PhoneGap - open source framework for mobile development with JavaScript.

The creators of PhoneGap think it’s nonsense that developers have to write the same app in several different programming languages to reach the widest swath of mobile phone customers, so they developed an open source, cross-platorm framework that bridges the gaps among them.

“PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you,” reads the Web site.

To get an idea of the types of mobile phone features PhoneGap supports currently (more are on the way), take a look at this quick reference chart the creators put together:

PhoneGap is the Adobe AIR of the IPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Just like Adobe AIR enables web developers to build Windows and OS X applications using the HTML and CSS skills that they know and love, PhoneGap allows web developers to build applications for the mobile devices with web technologies while taking advantage of the native mobile phone API’s.

Using PhoneGap, a developer need not write any Objective-C code and yet they can still have a proper app installed that is essentially a slightly customized PhoneGap application that sports a custom icon and a certain URL where application lives online (very much like AIR). When a user starts PhoneGap it essentially creates a browser on the mobile device and navigates to the specified URL where the author of the web page can access that particulars phone’s API through JavaScript like this:

getLocation();

//GAP will invoke this function once it has the location
function gotLocation(lat,lon){
    $(’lat’).innerHTML = “latitude: ” + lat;
    $(’lon’).innerHTML = “longitude: ” + lon;
}

Or access the accelerometer data like this:


function updateAccel(){
    $('accel').innerHTML = "accel:"+accelX + " "+accelY+" "+accelZ;
    setTimeout(updateAccel,100);
}


Seems like RIM needs some applications built on this API. And then all those RIM users might be able to run all the cool iPhone apps on there blackberries.

For a quick introduction to PhoneGap, watch this three-minute video:

Is Firefox dying a slow death?

Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0. The best thing about this new beta is speed — it’s 25% faster on V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to original beta version. Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill.

Wait a minute? Isn’t this article about Firefox dying a slow death … YES, it is and I am getting there.

Run Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, and Firefox is embarrassingly slow. It’s not even in the same league. It’s an old man on the running track trying to compete against a 20 year-old.

IE 8, Chrome and Firefox

The latest IE 8 absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their there stuff together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.

In Firefox All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser Clunky and slow cross platform UI implementation

When I use to run Firefox a few months ago before switching to Chrome I could feel Firefox getting slower and slower and slower as the hours of use ticked by until finally getting annoyed enough to have to quit the app and restart it. Doesn’t seem like a big deal but I would end up restarting Firefox three to four times every day just to clear out whatever junk it seems to accumulate.

Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from “fast and simplified feature set” to “include lots of features to make the web fun and easy.” They’re working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome and Safari—the new JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.

The Mozilla 2.0 [mozillazine.org] project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone’s attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and IE 8. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.

Cloud computing portability, where are we heading?

Over the last few months there has been a growing amount of concern around Cloud portability or in other words Cloud API’s portability issues. With Cloud service providers multiplying in numbers everyday, and almost all of them using there own proprietary API’s, moving from one cloud service provider to another is going to be a huge initiative in the near future thus consuming both time and money.

Lets first discuss what cloud API portability really means?

Cloud portability means ensuring that an application has a common method of programmatic interaction to the underlying resources and services. More simply, Cloud Compatibility means your application and data will always work the same way regardless of the cloud provider or platform, internally or externally, open or closed.

So what is the problem?

As we saw with the recent demise of Coghead. Cloud and platform-as-a-service application portability are sure to be big issues this year, as the economy continues to be a question mark. I highly doubt that Coghead will be the only service provider that fades out, leaving customers to fend for themselves. APIs are nice, and open standards are necessary.

This is really needed now -

I believe that its about time someone need to set the API standards to ensure portability when shifting vendors for cloud services. May be its the time for Amazon’s and Microsoft’s to come together and have a consensus on a common API or a Virtualization format that should be used by all cloud service vendors. 

 

Different types of Cloud API’s used right now as we talk -

Control APIs, which allow cloud infrastructure to be added, reconfigured, or removed in real time, either by human control or programmatically based on traffic, outages, or other factors

Data APIs, which are the conduits through which data flows in and out of the cloud.

Application functionality APIs, which enable the functionality with which end users interact, such as shopping carts, wikis, and widgets.

What is been done already?

One such example that address several of these concepts is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). The format is an “open” standard proposed by the DMTF for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or more generally software to be run in virtual machines. 

However, one of the problems a lot of these system management standards are missing is any kind of usage outside of the traditional “enterprise” system management platforms or in the case of VMWare or Microsoft, they are simply limited to their own platforms - interoperable, but only if you’re using our software.

Where are we heading?

At this point it seems like we are heading towards coexistence of a number of mini clouds. Major cloud players will have there own mini clouds and there cloud API’s will be portable within there platforms.

Please add on to the thoughts and leave your comments, I will probably do another post soon. if you have a better vision / suggestion of where cloud computing portability is heading and how major players should be playing this cloud game, you can leave your comments or email me at info[at]coolwebdeveloper[dot]com.

