WebProNews

Tag: web development

  • Adobe Introduces Edge Tools For HTML5 Development

    Adobe Introduces Edge Tools For HTML5 Development

    Adobe and its products have been instrumental in constructing how we view the Web. Flash was, and still is, a major innovator in the Web-based video and gaming arena. The company, however, saw that HTML5 will one day be the future. That’s why Adobe has begun investing heavily in it through various software like Adobe Shadow. This morning, the company announced its new plan to take Web development and HTML5 even further.

    At its Create the Web event in San Francisco, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch revealed the company’s bid to help build the future of the Web – Edge Tools and Services. The new tools take all of Adobe’s previous efforts in HTML5 development, and combines them with brand new tools that will help creative and technical minds alike create Web sites.

    Edge Tools and Services includes the following software:

  • Edge Animate – A motion and interaction design tool that allows users to bring animated content to the web using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
  • Edge Inspect – An inspection and preview tool that allows front-end web developers and designers to efficiently preview and debug HTML content on mobile devices.
  • Edge Code – A code editor, built on the Brackets open source project, optimized for web designers and developers working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • Edge Reflow – A responsive web design tool to help users create layouts and visual designs with CSS, the standard for styling HTML content.
  • Edge Web Fonts – A free web font service for using a growing library of open source fonts on websites and in apps.
  • Typekit – A service that gives designers and developers access to a library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites.
  • PhoneGap Build – A service for packaging mobile apps built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript for popular mobile platforms.

    • Edge Reflow was only shown in preview form today and will be available for general preview later this year. The rest of the software, including Edge Animate, Inspect, PhoneGap Build and WebFonts will be available today. Edge Code will also be available, but it’s still in preview.

    “We are excited to put a powerful new set of HTML5 tools into the hands of web designers and developers and can’t wait to experience the beautiful websites, digital content and mobile apps they’ll create,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, interactive development at Adobe. “We are passionate about enabling creative people to do anything they can imagine with web technologies, which is why we’re contributing to the web platform and making the Edge Tools & Services available for free, including the first release of Edge Animate.”

    Adobe hopes that these new tools will help developers and creators alike innovate the Web, including four key areas: layout, foundational graphics, cinematic visual effects, and typography. These four areas are central to the evolution of the Web by making it more expressive.

    To help get people started, Adobe will be giving away Edge Animate in Creative Cloud for free starting today. After the introductory period, it will go back up to its normal $499 perpetual license price. Those who don’t have that kind of money laying around can opt for the much cheaper $14.99 per month licensing fee.

    Those looking for the best bang for their buck, Adobe will be offering all of its new Edge Tools alongside CS6 in its Creative Cloud membership. It’s $49.99 a month under an annual contract.

    It’s not quite there yet, but the future of the Internet is going to the Web. HTML5 is heralded as what’s leading the charge to this brave new future. Adobe wants a part of that, and the company’s new Edge tools helps get a foot in the door near the beginning. Now it’s up to designers and developers to create the future.

  • Google+ Developers Discuss Google+ History API

    Google’s Google+ History API was recently revealed. It’s been compared to Facebook’s Open Graph, but uses Google+ connections to bring in updates from third-party services (Twitter, Foursquare, etc.). It also lets you choose what data from these services you want shared. The API collects what users have done with the apps, and adds it to their personal pages for sharing at the user’s discretion.

    Google has uploaded a new developer Hangout about the API, so you can learn more about developing with it. Specifically, the video looks at a ToDo list application developed using the API and GO on AppEngine.

    In case you missed it, here’s a session from Google I/O all about the API:

  • Google Discusses The Content API For Google Shopping

    Google has uploaded a recent Google Plus hangout it hosted, discussing the Content API for Google Shopping. In the video, Google discusses various community questions, library support and feature requests.

    A number of links are discussed in the video, so if you need to reference any of them, you can find them on the video page on YouTube.

    You can find Google’s list of best practices for the Content API here.

