loxal DEV

GAE support derived from Python's support NaCl support is already implemented in Go but "Hello World" examples might follow soon Actually NaCl might be one of the main reasons why Go was developed: To offer an alternative to C/C++ for NaCl-based apps Android support within the NDK that might get momentum and grater significance and supersede the Java SDK in the long-term also the significance of Go's ARM port may increase dramatically in the near future

Nokia has announced to publish its upcoming Qt 4.5 framework under the LGPL . In fact this is one of the biggest news since Sun has opensourced Java. And the impact will be similar meaningful as many companies, ISVs, and hobbyists can use Qt to develop not only open source but also commercial and closed source apps without being charged by Trolltech/Nokia. For the alternative OSS framework GTK the times getting really worse , since now GTK has lost one of the most important reasons to be advantaged instead of the technologically much more sophisticated Qt framework. Here are some projects that could be affected by Nokia's Qt license change: Android could include Qt as one of its native libraries [ read this ] All commercial and non-commercial Linux distributions that have used the GTK-based Gnome (because of GPL/LGPL ) as their primary desktop environment, could switch to KDE GNOME could loose many users a much better KDE/Gnome integration is...

What is Mozilla going to do as all bigger companies like Nokia ( WebKit embedded in Qt ), Google, and Apple are going to use WebKit and Javascript engines like V8 and Squirrelfish related to this rendering engine. Also Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are really strong Firefox competitors. Would it make sense for Mozilla to switch to WebKit? In fact Firefox is basically its rendering engine Gecko . And if you replace Gecko by WebKit, just the ugly Firefox GUI remains which looks like a rusty nail in a crystal carafe if you use Firefox with KDE 4 . I doubt if there is a bright future for Mozilla's Firefox. At least their market share will follow the current stock market: Downstairs.

Macromedia´s Flash technology revolutionized the web and this was obviously one of the reasons why Adobe has acquired Macromedia. Flash facilitated browsers to play multimedia content and allowed users to interact with this content. The shady sides of Flash are: The technology base is quite old It is written in C or C++ which is good for performance but horrible for code maintenance and platform independence efforts. High level languages like Java or C# is much better suitable for such kind of applications today. There is still no 64 bit version of Flash. This is especially on x64 Linux machines a problem because you have either to run a x86 browser or a flash wrapper. However both consume much CPU time because Flash occasionally was treated very stepmotherly as it was ported to Linux . Flash content cannot be read by search engine crawlers because the content is stored in binary form. In the times of the semantic Web 2.0 such binary content producing technologies are not appreciated...

The open source browser Firefox is going to lose its market share for the benefit of Webkit rendering engine based browsers . Firefox came up in a time as Microsoft's Internet Explorer was not improved for years. Despite many user requests Microsoft was not willing to implement the nowadays omnipresent and revolutionary "tab feature". People started to look for free alternatives and found the Mozilla browser (turned into Firefox) which had this coveted feature. However the technology base of Firefox is quite cumbersome and not really suitable for RAD . As a result of the approach to develop a browser, Apple took the open source rendering engine KHTML and made webkit which is the (quite fast) rendering engine of Apple's Safari browser. As Webkit had to keep the LGPL this rendering engine can be used in other (also closed source) browsers. Furthermore Webkit has a much cleaner and better readable code than Firefox' Gecko engine and is going to be adopted by Qt4...