumored Amazon Web Services-like platform, to name a few. There are still two days of sessions yet. Check back and refesh often.

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Yesterday, at Google I/O, I spoke with one developer waiting to get his big goody bag -- Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 and Nexus Q -- about his reaction to the first day's keynote. Like many other developers here, to my surprise, he develops for Android before iOS.

Among Jellybean's new features: Broader support for languages, including Arabic, and that makes this Google I/O attendee smile.

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Equipping your network with a web server can provide some useful extra ways to share files and information. Of course if you’ve tried to set one up before then you’ll know the process isn’t always straightforward, but Serva aims to change all that.

The program offers straightforward support for several protocols (http, ftp, tftp, dhcp, dns, sntp, syslog), yet somehow remains ultra-lightweight (under 2MB). And better still, it’s portable, which means you can run servers just when you need them, without affecting the host system for the rest of the time.

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