Web Development Live

Linux is set to make a major impact in the mobile computing realm, the executive director of the Linux Foundation stressed at a conference Monday morning.

Speaking at the Open Mobile Exchange portion of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., Jim Zemlin, executive director of the foundation, touted the trends and technologies pushing Linux into a leadership position in mobile systems. He was followed by Jason Grigsby, Web strategist at mobile and Web design firm Cloud Four, who emphasized the coming influence of the mobile Web but countered that developers are not ready for it.

“It’s clear that Linux is going to be a leader in the mobile space,” Zemlin said.

Linux, according to Zemlin, offers a unified product platform, flexibility, and a software stack. It also has experienced an increase in the volume of software content, with the lines of Linux handset code doubling every year.

“Really, what’s happening in mobile is instead of having a hardware-up approach, you’re starting to see a software-down approach,” with the software experience driving the mobile marketplace, he said.

By supporting Linux, developers don’t have to contend with compatibility issues of supporting different platforms. The industry wants to get away from that, he said.

“It’s just a nightmare to support all these different OSes and try to maintain some degree of compatibilty,” Zemlin said.

Different middleware packages and application development frameworks are available for Linux. “There’s a huge freedom to mix the core Linux kernel,” he said.

Business drivers for Linux include reduced deployment costs, room to differentiate, and an ecosystem of development around phone platforms. “It’s obviously a royalty-free platform. That’s a huge business driver, Zemlin said.

“Linux really allows device manufacturers and new people to come in and create their own brand,” he said.

Symbian’s move to open source has had a negative impact on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, leaving it the only royalty-based mobile platform, Zemlin said .

Linux application development is starting to coalesce around initiatives such as Google’s Android and LiMo, he said. Other Linux efforts are afoot such as Openmmoko, to create a smart-phone platform, and Ubuntu Mobile, Zemlin said.

“There really isn’t any major player from a corporate point of view who doesn’t have their foot in some way in the Linux camp,” other than Microsoft, Zemlin said.

Grigsby, meanwhile, emphasized that the mobile Web is coming, but Web developers are not ready yet.

He lauded the capabilities of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and what it has done for mobile computing. “The iPhone is really the Mosaic of the mobile Web,” opening people’s eyes to opportunities on the mobile side the way Mosaic did with browsers, Grigsby said.

But the mobile Web is being held back by UI issues and access to the device characteristics on the phone. Standards and performance also are issues.

The company behind the Opera Web browser has released a free online curriculum to encourage student and professional Web developers to create standards-based Web sites.

In an announcement yesterday, Opera Software ASA said it launched the effort to help set the pace of Web standards education and training in secondary schools, colleges, universities and businesses.

“This is essentially a curriculum for teaching standards-based Web design,” Ford said. Many existing materials on the subject are out of date or incomplete, he said, so Chris Mills, developer relations manager at Opera, created the company’s own version of a training course. “We wanted something that was easy to understand. Chris saw a lack of good standards-based design materials,” Ford said.

By using Web browsers that are standards-based, users aren’t locked into a browser from any specific vendor, and content is rendered properly online, Ford said. “It’s really about opening up the Web,” he said.

Anyone can use the class materials for free as long as they don’t try to resell them, he said.

The articles are being written by a range of notable Web developers and experts, including Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman “Norm” Francis of Yahoo Inc., Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode.org, Jonathan Lane, Linda Goin, Paul Haine, Roger Johansson of 456bereastreet, and Jen Hanen, according to Opera. “We hope the community gets behind this and they see the value in it and they help us promote it.”

In an interview, Mills said he created the course to make it easier for Web developers to get the skills they need for standards-based Web design. There are other such sites available, he said, including W3schools.com, but “none of them really cover the whole story of what you need.”

Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose, said the project is timely, but he noted that Opera isn’t one of the major players in the Web browser marketplace. “I think it’s a good idea, but for a small player, and Opera’s a small player, it’s hard to drive a change like this,” Enderle said. “Opera’s advantage has always been that they keep the product simple and it’s fast.”