  • Twitter Celebrates One Year Of Bootstrap With An Update

    Twitter is one of the friendliest companies in regards to the open source movement. They have open sourced much of the software they use to run Twitter on a day-to-day basis with one of the biggest releases being Bootstrap. It’s now one-year-old and Twitter wants to celebrate.

    It was announced on Monday that Twitter Bootstrap has been updated to version 2.1. The release comes as Bootstrap has proven itself to be very popular in its first year of existence. The new version aims to make it even more popular through ease of use and expanded functionality.

    First things first, the team at Twitter wants to thank the community for making Bootstrap the most popular project on GitHub. It reached that status after only a few months after launch. Since then, the team has been adding new features and bug fixes to code.

    The popularity of Bootstrap can not be understated. Twitter points out that many large organizations like NASA and the White House use Bootstrap to create new products and services. Startups like SoundReady and Jetstrap also used Bootstrap to make a stellar first impression.

    All this has led to Bootstrap 2.1. With the latest release, the team focused on simplicity. To that end, the documentation has been overhauled for those just getting into Bootstrap or Web development. They also created more live examples for those who learn better by seeing instead of reading. For those already using it, the team has patched up over 100 issues while adding new features.

    For a full list of new features, check out the Bootstrap blog. You can grab Bootstrap 2.1 here.

  • Here’s 40 Minutes Worth of Chrome WebRTC Developer Discussion

    If your’e looking to develop for WebRTC, you may be interested in the following Google+ hangout video Google has uploaded to YouTube.

    If your’e not familiar with WebRTC, it’s a free, open source project designed to enable web browsers with real-time communications capabilities via Javascript APIs. Google’s Chrome team creates and maintains the Web RTC site, but the project is supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera.

    Now, watch a handful developers discuss it:

  • Treehouse Is Growing, Is About To Offer Android Courses

    Web design and development site Treehouse is gaining users. Users that are willing to pay at least $25 a month to build their skills.

    Over the weekend, Treehouse surpassed 12,000 users. “That’s not just 12,000 folks signed up to an email list for free classes they don’t get much out of,” the company tells WebProNews. “That’s 12,000 students paying $25/month for access and regularly spending time learning.”

    Treehouse does have videos that are free to watch, but only a small portion of them are free. “To learn from all of our courses, you need to pay $25 per month,” CEO Ryan Carson tells us.

    Treehouse does have a couple of different plans. That’s the cheap one – the “Silver Membership”. There’s also a “Gold Membership,” for $49 a month with some additional perks.

    Treehouse offers courses in web design, web development and iOS development. Carson says the interest in web design is greater than both of the others.

    On the advantages and challenges of developing for iOS versus the web, Carson says, “The advantage of iOS is that there is a huge app economy in the Apple App Store and the Android App Store. It’s a brand new channel to customers that was untapped before. The disadvantage to iOS apps are that the iteration cycle is much slower as each time you change the app, you have to re-submit it to the app store, wait for approval and then it goes live.”

    There are plans to add Android developer training. In fact, it will be going live in a few weeks, Carson says.

    Treehouse will also soon launch courses in PHP, WordPress, jQuery and some other unnamed areas. Without getting into specifics, he says they’re also going to make learning more fun.

  • Netflix Is Now Streaming Content To You Via IPv6

    The global launch of IPv6 last month went without a hitch. All the companies involved can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. While some of the companies haven’t fully detailed their involvement in the launch, Netflix has been surprisingly open about the challenges of dealing with IPv6.

    The launch of IPv6 for Netflix was all about making sure nobody lost their service while they made the change. That’s why they focused exclusively on the PC/Mac platforms for the launch because they met all the requirements needed for the switch. The interesting part is the problems they ran into.

    Due to the large amounts of data they process, it was found that there was a leak in the IPv6 code that caused the cache that processes the IPv6 to hang. It just goes to show you that IPv6 can not be treated the same as IPv4 when programming for it. In a similar vein, they wanted to use a program that bypasses DNS on IPv4 on IPv6, but found that they are not compatible.

    It’s important to note that IPv6 is still largely prone to bugs and other mishaps. Netflix had to start with only one state getting IPv6 support and then expanding it as things began to go well. Switching to IPv6 is not as simple as flicking a switch and Netflix’ experience proves that.

