Stack Overflow is out with the big daddy of all developer surveys, polling more than 56,000 coders around the world, who are increasingly self taught, embracing React in a big way and in love with the Rust programming language.
At least those are a few of the standout findings among survey results that are mostly the same as the previous year: JavaScript rules everything; Notepad++ is the most popular dev environment/text editor; Windows is the most popular desktop OS; and so on. This is at least the fourth year in a row that the popular developer-oriented Q&A site has published survey results culled from its millions of users.
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Posted by David Ramel on March 17, 20160 comments
No way, right?
Conventional wisdom is that Windows Phone is dying a lingering death, caught in a vicious cycle of low dev interest -> less app inventory -> less consumer demand -> less monetization potential -> low dev interest ... and so on.
A VisionMobile survey last year summed it up: "iOS owns the premium segment, Android almost everything else, Windows and the browser fight for the scraps." I reported on that and other related data in a blog post titled "The Last Gasp for Windows Phone."
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Posted by David Ramel on March 1, 20160 comments
Developers are a finicky breed apart. They brook no nonsense, suffer no subterfuge and rarely tolerate the non-technical. As they reject many traditional outreach methods from dev tool vendors, they require a new approach. Hence, the rise of the developer evangelist.
"Targeting developers with advertising is not effective," said Josh Marinacci. "It simply doesn't work." Marinacci is a developer evangelist at PubNub, which provides a data stream network API to help customers to connect, scale and manage real-time applications and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 18, 20160 comments
Parse developer advocate Fosco Marotto was as surprised as everyone else when he arrived at work the morning of Jan. 28 only to discover that Facebook was killing the popular Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service (MBaaS).
He had intended that day to be the big launch of his pet Parse Server open source project, but had to change his rollout plans upon news that the Parse project would be closed down in a year, on Jan. 28, 2017. Instead of the news being all about the open source Parse Server, the news was all about Parse Server being just one part of one option -- out of many -- to help developers who now needed a replacement back-end for their mobile apps.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 8, 20160 comments
Less than a year after React Native was introduced as a new-age way to develop native iOS and Android mobile apps, the JavaScript-based technology has become one of the most popular open source projects on the GitHub code repository.
Since being open sourced by creator Facebook, React Native has garnered more than 26,000 "stars" on GitHub -- making it No. 23 in the all-time rankings -- and has been forked more than 4,600 times. Clearly, it's taking the mobile app dev arena by storm.
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Posted by David Ramel on January 27, 20160 comments
So it turns out the random number generator long used by developers working with Google's V8 JavaScript engine doesn't really generate random numbers at all.
That's being fixed in the latest release of Google's Chrome browser (and the latest Firefox and Safari releases), but the whole issue begs the question: Why is generating a random number so hard?
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Posted by David Ramel on January 13, 20160 comments
Last year saw the emergence of forces promising a tectonic shake-up of the mobile app development industry in 2016. Following are three trends mobile developers should keep an eye on as we progress in the new year.
New-Wave JavaScript
Part of the larger story of JavaScript evolving into a first-class programming language option far beyond its Web site scripting origins, this trend was exemplified by the emergence of React Native in the mobile realm. Facebook engineers took their React framework for building Web sites and applied it to creating fully native mobile apps for iOS and Android.
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Posted by David Ramel on January 4, 20160 comments
It's Thanksgiving time, and I'm surely thankful for the free open source software I use. But going open source always seemed counter-intuitive to me. Why would a company invest time, money and development resources to create valuable intellectual property and then throw it out to everyone to use for free as they see fit?
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Posted by David Ramel on November 19, 20150 comments
If Microsoft had simply asked me first, I could've told them: Android emulation on Windows just doesn't work very well.
Mobile dev media are abuzz with news of problems with Project Astoria, part of Microsoft's much-ballyhooed effort to provide Universal Windows Platform Bridge toolkits that let developers build Windows apps for phones -- in Astoria's case by reusing their Android code.
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Posted by David Ramel on November 16, 20150 comments