The move by Microsoft to make the upcoming IE8 browser standards-based “should help” drive the effort toward standardization, he said.

All these languages and their associated tools and frameworks are fine and respectable tools. However, for this article, I’d like to focus on Adobe ColdFusion, an alternative language that actually predates most other web development languages. And, though ColdFusion predates many languages, it is far from being a lumbering dinosaur. In fact, ColdFusion has been whipped mercilessly by the forces of technological change and has evolved into a scrappy and tenacious survivor of a language.

ColdFusion has always focused on making complex and difficult tasks easy. The classic example of this is the ease of querying databases. In most languages you need to have several lines of code to establish a connection to a database server, several lines to build your SQL statement, a couple lines to send the request, more to close the connection and then several more lines of code just to output data from the query into an HTML list However, early versions of ColdFusion consolidated most of this tedious process into one tag that wraps the SQL statement you’re running and one tag that iterates over results.

Google has been courting software developers to entice them into a money-making relationship built on turning its array of online widgets into a global infrastructure.

At a conference in San Francisco, said to be the biggest yet for net developers, the search giant made clear that the Web is the future for application development.

It wants its own bit of web infrastructure the Google Cloud to be more accessible to developers and spent two days wooing them to build and run applications on it.

To encourage them aboard, Google invited the 3,000 developers to mash-up Google’s online services, like Gmail, Docs, Maps and Search, with their own applications.

To show client-cloud connectivity, it showed off Google Gears, a browser add-on in the Adobe Flash mould that allows for richer browser experiences, to improve search in MySpace email.

It then showcased the new Google Web Toolkit, so rich net applications can be Java-built, and the hosting of new Ajax libraries, which enhances applications via JavaScript tagging.

Top of its agenda, Google wants the web browser the enabler of its cloud to have more functionality, interaction and to evolve so it becomes as powerful as its desktop counterpart.

“These diverse tools and technologies might seem loosely unintegrated and targeted at different areas,” said Ovum analyst Madan Sheina.

“In fact they’re all cogs and wheels of a more meaningfully connected web that hosts Google web services powered by the Google App Engine. Importantly some of these web services and applications aren’t written just by Google, but by an entire market of independent developers.”

The analyst believes most of these third-party developers no longer build ‘cool’ web applications just for the sake of it; rather they want a slice of Google as a lucrative advertising business.

“Google likes to separate its web development technologies from its advertising. But the two are inextricably linked,” Ms Sheina said.

“Google’s monetisation strategy is simple. Invest in advancement of the web by allowing users to do more on the internet. That makes the Web a much bigger market for Google to monetise services like search.”

Website Pros has released NetObjects Fusion 11, an enhanced version of the Web site design application .

In addition to an intuitive drag-&-drop functionality that the company says makes NetObjects Fusion 11 a fast, easy way to plan, build and manage Web sites, along with its standard e-Commerce capabilities, NetObjects Fusion 11 includes more advanced functionality for those looking for more technical development options.

The code generation engine of NetObjects Fusion 11 has been completely re-engineered to support the generation of Semantic XHTML code, allowing a tighter utilisation of CSS that Webiste Pros says produces leaner code, making it more accessible and search engine friendly.

Users can integrate data into Web pages from any local or remote XML data source, such as an RSS feed. NetObjects Fusion 11 automatically identifies the XML structure allowing drag & drop insertion of data fields directly into the page design.

Featuring a collection of AJAX Widgets, NetObjects Fusion 11 eliminates the complexity of designing Web 2.0 pages with dynamic user interactions by making it easy to quickly add customisable page elements, such as accordions, tabbed panels and toggle panes to make dynamic web pages that provide a richer, more interactive experience for Web site visitors.

Sophisticated animation of any Web site content, such as video, text, images and graphics, can now be easily created from within the drag-&-drop editing environment of NetObjects Fusion without coding or the purchase of additional software.

The database functionality implemented in NetObjects Fusion 11 fully supports the creation of data-driven, highly interactive Web sites turning NetObjects Fusion 11 into a Web Application Development System with broad appeal to enterprise Web developers. NetObjects Fusion 11 now supports all commercially relevant databases, Web servers and server-and-client side technologies and ships with support for PHP.