    IPv6 is growing steadily and Netflix can be thanked for that. It was found that they contributed to the highest gains in IPv6 traffic when it launched. They also have the second largest domain processing IPv6 traffic.

    IPv6 is the future of the internet and it’s here to stay. It’s pretty awesome to see consumer applications like Netflix are leading the charge instead of the more tech-savvy applications. It shows that demand for IPv6 is strong and consumers are pushing the trend.

  • Sit A Spell And Let Me Tell You The Tale Of HTML5 [Infographic]

    Sit A Spell And Let Me Tell You The Tale Of HTML5 [Infographic]

    Since its introduction in 2008, HTML5 has been heralded as the future of the Web. No longer would we be held back by individual plugins like Flash. The Web would be a free and open place with the many APIs provided by HTML5 leading the way. Where did the Web revolution start and where is it going? Let this lovely infographic from Wix lead the way.

    HTML5’s humble origins began in 2004 with the creation of “WHAT.” The organization gathered members from leading tech companies like Apple, Mozilla and Opera to develop what would become HTML5. Two years later in October 2006, the World Wide Web Consortium offered their expertise to further develop HTML5.

    The magic year was 2008 when Ian Hickson published the first draft of HTML5. It was pretty barebones at launch, but the best was yet to come. The best was only going to come with major adoption from the big players in the browser market with Mozilla leading the way by being the first to implement HTML5 capability into Firefox 3.

    What really kicked off the development of HTML5, however, was one Steve Jobs. He famously rejected Adobe’s Flash in an open letter back in 2010 by saying that it would not be allowed on any of Apple’s iOS devices. Adobe themselves would follow suit two years later by halting development of Flash for Android devices.

    Google made great strides at the end of 2010 by opening the Chrome Web Store in HTML5. Other companies like Pandora also began to experiment by switching over their applications to HTML5 to rave reviews. LinkedIn is the latest to join the HTML5 party by releasing a 95 percent HTML5 native iPad app.

    So where do we go from here? Research has indicated that there will be over 1 billion HTML5-enabled smartphones in people’s hands by the beginning of 2013. Couple that with the fact that people are increasingly relying on smartphones for Web browsing and you have the HTML5 revolution kicking off in full swing.

    We don’t know what the future holds, but HTML5 is sure to be a part of it. The relentless efforts of companies like Mozilla and Google are making sure that the Web is free and open for all to use.

    by Wix. Browse more data visualizations.

  • Google I/O Lingers On In The Hearts And Minds Of Android Developers

    Android developers, take note: Google I/O still has plenty of goodies for you. After all the previous video tutorials and information sessions, you can still take on some Android development knowledge, right? Google has uploaded some great videos that covers everything Android from developing Android apps that use Web APIs to how to best use NFC and Android Beam.

    The first video talks up building Android apps with Web APIs. Here’s the description:

    Google offers a large and growing set of back-end services, from AdSense to Tasks to Calendar to Google+, that can enrich your app, and increasingly they have a uniform set of APIs. This session discusses how to use them efficiently and securely, including authenticating safely and with good user experience, and describes Android-specific app-level optimizations.

    The next is all about Google Cloud Messaging for Android. Here’s what you need to know:

    Cloud-to-device-messaging (C2DM) is coming out of beta and getting a new name: Google Cloud Messaging for Android. GCM for Android incorporates the lessons we learned in the C2DM beta, many of which take the form of new features. This session will cover the new service end-to-end and in detail.

    Up next should be of particular interest for those who want to take advantage of Google Drive on Android. Here’s the lowdown:

    This session goes through how to write Drive apps that synchronize files with Android devices. We’ll also go into how to open files on Android devices, or create new files from this environment.

    Last but certainly not least, developers can learn all about NFC and its Android Beam counterpart. Here’s the skinny:

    A session covering the developer-oriented NFC features we’ve been adding to the Android platform. Learn how to use Android Beam to add magic sharing abilities to your application, and see what other new and exciting NFC features we’re working on.

