Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

Programming

+ - 126 WebKit Is Breaking The Web->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "WebKit's dominance is causing a real problem for other browser makers. It is a complicated story but an inevitable one, and perhaps would be better described as W3C's biggest blunder.
The problem all started with what appears to be a really simple and helpful idea. As CSS 3 was being developed, the idea was that vendor prefixes could be added to attributes to allow for flexibility during the early implementation. The trouble is that WebKit has become a de facto standard. So much so that many programmers think that -webkit- means CSS for the mobile web. To avoid being left out in the cold by pages that are only viewable using a WebKit browser other browser makers are planning to add the non-standard WebKit CSS to so destroying any pretense that there exists a single standard for HTML5/CSS3."
Link to Original Source
Microsoft

+ - 165 Why Microsoft Developers Need a Style Guide-> 2

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes "What your interface communicates to users can be just as important as what your software does, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister in discussing the latest edition of the 'Microsoft Manual of Style,' a style guide aimed at designers and developers who create Microsoft software, as well as those who write about it. 'The gist of much of Microsoft's advice is that a user's relationship with computer software is a unique one, and it's important to craft the language of software UIs accordingly,' McAllister writes. 'Occasionally, Microsoft's recommendations verge on the absurd. For example, you might not think it necessary to admonish developers to "not use slang that may be considered profane or derogatory, such as 'pimp' or 'bitch,'" but apparently it is.'"
Link to Original Source
Programming

+ - 170 Coding tricks of game developers->

Submitted by damian2k
damian2k writes "Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?

How about changing the background story of a game to suit a bug, or even just leaving the bug in there and making it a humorous feature of the game! There's also the game studio who keep a pair of white gloves handy, just in case you need to code up some particularly nasty hack and you don't want to feel dirty when you do it! Read more at the article here: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html"
Link to Original Source
Java

+ - 181 Making JavaScript Tolerable for A Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy 6

Submitted by DocDyson
DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"
Programming

+ - 121 The Road Ahead For Rising Node.js->

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes "Node.js is gaining traction as an application development platform among the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, but questions remain about JavaScript's appropriateness on servers and developers' readiness to use it, InfoWorld reports. The project's event-driven, nonblocking I/O model makes it ideal for data-intensive, real-time applications running across distributed devices, according to Node.js advocates, and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl sees Node.js even displacing Java on servers. But others, such as eBay's Ted Dziuba, see Node.js as a "scalability disaster waiting to happen." A formal 1.0 version should arrive this summer, according to Dahl, who recently stepped down as gatekeeper of Node.js. Among features planned for Node.js are binary modules to allow developers to interface with system libraries written in C."
Link to Original Source
Books

+ - 134 KDE Publishes a Book for Beginner Developers->

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes "During a recent 5 day sprint, four KDE contributors planned and produced a handbook for beginning KDE developers. The guide is recommended for every new contributor to KDE development. It outlines technical aspects of contributing to KDE and is a valuable first point of contact for new developers. The guide offers insights into KDE from the developer's point of view, and explains how to check out existing code, modify it and submit patches. Currently the guide only focuses on the coding aspects of KDE. Contributors are welcome (encouraged) to expand the guide to cover other aspects of the KDE Community as well as enhance the existing content in the book. We are currently working on how to release subsequent versions."
Link to Original Source
Firefox

+ - 282 Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM', Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."
Link to Original Source
Open Source

+ - 191 Perl Gets $100,000 From a grateful craigslist->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation.
craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course Perl.
So you could see this as a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."
Link to Original Source
Programming

+ - 125 Wikipedia Chooses Lua As Its New Template Language->

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes "In an attempt to tackle the inefficient complexity of its current template system, Wikipedia will be adopting the Lua scripting language. Known most for its use in videogame scripting, particularly World of Warcraft, Lua is lightweight and designed for easy integration into existing applications. The transition is expected to begin after the release of MediaWiki 1.19, possibly in May."
Link to Original Source
Programming

+ - 98 BigCouch 0.4 moved in->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "BigCouch, the highly available, fault-tolerant, clustered version of Apache's CouchDB NoSQL JSON document database, has been updated to version 0.4. BigCouch appears to users as if it were a single instance of CouchDB, when, behind the scenes, it is actually an elastic cluster of nodes working to store, index and retrieve views of the data. BigCouch is developed and maintained by Cloudant and released under an Apache 2.0 licence. Cloudant have also restated their intent to donate and integrate the core functionality of BigCouch into the Apache CouchDB project.