NetObjects Fusion 11 provides a suite of components that add advanced functionality to any Web site design. Flash Photo Galleries, Flash Calendars, Flash Web Charts, Password Protection, Guestbook, Google Analytics, SiteMaps and many other components are pre-built and easily integrated into any website.

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.

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.

Everything’s ready to go. Piles of 11 different kinds of shirts and pants for girls ages 5 to 12 sit stacked on shelves in RealKidz’s office in Ypsilanti’s Depot Town. Boxes, envelopes, tissue paper and clear plastic bags are nearby.

As of Friday, the company had made only one sale, to a Michigan woman who bought a pair of capri pants and a T-shirt. Though the company’s Web site, www.realkidzclothing.com, went live the evening of April 30, it has been plagued with glitches.

Only since Monday has it been operating trouble-free. Initially, the Web site will be the key driver of sales for the company.

Getting to this point wasn’t easy.

In late April, after an Illinois manufacturer had shipped the clothes, Guerra discovered that the inside bottom seams on one product, a pair of crop pants with cuffs, had not been sewn correctly. That meant sending back 100 pairs of pants.

Then, every time she thought her Web site was ready to go live, Guerra found things that needed to be fixed.

Late one evening, her babysitter called to tell her that the site had opened for business and was selling clothes for $0. Guerra frantically called a local Web site development company RealKidz had hired. Thankfully, no one had placed any orders.

And shortly after Guerra had sent out 219 e-mails to potential customers, someone tried to make a purchase and got an error message instead.

The Web site trouble “has been the big frustration of the last few weeks,” she said with a sigh. “I’m really frustrated with my Web developer.”

But the mishaps haven’t got the best of Guerra, RealKidz’s founder and chief executive. She plans to look for a new Web site development company and a new manufacturer.

“It’s stressful,” Guerra admitted in early May, days after she had graduated from the MBA program at the University of Michigan.

Aside from a onetime eBay sale of an outfit her son wore at a wedding, the 37-year-old has never sold any clothing online. Like other entrepreneurs, she is learning firsthand that simply putting up a Web site doesn’t mean customers will come.

To generate sales, RealKidz put flyers touting its clothes in the packets picked up by nearly 800 preteen girls who ran in a 5K Girls on the Run race in Grand Rapids on Thursday. Many participants were plus size.

RealKidz would like to develop a line of clothes for Girls on the Run, an international organization that helps preteen girls develop self-respect and healthy lifestyles through running.

The company also has begun to advertise on Google’s search engine, a marketing tactic used by many businesses.

So far, only a small number of people are landing on her Web site, but those who do are clicking on it.

In the long run, Guerra hopes the Internet won’t be the company’s biggest sales avenue. She plans to set up a network of independent sales representatives for her brand, which she said she believes will generate higher profit margins than going the wholesale-to-retail route.

Guerra knows network marketing. She worked as an Amway sales representative for five years and currently sells Silpada jewelry. She sees RealKidz’s clothes as a good fit with this sales method.

“My product has an extremely high emotional connection with people,” Guerra said, referring to the common struggle with weight issues. “Products that have an emotional connection work best.”

She dreams of the day when her network will be creating business opportunities for women, helping to change lives.

“I can’t wait to see stories like that,” she said.

Guerra is now trying to develop a compensation agreement for an experienced network marketer in Grand Rapids. The potential hire may become the company’s director of consultant development.

By June, Guerra hopes to begin recruiting sales representatives. Her business plans call for 18 representatives by the end of RealKidz’s first year.

To get her network off the ground, Guerra would like to hire a California consulting company that helps start-up network marketing companies with financial models and compensation agreement materials.

But the firm’s service initially costs about $10,000, money that RealKidz can’t afford to spend right now.

Guerra continues to hunt for more capital for her business. In mid-April, she spent 5 1/2 hours talking to the lead investor at BlueWater Angels, a group of wealthy individuals in the Midland area interested in investing seed money in promising start-up companies.