  • These 2 Google I/O Videos Will Teach You All About The Dart Programming Language

    Google has been uploading tons of videos of sessions from Google I/O, and these two deal specifically with the Dart programming language, so if you’re looking to learn more about it, and were unable to attend the event, you’re in luck.

    The first video is from the session: Dart – A Modern Web Language. Here’s the video’s description:

    The two creators of Dart will discuss the rationale behind Dart’s design and its impact on web scalability and performance. They’ll also present how Dart helps developers innovate by increasing their productivity without breaking backwards compatibility.

    The second is from the session: Migrating Code from GWT to Dart. Here’s the description:

    Curious to learn how to port your GWT code to Dart? In this session, we will go over Dart equivalents for various GWT libraries and idioms, techniques for interoperating with existing GWT server backends, and tricks to allow Dart code to talk to existing GWT and Javascript code.

    According to Google, you should learn Dart because:

  • Not about ‘best’, all languages have strengths and weaknesses
  • It is fun to learn new languages, bilingualism is good for the brain and career
  • Dart is an important new language for Structured Web Applications
  • You can’t really evaluate a language without using it first

  • Google Shows Developers How To Be On Target With Dart

    Google’s open source programming language, Dart, was one of the few things that didn’t get a lot of love from Google’s main keynotes. It was to be expected as Dart isn’t exactly the most exciting of subjects for the press. The press is now gone though and developers are taking over. Time for some Dart action.

    Google has been pushing building apps for the open Web during year’s Google I/O conference. The newly added features to Apps Script and Drive will hopefully kick start an entirely new generation of apps built for the Web. If you’re going to start building those apps, you’re going to want to program with a language built for those apps. For what it’s worth, Google thinks Dart is that language.

    The Google Dart team presented a few apps at I/O that showed off the power of Dart. What advantages does Dart provide to developers? Quite a few with fast speeds, great visuals and offline apps being a few of the advantages.

    The future of the Web is in your hands and Google wants you to use Dart as the main power source behind it. With this kind of instruction, it’s at least going to be easy.

  • Event Pages Keep Chrome Slim And Running Strong

    I don’t use a lot of Chrome extensions, but I use a lot of Firefox extensions. I’m going to assume that extensions add a lot of weight to both browsers. It’s worse when you realize that half of those extensions are only used some of the time, yet are still adding to the memory that is being used.

    Firefox still sucks when it comes to managing extensions, but Google is being proactive about fixing the problem. One of the previous solutions was through the use of background pages. It allowed the extension to offload all of its script onto a page that would help reduce the memory footprint of the browser. The only problem is that it continuously ran in the, well, background.

    To help fix that problem, background pages have become event pages. Event pages are a little magical because they only exist when the extension needs it. Once the extension stops running, the event page vanishes freeing up even more memory.

    To make event pages even better, Google will be releasing three new APIs that can work in tandem with event pages to manage memory and extensions. The first is the alarms API that will allow an extension to awake itself at set times. A new event API will let extensions when they have been installed and when they’re being unloaded. They are also developing a new version of the webRequest API that allows extensions do network interception without needing a background page.

    Event pages will be hitting the Chrome beta and stable channels later this summer. They are currently available in the developer channel for experimentation. If you want to build your extension with event pages, you should check out the documentation before you start building.

  • Google Talks Dart Editor Before I/O Starts

    Google Talks Dart Editor Before I/O Starts

    Can you believe that Google I/O is almost upon us? The gaming industry had their E3 and Apple had their WWDC, but now it’s Google’s time to shine. What are we going to see? More Google Glasses or maybe even a Google tablet? Google doesn’t care about any of that right now and neither should you. You need to get caught up on your programming skills before heading out to all the developer conferences at I/O.

    In the spirit of preparing your minds for the influx of information that you are most likely to be bombarded with at I/O, Google has created the Google I/O 101 video series. For those that still remember college after waking up from a bourbon bottle on the eve of your graduation, 101 is the most basic course available to students. In that sense, Google has prepared various introductory lectures on the stuff you’ll be seeing at I/O.

