Web Development Live

To encourage the creation of more Web-based applications during the next several years, Google Inc. will invest in three key areas for developers, including opening up its servers to host their applications, encouraging pervasive connectivity to the Web, and making the browser more powerful, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, who gave the opening keynote speech at this year’s Google Developer Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“Google was born in the era of the Web,” Gundotra said. “It’s the only platform we’ve known. It was a platform that was formed by consensus. It was all of us collectively that agreed to a few standards. We feel a debt of gratitude toward that community.”

Gundotra conceded that Web developers working atop Google-provided development tools and servers would lead to remunerative opportunities for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. “As the Web gets bigger and enables better Web apps, it attracts more users. For us, more users means more Google searches, which leads to more revenue. But the money we make will get dumped back into the platform.

7strategy, a Kansas City-based full service web design and development firm announced today that 7strategy has been honored as the Top 10 Most Dependable Web Design Firms, by Goldline Research.

Goldline made the announcement with a feature of 7strategy in Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine. Firms were first selected and pre-screened using private and public sources. Research of the initially chosen web design companies took place over several months and the final list was later refined using specific criteria including: customer satisfaction surveys, number of clients, productivity measurements and client references.

Ted Paff, Goldline Research President says, “Being selected for The 10 Most Dependable list clearly sets these companies apart from their competitors. Companies on The 10 Most Dependable list are considered high-quality companies that have achieved a level of excellence in customer service and professionalism.”

7strategy Vice President of Business Development, Rasvir Mustan says, “We’re proud to have received this award - and is a real testament to our team’s capabilities and the trust we’ve established with our clients. This kind of ranking,” continued Mustan, “will help strategically position 7strategy for future growth and competitive advantage.”

Hoping to give a marketing boost to nonprofit agencies that build and rehabilitate housing, the city of Columbus and a national nonprofit have created a one-stop shop Web site designed to market inner-city homes to current and potential Columbus residents.

The city is partnering with Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development agency based in Columbia, Md., to run the site. Enterprise has a 20-year history in Columbus, at one time running the Columbus Housing Partnership, a nonprofit agency that builds and rehabs inner-city homes, said Phillip Downing, director of the Enterprise office in Columbus.

Now Enterprise wants to help nonprofits that may be good at building and rehabbing, but not so good at marketing and sales.

Homes featured on the site are primarily in south, west and east Columbus neighborhoods around Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Franklinton, Hilltop and the King-Lincoln Arts district. Enterprise is placing homes from nonprofit agencies such as the Columbus Housing Partnership, MiraCit, the Greater Linden Development Corp. and others on the Web site.

Enterprise and the city also partnered with Dublin-based Coldwell Banker King Thompson and Gahanna-based World Financial Network National Bank to provide real estate and banking services to potential buyers.

The descriptive line of text is extraneous information for most web shoppers. But for an increasingly vocal group of web users, the text tag means the difference between comprehending what is shown in that image and being left in the dark.

Screen readers, purchased and owned by individual users, transform visual information into audio information. They also assist blind web users, who use keyboard commands instead of a mouse to navigate web pages, to move around a site, by recognizing and reading headings on a web page. The user can then respond with keyboard commands that move the cursor from element to element.

It further charges that because the site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers also are unable to make purchases on Target.com independently.

In October, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted class action status to a lawsuit against Target. The judge also ruled that e-commerce sites are required by California law to be accessible to blind shoppers.

National Federation of the Blind president Marc Maurer called the granting of class action status to the suit a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country.

With the outcome of the Target case pending, it remains to be seen just how motivating a ruling in favor of the National Federation of the Blind would be to retailers whose sites are not now accessible.

One retailer not waiting for that outcome to take action is Amazon.com. Though it provides text tags with images on its home page, it has more work to do in achieving full accessibility.

Developers praised the programming experience and the potential of Google’s Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference as the company emphasized its flexibility and showed cool new features.

There was a lot of buzz around Android at the conference, which covers all areas of Google development, and an “Introduction to Android” session was full. Google wants the technology to open up the mobile industry, where developers have faced hurdles getting applications ported to many different operating systems and approved by carriers. But Android will enter the fray as just one mobile platform among many, including the Apple iPhone SDK.

The latest prototype version of Android drew comparisons to the iPhone after it was demonstrated during a keynote session Wednesday morning. Google showed a home screen with colorful widgets similar to the Apple iPhone’s, plus a compass and a status bar that can be pulled down in any application to view messages. The compass, which could be built into a handset along with an accelerometer, would be able to orient maps according to which way the user was facing. As demonstrated with Google Maps Street View, it could show the exact view that a user was looking at, with street-name and address information built in to the map. Videos of the demonstrations were posted by the Android Community blog.

Aside from features on high-end phones, Android will reach far more people than the iPhone platform, if it meets its potential, said Atif Iqbal Chaudhry, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who attended the conference. The platform could be extended to inexpensive phones with a smaller set of capabilities for average consumers, he said.

Android is an easy way to begin developing a mobile application, because Google provides all the pieces required, unlike some other platforms, such as PalmOS, Chaudhry said. He has been developing location-based applications through the PC-based emulator software for Android and said he is looking forward to trying out the software in the field on a real handset.

Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance are pushing Android as more open than other mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Developers won’t need to get Android applications certified by anyone, Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen told the Android breakout session. In addition, there won’t be any hidden APIs accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators, he said.

Developers will also be able to modify core elements of the interface and come out with replacements for the basic building blocks that come with Android, such as the address book, Chen said. Even the look of the home-screen widgets will be customizable. For users, that will mean being able to control their own experience by downloading their favorite third-party versions, Chen said.

Google expects the first Android-based devices to hit the market in the second half of this year and will make the finished software platform available to developers after that, so anyone can create their own phone platform, Chen said. The core elements of it will be released under the Apache open-source license.

Until all parts of Android are complete, Google won’t start translating the platform and documentation into languages other than English, Chen said in response to a question. The team doesn’t want translations to lag behind the current information, he said. But he welcomed an attendee to help Spanish-speaking developers by translating materials or participating in message boards.

Developers praised the platform, in which applications are written in the Java programming language and then compiled for the Dalvik virtual machine.

“It’s sweet,” said Free Beachler, owner of Longevity Software, in Boulder, Colorado. Beachler wrote an entry for the Android Developer Challenge, a competition to find the 50 best Android applications. His software, designed to store itineraries, contacts, destinations and other travel information for users on their phones, didn’t make the top 50. But he’s working on two projects for Android Developer Challenge 2, which will take place after handsets are out and the platform are complete.

Beachler, a Web developer, said it took time to learn to use Android but once he did it was logically organized and easy to use. He compared it to languages such as PHP for Web development.

Enterprises are asking R Systems International, a software services company in El Dorado, California, to write applications that work on any mobile platform, said Harsh Verma, vice president for global innovative research at R Systems. One way to do this is on browsers, but there are problems with that, including differences among mobile browsers and the need for a network connection, he said. Verma hasn’t yet started working with Android but believes it could reach a broad range of devices.