Intel’s Appstore
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Developer, Intel, Mobile on
Intel has just launched its first appstore - in the shape of appdeveloper.intel.com.
Targeted at Netbooks, appdeveloper.intel.com is more than just another Apple-style appstore. It’s also a set of tools to help developers build applications that run on Atom. Integrating into common IDEs, Intel’s Atom SDK contains tools to help manage your applications, as well as integrating with Intel’s ecommerce platform for licensing and for handling delivery of additional content.
There’s a lot in appdeveloper.intel.com, and more to come. IDE support is a ways off, and it’ll be interesting to see how Intel handles integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio (and how it intends to deliver support to Flash Builder and Aptana). Sign ups are already open, and are free for now ($99 in the future), and there’s plenty of content on the site, so developers can get started quickly.
One big difference from other appstores is the developer catalog - where you’ll find components you can use in your own applications. Intel’s planning on building a developer ecosystem with its Atom offering, and getting tools out there is important. Software components and component stores were one of the drivers that contributed to the success of Visual Basic, and it’s good to see that Intel has learnt that part of the developer ecosystem lesson… The first batch of components is up already, and includes power and network management tools as well as video capture libraries.
There’s also a cross-platform bent to the site that’s refreshing. Developers can use the site to work with two operating systems - the Intel-sponsored Moblin Linux and Windows 7 - and two run times - Java and Adobe’s AIR. Moblin is becoming increasingly important to Intel (and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a tie up between it and Google’s ChromeOS in the future), and this year’s IDF will also see it get a new release and a whole new UI.
However the big winner here is Adobe. AIR’s still a relatively new arrival on the application development scene, but one that’s quickly picked up some very significant mindshare. With netbook’s relative low power, and near ubiquitous connectivity, there’s a lot of synergy between the hardware and Adobe’s rich internet application vision.
Yet Another Appstore it may be, but appdeveloper.intel.com looks set to be an important tool for developers who want to work with the growing netbook segment - and who want to turn them into devices that are actually useful rather than glorified Gmail appliances.
–S
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Giving Android A Helping Hand
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Developer, Google, Mobile on
Q. How do you get 4000 people to start developing for your mobile platform?
A. Give them all a phone.
No, that’s not a riddle - that’s just what Google did this morning at its IO event here in San Francisco. After a keynote that majored on the future of the web - specifically on HTML 5 - and only touched on some of the features in the upcoming “Donut” release of Android, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled not just one more thing, but three more things.
The first was the return of the Android Developer Challenge, this time with the added appeal of user votes. I’m not quite sure how The Web’s Got (Developer) Talent would televise, but the folk at Google seem to think that they’ve got the software needed to manage a large scale user driven voting process. Certainly tools like Google Moderator seem to have the user voting process working well - and it’s been heavily stress tested by hosting a White House electronic town hall meeting.
The second was a box that would be given to every attendee at the event, a box that would contain details of the Android SDK.
The third was what else would be in the box: an unlocked Android phone running the 1.5 “Cupcake” release. It was what Gundotra called his “Oprah moment”, not giving away a car, but more than 4000 3G devices with a month’s unlimited data (and a far chunk of voice).
It was quite an impressive giveaway, especially when the phones turned out not to be the familiar G-1, but the new G-2, the HTC Magic, which was unveiled at MWC in Barcelona in February. By the end of the afternoon most of the developers in the conference centre were clutching their boxes, and the 3G bandwidth in and around the Moscone Center was starting to get a little thin…
Of course it’s going to take time to see just how well Google’s bet pays off, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting gambits - and even more interesting considering the tough financial constraints many developers are under. If having a device to test code on is the difference between working with Android and working with Windows Mobile or iPhone, then Android will certainly pick up a hefty new constituency.
I suspect that Google will be watching the number of Android SDK downloads very carefully over the next few weeks…
–Simon
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Web 2.0; where did all the money go?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Business, Futures, Developer, Internet on
Is it really just a buzzword? Since 2001, the venture capitalists who fund start-up businesses have invested $29 billion in Web 2.0 companies, but there hasn’t been a single company in the sector that’s been successful enough to have an IPO and become a rich, successful company (and pay back the VC investors). Even if you want to push the definition of Web 2.0 to include Skype, they got their investment in 1998.
In fact, talking at the Future in Review conference this week, Seattle VC Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners says only 15% of venture funds have made money since 2001. “VC as we know it is over”, says Jeb Terry of Aberdeen Investment Management and the US has some hard lessons to learn. Engineers and developers who used to train in the US and start companies in the US now go back to China or Japan and set up there. US companies and products aren’t always setting the standards for the rest of the world either, he says; “The idea that if you won here you could be successful elsewhere is no longer true. You have to think about the rest of the world.”
For Australian companies, the US used to be 65% of the global market; Roger Buckeridge of Australian VC Allen & Buckeridge says it’s down to 30-40%. And start-ups in other countries get more support - from government or other programmes - than new US companies. “Everyone is trying to solve the same problems all around the world and in other countries they’re helping far more than we are helping,” says Michael Pfeffer of Kolohala Ventures in Hawaii. “How much time does a start-up spend fund raising? Five, six months out of the year? If there’s some guy in Israel working on the same problem and all he’s doing is building value in his company, you’re at a disadvantage. We all have to think globally now.”