    One of the first videos out of the gate comes from Google’s Seth Ladd. It’s all about Dart, Google’s programming language that’s built for the Web. It’s completely open source and super awesome. Google will be hosting two sessions directly about Dart, but you can bet that a lot of the Chrome sessions will have heavy Dart influences. That’s why you should get all the learning in now before the event.

    The below video will show you how to use the Dart Editor. It’s assumed that you will be using the Dart Editor during the Chrome sessions to manipulate the code that you use to build dynamic Web pages. A lot of Web developers probably already know how to use the Dart Editor, but the video should be a good refresh nonetheless.

  • Mozilla Thimble Makes Web Page Design Simple

    If you’re reading this, that means that you consume the Web in some fashion. You read, watch and play with all sorts of neat things all over the Internet. Do you create the Web though? A lot less people do that because code is complicated. Mozilla has an answer and it might help turn the Web from a culture of consumption to a culture of creation.

    Mozilla has announced the launch of Thimble. Now what is Thimble besides a poorly laid out metaphor for kissing in Peter Pan? In the words of Mozilla’s Matt Thompson:

    It’s an intuitive visual editor that lets you write and edit HTML right in your browser, preview and correct your work, and then publish and share fully functional web pages with a single click.

    That actually sounds pretty amazing. One of the major hurdles of developing in HTML is that you can’t actually see what your Web site looks like until you’re finishing with the code. There’s not a lot of options out there either in terms of plugins that allow you to see the changes being made by your code in real time. Thimble appears to rectify both of these issues.

    While Thimble is great for the programmer who wants a simultaneous code/visual editor, it’s even better for the amateur or the guy who doesn’t know a single thing about HTML programming. It includes a number of starter projects that will help coders at any skill level get started on coding and making Web pages.

    On top of the Thimble announcement, Mozilla has also rolled out a new Web site for Webmaker. It’s tied together with Thimble to give amateurs all the tools they need to start making Web pages in seconds. It also contains separate projects that netizens will want to take a look at including tweaking blog templates, creating interactive videos and making 3D Web pages.

    To join in on Google’s Summer of Code, Mozilla has announced the Summer Code Party. The key difference between the two is that everyone is invited to Mozilla’s party. It starts on June 23 and signals the beginning of the “Global Weekend of Code” that will encourage people from all over the world to develop Web pages with friends and family.

    If you want to get started on your own Thimble project, you can head over to the Web site right now to get creating. It promises to be simple and easy enough that even the most coding illiterate person can learn how to code as long as they apply themselves.

  • CDNPAL Kickstarter Project Aims To Build Search Engine Using Facebook’s Open Graph

    This week, we reported on a Kickstarter project called Gooey Search, which strives to be a “Google on steroids (with privacy). While poking around through Kickstarter, we noticed another search engine project in the works called CDNPAL, billed as “an American search alternative to Google.”

    “There are problems with PageRank and Rankdex in that pages linked to by high ranking websites may not be indicative of a positive reference to that linked page or document,” the Kickstarter page says. “For instance, you can have a link from your high scoring website saying, I really hate x,y,z and that linked page will now inherit a higher rank from the page even though that was not the intention.”

    “The other problem is UGC or user generated content, where a website may have a high ranking score based on its popularity, but the authors are random people who arbitrarily join the website, and those people who have little or no history with the score instantly inherit the ranking mechanism,” it continues. “Another stinging problem with the PageRank system is that false or misleading information can rise to the top of search results due to the purely automated nature of the sorting of World Wide Web content.”

    This is how they’re putting it for those who don’t understand the details of how search works:

    So what we are really saying is that for the past 15 years the web has been largely dominated by Google’s way of organizing what you search for. We have a new way of organizing the World Wide Web that we think will work better.

    Here’s a video from the guys behind the project, describing their efforts:

    CDNPAL re-indexes web pages as Open Graph objects, which users can use in social graphs “in conjunction with your own social information or to use in any way from presentations to applications,” the page explains.

    “At this point, we have modified the crawler to only grab Open Graph information, or create it from document data, for later compilation,” the page explains in an update. “The crawler also records network properties such as the location of the remote website server, and the contact information such as geo-location of the OG content by business address, or other location hints. By focusing only on what we want to achieve and leaving traditional search behind we have a greater chance at giving users something brand new.”

