Category Archives: software development

mobile, open source, software development, Web, web authoring

Sencha’s Michael Mullany talks about Flash developers “flailing around for an alternative” and the Big App Rewrite

I spoke to Michael Mullany, CEO of Sencha, a company which creates HTML5 frameworks and tools for desktop and mobile browsers. Ext JS is aimed at desktop browser applications, while Sencha Touch is for mobile devices, currently Apple iOS, Google Android and Blackberry 6+. Sencha’s tools include Ext Designer, a visual application builder for Ext JS, and Sencha Animator, a designer for CSS 3 animations. Sencha Touch apps can also be packaged as native apps for iOS or Android.

At its developer conference in Austin USA earlier this month, attended by around 600, the company announced Sencha.io, a cloud service for mobile web apps, as well as presenting Sencha Touch 2.0, a major update.

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Mullany talks on his blog about “The Big App Rewrite”:

It’s a world where HTML5 powers the client apps, and they’re enriched with local APIs that execute on everything from traditional desktops to Smart TV’s. And cloud services provide the fabric that enables continuous, shared experiences across the diversity of end-devices. We think this is the platform for the web.

Sencha is perfectly in tune with the trends towards cloud, HTML5 and mobile, which is why I was keen to speak to Mullany. I asked him to contrast Ext JS and Sencha Touch with JQuery and JQuery Mobile.

JQuery is a pretty tiny library that helps with Dom abstraction and animations but that’s it. JQuery UI gives you some visual components as well but Ext-JS is the full enchilada. It’s supposed to be the web equivalent of Cocoa or the Microsoft Windows presentation foundation. It’s got an event system, a theming system, a very rich set of user interface controls, its object oriented, and it’s got a complex layout system so you can build nested layouts that have very complex event handling among different parts of the user interface. We’ve seen user interfaces that have several thousand data elements on a page.

It also has a model-view-controller architecture library on the client side so you can structure your code properly for large applications, it’s got a theming system so you can variable-ise your colours, shapes and look and feel very easily. It also has a full data package so you can do very rich data manipulation on the client, bind data in various complex ways across variables, it’s very different than J query.

And just like you’d probably never use Ext-JS on a public web page, you’d never use JQuery to build something like Marketo or Salesforce VisualForce or a Documentum content management system, all of which use Ext-JS. Ext-JS is one of the most popular behind the firewall development libraries for desktop development.

Now on the mobile side the difference is slightly less. JQuery mobile does give you a set of user interface widgets, but the difference is also similar to the desktop … Sencha Touch is designed to let you do anything you could do with Cocoa Touch or an Android SDK or a Windows Mobile SDK. Its intent is to equip you to develop native quality experiences with native style interaction, things like fixed user interface chrome, multiple independent scrollable areas, nested layouts, those kinds of capabilities.

Our performance tends to be better cross-platform, we’ve done more performance work, we have our theming system, we have an MVC library, we have a templating system. With JQuery mobile you tend to want to add multiple things together and you can certainly assemble a collection of things that will look like Sencha Touch, but Sencha Touch is designed to be integrated, everything is designed to work the same, and the general feedback is that even though Sencha Touch is a much richer system that takes some insight to learn, you get better applications out of it.

I also asked about the new cloud service, Sencha.io. A notable feature is that according to Mullany developers do not have to touch the code that runs on the cloud, they just call its API from the client:

We call it the first client-centric HTML5 cloud, which is a set of authentication, data, data synchronisation, and geo-location services that help people build mobile applications without needing to write server side code. So you literally write your client side application in HTML 5 using Sencha SDKs and then you store your user’s data and you store your user’s authentication credentials in our cloud. You don’t have to worry about mucking around with anything from Ruby on Rails to PHP to Java, it’s all abstracted behind these very clean APIs. We think that’s the future of mobile development, that you’ll have these very thin abstracted server-side services, and and these very rich mobile clients that have off-line state and local data storage powered by HTML5. We think that model is the future of mobile web development and we obviously hope that Sencha.io will be the most popular back-end.

