I admit, I thought some of Linux creator Linus Torvalds' rants in his public feuds with other open source developers were kind of funny, even if some were over the top. His style rubbed off on others, generating several contentious back-and-forth exchanges on mailing lists that I still found humorous sometimes.
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Posted by David Ramel on October 16, 20140 comments
Up 'til now it's been a supporting character in the ongoing "Hypes of Our Lives" drama starring Big Data, cloud computing and mobile-first, but a flurry of announcements this week confirms the Internet of Things (IoT) is striving for top billing.
The IoT was the feature attraction at this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. In announcing new developer tools, the hardware giant highlighted "how the company is moving quickly to enable new market segments where everything is smart and connected."
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Posted by David Ramel on September 11, 20140 comments
Big Data died when I wasn't paying attention.
Recalibrate the hype machine: It's "all data" now. I learned this while talking to industry experts to research an upcoming article on SQL Server 2014 and how it fits into the new-age world of what-used-to-be-called-Big-Data.
Analyst Donald Feinberg at research firm Gartner Inc. doesn't even like to use the term. Don't get him started.
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Posted by David Ramel on September 8, 20140 comments
Programming is hard. Programming modern mobile apps is wicked hard. There's no getting around it, though a lot of companies are trying to do just that.
Yesterday saw a new effort from CAIL Mobile Solutions. "Rather than going through the traditional app development process, the CAIL Mobile Design Platform provides the mobile enterprise with easy-to-use, codeless templates, prebuilt forms, drag-and-drop capabilities, and various setup options," the company said.
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Posted by David Ramel on August 12, 20140 comments
It's like a week doesn't go by without multiple PR pings to my inbox announcing the latest cross-platform mobile app development tool release.
Everybody is getting in on the act, even companies you wouldn't expect, like Facebook, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, Intel, Cisco -- even Microsoft. I alone have recently reported on tools like Xamarin, RhoMobile, Appcelerator, Appmethod, AppGyver, PhoneGap, RAD Studio, Icenium and many more.
So cross-platform is the way to go, right? The benefits are well-known: Save time and expense by mostly using one code base to target iOS, Android, Windows Phone and so on. Even traditional concerns about lower performance and less native device functionality were seemingly being addressed by the emergent class of tools for building hybrid apps. Unlike Web-based apps just using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, the hybrid tools use different types of wrappers -- or containers -- to access native resources such as cameras and accelerometers, usually through JavaScript API calls. The vendors claim this method provides native performance -- or nearly so. It also gets you into the app stores -- unlike Web apps -- and reportedly provides other benefits.
[Click on image for larger view.]
Developer awareness of cross-platform tools is growing.
(source: research2guidance)
The message is that only under special circumstances would you want to spend your time and effort on multiple projects for platform-specific native development.
Maybe not so much.
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Posted by David Ramel on August 1, 20140 comments
When we last left our friend Sergey Aleynikov, the Wall Street programmer had been convicted of stealing trade secrets from Goldman Sachs and sentenced to prison in 2010.
Aleynikov was involved in the ultra-secret world of high-frequency trading (HFT), where programmers build the lowest-latency systems in the world to execute market trades milliseconds before competitors, making untold millions of dollars with no human intervention whatsoever. He was convicted of stealing HFT code en route to a new job at a rival trading house.
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Posted by David Ramel on July 25, 20140 comments
While not a new trend, the migration of mobile and Big Data development to the cloud has shifted into overdrive lately.
Witness a new report from ABI Research predicting that the growth in cloud application development and management platforms will drive $3.6 billion in mobile enterprise application revenues by 2019.
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Posted by David Ramel on July 11, 20140 comments
Nothing gets developers going like a discussion of programming languages. I still have to stop and click on each new article purporting to tell us which is the best or most popular language. (Part of the attraction is wading through the inevitable flame wars that break out in the reader comments section. Things are always guaranteed to get lively.)
There's never a "right" answer, of course, so a new tool published by IEEE Spectrum lets you rank languages according to your own criteria (the tool's sources and methodology are explained here).
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Posted by David Ramel on July 7, 20140 comments
Is it really a good idea to team up two developers to work on the same piece of source code, actually sitting together and watching one another type?
Programmers are known by some for being introverted loners, sometimes lacking social graces. They're known by some as artists, extremely touchy about their code and style. They're known by some for keeping strange hours, sometimes churning out their best artistic creations in long, caffeine-fueled, late-night coding jags with who-knows-what screaming through their headphones. They're known by some as -- ahem -- practicing questionable hygiene.
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Posted by David Ramel on May 27, 20140 comments
Remember Wintel? Since the birth of the original PC, Windows and Intel have been aligned in a marriage of cooperation and profitability.
Not so much anymore.
With traditional PCs dying and mobile devices such as tablets thriving, Intel is increasingly moving to the dominant tablet OS, Android. That's not news, of course, but the trend has become even more prominent recently, and Intel is actively courting Android developers with a new cross-platform development tool, still in a beta preview.
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Posted by David Ramel on April 18, 20140 comments