    Here’s a flow chart diagramming the process:

    CDNPAL flow chart

    So far, the project has attracted 15 backers at $269. It has 9 days to go to hit its goal of $100,000. Money isn’t all the project needs, however. They’re also calling for developers to help write code.

    “One of our large problems is the high cost of educated and or experienced Java programming labor in Southern California and the legal overhead of having employees and the paperwork,” says CDNPAL. “So we have some programmers we work with out of the country, but ultimately we need people here that we can do status meetings with [us] every day. We are also Java programmers and need to make our team bigger.”

    I find it interesting that they’re using the Open Graph as the basis for the search engine, while there is a fair amount of speculation (and possibly some evidence) that Facebook is working on search itself.

    Do you think Facebook’s Open Graph is a good approach to search?

  • Google Apps Script Gets Libraries And Versions

    Google Apps Script is a powerful tool for automation. It has a few downsides like not being able to save certain queries that you might call for multiple scripts It also doesn’t make it easy to take changes to XML formats into account when updating old script. Google has a few ideas to make these processes a little easier.

    Gustavo Moura of the Google Docs team announced the availability of libraries and versions in Apps Script today. These two additions drastically change what can be done with Apps Script. The library functionality will be especially useful for those who write a lot of code using App Script.

    The first step is of course writing the library itself. It’s pretty straightforward, but Moura provides an example of a library he wrote to call the WeatherService. The best part about the library creation tool in Apps Script is that it creates documentation based on the code comments. You can also hide certain bits of code from the user by ending its name with an underscore.

    After you put all that hard work into writing the library, you will obviously want to save it. In Apps Script, the saving is now done through versions. It’s just like any version of software where the last stable version is available for all to use while you work on updates to the actual script. When you update the script to a stable state, publish a new version.

    There will be many libraries over the next few weeks, months and years as more people begin building in Apps Script. You might even want to make use of the libraries that these users create. To share a library with another user, all you need to provide is your permission and a project key.

    Once you get knee deep into library creation and using other libraries, there are three features that developers will want to take advantage of:

    Documentation – In the Script Libraries dialog, you can click on the title link to navigate to documentation page for the library.

    Development Mode can be used to test changes to a library without saving a new version.

    Autocomplete in Script Editor – Typing in the editor will auto-complete your library function names.

    Google already has a decently sized list of script libraries for users to play around with. The libraries range from the aforementioned WeatherService to a YouTube library that can read different kinds of video feeds. Check them out here to see if any of them tickle your fancy.

  • Adobe ColdFusion 10 Launches With Increased HTML5 Support

    Adobe ColdFusion 10 Launches With Increased HTML5 Support

    After coming off of the successful launch of Creative Suite 6, Adobe has not been resting on its laurels. They’re back again with another product release that should go hand-in-hand with CS6’s HTML5 features.

    Adobe announced today that ColdFusion 10 is available to Web developers. If you’re familiar with ColdFusion, then you should know that it’s Adobe’s server side technology for developers to create Web applications using the Java EE platform. The big addition this time is increased HTML5 support.

    Adobe boasts that the newest version of ColdFusion 10 accelerates the Web development process by reducing “complex business logic into a few lines of code.” It does through the power afforded by HTML5 including Web-sockets, video players, geo-tagging and interactive charting.

    “In the world of rich internet applications, the latest HTML5 standards are pushing the limits of what developers can achieve on the Web,” said Tridib Roy Chowdhury, senior director of Products & GM-Web and eLearning, Adobe. “With the increase of content consumption on mobile devices and tablets, it has become critical for companies to provide a rich and consistent brand experience on mobile. Adobe is at the forefront of the HTML5 revolution, and ColdFusion 10 delivers the first server side solutions to help develop interactive HTML5 applications to deliver richer user experiences across multiple screens from desktops to tablets and smartphones. In ColdFusion 10, we’ve focused on helping enterprise Web developers improve their productivity in development, deployment and maintenance and helped them easily leverage the latest technologies of the day.”