Sencha’s frameworks are open source and dual-licenced. You can use both Touch and Ext JS freely under the terms of the GPL v3. There is also free commercial licencing for Sencha Touch, while commercial licences for Ext JS are paid for. Sencha also has commercial tools, and I asked Mullany to describe the tool products:

We really see the three legs of the business being cloud, tools, and SDKs. We just did a preview of the Sencha Designer 2.0 release at our conference. That has support for Sencha Touch in it so you can drag and drop Sencha touch applications together and then actually package them from within the tool. The intent is also to allow you to hook up to cloud APIs from within the tool as well so it is an integrated, easy-to-use visual application builder for both desktop and touch. So that’s targeted at developers.

Sencha Animator is a little bit different. There’s no JavaScript in it really at all. It is a pure CSS 3 animation tool, and it is a traditional visual timeline with keyframe manipulation, and a style visual editor for creating rich animations.

The market we’re targeting for that is people doing interactive brand advertising on mobile. That’s where you have ubiquitous support for CSS 3 animations that are hardware accelerated so they tend to be the best performance. It’s also very web content friendly so you don’t have to write your application in Sencha Touch just to use Animator, it’s pure CSS output that you drop into whatever piece of content that you want to build.

The reason we built it is because we saw people flailing around for an alternative to doing Flash ads on mobile. Because Flash was banned from iOS, it meant that a whole segment of rich advertising that was based on Flash for the desktop had nowhere to go. They weren’t going to build native iOS applications, it had to be web. So the question then was what do you build it in, do you use JavaScript animation, do you use SVG, do you use Canvas, do you use some of the other graphic technologies such as Web GL? The answer is that CSS 3 is really the highest performance and cognitively pretty easy to wrap your head around.

People “flailing around for an alternative to doing Flash ads?” Mullany has his own agenda, but his comments do highlight the problems caused for Adobe by the success of Flash-free iPhone and iPad. I cannot help thinking that Sencha would be an attractive acquisition for Adobe or certain other companies, but I am sure smarter people than myself have thought of that.

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internet, javascript, microsoft, professional, software development, Web, web authoring

Microsoft backs ECMAScript, dismisses Google Dart

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Microsoft has posted an article on Evolving ECMAScript on its IE Blog. ECMAScript is the official standard for what we call JavaScript. The company is proposing some minor additions “to address gaps in Math, String and Number functionality as well as Globalization.” It has also taken the opportunity to take a shot at Google, which is proposing a new web language called Dart:

Some examples, like Dart, portend that JavaScript has fundamental flaws and to support these scenarios requires a “clean break” from JavaScript in both syntax and runtime. We disagree with this point of view. We believe that with committee participant focus, the standards runtime can be expanded and the syntactic features necessary to support JavaScript at scale can be built upon the existing JavaScript standard.

Dart will compile to JavaScript so there is a measure of compatibility, but if the language catches on then browsers without a native implementation will be disadvantaged.

development, professional, software development, visual studio

What is the best programming language for a child progressing from Scratch?

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Someone asked me what is the best programming language for a child to learn after starting (and having success) with Scratch.

Scratch is a visual programming language which actually runs on Smalltalk, though its users do not need to know this. Scratch 2.0 seems to be written in Adobe Flash so you can create and program projects in a web browser. As far as I can tell though, there is no obvious and natural progression from Scratch to a code-centric programming language.

I guess the first answer is not to move away from Scratch until you need to. You can do a lot with Scratch, as the many shared projects demonstrate.

Still, I agree that it makes sense to learn text-based programming before too long. What is the best one for a child to learn, not necessarily with computer science or a professional career in mind, but just to take the next step and create some cool games and applications?

I find myself leaning towards Microsoft’s C#. The reason is that there is a capable free version and  you can add XNA Game Studio for game development. C# is an excellent language and has some family resemblance to other languages including C, C++, Java and JavaScript, and Visual Studio is a strong IDE that is perhaps more approachable than say Eclipse or Netbeans.

