programming

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google isn't the only big tech company with two operating systems. But it's the only one with two that take such a different approach.

Android and Chrome OS each got a day to themselves here at Google I/O a conference designed to fire up programmer interest in Google's technology.

With the new Android 3.1, an update to the tablet-centric Honeycomb version, Google yesterday added the ability for people to plug in keyboards, mice, game controllers, and many other USB and Bluetooth devices. In short, it's making the tablet more into a PC, architecturally … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why yesterday.

Because people can scrutinize Android's source code, modify it, and build it into their own hardware, the mobile operating system qualifies as open-source software. But Google exercises tight control over what gets built into the official Android software, what gets released as Android, and when that source code appears--especially with the tablet-oriented Honeycomb version.

The reason for Google's approach is so the company can control Android's interfaces, the underlying features that … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Hoping to bring magazine-style layout tools to Web publishing, Adobe Systems tonight released a prototype browser specifically designed to let Web developers test the company's proposed formatting technology.

The technology, called CSS Regions, lets programmers easily create multi-column layouts, place text in various polygonal shapes, and flow around objects in the middle of text. That technology has existed for years in the print publishing world, but it's generally missing from the Web, and its absence grows ever more conspicuous as magazines and newspapers move to digital publishing, especially on tablets such as Apple's iPad.

The formatting … Read more

A company at the heart of the Web-app revolution hopes a major update to its programming tools will further the new style of development.

Sencha plans to release Ext JS 4.0 today, bringing new features and some maturity to the software. Ext JS is a software foundation that lets programmers create Web sites that house active applications, not just static pages, that work not just on modern browsers but also on Microsoft's ancient, despised, but still widely used IE6.

Web programming these days is getting steadily more advanced, and indeed Web browsers are becoming more like operating systems … Read more

Google lost some ground in its effort to catch Apple's lead in the effort to attract mobile developer interest, but other rivals aren't even close, survey data released today show.

So concludes the latest quarterly survey by Appcelerator, released today. The company, along with analyst firm IDC, polled 2,760 developers in mid-April who are using Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform development software.

"Interest in Android has recently plateaued as concerns around fragmentation and disappointing results from early tablet sales have caused developers to pull back from their previous steadily increasing enthusiasm for Google's mobile operating system,&… Read more

Mozilla, taking interest in the Node.js project to run JavaScript programs on servers, not just browsers, has passed an early milestone with its own flavor of the software.

Node.js is built with the V8 JavaScript engine from Google's Chrome browser, but Mozilla is transplanting Firefox's JavaScript technology in a project called SpiderNode. (The JavaScript engine in Firefox is called SpiderMonkey, and the hybrid technology used in SpiderNode is called V8Monkey.)

"We now have a Node executable running on V8Monkey," though it still crashes at this early stage, said SpiderNode project member Paul O'Shannessy … Read more

Web-page speed guru Steve Souders, putting to use the latest in a string of useful tools he's created, has found that the top 17,000 Web sites have eased off use of Adobe Systems' Flash Player in the last half year.

Specifically, Souders has started showing data collected by his HTTP Archive project, which logs a wide range of statistics about a collection of 17,000 top Web sites. He began logging data last year but only announced the HTTP Archive at the end of March.

The site lets people compare statistics about how Web sites are built from … Read more

Back in the good old days, Microsoft's Silverlight merely had to take on the mighty Flash Player.

Now Microsoft's browser plug-in has a very different challenge than Adobe Systems' rival technology: Web standards. And Microsoft, through the release of IE9 and presumably its successors, is helping to bring those standards to the real world.

Nevertheless, Redmond's engineers believe Silverlight has a future as a browser plug-in, and at Microsoft's Mix conference next week, the company will be trying to advance that future.

At Mix11, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of Silverlight 5, and augmenting … Read more