Developer tools

BALI--Research In Motion is looking to harness the best of today's Web technologies including HTML5 and JavaScript, to bridge the gap between development efforts for its BlackBerry smartphones and the soon-to-be-released PlayBook tablet.

Tyler Lessard, vice president of global alliances and developer relations at RIM, said the Canadian smartphone manufacturer is intent on bringing the "Web to mobile" by incorporating existing Web technologies into its WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS.

Released today, the beta version of the software development kit will give Web and mobile developers skilled in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS the tools to create apps … Read more

The ninth beta version of Firefox, due imminently, is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser's computer.

"IndexedDB allows Web apps to store large amounts of data on your local system (with your explicit permission, of course) for fast offline retrieval at a later time. We're hoping that Web mail, TV listings, and online purchase history will one day be as convenient to access offline as they are online," Ben Turner, who develops IndexedDB for Mozilla'… Read more

Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant.

It was hard to miss the response that accompanied Google's announcement earlier this week that it no longer planned to support the H.264 codec for the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in order to focus on the WebM technology. Depending on what you read, Google is either evil, brilliant, hypocritical, cunning, principled, or confused in dropping support for H.264, … Read more

Google just fired a broadside in the Web's codec wars.

With its alternative WebM video-encoding technology now entering the marketplace, Google announced plans today to remove built-in Chrome support for a widely used rival codec called H.264 favored by Apple and Microsoft. The move places Google instead firmly in the camp of browser makers Mozilla and Opera, who ardently desire basic Web technologies to be unencumbered by patent restrictions.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed … Read more

Google took a somewhat arcane but important step yesterday in improving its goo.gl URL-shortening service, making it available not just through the Web but through third-party software.

Google announced the goo.gl application programming interface (API) yesterday. That makes it possible, for example, to let software such as TweetDeck shorten Web addresses to more easily fit within Twitter's 140-character constraints.

As with other services such as Bit.ly, the goo.gl service can share data about the expansion of the URLs. That's useful for companies that want to know how many people clicked a link in some … Read more

Quora, an increasingly popular question-and-answer site with a social networking angle, has released an application programming interface that opens the door for third-party software to use the service.

The API, announced Friday, has very limited features and is only an alpha release that the company doesn't promise will remain stable. But it's an important milestone nevertheless for the company as it charts a course through the complexities of building a business on today's Net.

That's because an API, if rich enough, means people using a service don't necessarily have to use that services' Web site. … Read more

Adobe Systems' Flash Media Server software is now available as a pay-as-you-go option on the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing technology, the companies announced Wednesday.

Flash Media Server 4 lets customers send streaming video across the Net. By using it hosted on AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, customers don't have to worry so much about installation and configuration details.

The service costs a flat rate of $5 to set up and $5 per month to use, with variable costs according to the video-streaming capacity needed and data transferred. For example, an extra-large server instance that can manage up to … Read more

It probably wouldn't have helped WikiLeaks' struggle to stay on the Web last week, but Amazon.com has launched a new service for companies whose Internet operations need Domain Name Service.

DNS is technology that connects the Internet address that people use, such as www.flickr.com, to its numeric address, 68.142.214.24. It's that numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address that computers and network gear need to route data over the Internet. DNS functions not unlike a phone book, where you can find a phone number by looking up a person's name.

Now Amazon is … Read more

Strobe, a start-up focusing on publishing tools that employ a new generation of Web standards, has secured first-round funding.

Chief Executive and co-founder Charles Jolley announced the move today but declined to share exactly how much Hummer-Winblad and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures bestowed upon his company. The company's technology is based on a project called SproutCore that Jolley has been working on for years, including several while at Apple. Jolley left Apple in July.

SproutCore uses JavaScript and other Web tools to endow Web pages with user interfaces more like what one would expect of a native application. It … Read more