Category Archives: software development

apple, professional, software development

JetBrains announces IDE for Objective C to compete with Xcode

JetBrains, maker of the admired IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, has announced CIDR, an IDE for Objective C.

The 10 facts in the initial post tell us that it will be Intel Mac only, will open and create Xcode projects, and integrates with the standard interface builder and with the iOS simulator.

Xcode is decent so what is the point? Mainly I guess because of the refactoring and productivity tools JetBrains builds into its tools. W are promised refactories, on the fly code analysis, and code completion.

I am sure it will be worth a look, though taking on Apple will not be easy; it is a bit like going up against Microsoft’s Visual Studio n Windows, except that Xcode is free.

That said, it does not take much in terms of added productivity to pay back the cost of an IDE.

apple, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Apple announces slightly better iPad, world goes nuts

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says the iPad 2, announced today, is “magical, revolutionary and at an unbelievable price”.

The new iPad is dual-core, has front and back cameras, and a new magnetic cover which also forms a stand. It is also 33% thinner and 15% lighter.

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These are nice improvements, but the truth is that it will not be very different from the first one.

It was enough though for the press to announce catastrophe for the competition:

Larry Dignan on ZDNet:

Apple just ensured that the other tablets are dead on arrival.

James Kendrick on ZDNet:

Here’s all you need to know about the iPad 2: it’s thinner, lighter, faster, got cameras and is more capable than the iPad, for the same price. Apple had dominated the tablet wars with the original iPad, and with the iPad 2 it is game over … Apple will continue to maintain or grow its market share in the tablet space, and the competition will release tablets that are not as good and cost lots more than the iPad/iPad 2. Rarely does one company in the technology sector dominate a product category so totally as Apple does the tablet space.

I am still mulling this over. There is a lot to like about the iPad – convenience, design, long battery life – but there are also annoyances; and while Dignan and Kendrick may be right, I would like to think there will be healthy competition and that at least some of the interesting devices on show at Mobile World Congress earlier this month will find a market.

Another question is how the appearance of ever more powerful smartphones will influence the tablet market. It is hard to believe that the average person will carry three devices: smartphone, tablet, laptop. Personally I would like to get it down to one, which is why I find the Motorola Atrix an interesting concept: it plugs into a laptop-like external keyboard and screen when required.

Apple’s advantage though is its focus on quality and design, rather than features. Few other manufacturers have learned this lesson. There is always something not quite right; and rather than fix it, a new model six months later with something else not quite right.

There was something else interesting about today’s event. iMovie for iPad 2, priced at $4.99. What is happening to the price of software, and what are the implications for developers? Something I will explore in another post shortly.

Spare a thought for Microsoft. Remember Bill Gates, telling us that one day tablets would dominate portable computing? Fumbling tablet computing may have been Microsoft’s biggest mistake.

design, development, php, professional, software development, web authoring

JetBrains WebStorm 2.0 and PHPStorm 2.0 First Look

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I respect JetBrains, an IDE company which survives despite intense competition from free tools such as Eclipse and NetBeans. It does so because developers like the products, especially the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. The tools are focused on coding; there are few visual designers but lots of coding help, such as code completion, refactoring, find usages, and fast navigation. The tools are also relatively lightweight, so start up quickly, and generally run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The latest from JetBrains is two related web development IDEs. WebStorm 2.0 is for general HTML/CSS/JavaScript work, and PHPStorm 2.0 is a superset of WebStorm which adds PHP editing and debugging. There is also some support for Adobe’s Flex and ActionScript code.

New in PHPStorm is PHP 5.3 support, Zend Debugger support, improved SQL editing, support for the Mercurial source code management system, and updates for HTML 5 and EcmaScript 5.

I am interested in these tools since HTML development is increasingly important. Browsers are getting increasingly powerful, with HTML 5 and fast JavaScript engines challenging plugins as rich application runtimes, and PHP is less well served by IDEs than you would expect considering its popularity.

My first impressions though are mixed. I noticed a lot to like, in particular the work JetBrains has done on supporting mixed languages: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SQL,XML and so on. One of its features is that code completion works even within quotes. For example, if your PHP is outputting HTML to the browser, code completion still works. Most editors treat anything within quotes as plain text rather than as code.

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The IDE is highly configurable and also supports plugins. Live templates let you expand abbreviations to code fragments. There is support for generating documentation with JSDoc, ASDoc and PHPDoc. Testing with PHPUnit is integrated. These are products that will appeal to developers who are code-oriented – are there any others? – and who like the ability to fine-tune their tools to improve productivity.

That said, I did not find it easy to get started with PHPStorm. The main challenge is configuring your PHP environment to support debugging. I have not yet succeeded, though I have not spent all that long on it. Difficulty getting PHP debugging working seems to be the biggest single topic on the support forums currently.

