Gears, Google's project to make Web browsers a better foundation for elaborate online applications, now supports Firefox 3, the company plans to announce soon.
"Gears for Firefox 3, as of today, is available for all users," said Aaron Boodman, a Google programmer working on the Gears project, in an interview Tuesday. "We hope to announce it either today or tomorrow."
Indeed, the Google Gears code site lists Firefox 3 support in version 0.3 description. Firefox 3 itself is due this month; the open-source browser currently is in its second release candidate.
Google is working on Gears--formerly called Google Gears--as a way to advance Web programming. It's a key enabler to the cloud computing model exemplified with Web applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.
The company hopes features developed for Gears will eventually settle into HTML, the standard used to describe Web pages. There has been some success: the offline page access and internal database technology released in the first Gears incarnation, has made its way to the HTML 5 specification under development.
At the Google I/O conference conference in May, the company described several Gears features under development--though not promised--for Gears. The Gears history page is more specific about two of those features, listing the "blob" module and the geolocation module as "in the oven" for Gears 0.4.
The blob module lets a Web browser handle a large chunk of data in pieces, for example, uploading a large video bit by bit to better protect against unreliable network connections. The geolocation module gives browsers abilities to use data about where exactly a person using the Web is located, but Google hasn't worked out exactly how to handle the privacy implications of that work.
Also demonstrated in version 3 is the ability to make a Web site into a shortcut users can drop onto their computer desktops. That feature is built into Gears 0.3.
The primary initial feature of Gears was offline access to Web applications, which has obvious utility for somebody editing a spreadsheet on an airplane. Future Gears features, such as the geolocation technology, likely will have broader adoption on Web applications, he predicted.
"We started with offline, a very hard feature because it involves synchronizing data with multiple computers," Boodman said. "I don't think every Web app needs offline. But as we add additional capabilities beyond just offline, it will be appealing to more Web sites."
Gears, an open-source project, already supports Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer. Google is working hard on a version for Apple's Safari browser, and Opera is extending support to its own desktop and mobile browsers.
"We do plan to make it work across all major browsers across all major platforms," said Sundar Pichai, the Google vice president in charge of Gears, iGoogle, Google Desktop, Gadgets, and various other products.
Gears has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, Google said, and the company expects it to spread. Also at Google I/O, MySpace announced it's using Gears to augment its online inbox.
Google isn't alone in the area: Yahoo is working on a conceptually similar project called BrowserPlus to improve Web browsers.
Google is expected to update its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this week at its new developer conference, according to eWeek.
GWT is designed to help programmers write richer Internet applications using a beefed-up JavaScript programming technique called Ajax; the project was released as open-source software in 2006 with version 1.3, and the current version is 1.4. There are several GWT talks at the Google I/O conference.
Google has been working on improving GWT's performance, Java compatibility, and developer tools, eWeek said.
Consumer Web 2.0 applications are influencing--and changing--how business systems are developed.
That was the message from Oracle on Wednesday at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, where Oracle executives Thomas Kurian and Peter Moskowitz showed how to link disparate applications into a cohesive order entry system.
Call it "enterprise 2.0" if you'd like. But Salesforce.com and others will argue that this form of business mashup has been around for years.
Still, the Oracle demo is yet further proof that linking, tagging and other basic technologies borrowed from the consumer Web are making it vastly easier to construct fairly complex business applications.
SAN FRANCISCO--The glitzy, interactive abilities of Web 2.0 have led to a profusion of new applications, but the technology also is bringing a new era of security vulnerabilities, a security researcher warned Wednesday.
"Security was a challenge to begin with, but if anything it's getting harder in the Web 2.0 world," said Jacob West, manager of the security research group at Fortify, a company that helps companies make sure their software is secure. He made his comments during a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco here.
Jacob West, manager of the security research group at Fortify
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)A big culprit is JavaScript, a language that's widely used to control Web browsers and enable more sophisticated operations. JavaScript has been around for more than a decade, but new risks are emerging since it's a major component of Ajax, a Web 2.0 technology used to build richly interactive sites.
"The number of unique problems from Ajax will remain pretty small," West said in an interview after his speech. But Ajax means that JavaScript is being used much more widely and in much more complicated ways, so existing vulnerabilities are more widespread, and "attack techniques are improving quickly."