    As mentioned, the biggest new feature is HTML5 integration. While providing all of the above technologies powered by HTML5, it also gives developers a choice in terms of publishing. They can either push out data to multiple clients or go for a point-to-point data push.

    ColdFusion 10 also promises to be the fastest version of the software yet. It has replaced Adobe’s JRun software with the open-source Tomcat to increase the performance of ColdFusion. The move to Tomcat brings with it a large development community that will keep it up to speed with the latest Web standards.

    The newest version of ColdFusion also comes with access to a large repository of client-side HTML5 charts. Developers can easily implement them into their apps using the built-in chart functionality. These charts can also run in Flash so more reason to integrate CS6 with ColdFusion 10.

    Following the example of Flash’s latest update method, the ColdFusion Administrator will now notify developers when updates are available. Developers can also opt-in for the one-click Hotfix installer to save time.

    As always, new versions of Adobe products come with a wide range of security enhancements. ColdFusion 10 is no different as it utilizes the latest security standards to protect applications from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery.

    ColdFusion 10 is available in three editions with one of them being free. The Enterprise edition of the software will set you back $8,499 while the standard edition is a bit more manageable at $1,499. The developer edition which can only be used for development purposes is free to download and use. As with other Adobe products, customers who have previous editions of ColdFusion will be able to upgrade at a much lower cost.

    If you want a more visual guide to the new features in ColdFusion 10, check out Adobe’s video guide.

  • Google: How to Find Other Sites Linked to Yours?

    If you’ve ever wondered how to track which pages are linked to your own, Google has been working on a solution for you. It comes in the form of some refinements to their tools for analytics. They put it like this:

    “Now you can see all the backlink URL’s, post titles, and more right within the new Social reports.”

    Here’s how Google+Analytics+Blog%29″>they explain it:

    “The concept of trackbacks, a protocol by which different sites could notify each other of referencing links, first emerged back in 2002. Since then, the blogosphere has grown in leaps and bounds, but the requirement for each site to explicitly implement this protocol has always stood in the way of adoption. If only you could crawl the web and build an accurate link graph. The good news is we already do that at Google, and are now providing this insight to Google Analytics users.”

    “These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.”

    So if this sounds like something you could use, get started with Google Analytics right away. If you want to know more, you can click here for an in-depth example of how it works. There’s a lot of resources within Google Analytics and there’s also a lot of ways to get help using them. Enjoy!

  • App Engine 1.6.5 Released, Brings New Datastore Features

    Many businesses and developers rely on Google’s App Engine to deliver their content to the Web. It’s a good thing then that Google is not being lazy with constant updates being made to the platform. Yesterday marked the release of version 1.6.5 of the Google App Engine.

    The first update is being made to the Datastore. Google is introducing an experimental type of query called a projection query. The company says that this new type of query has the “same cost and performance characteristics as keys-only queries but return entity objects populated only with the requested properties.”

    On top of that, there are some other new features coming to Datastore as well. Here’s the full feature list:

    Each entity group now has a numeric version property that strictly increases on every entity group change. You can use this counter, for example, to easily and consistently cache the results of an ancestor query, such as the count of all entities in an entity group

    The Datastore Admin now allows you to restore individual Kinds from an existing backup, abort in-progress backups, and view more detailed backup and restore information.

    For Python users, the @db.transactional decorator now supports concurrent transactions. We’ve also expanded the options available for the db.run_in_transtion_options() function.

    There are some new features coming to the Images API as well. The first is that the Images API can now access image objects stored in Google Cloud Storage. The second has URLs generated by get_serving_url or getServingUrl can now be generated to serve over HTTPS.

    Google is also including additional Request Headers in the newest release. They’ve added Region, City and LatLng headers to each request “where this information can be inferred from the IP address.”

    A small note to Java developers, you now must include the threadsafe element in your appengine-web.xml file. If you don’t, it will cause an error in the dev appserver.

    Finally, Google is looking for Trusted Testers for Task Queue Statistics. The feature allows you to “fetch statistics and information about your task queue from within your application.” If that sounds like something you would want to test, you can apply to be a Trusted Tester here.