If investors don’t get a return from start-ups, they’ll stop putting money in and we’ll stop seeing new companies and new products. The venture capital business has made so much money it’s not going to stop overnight, but it is going to change. The VCs are going to be more involved in fewer companies, for a longer time. Expect more tools to come from start-ups in countries other than the US as well.
-Mary
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The ColdFusion Renaissance
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Developer, Adobe, Internet on
Most years you’ll see an “is ColdFusion dead?” article. Like the infamous bad penny that keeps turning up it’s a meme that just won’t die. So if it’s a story we keep seeing, surely there must be a grain of truth in it?
Spend 30 minutes with Adobe’s Ben Forta, and you’ll know that’s not the case. Ben’s been working with ColdFusion since the Allaire days, and he knows the product (and its market) inside and out. Sure, there are fewer pages that show up with that tell tale .CFML extension these days, but that’s more because the underlying technologies of the web have changed.
Where we might have used a page markup language to dynamically generate page content, we now use AJAX - or even Flash. Today’s dynamic HTML pages talk directly to application servers and database engines, using REST and JSON to fire up their AJAX display components. It’s a much better architecture, separating business logic from display. That doesn’t mean those in-page dynamic content engines have gone away. They’re now in the background, handling database queries, managing and marshalling the new asynchronous connections between server and web browser.
That’s where you’ll find ColdFusion today. Sitting on top of Java, it simplifies the process of building and deploying web-facing Java applications. You don’t need to build complex new application server applications, wrapping Java classes in servlets - all you need are a few lines of hidden CFML to parse incoming XML and JSON, and to mediate the response from the server. Your browser (and the various site sniffers that people use to get the data for web technology surveys) won’t see the ColdFusion middleware layer - just the smooth Web 2.0 user experience we’ve come demand.
Cold Fusion’s also making quite a lot of inroads inside the firewall. Too often businesses and government lock up essential data in inefficient Access databases. Cold Fusion applications can take that data and make it available to any one on the network, with quick wins and rapid application development.
Adobe’s MAX event in Milan showed off a product codenamed “Bolt”, which will help developers work with ColdFusion in this new middleware world. It’s Adobe’s
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Enter the interaction architect
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Developer, Adobe, Internet on
Adobe’s MAX event here in Milan has seen the European unveiling of its upcoming Catalyst web application design tool. It’s here that it’s also begun to discuss how it sees web application development workflows changing to improve the often fractious relationship between designer and developer.
The launch of Flex (developed by ASP co-architect Mark Anders) changed the way the development world looked at Flash. A tool for producing animations and the butt of a million “Skip Intro” jokes had become a new way of producing complex state-based user interfaces. Flex made Flash as much a part of Web 2.0 as AJAX. Even so, there were still problems. It was easy to tell a Flex site, as the limited skinning capabilities made Flex controls look the same wherever you went on the web. You could design your own controls from scratch, but then they became as much part of the code as a site’s business logic - which was exactly the thing it was trying to prevent.
Designers and developers don’t think the same way. That’s not a bad thing - the creative tension between the two ways of working can deliver amazing applications with intuitive ways of working. However, it also means that they don’t work well while sitting in each other’s pockets, working on each little piece of a page. What’s best is that architectural utopia, the complete seperation of design and code. Developers can work on business logic without affecting the design, and designers can do the opposite…
That’s the idea behind Catalyst (perhaps still best known by its codename “Thermo”). Designers can start work in familiar Illustrator and Photoshop, and then import their layers into Catalyst. Here they can map out buttons and dynamic content, marking them up and adding state information to a design. The resulting prototype can be converted into a new FXG format, and imported straight into Flex. Developers can start work on the code straightaway, adding the logic behind the buttons and the dynamic content. Meanwhile the designer team can concentrate on fine tuning the interactions, producing a user interface that’s clean and easy to use. The two versions can eventually be merged, ready for testing and delivery. It’s a simple, clear workflow that brings designers and developers closer together, concentrating on their strengths and avoiding the pitfalls of their weaknesses.
Of course this means we’ll need a new kind of designer, one who’s focussed on the user experience and on how it should be delivered. We’ve already got application architects putting together the backend, and information architects managing metadata (as well as database architects handling storage). So why not call this role the interaction architect? It’s definitely a senior role that defines the direction of the UI component of an application -
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Ruby in the Studio
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Developer, Windows, Microsoft on
A while back Microsoft announced that it was changing the licensing requirements for Visual Studio. Yes, it probably was a response to the success of Eclipse, but it also changed the way Microsoft worked with development tools partners. Two significant announcements today show that it’s a strategy that is starting to pay off.
So what did Microsoft do? First, anyone could get access to the Visual Studio IDE. That meant you could use its editor, and its code completion tools with any language. You could host anything yyou liked in the Visual StudioShell, using it for modelling tools, for programming, or for just about anything you wanted. A generic multi-pane shell could host just about any application, from a E-911 call centre hub, to a (dare we say it in these times of crisis) bank trading desk.
The second part of the change was one of the most significant. Now you didn’t need to target Windows with your development tools. That meant you could use Visual Studio to host a PHP editor working against UNIX Apache web servers, or a development tool for Android or BlackBerry.
One of the tools announced today works in just that way. SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel is a Ruby On Rails development tool, built entirely inside the Visual Studio Shell. You can running the resulting code on any Ruby interpreter - whether it’s a Windows version (like Microsoft’s own IronRuby) or one running on a Linux web server somewhere on Amazon’s hosted RedHat EC2 servers.
While Ruby In Steel is a commercial tool,
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