Tips for using Twitter and not getting overwhelmed

About a week ago at work one of my coworkers saw the Twitter window at my desk. And he asked me “what do you use twitter for, I have tried this about an year ago, but it seemed just another way of fooling around and wasting time. And not to mention the distraction it brings to your desk.”

Well I gave him an honest answer and I am going to share with you what I told him -I do find twitter overwhelming in the beginning. And I used to spend a lot of my time reading tweets and participating in open discussions. Though I was spending a lot of my time on twitter, I would still not say it was a time waste. If you are following the right people and know the right tools, you can accumulate a lot of knowledge and can use twitter to expand your business by developing relationships.

e.g. If you are a startup blogger and you know nothing about online marketing, I would suggest you go to http://twitter.grader.com/search here you can search other users specialized in your niche and can interact with them directly, so you can search for online marketing in our case. Most of the times users on twitter are very helpful and knowledgeable.

@problogger, @shoemoney, @mashable are some of the users that I have been following even before I started blogging.

I’ve also found that Twitter isn’t something you can explain, and it’s not something you can understand until you’ve used it for at least a few days. You have to use it to get it.

Follow a very Moderate approach

When I first started using Twitter I’d wake up in the morning and try to read through all the tweets, or at least scan them. Then I’d try to keep up periodically throughout the day. It was stressful. And i was falling back on a lot of other important tasks.

So remember DO NOT TRY TO KEEP UP

Twitter will be there for you and you can login anytime to find all the useful tweets, don’t sit there refreshing your screen to wait for more tweets, you can use twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/) to go through all the tweets that you have missed at any time of the day.

Follow people that you can learn from

Don’t follow people simply because they follow you back. Also by following a lot of people you will fed with a lot of not so useful information which defeats the very purpose of you using Twitter, unless you have some other good reason.

Don’t be on Twitter all the time

Personally I always had hard time concentrating on other tasks if my twitter window is open. So like I said, I close it most of the time and open it a few times a day to see what’s going on. And to market my BLOG links or any other affiliations that make sense to me.

There should be a Full Stop on your tweets

Make sure you don’t tweet whole day long. Your followers might get annoyed and might stop following you. Tweet only about something that makes sense.

Reduce the number of feeds and emails.

If you use Twitter regularly, you can probably reduce your need for RSS (my favorite blogs are on Twitter anyways), email (you can DM people), IM, news sites, and so on. It’s nice to consolidate, as long as you use it intelligently. This will help in saving a lot of time by replacing a lot of stuff with twitter.

Twitter is a wonderful tool if used right. Wish you all the best for your tweets. Please leave any further comments or suggestions about using Twitter effectively and not wasting a whole lot of time while tweeting.

Follow me on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/coolwebdev

Motivational phrases for startup blogger’s

When I first started blogging, my main idea behind blogging was to gather information and keep myself up to date with the info for efficiently making my regular work decisions and to be on top of emerging technologies for professional development. I have subscribed to a number of RSS feeds and I was a regular gold member and reader of number of tech blogs.

While following this habit my passion grew and I started my own blog to share my ideas and information gathered from my day to day work. I was getting around 200 hits a day at that time.

That is when a friend of mine suggested me to try making some money out of my blog. I have tried since then and it took me some time to start earning some amount of money. I would like to add here that first and foremost purpose of this BLOG is still to share accurate info and to help other techies for no cost involved.

Back to making money -

I know its very easy to give up initially and I have experienced this myself. A lot of blogger’s step in the blogging world thinking of making easy bucks. But slowly they began to realize that its not an easy job and requires a lot of hard work and patience, and on top of all a very knowledgeable and a very smart head above your shoulders.

Well I am sharing some of the motivational phrases that I have used for being energetic and motivational all the time. If you are a start up blogger I will suggest you print them out and hang them on a wall somewhere in your home office or behind your computer.

These phrases will always remind you to of the perseverance required for running a successful BLOG. And some of these phrases come from very successful blogger’s who are earning more then six figures. And always remember one thing - Always treat people as people, You will meet Internet personalities and famous people over your life span, but never undermine yourself. And treat all as people you meet everyday.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

“Yesterday’s failures are today’s seeds that must be diligently planted to be able to abundantly harvest tomorrow’s successes.”

“Don’t let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you’re crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you’re lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you’re greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn’t understand.”

“Never Give Up”

“If you can make something for a little less than your competition, and sell it for a little more, then you’re doing OK.”

“Choose to blog about something that you can see yourself still blogging about in 3-4 years - it takes that long to build a successful blog.”

“You have to earn their trust, before you can make a successful sale.”

“you are enough”. You are enough to become a millionaire, you are enough to have an attractive partner, you are enough to fulfill your dreams. You don’t need to keep adding things to yourself, you need to take away the things that hold you back such as doubt, fear and limiting beliefs. You are enough to do [insert anything here].

“Follow your passion”

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

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