Snags with C# are that Visual Studio only runs on Windows, the language is proprietary to Microsoft (though Mono is free and open source) and it is not ideal if you want to run on the Mac, or Google Android or Apple iPad.

That said, I could also make a case for Java, or JavaScript, or Python.

I would value suggestions though: what would you recommend to a teenager?

development, open source, professional, software development

Adobe’s Falcon JS: Compile Flex code to HTML and Javascript

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Adobe has issued further information about its intention to donate the Flex SDK, which builds Flash applications from XML and ActionScript, to the Apache Software Foundation. Specifically, the donation will include:

  • BlazeDS, the free version of LiveCycle Data Services
  • Falcon, the new Flex compiler due to be completed in 2012
  • Falcon JS, a previously unannounced project

Of these, Falcon JS is the most eye-catching. This is an “experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript.” In other words, Falcon JS has the potential to give developers a migration path from Flash to HTML clients. Note that it is described as a cross-compiler rather than a porting tool, so it may well be that the output is not easily edited. The Google Web Toolkit works like this, converting Java to JavaScript but not in a form that anyone is expected to edit. Adobe also adds:

We have undertaken some experimental work in this area, but remain unsure as to the viability of fully translating Flex-based content to HTML. The Falcon JS cross-compiler, referenced above, represents this early work.

What about the most sensitive of Adobe’s statements, that HTML is the long-term solution for enterprise applications? Adobe says:

In time (and depending upon your application, it could be 3-5 years from now), we believe HTML5 could support the majority of use cases where Flex is used today.

and adds:

We intend to make investments in HTML-related technologies, so that we can help advance HTML5 to make it suitable for enterprise applications.

I am not sure to what extent the new statement will ease the worries of Flex developers; but at least Adobe is clear about its intentions. While there are benefits in the Flex SDK moving to Apache, overall the message is that Adobe is hastening towards HTML 5. I am surprised, considering the progress the company has made in creating a strong cross-platform toolkit for mobile and desktop applications. Although no-one should doubt that Adobe will continue to support and evolve Flex as a development platform, it has in effect declared it to be a legacy technology, and I would guess that the effect will be to depress the level of activity there.

development, mobile, professional, software development

GPU programming coming to low-power and mobile devices – from EU Mont Blanc supercomputer to smartphones

Supercomputing and low-power computing are not normally associated; but at the SC11 Supercomputing conference the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has announced a new supercomputer, called the called the Mont-Blanc Project, which will combine the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra SoC with separate CUDA GPUs. CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture, enabling general purpose computing on the GPU.

The project’s publicity says this enables power saving of 15 to 30 times, versus today’s supercomputers:

The analysis of the performance of HPC systems since 1993 shows exponential improvements at the rate of one order of magnitude every 3 years: One petaflops was achieved in 2008, one exaflops is expected in 2020. Based on a 20 MW power budget, this requires an efficiency of 50 GFLOPS/Watt. However, the current leader in energy efficiency achieves only 1.7n GFLOPS/Watt. Thus, a 30x improvement is required.

NVIDIA is also creating a new hardware and software development kit for Tegra + CUDA, to be made available in the first half of 2012.

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The combination of fast concurrent processing, low power draw and mobile devices is enticing. Features like speech recognition and smart cameras depend on rapid processing, and the technology has the potential to make smart devices very much smarter.

NVIDIA has competition though. ARM, which designs most of the CPUs in use on smartphones and tablets today, has recently started designing mobile GPUs as well, and its Mali series supports OpenCL, an open alternative to CUDA for general-purpose computing on the GPU. The Mali-T604 has 1 to 4 cores while the recently announced Mali-T658 has 1 to 8 cores. ARM specifically optimises its GPUs to work alongside its CPUs, which must be a concern for GPU specialists such as NVIDIA. However, we have yet to see devices with either T604 or T658: the first T604 devices are likely to appear in 2012, and T658 in 2013.

professional, software development

New OpenACC compiler directives announced for GPU accelerated programming

A new standard for accelerating C/C++ programming with compiler directives has been announced at the SC11 Supercomputing conference in Seattle. The new standard is called OpenACC  and has been created by NVIDIA, Cray, PGI (Portland Group) and CAPS enterprise.

