Web Development Live

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.

Apple doesn’t get a whole lot wrong does it? (Although I drafted this blog before seeing the lead story “Firefox chief fumes over Apple Safari update” on ZDNET this morning.) So it’s sometimes tough to have a decent grumble. Speaking as an owner of a pair of Mac laptops and a nice shiny iPod I’m hardly best placed to start venting my spleen, but I think I have grounds here…

First, there was the incident of my browser imploding on my old PowerBook G4. OK, so I’m only running Panther and the new Safari upgrade is for Tiger upwards. So why did the software updater let me install and then decide to send all copies of Safari down a spiralling staircase of thermonuclear destruction?

Software updates come at you so often with Apple that sometimes it becomes a case of ‘click to update’ without giving it too much thought. Thinking about it more closely, it’s usually just an upgrade to iTunes so they can sell me more “stuff” to download. Note to self for more caution in future - Firefox it is from now on then.

Then, after doing some digging around in the FAQ department of the online Safari support pages I noticed that there was a glaring lack of ‘mobile development’ info to be had. As I rifled through the reams of pages on best practices for development I thought, hang on – they have to be kidding, no web for mobile?

This was because I was already too far in – Apple appears to keep its ‘development for iPhone‘ section separate to its web development section. I think this is a strange move from a strategic point of view based on the consensus from the rest of the industry. Mobile device access is a natural extension of all development, web or otherwise – isn’t it?

Thinking about this little rant, I did speak to Apple’s VP of developer relations Ron Okamoto a couple of years back. He’s a lovely chap for sure, but our chat was all ‘big picture’ stuff and I wasn’t able to write up a Q&A from it. Does Apple invite us developer-focused journalists to the Apple Developer Connection? They do not.

On Monday, ICANN, the organisation that maintains the internet’s addressing systems, said it had for the first time added IPv6 addresses to the appropriate files and databases on six of the world’s 13 root server networks. Before it did this, those who were using IPv6 had no choice but to run it alongside IPv4, because the root server networks were IPv4-only.

“IPv6 will be an essential part [of] our future, and support in the root servers is essential to the growth, stability and reliability of the public internet,” said the chair of ICANN’s internet service and connectivity provider constituency, Tony Holmes. “The ISP community welcomes this development as part of the continuing evolution of the public internet.”

Almost all IP addresses currently use the fourth version of the protocol (IPv4), but the length of those addresses limits their number of permutations to around four billion. As more people become connected to the internet and as more devices are manufactured that can themselves intelligently connect to the internet, that number is rapidly becoming insufficient.

Businesses are now being urged to start migrating to the sixth version of the internet protocol (IPv6). As it uses a longer string of characters, this version makes it possible to have more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion possible unique addresses. IPv6 has already been in use for a while in large corporations, where many employees need to be hooked up to a semi-private network, but ICANN’s latest move marks the start of the wider migration.

David Conrad, ICANN’s vice president of research, said the addition of IPv6 addresses for the root servers “enhances the end-to-end connectivity for IPv6 networks, and furthers the growth of the global interoperable internet”.

Nominet is the not-for-profit company that runs the .uk registry. Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk on Tuesday, Nominet’s director of IT, Jay Daley, said the onus was now on those running large websites to make the transition to IPv6.

“Gov 2.0 will replace e-gov as governments seek to gain additional value from citizen interaction and business transactions,” Teresa Bozzelli, chief operating officer and managing director of Government Insights, which produced the report, said in a statement.

Governments are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations as a means of fostering greater participation and dialogue with their citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication.

Research vice president at analyst firm Gartner, Richard Harris, told ZDNet Australia: “A lot of Web 2.0 applications will allow government to change the nature of what they can do in terms of interaction, but apart from the technical side of things there will be a greater focus on improving the business of government.”

“Gov 2.0 will replace e-gov as governments seek to gain additional value from citizen interaction and business transactions,” Teresa Bozzelli, chief operating officer and managing director of Government Insights, which produced the report, said in a statement.

Governments are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations as a means of fostering greater participation and dialogue with their citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication.

Research vice president at analyst firm Gartner, Richard Harris, told ZDNet Australia: “A lot of Web 2.0 applications will allow government to change the nature of what they can do in terms of interaction, but apart from the technical side of things there will be a greater focus on improving the business of government.”

Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, has much to say on the differences between Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s approaches to browser development. ZDNet.co.uk caught up with Nitot at the Online Information conference in Londonthis week to talk about the security of Firefox andInternet Explorer (IE), online privacy and the future of open source.

Q: A recent study by Jeff Jones, a Microsoft security strategy director, found Internet Explorer to be more secure than Firefox. Are you surprised?A: I’m surprised that bug counting, which is a terrible metric, was used by Microsoft. It isn’t easy to assess security, but bug counting definitely isn’t the way to do it. I’d rather talk about time to fix the duration of the window where users are at risk, which in our opinion is a much better metric.

