With Flutter, Google Throws Dart at Cross-Platform Mobile Development

Google has taken the wraps off Flutter, a new open source mobile development framework that uses the Dart programming language to create high-performance apps that can run on iOS and Android with one code base.

While still a work in progress yet to reach 1.0 status -- no Windows support, practically no documentation, no IDE (an Atom plug-in is in the works), no deployment tools and so on -- the new Flutter.io Web site was today unleashed on the Hacker News and Reddit social coding sites. The Flutter site says: "We are focused on low-latency input and high frame rates on Android and iOS," seeking to provide users with "beautiful, fast and jitter-free app experiences."

Posted by David Ramel on November 6, 20150 comments

Building a Mobile App? Set Aside 18 Weeks and Up to $250,000

By many accounts, the state of enterprise mobile app development is a mess. The mobile app skills shortage is a chief culprit, of course, leading to a failure to capitalize on mobile investments and forcing many companies to seek outside development help by outsourcing work to offshore coders.

Posted by David Ramel on October 20, 20150 comments

MapReduce vs. Spark Smackdown (from Academia)!

Apache Spark, you may have heard, performs faster than Hadoop MapReduce in Big Data analytics. An open source technology commercially stewarded by Databricks Inc., Spark can "run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk," its main project site states.

Posted by David Ramel on October 6, 20150 comments

The 'Native vs. Web' Mobile App Conundrum: Handling Offline

It's an eternal back-and-forth tug of war between native vs. Web apps in the mobile development arena. Announcements of major companies switching from one to the other abound. As do surveys claiming to show one approach is currently in favor amongst the coding masses (just pay attention to who conducted the survey and, perhaps, why -- is there "skin in the game"?).

Posted by David Ramel on September 25, 20150 comments

Using React JavaScript in Visual Studio 2015 (for Free!)

As promised in February, Microsoft embraced the wildly popular React JavaScript library in Visual Studio 2015 by providing built-in support for its JSX syntax.

Posted by David Ramel on August 31, 20150 comments

Free Tool Offered as Classic Visual Basic Successor

Classic Visual Basic refuses to die. There's just something about Dims and Subs that programmers won't let go of.

The granddaddy of rapid application development (RAD) tools -- known for its simplicity and drag-and-drop ease of use -- was created by Microsoft 24 years ago and has enjoyed a voluble cult following despite losing official mainstream support in 2005.

Posted by David Ramel on August 18, 20150 comments

Dumbing Down Development

As low-code/no-code, drag-and-drop solutions abound to democratize (or dumb down) development, new niche coding tools are emerging that target ever-more-specific functionality.

Increasingly, industry experts and pundits are advocating coding for the masses in the face of a lack of skilled developers to meet an overwhelming demand for mobile apps, Big Data projects and -- coming soon -- to deal with the exploding Internet of Things (IoT). Some say software development should be taught to school students everywhere, just like math and science.

Posted by David Ramel on July 17, 20150 comments

Twisted Tale of Highly Paid HFT Coder Takes Another Turn

When we last left our hero, he was facing prison -- again.

Yes, highly paid rock star coder Sergey Aleynikov is back in the news. It's been a long, strange soap-opera-like trip for the Russian immigrant, accused of stealing proprietary code of the kind that makes billions of dollars for Wall Street firms engaged in high-frequency trading (HFT). With the right algorithms, HFT houses can beat competitors by microseconds and take advantage of stock market timings to make huge sums of money with no human involvement.

Posted by David Ramel on July 7, 20150 comments

Analysts Keep Saying Big Data Is So Over

Tech analysts keep saying this Big Data thing is over, meaningless, but is anyone listening?

The cries to move on are getting almost plaintive. "Join us in the revolution!" said Forrester Research analyst Brian Hopkins last week in calling for followers to forget Big Data and turn to an alternative approach he developed with fellow analyst Ted Schadler.

Posted by David Ramel on July 1, 20150 comments

Web Site Not Performing? Maybe it's Page Bloat

Whether it's converting e-commerce customers or getting readers to click on an article and see some ads, Web sites are generally put up to make some money.

If you're not making enough money, the causes could be any number of things, like uncompelling content, network latency or a slow database, but it could also just be that your pages are too big. And nobody waits for pages to load anymore. It's now or never with today's surfers. By the time a fat page would've loaded, they've probably clicked on to a couple more sites after dumping yours.

Posted by David Ramel on June 11, 20150 comments