  • Google Updates Its Deprecation Policy

    Google Updates Its Deprecation Policy

    Software gets old. It’s an unfortunate truth that many developers have to live with. It’s even harder when you have to deal with software that may be deprecating and it’s hard to know when official support is going to dry up.

    Google is hoping to make all of this easier by changing up their software deprecation policies. These include the changing some APIs to a one-year deprecation policy while just retiring some APIs outright. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of it to see which APIs are being affected.

    First up is the change to a one-year deprecation policy. They are not deprecation the APIs themselves, just the policy. The four APIs that are affected by this new policy are the Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Maps/Earth API and the YouTube API. The App Engine, Maps and YouTube API will wind down from their three-year API deprecation period in April 2014 and transition to the new policy. Cloud Storage is keeping its current one-year policy.

    For the above mentioned APIs, Google is writing a new policy that is clearer and more concise. Google says that the new policy “simply states that we will strive to provide one year notice before making breaking changes.”

    A metric ton of other APIs will be losing their deprecation policies. To be clear again, Google is not removing these APIs. To give developers time to get things up to snuff, the current deprecation policies for these APIs will not be removed until April 2015. The current list of APIs to lose their policies are as follows: Accounts API, AdSense Host API, Chart Tools API, Checkout API, Contacts API, Custom Search API, Documents API, Doubleclick for Publishers API, Feed API, Google Apps Admin APIs, Libraries API, Orkut API, Picasa Web Albums API, and Prediction API.

    In sadder news, Google will be retiring some of their older APIs. These include the Moderator API, Legacy Portable Contacts API, ClientLogin, AuthSub, OAuth 1.0, and Google Chart Tools. They are also retiring the non-current versions of Spreadsheets, Contacts, Documents List and Freebase APIs. Last but not least, the Finance and Feedburner Administrative APIs will finally be retired after being depreciated last year.

    While some developers may cry fowl at these changes, Google assures you that they’re only doing this to make it easier for people to stay on top of the current tools available to them. This should allow everybody to be a level playing field in terms of the newest technology.

    What do you think of Google’s new deprecation policies? What about their massive removal of several API policies? Let us know in the comments.

  • Mozilla Inspired To Rethink How We Create

    I love inspirational speakers. They have a certain air about them, like they know what they’re talking about. While their job is to inspire people to do great things, it’s even better when their actions, not their words, inspire us to even greater lengths.

    The fine folks at Mozilla have been inspired by such a man. They recently uploaded a talk by Bret Victor, a man whose Web site is simultaneously the most inspiring and terrifying thing I have ever seen. In his own words, he seeks to “Revolutionize how people learn, understand, and create. Give scientists the tools to diagnose and cure the world’s ills, and artists the tools to create and share beauty in ways currently impossible.”

    In short, Victor’s a dreamer who has lofty ambitions. That makes him one of the perfect fits to deliver the kind of speeches that can inspire people to try new things. His speech, “Inventing on Principle” has one main takeaway for developers and programmers – “creators need an immediate connection to what they create.”

    To that end, Mozilla has shared a few of the demos that have been inspired by this mantra. The first is from Frogatto & Friends. While the game is fully playable as it is, it has one unique advantage. You can open a text editor inside the game while playing and alter the game’s code without ever exiting the game. It’s the kind of development that allows you to see the direct effects of your code without having to leave the game.

    The other demo is more of the same thing but for Web development. A member of the Mozilla Devtools team, Cedirc Vivier, created a Live Scratchpad extension for Firefox. This allows developers to write code while the browser is open, immediately enacting changes as soon as the new code is entered.

    Regardless of whether or not you think Victor actually knows what he’s doing , his thoughts on creators and developers are fascinating. What if we had the power to edit the things we interact with coupled with the immediacy of the Internet? These simple demos show us a future that is faster, yet simpler.

    Do you think the Web could ever get to a point of immediate changes? A place where anybody can alter the way we see the Web, and by extension the world, whenever they see fit? Let us know in the comments.