Version 0.4 brings BigCouch up to date, in API terms, with CouchDB 1.1.1 and now features "zones", which offer more control over where documents are persisted in the cluster. For example, Cloudant uses the feature to ensure that a copy of a customer's data exists in both of their geographically separate data centres. The developers have also added the functionality of CouchDB's replicator DB for better control of data replication. Other changes in 0.4 include the addition of native SSL support and FreeBSD support. A full list of the changes is available in the change log. BigCouch 0.4 is available to download from the project's github repository."
Link to Original Source
Open Source

+ - 267 Rockbox dev interview: Open source firmware->

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes "I recently caught up with some of the key developers of Rockbox: An open source firmware replacement for the stock firmware shipped on MP3 players. The project, which has been active for over a decade, currently supports products from more than half a dozen manufacturers, including Apple, Arhcos, iRiver and Toshiba. It involves extensive reverse engineering to figure out how the devices' stock firmwares operate, as well as the challenge of developing for greatly varied targets. You can read the interview here (or the full Q&As with the project's founder and some of the developers involved in it)."
Link to Original Source
Australia

+ - 211 OzLog: unlimited private data retention for Oz law->

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes "delimiter.com.au has news on ISP data retention ideas in Australia.
Australia would like to follow the EU down the "European Directive on Data Retention" path.
Australian law enforcement agencies may have the option to request a log of all a users of interest telco usage without any review or time limits.
Another option would be for local politics eg. an activist community. Data retention over a postcode (suburb).
The data collection could also be out sourced to private contractors."
Link to Original Source
Android

+ - 126 Google's Android App Inventor Goes Open Source->

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "Google, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has decided to open source the Android App Inventor code. The developers at MIT stated that for the time being the App Inventor will not accept any contribution made to the code, however, it will definitely do so in the near future. Also, there will be periodic updates to the system to keep it at par with what's running on experimental MIT Systems. Android developer community will definitely welcome this move as Google had left the App Inventor in a Limbo after it decided to pull the plug from the project."
Link to Original Source
Firefox

+ - 173 Mozilla releases Rust 0.1->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "After more than five years in the pipeline, Mozilla Labs and the Rust community have released the first alpha of the Rust programming language compiler. The Rust language emphasizes concurrency and memory safety, and — if everything goes to plan — is ultimately being groomed to replace C++ as Mozilla’s compiled language of choice, with Firefox (or parts of it) eventually being re-written in Rust."
Link to Original Source
Education

+ - 111 Why We Should Teach Our Kids To Code->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "An article by Andy Young in The Kernel makes the case that lessons in programming should be compulsory learning for modern school kids. He says, 'Computers help us automate and repeat the many complicated steps that make up the search for the answer to some of our hardest problems: whether that’s a biologist attempting to model a genome or an office administrator tasked with searching an endless archive of data. The use of tools is a big part of what make us human, and the computer is humanity’s most powerful tool. ... The computer makes us more efficient, and enables and empowers us to achieve far more than we ever could otherwise. Yet the majority of us are entirely dependent on a select few, to enable us to achieve what we want. Programming is the act of giving computers instructions to perform. This is true whether the output is your word processor, central heating or aircraft control system. If you can’t code, you are forced to rely on those that can to ensure that you can benefit from the greatest tool at your disposal.'"
Link to Original Source
Android

+ - 119 App Inventor Code Released - But Still No Service->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "The way Google has treated the App Inventor community is probably the biggest negative mark against it in some time and yet few seem to care.
Google simply pulled the plug on the App Inventor servers at the end of December 2011 and MIT Is still months away from providing a replacement.
As a result, and despite warnings, some students had their projects locked up in the dead servers. We are now told that, due to some heroic work by Googlers, the projects have been recovered.
A more heroic action would have been to not turn the servers off until there had been a reasonable overlap between the old and the new service.
MIT has now announced that the source code is available for you to download. This is great news but most of the people wanting to use App Inventor for educational purposes don't want to or can't get involved in the technicalities of setting up App Engine servics and so on.
What this means is that at the moment the source code is open but the service is closed.
In a status update report we are told that MIT's efforts are going well and it is three weeks into its three-month project to get App Inventor up and running as a free service. This is astonishing. It isn't as if the transfer of App Inventor to MIT happened only three weeks ago.
Never mind getting excited about Raspberry Pi and other hardware bringing programming back to the masses — App Inventor is the sort of software that could do just that and Google can't even keep the servers running to provide continuity. What would it have cost them?"
Link to Original Source
Graphics

+ - 208 Ray Tracer in JavaScript->

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes "Just when you thought you had seen everything that could impress in JavaScript, along comes another crazy application.. Now we have a ray tracer that creates very realistic 3D scenes right in your browser. Probably not up to creating the next CGI movie but still a lot of fun to play with."
Link to Original Source
Programming

+ - 233 Mobile UIs: It's Developers vs. Users->

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes "Increased emphasis on distinctive smartphone UIs means even more headaches for cross-platform mobile developers, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister, especially as users continue to favor native over Web-based apps on mobile devices. 'Google and Microsoft are both placing renewed emphasis on their platforms' user experience. That means not just increased competition among smartphone and tablet platforms, but also new challenges for mobile application developers. ... The more the leading smartphone platform UIs differ from one another, the more effort is required to write apps that function comparably across all of them. Dialog boxes, screen transitions, and gestures that are appropriate for one platform might be all wrong for another. Coding the same app for three or four different sets of user interface guidelines adds yet another layer of cost and complexity to cross-platform app development — as if it wasn't already hard enough."
Link to Original Source

I know on which side my bread is buttered. -- John Heywood