She met again with this investor Monday. This week, she will travel to Midland to make her second presentation to the group, hoping to persuade it to invest $200,000 in her business.

On Wednesday, Guerra met in Ypsilanti with a Chicago-based group of angel investors that focuses on women-owned businesses and is interested in RealKidz. But she’s uncertain whether they will be able to reach an agreement.

“I’m still stressed. It’s definitely hard for me to shut my brain at night,” Guerra said.

“But every week something really big and exciting happens that will help move this business forward.”

The company’s cash cushion has shrunk to $12,000. To keep her business going, Guerra hopes to quickly sell at least 200 pieces of clothing. That way, she will have enough cash to order more clothes and possibly add a line of shorts.

Her shirts sell for $22.50 for a short-sleeve T-shirt to $32 for a mock turtleneck jumper combination, with the pants going for $30 to $32 apiece. These aren’t Wal-Mart prices, but Guerra said she thinks mothers will be willing to pay a little more for clothes that fit their daughters.

Will she be right? Consumers are already reeling from soaring prices at gas pumps and supermarkets.

The survey, conducted by US market research firm Evans Data Corp, ranked Microsoft’s MSN/Live developer package above other offerings from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and eBay according to user satisfaction.

However, Australian web developer and co-founder of the Web Directions conference John Allsopp told ZDNet.com.au on Wednesday that the survey “doesn’t say anything meaningful at all”.

Allsopp added that the nature of Web 2.0 development and its accompanying technologies isn’t suited to this type of assessment, as developers don’t tend to compartmentalise which programs they use to Web Development build applications.

“It’s a misleading thing,” he said. “Web 2.0 is all about mashing and mixing things up to create something new, and using a whole lot of different programs to do it.”

“One of the criticisms of a lot of these technologies is that they’re tied to a certain property, such as Facebook, meaning you have to use their platform to build applications for their site,” he said.

Stewart Smith, president of the Australian Linux Foundation, echoed Allsopp’s sentiments, saying many of the Web Development programs “really aren’t as open as they’d have you believe”.

“People who really care about writing their own applications won’t be doing it for someone else’s platform, they’ll be writing them for their own sites, using a variety of things,” he said.

Allsopp said technologies are “still in their infancy”, and for many large companies, such as Google and Microsoft, “it’s still a pretty novel way of doing things… to open up and let other people start building things for you”.

“A lot of companies are still coming to grips with that, but I think that, over the next year or two, all of these programs are going to Web Development become more sophisticated and usable,” he said.

MindTouch is releasing today a new version of its Deki Wiki open-source Wiki tool software which makes it much easier to manage web content in multiple languages.

The MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05 is a Web Development based Wiki platform that lets web development teams build web pages that are much easier to create and maintain. One of its interesting new features is “polyglot support.” With it, a developer can use the Deki Wiki tool to post updates in multiple languages.

This means a web developer can integrate multiple languages into a single site, rather than create a separate site for each language. In addition, users visiting the site can search across all languages, with the search results prioritized to that user’s language.

The developer can use the tool to design a web page in English. They can then include a button that switches the user to that same page in another language. The user-interface for the page stays the Web Development same, but the words are in a different language.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, plans on using Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Development Center, the site where Mozilla manages its community of developers. That’s important for open-source developers such as Mozilla, which has thousands of developers around the world.

“This is particularly good for Wiki-style collaborations,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of San Diego, Calif.-based MindTouch, in an interview. It’s also good for platform companies who work with a variety of application developers as well as enterprises that are tapping their customers for development support.

Beyond polyglot support, the software also makes it easy for developers to upload images, videos and other files to a web site. It’s also easy to transform content from one kind of format to Web Development another, as needed to make the content compatible with a web page’s given design.

The 25-employee company started in 2005, released its first version in 2006 and then another version in 2007. Fulkerson said the company has bootstrapped the financing and is likely to delay raising a round of venture capital because the business growth is strong. He said the company gives away the tool for free but sells enterprise subscriptions for those who need support. The Web Development closest competitors are IBM and Oracle’s BEA.