Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 8 February 2008, 12:30 PM
Do software engineers think about hardware?
After spending some time on the phone to Symbian this morning I thought it was kind of interesting to note that a lot of the discussion I had with this operating system company was focused on hardware rather than software. In the same vein, I notice another batch of news emanating from Intel HQ about a prototype memory technology called Phase Change Memory (PCM) – and that most of the implications for news like this directly impacts the way applications may soon be developed.
Yes, of course software engineers think about hardware. They all do, especially embedded software engineers. But what I’m saying is - standing here in the firing line for technology news from every corner of the industry - it’s not all language, APIs and modelling y’know? Talk to a smartphone manufacturer for example and they’ll typically focus on how physical restrictions like screen size, memory and battery life affect application development. The aforementioned chip manufacturer would probably rather you thought of them as a “technology” company these days anyway right?
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, memory devices. This one is codenamed "Alverstone" and it uses PCM, a new non-volatile memory technology providing faster read and write speeds at lower power than conventional flash. It also allows for bit alterability normally seen in RAM.
With Moore’s Law fast becoming a distant memory, Intel says that RAM and flash technologies will run into scaling limitations over the next decade, but PCM costs will decline at a faster rate. The advent of multi-level-cell PCM will, according to Intel, further accelerate the cost per bit crossover of PCM technology relative to today's technologies.
Clearly, without hardware there would be no software - and vice versa for that matter… but perhaps we don’t consider the interrelationship between the two enough?
Thursday 7 February 2008, 10:01 AM
Enhancing E-Experiences by 360 degrees
Fond as they are of extolling the virtues of an ever-enhanced online experience, web design specialists everywhere are jumping on the chance to enrich our lives with increasingly personalised and more visually appealing web offerings. Analysts point to the greatest growth areas for new features being mobile commerce, URL/widget sharing, personalised messaging and user ratings. Remember, these are mostly analysts paid by web development specialists to report on developments on the Internet – but those growth areas sound pretty accurate don’t they?
With this area in mind, I picked up on a quantitative survey released this week by Scene7 (a division of Adobe) based on 347 respondents from retailers, manufacturers, agencies and high-tech companies worldwide that sell a wide variety of products and services online.
Top-ranking features and functionalities identified by respondents included: alternate views, user ratings, videos, blogs, product tours, online catalogues, personalised messaging, quick looks and personalised stores. No major surprises there right?
Twenty-five percent of the respondents said they have deployed the following features and functionalities, which they ranked as equally effective: microsites, videos, online catalogs, personalised stores, blogs, colour swatching, quick looks, RSS and product tours. More interesting? Yes I think so.
But perhaps most interesting of all, respondents indicated that one of the most highly-effective features for online business is a 360-degree image spin (to allow users to look all around a product), which the survey found to be not yet widely deployed. Subsequently, nearly 30 per cent of respondents plan to add 360-degree spin functionality to their sites in 2008.
Tuesday 5 February 2008, 7:44 PM
Homeland Security Backdoor Behaviour
Recent research from the US Department of Homeland Security points to a “significant” risk from backdoors and 23% of software packages used by US government employees have backdoors built into them – or so I’m told. Taken out of context this statement may be misleading (as far as I know, it may even be unfairly “massaged” statistics) as a huge proportion of the total Homeland Security installed base of IT is almost certainly well behind locked doors – much bigger, stronger locked doors than any backdoor hacker could access.
However, it is a statistic that security companies are fond of using when highlighting the potential security flaws thrown up by backdoor entry possibilities – and automated testing for backdoor entry into software systems is certainly a current must-have in the top ten tricks for any security vendor worth their salt.
Here’s another thing - as the complexity of modern software applications increases, with components assembled from reusable binary components, backdoors can easily circumvent even the best of QA cycles. Then there’s the aspect of outsourcing and the increasing use of third party libraries. More backdoors – yup, for sure.