OpenACC compiler directives are code annotations that enable the compiler to parallelise code while ensuring thread-safety. The big difference between OpenACC and the existing OpenMP standard is that OpenACC primarily targets the GPU rather than CPU, whereas OpenMP is generally CPU only. That said, OpenACC can also target the CPU so it is flexible; the idea is that it will adapt to the target system.

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OpenACC is “defined to be interoperable with OpenMP” according to the FAQ and the OpenACC CEO hopes for some future integration, though it seems to have been developed independently which may cause some tension.

OpenACC is expected to ship during the first half of 2012 on compilers from PGI, Cray and CAPS Enterprise. The NVIDIA involvement may make you wonder whether it is GPU-specific; the answer is “maybe”. The FAQ says:

Will OpenACC run on AMD GPUs?

– It could, it requires implementation, there is no reason why it couldn’t

Will OpenACC run on top of OpenCL?

– It could, it requires implementation, there is no reason why it couldn’t

Will AMD/Intel/MS/XX support this?

– As this is just announced we can’t speak to the rate of external adoption or participation.

Will OpenACC run on NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA?

– Yes. Programmers may wish to develop some code using directives, and more sophisticated code using CUDA C, CUDA C++ or CUDA Fortra

Spot the Yes in the above! Still, you can scarcely blame NVIDIA for supporting its own GPU family; and I have been impressed with how the company works with the scientific and academic community to realise the potential of massively parallel computing.

OpenACC is about democratising parallelism, rather than advancing the state of the art. Best optimisation is obtained by more complex programming, but directives make some remarkable performance improvements easy to achieve.

microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, software development, visual studio

Developing for Windows Phone: what’s new

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One thing that is easy to overlook in all the talk about Windows Phone, Nokia, and Microsoft’s prospects against iPhone and Android, is that the Windows Phone developer platform has substantially improved with the 7.1 SDK – the phone is 7.5 but the SDK is 7.1, just to confuse you.

Here are a few highlights from the list of what’s new:

Multitasking. Apps still do not continue to run when they do not have the focus. However, Microsoft has implemented several features to make it look as if they do. This includes background agents, background audio (another kind of agent), scheduled tasks, background file transfers, and fast application switching. Although apps do not execute in the background, they do stay in memory if free space allows, so that resume is near-instant.

Silverlight 4. The version of Silverlight implemented in Windows Phone is now Silverlight 4, though there are some differences between Silverlight on the desktop and Silverlight on the phone, including the fact that there is no Silverlight in the browser.

Apps that combine Silverlight and XNA. You can now render both XNA and Silverlight content in a single combined Windows Phone app.

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Visual Basic and XNA. XNA was C# only in the initial release. No longer.

Better sensor support. You can now access the compass and gyroscope, and use a combined motion API.

Socket support. Use TCP and UDP socket protocols.

Network information. This is actually critical to creating well-behaved apps. New network information classes let you get network status and capabilities. You can also register for network availability change events.

Two-sided Live Tiles. Live Tiles in Windows Phone have two sides and flip automatically, effectively giving more space to show information.

Advertising SDK. Sign up to include ads from Microsoft Advertising in your app.

IE9 WebBrowser Control. You cannot embed your Silverlight app in the browser, but you can embed the WebBrowser control in your Silverlight app, now with IE9’s fast Javascript and HTML 5 features.

Local Database. A local database API is now included in Windows Phone. Sadly this is not Sqlite; I’m guessing it is a variant of SQL Server Compact Edition. You access and manipulate data with LINQ to SQL – no Entity Framework ORM (Object Relational Mapping) on the phone, though LINQ to SQL is also an ORM framework. There is no way other than LINQ to execute SQL locally.

