Developer tools

Developers interested in working with Facebook Platform, the new third-party widget initiative from the fast-growing social networking site, gathered in several locations on Wednesday evening to hold inaugural Developer Meetups. The New York get-together, hosted by local entrepreneur Amit Gupta, was attended by somewhere between 80 and 90 people--mostly either developers who wanted to learn how they can use Facebook's offerings, or start-up entrepreneurs who had caught the "every Web 2.0 company needs a Facebook Platform app" bug.

Attendees knew that the event would feature a videoconference with Facebook's director of platform, Dave Morin, who … Read more

BOSTON--eBay on Monday opened the doors to its developer conference, where the commerce giant announced a batch of new application-programming interfaces, or APIs, and showed off its new desktop application.

The company announced better-performing shopping Web services, an API for bidding on goods and a way to notify users about auctions through automated alerts.

In addition, the company is expected to demonstrate the desktop application for accessing eBay services, code-named the San Dimas project, during the morning keynote speech.

The software was built using Adobe's AIR platform which enables people to write applications with Web-based toolkits that operate like … Read more

Adobe's upcoming Apollo runtime engine (hands-on look at Apollo) will be an important platform for Web and software developers, since it lets programmers create applications that work equally well online and off, and also across computing platforms. At the moment, Apollo requires developers to use Adobe's tools. It's a platform primarily for applications written in Flash or Flex, both Adobe products. But that's going to change.

Renamed AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), the product previously known as Apollo will change from being a runtime for Adobe products to being a runtime for any Web application, even one … Read more

Salesforce.com and Google launched a Web site on Tuesday that is designed to allow the online customer relationship management software maker to act as a reseller for Google's AdWords.

For Salesforce.com, the alliance expands its efforts to tie its hosted CRM software with Google AdWords, following its acquisition last year of privately held Kieden, which had created an add-on to Salesforce's hosted services for purchasing and managing Google-driven ad campaigns. Salesforce.com will expand beyond allowing its customers to launch Google AdWords from a Salesforce.com application to one in which it will act as a … Read more

Google on Thursday at its Developer Day announced Google Gears, a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications offline. The first application to use Google Gears is Google Reader, its Web-based RSS feed reading application.

The download for the Google Gears beta is quick--the files are less than 1MB in size. Once you have it installed, the Web application you're connecting to asks you whether you want to allow it to store data locally.

Here's a news story with more details, including the technology architecture of Google Gears.

Although it stayed away from making specific commitments, we … Read more

The Webware 100 is going strong, and if you're still in the voting mood, Digg has unveiled their list of 10 finalists for their API visualization contest, which can be voted on by--you guessed it--digging. Like Digg Expose, which I wrote about earlier this week (and is coincidentally a nominee), each of the finalists has found some really neat ways to play with Digg user data.

One of the most interesting aspects of this contest is the use of Adobe Apollo. Four of the 10 finalists' offerings are served up as Apollo apps, which is fairly impressive considering how … Read more

The simplicity of Craigslist is key to its success, but the classifieds can be clunky when you're shopping for something specific that could turn up anywhere on the map. What if you're willing to drive up and down the West Coast to find a mint Cadillac coupe from the Carter era? Here's where Craigslist stops being simple. It certainly can do the trick, but you'll have to do separate searches from Seattle to San Diego. Since my knuckles are sore, I don't want to click that much.

Two low-key-looking Web sites that provide portals to … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--You can think of Green Building Studio (GBS) as a mashup between Autodesk and Google.

The Santa Rosa, Calif.-based company makes a computer automated design application for architects and builders that evaluates a building's energy efficiency. And after it does that, it pops up product recommendations for insulation, lighting and other products to increase efficiency. It makes money from the software as well as generating leads for product suppliers.

The company essentially exists to tackle two problems, according to CEO John Kennedy, who spoke at the Clean Energy Venture Summit taking place this week in Austin. First, … Read more

At JavaOne, Sun's James Gosling talked with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland about the new application platform, JavaFX. Gosling talks a bit about how JavaFX will compare to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

See News.com for more on JavaFX

If you're a Web user wondering what to do about this three-way race, here's my advice: don't worry about it, but do prepare to be impressed. The competition among these three powerhouses is going to make for fantastic new apps, as the platform vendors struggle to one-up each other by building their most … Read more