I’ve been in touch with a company in Boston on this subject called Veracode (who specialise in on demand pay-as-you-go application security testing services) and here’s what their CEO Matt Moynahan has to say on the subject. “We expect backdoors and malicious code insertion to become an increasingly prevalent attack vector against the enterprise. Because the binary (compiled code) represents the actual attack surface for the hacker, testing the application binaries is the most accurate and complete way to conduct final, independent security validation and verification.”
Interestingly, Moynahan’s company has developed what is says is the first comprehensive taxonomy of backdoors so that application developers can better understand and detect these hidden threats. Where readers might direct their thoughts from here is the difference between backdoor detection in open source software environments vs. their ‘closed source’ cousins. We might generalise here and say that open source detection will always be a lot faster – but it makes you think about how much might be going undetected doesn’t it?
Monday 4 February 2008, 3:13 PM
Mobile development: global, competitive & useful… but how?
With the Mobile World Congress just around the corner, it’s no surprise to see a whole heap of mobile marketing malarkey bubbling up this week. A new name to me was the LiMo Foundation, who, I read, are rolling out a “globally competitive” Linux-based software platform (and publicly available API) for mobile handsets.
Now I’m not necessarily a mobile specialist, so I had to look LiMo up (do they pronounce that Lii-moh or Lee-moh I wonder) and found that the likes of NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Vodafone, Panasonic and Samsung comprise its founding members.
According to LiMo head honcho Morgan Gillis, the “globally competitive” spin here comes as a result of the platform combining technologies that are already extensively market proven within an array of leading handsets. “This will enable initial LiMo handsets to register in the marketplace far more rapidly than handsets based on unproven technology,” they say.
As an open-source project – this is a modular, plug-in-based, hardware-independent architecture with a secure run-time environment – and will no doubt benefit from the functionality and scalability of being Linux-based. But – I recently completed some emerging markets telecoms analysis work and spoke extensively to Nokia, Motorola and Samsung about the factors that will make handsets globally competitive in developing areas such as those in Africa or poorer parts of China – and the deciding factors were not perhaps as Linux-driven as LiMo initially appears to be making out.
For starters, it’s things like smaller units of incremental billing and top-ups that will make a difference to your typical Soweto user who wants to be able to spend just a dollar on top-up rather than five dollars. Non-tech factors such as license liberalisation and excise duties aside, it is developments like software that can handle dual slot phones that can handle two SIMs (for communities that can not afford one handset each) that will make the biggest difference. There’s the whole question of spectrum refarming to consider too (the process which allows the 2G spectrum to be used for 3G) in terms of allowing global roll out of mobile services to be done competitively.
I know I have gone off on a slightly different tack to the “hey we’re here and we’re doing good work” theme of LiMo’s central pre-show message. But if you are going to make statements about global competitiveness and simply refer to compatibility and scalability I think you need to consider what “global” really means these days in terms of mobile.
Friday 1 February 2008, 8:53 AM
MySpace, Google, Facebook: Developer love – who will win their hearts?
You’ll no doubt have noticed that MySpace has piped up with the launch date next week for its programme to encourage external software developers to develop both useful and (no doubt) “fun” applications in the style of those seen on Facebook.
Looking back at Google’s OpenSocial announcement from late last year – its system that will allow developers to create applications for a variety of social networks - there is clearly quite a “space-race” on at the moment to win the hearts and minds of the developer cognoscenti in this area.
On the face of it, where Google looked like they had stolen a march on the rest of the crowd was news that in contrast to Facebook, OpenSocial is structured to allow code to be written in straightforward JavaScript or HTML, needing only minor tweaking from that point to enable it to work. However, ZDNET Australia’s Liam Tung has reported that first-stage trial applications could be hacked in less than an hour.
It remains to be seen as to whether we will see some of the players in this space stumble and fall as they race to put out “solutions” in a segment where there is feverish interest and where implementer (and user) expectations are set at extremely high levels.
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