New Launchers and Choosers. Launchers and Choosers let your app present picklists from data stored elsewhere in the phone. You can now choose an address, invite players to a game session, show a location on a map, or show map directions.

Read-only access to Contacts and Calendar.

Encrypted credential store. This enables you to store login details securely using a built-in API.

Programmatic access to the camera. This includes real-time access to the raw frames so you can create apps that use the camera.

Pictures and Search Extensibility. This lets your app interact with the Pictures hub and with the built-in search. Users who search Bing can launch your app from the results if there are matches.

New on-screen keyboards. There are now specialist keyboards for numbers and formulae.

Additional language support including East Asia. Overall there are 16 additional cultures available including font support.

Overall it adds up to a major update for developers. If you tried the first Windows Phone SDK and found too many annoyances, it might be worth a second look.

Is this the best mobile developer platform? I had this discussion today with Keith Varty, developer evangelist for Nokia. After rather enjoying a brief go with Xcode for iOS, I am not sure; there is no simple answer. It is certainly a candidate though: you get the excellent C# language, the mature Visual Studio IDE, and strong frameworks for both form-based and gaming applications. Then again you may miss those beautiful iOS controls.

.net, adobe, flash, professional, software development, web authoring

What next for Adobe Flash? Think runtime not plugin

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Adobe is stating that mobile Flash will no longer be developed:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Although this seems like a major shift in strategy, Adobe has been moving in this direction for some time. At the MAX conference last month the company was clear that most web developers can be expected to use HTML 5 rather than Flash most of the time, reserving use of the plug-in for video, games and certain kinds of application. As for mobile, all the talk was about AIR and the captive runtime, an approach similar to the iOS packager which bundles the Flash runtime into your application so that no plug-in or additional download is required.

This approach is now explicit, and I reckon we can further conclude that if the Flash plugin for mobile is being abandoned, then the Flash plugin for the desktop is also less important than before. Mobile browsing is huge, and likely to grow, so developing web pages for Flash is unattractive other than in cases where there is an easy way to direct mobile browsers to a non-Flash alternative. Flash as a browser plugin will now decline forever, which is a good thing for web standards even if it is not necessarily a good thing for web developers, who must face the challenge of cross-browser development.

So what is Flash now? It is still Adobe’s runtime, and the client for its media services, and in that role it remains significant. Thanks to Adobe’s packaging work, you can take your Flash or Flex application and deploy it to most desktop and recent mobile platforms, though not to Windows Phone or older Android devices. Could you not use HTML 5, JavaScript and PhoneGap instead? Maybe in some cases; but Flash is a richer, faster and more consistent platform, as well as benefiting from Adobe’s design and development tools.

See also my piece for the Register: Down but not out: Flash in an HTML5 world.

Update: Added official Adobe link for statement on mobile Flash.

development, eclipse, java, professional, software development

Eclipse and Xtend: some confusion in getting started

Last weekend there was some publicity around Xtend, an Eclipse project which extends Java with new language features. Xtend now has a new landing page, as announced by the lead architect Sven Efftinge.

I did intend to post about this yesterday, but I wanted to see it in action first, so I tried to download it and have a look. I believe this is a case where those who wrote the new landing page are too close to the project and made some assumptions, because I did not find it obvious how to proceed.

If you follow the Download link you are invited to paste one of the three URLs into the Eclipse update manager.

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As a newcomer to the project, I did not want three URLs to choose from, I wanted just one. I picked Release as in general this one is likely to work.

Now, the instructions say:

To install the Xtend plugins open the update manager and paste one of the URLs on the right into the field ‘Work with’ and select the Xtend SDK.

The update manager actually presents you with a long list of updates, none of which say Xtend. I took a stab at what I thought was the right thing.

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The All-In-One includes the Xtend SDK, which is what I want, right?

Wrong. After installation I could not find the tutorial which the docs said would be available.

I did some messing around with Eclipse and got the occasional error like this one:

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Then I realised that I should have looked under the TMF Xtext-2.1.0 tree, which is where the correct Xtend SDK resides:

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Except that if you find this helpful post by  Max Rohde you will know:

The other packages need to be selected since otherwise the Xtend editors will not work.