I know this is tricky and it took me a while to get it working with Eclipse. It is important though, and anything the tools vendors can do to make this easier to setup would be welcome. There is a case for simply installing a dedicated LAMP or WAMP server with the product so that developers get immediate and reliable support for PHP debugging, with the option to configure for their own PHP server later.

Another thing I found annoying was the over-zealous spell checker, which seems inclined to check variable names as well as being unaware of PHP extensions like mysqli:

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I expect there is a way to fix both issues by configuring the product.

In general JetBrains does not seem to suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome and uses open source libraries and tools; in fact it depends on Firefox for JavaScript debugging, and automatically installs its own plugin to improve integration.

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However I picked up a note of disapproval in the description on the Zen Coding site about the way JetBrains has chosen to implement Zen Coding abbreviations:

These plugins are developed by third-party and has their own ZC engine implementation, which leads to different feature set and abbreviation syntax. Zen Coding team has no relation to this projects

WebStorm is modestly priced at £54.00 for individual developers or £115 per concurrent user for organisations.  PHPStorm is £77 or £154 on the same basis. Free licenses are available for education or for open source projects, on application.

Competing products include the free Eclipse PDT and NetBeans, the commercial Zend Studio, and for a more designer-friendly approach to PHP, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.

software development

NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 simplifies GPU programming, aims for mainstream

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NVIDIA has announced CUDA 4.0, a major update to its C++ toolkit for general programming on the GPU. The idea is to take advantage of the many cores of NVIDIA’s GPUs for speeding up tasks that may not be graphic-related.

There are three key features:

Unified Virtual Addressing provides a single address space for the main system RAM and the GPU RAM, or even RAM across multiple GPUs if available. This significantly simplifies programming.

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GPUDIRECT 2.0 is NVIDIA’s name for peer-to-peer communication between multiple GPUs on the same computer. Instead of copying objects from one GPU, to main memory, and to a second GPU, the data can go directly.

Thrust C++ template libraries Thrust is a CUDA library which is similar to the parallel algorithms in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). NVIDIA claims that typical Thrust routines are 5 to 100 times faster than with STL or Intel’s Threading Building Blocks. Thrust is not really new but is getting pushed to the mainstream of CUDA programming.

Other new features include debugging (cuda-gdb) support on Mac OS X, support for new/delete and virtual functions in C++, and improvement to multi-threading.

The common theme of these features is to make it easier for mortals to move from general C/C++  programming to CUDA programming, and to port existing code. This is how NVIDIA sees CUDA progress:

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Certainly I see increasing interest in GPU programming, and not just among super-computer researchers.

A weakness is that CUDA only works on NVIDIA GPUs. You can use OpenCL for generic GPU programming but it is less advanced.

CUDA 4.0 release candidate will be available from March 4 if you sign up for the CUDA Registered Developer Program.

.net, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows

Where is Microsoft going with its Rich Client API? Microsoft drops some clues as developers fret

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A discussion taking place in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) newsgroup, in a thread called WPF vNext, shows how Microsoft’s confused rich client development strategy is affecting developers, and offers some clues about what is coming.

Developer Rudi Grobler, who posted on his blog some wishes for Windows Phone, Silverlight and WPF, describes his difficulty in discerning Microsoft’s direction:

The strategy for the future is very vague… I daily get questions about should I use WPF or Silverlight? Is WPF dead? Is Silverlight dead? etc…

Jeremiah Morrill describes his frustration with WPF performance:

Microsoft has known of WPF’s performance problems since the first time they wrote a line of code for it.  You will be hard pressed to find a customer that hasn’t complained about perf issues.  And you will not have gone to a PDC in the last few years and not hear folks bring this up to the WPF team. This is 3rd party info by now, but I’ve been told the issues I have noted have been brought up internally, only to be disregarded.

and remarks his frustration with what has happened to Silverlight:

Silverlight’s strategy USED to be about cross-platform, get-the-runtime-on-every-device-out-there, but it’s obvious that is not the strategy any more.  What happened to Silverlight on set-top-boxes?  Android? I read an article that some people saw it on XBox, but nobody has talked about it since.  Cross-platform with OSX has become symbolic at best.

Developer Peter O’Hanlon describes how the uncertainty has affected his business:

I run a small consultancy, and I bet the company on WPF because I could sell the benefits of faster development time for desktop applications. We have spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the platform and saw that Silverlight gave us a good fit for developing web apps. In one speech Microsoft caused me months of work repairing the damage when Muglia seemed to suggest that these technologies are dead and Microsoft are betting the farm on Html 5. We hand our code over to the client once we have finished, and they ask us why they need to invest in a dead technology. I don’t care what you say on this thread, Microsoft gave the impression that html 5 was the way to go.

[…] Muglia’s statement about the future being html caused serious issues for my company. We lost two bids because the managers didn’t want to commit to "dead" technology.