He did describe one particular Ajax-specific problem called JavaScript hijacking. With it, a Web browser that picks up malicious JavaScript code from a Web site can be instructed, in effect, to send confidential information with an attacker.
"JavaScript hijacking is Ajax-specific," West said. It relies on the transmission of personal information packaged as JavaScript code, and "transmitting information with JavaScript I unique to Ajax code."
Another problem triggered by Ajax are that JavaScript is more complex and therefore harder to test. And more sophistication brings more opportunities for problems with "input validation"--making sure that text typed into forms, for example, isn't actually naughty code that could sidestep ordinary scrutiny and run on somebody's computer.
West was pessimistic that fundamental progress would help reduce vulnerabilities. Companies with browsers and Web sites are reluctant to embrace change that would break compatibility with older technology, for example.
"We're talking about fixes that are going to come in the 10-year time frame," he said.
But some are working to at least close up the holes. For example, programmers working on Direct Web Remoting (DWR) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) updated their Ajax programming toolkits to head JavaScript hijacking attacks off at the pass.
Other toolkit makers were not so responsive, though, he said: "Microsoft and Yahoo wrote back and said, 'Nope, we're not going to fix that.'"
Microsoft will begin collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to improve native Windows application development on Java.
Sam Ramji
(Credit: Microsoft)Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab, announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday that the lab will work with Eclipse .
The goal of the joint work, which will include contributions from Microsoft engineers, is to make it easier to use Java to write applications that take full advantage of the look and feel of Windows Vista. Ramji wrote about the planned collaboration on Microsoft's Port25 blog.
"Among a range of other opportunities (which we're still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We're committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers," he wrote.
The move builds on several initiatives coming from Microsoft's open-source software labs to ensure that open-source products work well on Windows and other Microsoft products.
The interoperability work from the open-source lab continues to rise in prominence at Microsoft. Last month, the company's top executives rolled out a number of interoperability initiatives only a few days before international delegates considered a vote to standardize Microsoft's Open XML document format.
Eclipse, which has become the most popular development environment for Java, is the biggest competitor that Microsoft faces to its Visual Studio developer tool line. With the exception of Sun Microsystems, most other large software companies have committed to using Eclipse in some way.
"It just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it's all about the developer," Ramji said.
Open-source support company SourceLabs on Tuesday launched a subscription service aimed at Linux developers and IT administrators who do their own support.
Called Self-Support Suite for Linux, the offering includes software that monitors people's machines and a repository of 16 million known issues with Linux and open-source Java, said SourceLabs CEO Byron Sebastian.
SourceLabs' service gives users a search engine to help them locate information from their knowledge base to help resolve problems.
(Credit: SourceLabs)The company makes the bulk of its money from supporting open-source Java. But Sebastian said that he was surprised to find that there are a substantial number of people who either do their own support, or are looking for quicker responses to support problems.
The SourceLabs service lets developers or IT administrators query the company's database and it can send notifications, Sebastian said.
It's not likely that this sort of service will steal a lot of customers from Red Hat or Novell, but it sounds like a decent approach to resolving well-known problems.
After a free 30-day trial, the cost is $99 to monitor a developer Linux machine for a year or $399 for applications in production.
After the release of the software development kit for Apple's iPhone, Sun Microsystems says it's going to enable Java applications to run on the device, InfoWorld is reporting.
Sun will build a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), based on the Java Micro Edition version of the programming language after June of this year. It will be available in the iPhone AppStore. Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, told InfoWorld Friday that although Apple passed on enabling Java on the iPhone, Sun decided to do so anyway after Thursday's SDK unveiling. After combing through the documents for the SDK and seeing nothing that barred it from doing so, Sun decided to go for it.
"We're going to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible," Klein said.
Java on the iPhone will mean that versions of software, like customer relationship management and other enterprise applications, could be available on the device.
Using book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.
Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:
... Read more"No man is an island, entire of itself," wrote poet John Donne. But Microsoft apparently doesn't like poetry.
The company is currently mulling over whether to get in line with JavaScript standards for Internet Explorer, or whether to go it alone and crown itself a standard.
This is particularly tricky since every browser implements the JavaScript standard in different ways. So, the problem isn't exclusive to Microsoft.