In a nutshell, Microsoft claimed that because Mozilla had fixed more vulnerabilities since 2004 than Microsoft, IE was more secure than Firefox. What do you think of that argument?To quote Mike Shaver, [Mozilla's director of ecosystem development], just because dentists fix more teeth in America doesn’t mean we have worse teeth than Africa. Just compare the number of high-security advisories over time between Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

What is your opinion of the claim that the more vulnerabilities fixed, the less secure the browser?It’s false logic. If you have issues and don’t fix them you will look good on the outside but in reality you still have the issues. There’s a really good movie, Les Repos ?in English, “The Rotten Ones” ?about two cops, one old, one young, and the younger is in the process of being corrupted by the older. They find a bad guy, catch him, and the young one wants to take the bad guy to the police station. But the old one says: “You can’t do that ?if we take him to the station the crime statistics will increase, and we will look bad. Release the guy and take his money. That punishes him.”

This is comparable ?if you do the right thing you look bad, but people are safer. What really counts is that our users are secure, and that people count on us to do the right thing. People within the Mozilla community have a better-than-average understanding of this ?we work together and have to trust each other. If people hide, it’s no good for the community or overall motivation. But we’re not building fixes for our teams, we’re building them for our users.

The web giant has also confirmed that the members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) have signed a “non-fragmentation agreement”, thus answering doubts that have been raised over the level of co-operation at the code level between members. Depending on the details of this agreement, this could stop various implementations of Android being incompatible.

The Linux-based mobile software stack ?incorporating everything from the operating system to applications ?was announced a week ago. The OHA includes 34 companies, ranging from major manufacturers, such as Motorola and HTC, to operators,such asSprint and T-Mobile. HTC recently announced that it would have the first Android-based handset on the market in the second half of next year.

To attract developers to Android, Google has launched a $10m (?m) competition to find applications that can be run on the various handsets that will use the platform.

“We’ve built some interesting applications for Android, but the best applications are not here yet, and that’s because they’re going to be written by developers,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Monday. “We’d like to reward these developers and recognise them as much as possible.”

There will be two phases of the Android Developer Challenge, each of which will involve a total of $5m (?.4m)in prizes. The first phase will run from 2 January to 3 March, 2008. The top10 applications in each phase will win $275,000 (?33,000)in funding, with the next10 earning $100,000 (?8,000) each.

One aspect of Android that has raised concerns has been the nature of its licensing. Although the base of the stack falls under the fully open-source GPL licence, many parts fall under the Apache licence, which allows companies to modify the code into a proprietary form and not have to feed it back into the wider Android community.

The chief technology officer of a rival mobile Linux development firm, Trolltech, told ZDNet.co.uk lastweek that “the temptation will be to diverge”.

“Android is offering free food and, when there’s free food, people go to have a look and the risk is limited,” said Benoit Schillings. “It would be surprising not to see a whole bunch of companies saying: ‘This is interesting’. That doesn’t mean that’s going to be what they eat every day, and it doesn’t mean they’ll use the entire solution either. I’m always careful when I see an alliance where everyone joins up.”

But being disruptive and innovative is easier in some industries than others. Financial services is one place where innovation equals risk, which is usuallybest avoided. However, even those companies in that sectorwhich have embraced a so-called”culture of innovation” still face the dilemma of choosing which areas of technology to focus research efforts and resources on.

While Accenture is best known for its IT consultancy work, the firm also invests in research and development. Martin Illsley, director of research at Accenture Technology Labs, basedin Sophia Antipolis, France,spoke to ZDNet.co.uk about innovation and some of the big developments in technology that should be on every business’s radar.

Q: What are the main challenges facing businesses at the moment in terms of practical application of technology?A: There are choices dragging people apart about how to balance the physical and the virtual. Bank branches are back but, on the other hand, the virtual is going to the extreme ?look at Second Life. Assuming you can do everything virtually, what do you choose to do virtually and what do you choose to do physically? With technology, we have the choice to be antonymous. With inventories, you could put an RFID tag on every chair in the building and, at the press of a button, you could do the inventory. You can drive a car which has a bleeper on the front that lets you go through toll gates at the moment on the continent. On the other end of the scale, mass people participation is important ?wikis and blogs, for example. You can have everyone involved, from the policies you put out, to product design, customer feedback and service.

Mike Downey, Adobe’s group manager for platform evangelism, hinted on Wednesday that the company might be about to develop such software.

Downey clarified the situation in an interview with ZDNet.co.uk’s sister site CNET News.com on Friday. He said that Adobe would focus primarily on providing its development platform, AIR, rather than creating online Office-style applications.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) would allow start-up companies to develop their own web-based applications which could rival Microsoft Office.

Adobe’s Flash Player is widely used on the web, and AIR lets web developers create desktop applications.

“Our primary focus is building a platform that allows developers to build great web-based applications,” Downey said. “AIR is the ideal platform for building these types of web applications that are robust and powerful.”

Adobe is itself using AIR to build some applications. The Adobe Media Player, which it announced earlier this year, is designed for watching internet videos. Even though it is an application, Adobe considers the media player part of the platform it provides to third parties who have the ability to customise it, Downey said.