Firefox fans get IE-happy AJAX testing tools
JavaScript coders targeting Firefox can now test their apps with free tools that started life serving the developers on Microsoft's once mighty Internet Explorer.
dynaTrace Software has released AJAX Edition 3 that adds support for Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 to its AJAX performance management tool.
Earlier versions had only tested AJAX apps working with Microsoft's IE 6, 7, and 8 and .NET servers.
dynaTrace is working with Microsoft to add support for IE9, released two weeks ago, but it said it's embracing Firefox now because of the large number of devs using Mozilla's browser. Read more...
Nokia: Keep codin’ for Symbian and Qt!
Is Nokia wobbling over its commitment to Windows? Or just stringing along the Symbian and Qt faithful?
The cell-phone giant has published a lengthy open letter pleading with coders to keep building apps for phones running Symbian and Qt - at least in the short term.
Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Nokia's community operation, Forum Nokia, is pleased to report that Nokia has evaluated its roadmap and that it now feels confident it will offer a strong portfolio of Symbian products during the transition period to Windows Phone during 2011 and 2012. Phew.
According to Kochikar, there's plenty to be optimistic about. This includes faster graphics and strong processors on upcoming phones as well as updates to the Symbian user experience, starting this summer with a new home screen, a faster browser, a new Navbar, and a "fresh look and feel" for Ovi Store and Ovi Maps. Read more...
Cisco backs up its big cloud talk
Cisco made announcements this week that demonstrate its commitment to more aggressively pursue its cloud vision. Clearly, the company is not aspiring to be a cloud provider like Amazon or Google. Rather, it aims to provide the groundwork for converged data centers, where network and storage traffic share the same fabric, workloads can move across data center boundaries with ease, and organizations can grab hosted and cloud-based resources with equal simplicity.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled a host of enhancements to its Data Center Business Advantage portfolio, ultimately aimed at allowing multiple data centers and cloud services to be connected across a common intelligent fabric. The announcement came one day after Cisco revealed plans to acquire newScale, a provider of software that delivers a self-service portal for IT organizations to select and deploy cloud services in a near on-tap manner. Read more...
Multicore Coding Standards Aim to Ease Programming
The Multicore Association is establishing specifications for a programming model that will reduce the complexity involved in writing software for multicore chips used in smartphones, tablets and other embedded systems.
The association is putting together a cohesive set of foundation APIs (application programming interfaces) to standardize communication, resource sharing and virtualization spanning cores on the same or different chips, said Markus Levy, the group's president.
Chip makers are adding CPUs, sensors and accelerators to chips as an energy-efficient way to boost application performance on devices. But multicore chips have also created a challenge for programmers, who have to write applications that scale across multiple cores and synchronize correctly to ensure calculations are executed in a certain order to get the correct output. Read more...
Android Likely To Lead Smartphone Market This Year
Android's rocketing rise as a mobile platform is about to hit the stratosphere. According to a new report from industry research firm IDC, Google's open-source operating system, currently in second place worldwide, will become the leading smartphone operating system this year.
Ramon Llamas, IDC senior research analyst, said, "For the vendors who made Android the cornerstone of their smartphone strategies, 2010 was Android's 'coming-out party,'" while 2011 will be the "coronation party."
The report also projected that the worldwide smartphone market will grow 49.2 percent this year as consumers and enterprise users continue to move from feature phones. This growth rate is more than four times faster than the overall mobile-phone market. Read more...