Microsoft’s Jaime Rodrigues, WPF Technical Evangelist, offers the following response:

You are telling us to improve perf in WPF. We hear this loudly and we are trying to figure how to solve it. Unfortunately, there are a few pieces to consider:

1)      First of all,  a lot of our customers are telling us to invest more into Silverlight.  Let’s say (again made up) that demand is  4-to 1. How do we justify a revamp of the graphics architecture in WPF.  This is not trivial work; the expertise in this space is limited, we can’t clone our folks to 5x to meet everyone’s needs.

2)      Let’s assume we did take on the work.  My guess (again, I am not engineering) is that it would take two years to implement and thorougly test a release.  At the stage that WPF is at, a rearchitecture or huge changes on the graphics stack would be 80% about testing and 20% about the dev work.    It is not a trivial amount of work.   Would we get the performance you want across myriad of devices? We don’t know. WPF bet on hardware, and there is new devices out  there that are trading hardware for battery, weight, or simply for cost.  it would suck to do that much work, make you wait a long time, and then not get there. Let’s get real on the asks; you say "improve perf" but you are asking us to do a "significant re-write"; these two asks are different.

3)      By the time we get there, what will be a more powerful framework?  Silverlight, WPF, C++, or SuperNew.Next ??  we don’t know today.  We go back to #1 and look at demand We are in agreement that "customers" is the driving principle.

The WPF has looked at the trade-offs, and risk many times.  We are also looking at what customers need. Jer, to you it is all about graphics.  To many others, it is about data.  So, how do we serve all customers??
The strategy is exactly what you have seen/heard:

1)      WPF 4.5 is going to have some significant data binding performance improvements.

2)      We are not redoing the graphics framework, but we are doing a lot of work to let you interoperate with lower level graphics so that if you need more graphics perf you can get it, and still keep the RAD of the rest of the framework.

[…] Hope it helps; apologies if it does not, and again, wait for Rob Relyea or someone else to make it official.  That is just my 2c as a person who bet heavily on WPF but has seen the data that drives the trade-offs the team has to make.

This will be disappointing to former Microsoft evangelist Scott Barnes, who has initiated a Fix WPF campaign.

The problem though is lack of clarity about the strategy. Look at Rodrigue’s third point above. Nobody can predict the future; but what is Microsoft’s current bet? Silverlight, HTML5, or maybe SuperNew.Next – for example, the rumoured new native code UI for Windows 8 or some variant of it?

My own view is that the current difficulties are rooted in what happened with Longhorn and the fact that the Windows team abandoned WPF back in 2004. I’ve written this up in more detail here.

Lest this post be misinterpreted, let me emphasise that Microsoft has a good track record in terms of supporting its Windows APIs long-term, even the ones that become non-strategic. Applications built with the first version of .NET still run; applications built with Visual Basic 6 mostly still run; applications built for ancient versions of Windows often still run or can be coaxed into running. Build an application with WPF or Silverlight today, and it will continue to work and be supported for many years to come.

My guess is that events like the coming 2011 MVP Summit and Mix 2011 in April will bring some clarity about Microsoft’s mobile, tablet, Windows and cross-platform story for rich clients.

Update: Barnes has his own take on this discussion here.

microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software development, vista, visual studio, windows

Microsoft still paying the price for botched Vista with muddled development strategy

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Professional Developers Conference 2003. Windows Longhorn is revealed, with three “pillars”:

  • Avalon, later named Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
  • Indigo, later named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
  • WinFS, the relational file system that was later abandoned

With the benefit of hindsight, Microsoft got many things right with the vision it set out at PDC 2003. The company saw that a revolution in user interface technology was under way, driven by the powerful graphics capabilities of modern hardware, and that the old Win32 graphics API would have to be replaced, much as Windows itself replaced DOS and the command-line. XAML and WPF was its answer, bringing together .NET, DirectX, vector graphics, XML and declarative programming to form a new, rich, presentation framework that was both designer-friendly and programmer-friendly.

Microsoft also had plans to take a cut-down version of WPF cross-platform as a browser plugin. WPF/Everywhere, which became Silverlight, was to take WPF to the Mac and to mobile devices.

I still recall the early demos of Avalon, which greatly impressed me: beautiful, rich designs which made traditional Windows applications look dated.

Unfortunately Microsoft largely failed to execute its vision. The preview of Longhorn handed out at PDC, which used Avalon for its GUI, was desperately slow.

Fast forward to April 2005, and Windows geek Paul Thurrott reports on Longhorn progress:

I’m reflecting a bit on Longhorn 5048. My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck.

Thurrott was right. But why did Longhorn go backwards? Well, at some point – and I am not sure of the date, but I think sometime in 2004 – Microsoft decided that the .NET API for Longhorn was not working, performance was too bad, defects too many. The Windows build was rebased on the code for Server 2003 and most of .NET was removed, as documented by Richard Grimes.