So you should select all of TMF Xtext-2.1.0 (or the latest release). Easy when you know, but not obvious since the word Xtend does not appear in the top node of the tree.

I was then able to create the tutorial project. I opened HelloWorld.xtend and got this:

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Ah, but you have read Rohde’s post so you know this is expected and that you should run this as a JUnit Test. However it does not have any output. To see some output, you have to run one of the other examples, like Xtend08_RichStrings, or perhaps add:

sayHelloToSystemOut2(‘Tim’)

to the testHelloWorld() method in HelloWorld.xtend.

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OK, it works.

So what is Xtend? It is essentially a code generator which lets you write in Xtend and generate Java. You can see the generated code in the tutorial project under xtend-gen.

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Xtend adds some nice features: type inference, property syntax, closures, switch expressions with no fall-through, template expressions, extension methods, and multiple dispatch.

I can imagine C# creator Anders Hejlsberg smiling here, as most of this is already in C# in some form or other.

But is Xtend the right way to bring these features to Java? I am not convinced so far. It is an interesting Eclipse project, but it may be more significant in speeding the implementation of features like these into Java itself, than as a mainstream approach to writing applications. Xtend is a kind of hybrid approach, where you will be switching between Java and Xtend while you code and debug your application, and I suspect it would get frustrating.

There is also the question of widespread community support – beyond Eclipse.

Finally, it would be good if the new landing page could be made more helpful for those getting started.

.net, apple, development, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Quick thoughts on Xcode and Objective C versus Microsoft’s tools

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I have been trying out JetBrains’ AppCode which meant working in an Apple development environment for a time. I took the opportunity to implement my simple calculator app in iOS native code.

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Objective C is a distinctive language with a mixed reputation, but I enjoy coding with it. I used Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), a feature introduced in Xcode 4.2 and OSX 10.7, iOS 5; ARC now also works with 10.6 and iOS 4. This means objects are automatically disposed, and I did not have to worry about memory management at all in my simple app. This is not a complete memory management solution (if there is such a thing) – if you use malloc you must use free – but it meant that the code in my app is not particularly verbose or complex compared to other languages. Apple’s libraries seem to favour plain English method names like StringByAppendingString which makes for readable code.

I was impressed by how easy it is to make an app that looks good, because the controls are beautifully designed. I understand the attraction of developing solely for Apple’s platform.

I also love the integrated source control in Xcode. You find yourself using a local Git repository almost without thinking about it. Microsoft could learn from that; no need for Team Foundation Server for a solo developer.

I did miss namespaces. In Objective C, if you want to remove the risk of name collision with a library, you have to use your own class prefix (and hope that nobody else picked the same one).

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Interface Builder, the visual UI designer, is great but many developers do not use it, because coding the UI without it is more flexible. It is a shame that you have to make this choice, unlike IDE’s with “two way tools” that let you edit in code or visually and seamlessly keep the two in synch. I found myself constantly having to re-display windows like the Attributes Inspector though it is not too bad once you learn the keyboard shortcuts. The latest Interface Builder has a storyboard feature which lets you define several screens and link them. It looks useful, though when I played with this I found it difficult to follow all the linking lines the designer drew for me.

It is interesting to compare the Mac and iOS development platform with that for Windows. Microsoft promotes the idea of language choice, though most professional development is either C# or C++, whereas on Apple’s platform it is Objective C and Cocoa or you are on your own. Although Mac and Windows are of a similar age, Microsoft’s platform gives a GUI developer more choices: Win32, MFC, WTL, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, and in Windows 8 the new WinRT.

I get the impression that Microsoft is envious of this single-minded approach and trying to bring it to Metro-style Windows 8, where you still have a choice of languages but really only one GUI framework.

That said, Visual Studio is an impressive tool and both C# and C++ have important features which are lacking in Objective C. I would judge that Visual Studio is the more productive tool overall, but Apple’s developer platform has its own attractions.