It's more nettlesome with Microsoft, however, given its dominant browser market share. In some ways, it already is a standard unto itself. But I'm not sure the industry is ready for Microsoft to veer from the quasi-beaten path. According to an article posted Thursday on The Register:
Microsoft's browser is renowned as being a basket case on standards compliance, being less compliant than other leading standards in recent years according to the group monitoring this issue--The Web Standards Project (WASP).
... Read more
Software can be made pretty reliable, lots of people and companies know how to do so. The auto-pilot on an airplane comes to mind, as do the computers that run financial markets. Then there's mainframe computers, perhaps the classic example of reliability (I spent many years working in a mainframe environment). But chances are that the computer you are reading this on is not as reliable as it could be.
Impolite Waiter
Let's start with an analogy. How would you feel if you were in a restaurant, in the middle of your meal, and the waiter takes your food away? It's a breach of the rules; food isn't supposed to be removed while the customer is eating.
Windows XP is that waiter. It lets you delete a file while an application is using it.
I ran into this recently while viewing an image with the popular IrfanView program. I was cleaning up files and deleted some pictures only to realize later that IrfanView was still running, minimized in the taskbar, and viewing one of the just deleted pictures.
This should never be allowed to happen, and it doesn't on a mainframe.
Windows knows full well what picture IrfanView is using. IrfanView didn't scan the sectors on the hard disk by itself to figure out which ones constitute the picture. It asked Windows to grant it access to the file. But when it comes time to delete a file, Windows has amnesia.
IrfanView is only one example. Windows XP will delete pictures while they are being used by a running copy of both Paint and the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer too.
Adding insult to injury is that Windows makes the opposite mistake too. Many times when I'm finished using the files on a USB flash drive, the Windows "Safely remove hardware" function won't let go because it thinks one or more of the files are still in use.
Multiple Updaters
Open a file in WordPad. Then open the same file in Open Office. Now both programs updating the same file at the same time. How come no one at Microsoft ever saw this as a problem?
To be clear, the gripe here is about Windows XP, not WordPad or Open Office. The operating system is in charge of the files. It has the responsibility for integrity, so it should not allow two programs, any two programs, to update the same file at the same time. Anyone with a database background knows what comes next.
Open a plain text file with Notepad and then open the same file with AbiWord (again the specific applications are not the issue). Make a change to the file with Notepad, save it and close Notepad. Open Notepad again and you will see the change that it just made. Now make a change with AbiWord and save the file. The change that Notepad made is gone. Disgraceful.
Ubuntu Linux
There's no gloating in Linux land either.
In a virtual machine running Ubuntu 7.04, I double-clicked on an image and opened it in the default application, Eye of Gnome. Here too, I was able to delete the image while viewing it. I also tried opening an rtf file in Open Office v2.2. Again, I could delete the file while an application was using it.
Ubuntu fared no better with multiple editors. I was able to open a file in both gedit and Open Office v2.2 at the same time. Changes made in gedit and saved, were wiped out by later changes made in Open Office. Just like Windows XP.
Java
This brings to mind my initial experience with the Java programming language back in February of 2001. The first thing I did was to write a simple program that added two numbers and printed the result.
To explain why I chose this as my first Java program, let's suppose that all numbers are limited to a single decimal digit. Then, if you add 1 and 1 you get 2. But, if you add 4 and 8, you should get an error since the result is larger than a single digit.
Along these lines, Java has a numeric data type called "integer" which is used for integer numbers up to 2,147,483,647 (let's call it 2.1 billion for the sake of argument). In my first Java program, I added two integer numbers and stored the result in a third integer - the code is below:
int var1, var2, var3;
var1 = 2111000333;
var2 = 1000222333;
var3 = var1 + var2;
System.out.println("var3=" + var3);
This adds 2,111,000,333 and 1,000,222,333. The result--roughly 3.1 billion--is too large to fit in an "integer" variable. I wanted to see how Java handled this. The result was:
var3=-1183744630
Not only is the answer wrong, but Java didn't crash, as I expected it would. Mainframe programs crash when they encounter this type of error - better to fail than produce wrong results.
Java didn't even issue an error message.
Update: October 22, 2007. I was asked by CNET if the above Java issue still exists. It does. Using Sun's JDK version 1.6.0_03 on Windows XP, I was able to re-create the problem. A screen shot is below.