Vista as we now know was not a success for Microsoft, though it was by no means all bad and laid the foundation for the well-received Windows 7. My point though is how this impacted Microsoft’s strategy for the client API. WPF was shipped in Longhorn, and also back-ported to Windows XP, but it was there as a runtime for custom applications, not as part of the core operating system.

One way of seeing this is that when Longhorn ran into the ground and had to be reset, the Windows team within Microsoft vowed never again to depend on .NET. While I do not know if this is correct, as a model it makes sense of what has subsequently happened with Silverlight, IE and HTML5, and Windows Phone:

  • Windows team talks up IE9 at PDC 2010 and does not mention Silverlight
  • Microsoft refuses to deliver a tablet version of Windows Phone OS with its .NET application API, favouring some future version of full Windows instead

Note that in 2008 Microsoft advertised for a job vacancy including this in the description:

We will be determining the new Windows user interface guidelines and building a platform that supports it. We’ll eliminate much of the drudgery of Win32 UI development and enable rich, graphical, animated user interface by using markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime.

In other words, the Windows team has possibly been working on its own native code equivalent to XAML and WPF, or perhaps a native code runtime for XAML presentation markup. Maybe this could appear in Windows 8 and support a new touch-oriented user interface.

In the meantime though, Microsoft’s developer division has continued a strong push for .NET, Silverlight and most recently Windows Phone. Look at Visual Studio or talk to the development folk, and you still get the impression that this is the future of Windows client applications.

All this adds up to a muddled development story, which is costly when it comes to evangelising the platform.

In particular, eight years after PDC 2003 there is no clarity about Microsoft’s rich client or RIA (Rich Internet Application) designer and developer story. Is it really WPF, Silverlight and .NET, or is it some new API yet to be revealed, or will IE9 as a runtime play a key role?

There is now a little bit more evidence for this confusion and its cost; but this post is long enough and I have covered it separately.

apple, google, iphone, javascript, mobile, open source, professional, software development

Appcelerator releases Titanium Mobile 1.6

Appcelerator has released Titanium Mobile 1.6, an update to its cross-platform app framework for Apple iOS and Google Android.

The update adds 26 features for Android and 9 features for iOS. The Facebook API has been completely redone, keeping up-to-date with the latest Facebook API. There is beta support for the Android NDK – native code development.

Android 1.6 is now deprecated and will not be supported in future releases.

While not a big release in itself, Titanium Mobile 1.6 is require for using forthcoming Titanium+Plus modules, libraries which add support for features such as barcode reading and PayPal payments.

There is no sign yet of Aptana integration, following the acquisition of this JavaScript IDE in January.

Updating to the 1.6 SDK was delightfully easy on Windows. Just open Titanium Developer and click the prompt.

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development, mobile, professional, software development

RunRev releases LiveCode for Android preview alongside iOS, Mac, Windows, Linux

RunRev has announced a preview version of its LiveCode for Google Android, which will join existing versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, Web and iOS.

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LiveCode is like a modern-day HyperCard, an early database and simple application builder for the Mac. It includes a graphical development environment with scripting using the LiveCode language, described by RunRev as “A very high level language”. Here is a sample:

put “The fox jumped over the lazy dog.” into theText

put “ quick brown” after word 2 of theText

The advantage is fast development, once you have become familiar with the platform.

On a quick look I noticed that LiveCode looks great for building a business-oriented client, but looks more challenging when it comes to interacting with a remote server application, though it does have support for basic http and https requests as well as socket support.

Now that Android is supported LiveCode looks interesting as a quick and easy route to cross-platform mobile apps.

Mobile app developers can register to receive the Android pre-release version today at www.runrev.com.

google, java, mobile, professional, software development, web authoring

Computer book stats show resilience of Java as Android booms

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Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly has posted four articles analysing the state of the computer book market in more detail than most of us care about.  The overall picture is not too good – sales are down – and there are some interesting trends.

Here is a good one for anyone who thinks Java is dying. The programming languages post shows that unit sales of books on Java increased by 17.2% in 2010 vs 2009, whereas the next most popular language, C#, declined by 1.7%. Objective C, in third place, also declined slightly. JavaScript unit sales were up by 14.5%.

Why is Java booming? There is a clue in one of the two bestselling Java titles mentioned by Hendrickson: Professional Android 2 Application Development

Another trend that caught my eye is in the first post. Some of the Down categories surprised me:

Adobe Flash –84.43%

Mac OS –32.12%

Web Design Tools –53.2%

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has sold well as far as I’m aware so although books on Flash and Dreamweaver have not been selling well, it is dangerous to draw obvious conclusions.

The influence of Android is unmistakeable though. Something for Oracle to consider as it pursues Google for breach of intellectual property.