James Governor's Monkchips

Developer Links for Today

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Platinum Friend of RedMonk and valued client Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation has complained a few times now that I no longer post delicious links for quickfire industry commentary. I think he has a point. Of course, like many of you delicous is no longer my tool of choice, especially now Yahoo has announced plans to deprecate the service, so again, like many of you, I need a new toolchain.

Its important that I increase my frequency of posting for a few reasons – not least because I know how much you appreciate fresh meat, but also because I need to feed the RedMonk Analytics beast.

Talking of analytics, my first link for today comes from another client – Alcatel Lucent’s developer division – or more particularly subdidiary, the mashup tracker ProgrammableWeb. RedMonk has followed John Musser for a long time- and his site contains a wealth of interesting data. Like RedMonk, ProgrammableWeb is increasingly mining itself for interesting trends. This link comes courtesy of Delyn Simons aka @delynator of Mashery (another API play – this time managing them).

“We’ve started to notice new APIs emerging where there is no corresponding service. Or, put another way, the service is the API and thus the company is an API. The Twilio API (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor) is a prime example, offering telephony-as-a-service. Developers pay a few pennies per use to add voice and SMS to their applications. Developers have certainly responded: we list nearly 150 Twilio mashups.”
RedMonk loves developers, which is why we love well-designed APIs. We also appreciate pragmatism. Its been good to see another client- Adobe coming round to HTML5, and the market is reacting accordingly, with renewed interest in the company’s products- notably its media toolchains; in a market dominated by fear of an Apple Planet, with its 30% tax, Adobe begins to look rather Swiss is contrast (given Adobe recently acquired open source web content management player Day Software, which actually is Swiss, maybe there is something to the Switzerland thing…)

John Nack on Adobe : “Wallaby” Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool now available

That’s the good news. But of course there has to be a catch. Check out what Wallaby is optimised for.

“The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5. Wallaby does a good job of converting graphical content along with complex, timeline-based animation to HTML5 in a form that can be viewed with browsers using a WebKit rendering engine. Supported WebKit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod).”

Oh no – HTML banner ads. How are we going to block those? 😉

On HTML this tweet also caught my eye.

Interesting to see Jolicloud port their great web dashboard to HTML5 ready browsers only: http://j.mp/hzNK8M. – @tomwoolway

I don’t know Jolicloud but I do know Tom Woolway rocks, so I will be looking into this one. Seems like Jolicloud is supporting multiple platforms, including Android, but the iPad app (as an experimental HTML5 port) is what struck me. We’re going to see a lot of that.

And finally a wonderful link I came across last night. Its a classic reframing of a long time issue- and it made me think deeply about what we do, and how and why we do it. Software innovation is harder to measure than processor speeds and feeds, but its often where the real action is. Developers deliver more aggressive increases in performance than chips tracking Moore’s law do. Frankly I need to think on it more. You do too.

And that’s it for now.

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