Software application development

Embedded software can sometimes sound a bit dull can’t it? You’ve just been offered a chance to read a case study from WhizzBang Technology Ltd about their new embedded solution to operate railway-ticketing machines or retail scanning devices – or maybe even intelligent toasters… and you know what? You’d probably rather not.

So, in my quest for “Embedded software stuff to read about that’s not dull” – I was pleased to find the new Sputnik e-clothing shirt, which (it says here) gives athletes the ability to analyse their training and performance statistics from sensors in the shirt itself.

'

The shirt works by employing sensors to measure and record skin temperature, heart and respiration rates. The data can be stored in a small plastic unit housed in the garment and uploaded to a PC via a USB connection or Bluetooth.

Take this idea all the way then. Suddenly Joe Cole is streaking down the left and Fabbio Capello stoops over his ‘Boot-O-Matic’ readout display and he can see Cole is becoming dehydrated, he’s got two subs left and we’re 2-1 up against Nicaragua with 15 minutes to play. So there’s a chance he can bring him off and we’ll still win.

Oops, they’ve scored and it’s gone to penalties. You know what happens next. Not even embedded software can help England now.

Have you seen the BBC report on Dubai’s first ‘rotating skyscraper’ this afternoon? There’s some French architect saying how much he’d observed the wind affecting skyscrapers, so now he wants to use the wind to help shape the buildings themselves.

According to the Beeb, “The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building's apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.”

Do they honestly think this thing is going to stay up? OK, they may have employed huge layers of algorithmic logic in the design phase to make sure it is stable wherever the rooms stand in relation to each other… but what about the weather? You can’t predict ALL the effects that the building may face.

Although I know the weather pretty well in the UAE having spent three years there (it only rains for 10 days a year and when it does it all comes at once, there’s a bit of fog too but that’s about it apart from the sand storms and ‘shimal’ breezes) – surely this is one environmentally unquantifiable nightmare.

I’m sure our wonderful French construction architects used heaps of software to produce the design for this building, but I also think that there’s a cut off point between what software can help us to create in the physical world when the manifestation of our designs is something that faces nature in such a direct form.

Pepé le Pew, n'est-ce pas?

To be honest I don’t find archives interesting do you? I remember my work experience job at 16 years old when I was despatched to our local government admin offices to work on their microfiche unit and, umm, write down stuff I think. That was the closest to an archive I’ve been for a while.

'

Anyway, Forbes.com is apparently interested in archiving these days – more specifically, the topic in hand is email archiving.

IDC estimates the volume has increased from 9.7 billion in 2000 to 97 billion in 2007 – per day! Added to that regulation means that companies are now required by law to archive email. Finally companies need to be prepared for litigation and need to be able to comply with e-discovery orders.

I might think it’s as dull as a wet weekend in Wolverhapton, but it’s hot with the vendors too by all accounts. Proofpoint, a company that specialises in unified email ‘stuff’ (or solutions if you prefer) just snapped up Fortiva, a company that offers on-demand email archiving.

Just to clarify, this is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so there’s development work to be done here – plus, this type of thing features a hybrid deployment model that, allegedly, delivers SaaS with the security of an ‘on-premises’ appliance. OK I’m starting to get (slightly) interested. So what are the key challenges in this space? Well, I’m glad you asked: email storage management, legal discovery and, thirdly, regulatory compliance.

According to Proofpoint’s web site, industry analysts have acknowledged email archiving as a ‘must have’ component of today’s enterprise email infrastructures. Record retention, electronic discovery and mailbox management may soon be terms that we are all more used to hearing then. I also hear that nearly a quarter of large U.S. enterprises were ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the past 12 months. Yikes!

As for me, cutting as pasting from Gmail into Mac TextEdit and then backing up to Lacie seems to have been enough for now.

Despite the fact that I find the most compelling aspect of the BlackBerry to be the retro-style “Breakout” bricks and paddle game, it’s for sure that plenty of people love them to bits. Madonna sleeps with one under her pillow by all accounts and my wife’s friend’s husband recently issued his spouse with a, “It’s the BlackBerry or me,” decree. Well, she’s from Kentucky – what do you expect?

Anyway, love them, hate them or harbour a passing indifference to them – the email-enabled PDA is with us to stay and we all know it. It does make you wonder why it’s taken RIM so long to formalise a physical meeting for developers on its device, but it has finally come about. The BlackBerry Developer Conference is planned for the week of October 20, 2008 in Santa Clara, California.

So what does RIM think is hot in the handheld space right now for software engineers interested directing their ‘next big thing’ towards the BlackBerry?

ENTERPRISE APPS - corporate developers should extend business systems to the mobile workforce says RIM. Let’s hope we hear the word ‘security’ plenty of times huh?

CONSUMER APPS – what exactly is a ‘lifestyle’ application then? Developers don’t typically use this term themselves so should we be wary? It is games, is it PIM, is it a travel planner and map. Alright alright I know, it’s all of those.

TOOLS – there’s a new BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) and a JDE Plug-in for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS - RIAs will make a showing too apparently alongside AJAX, streaming video and GPS.

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES – you’d be worried if RIM hadn’t mentioned these, but they did. But we do seem to have been talking about them for years without really seeing too many of them emerge haven’t we? When will my mobile phone tell me where the nearest toilet is then?

OK, I was only joking about the Breakout game.

You’ve got to admit it; nothing makes your brain feel numb more than terms like device software optimisation, or DSO to those in the know. It sounds like one of those vendor-created terms designed to sell us something we already have capabilities in, or can do with our existing toolset.

So why do we need it? We already have version control and change management software to help re-engineer desktop software to ‘devices’ in various forms – and if the software is being developed for a device from its first iteration then why should it need optimising in some special kind of way?

The BlackBerry gang at Research in Motion and Palm have been telling us for years about the various challenges of developing for ‘devices’ – you know the kind of thing: smaller screen, user input restrictions, limited battery life, slower processing power etc. Developing for these and other devices is different, so why do vendors like Wind River keep pushing the whole optimisation programme?

'
Image courtesy of: Research in Motion

DSO has now, according to Wind River, encompassed multi-core software development and virtualisation techniques. The argument being that the ability to virtualise hardware allows multiple operating environments to share underlying processing cores, memory and other hardware resources. The company says that virtualisation presents the opportunity for device manufacturers to reduce hardware costs and power consumption as they add new capabilities to existing devices.

I think the problem here is what we mean by the term ‘devices’. It’s not just mobile phones, PDAs and other handhelds. The kind of device Wind River’s toolset would be used for could be a heads-up-display in a fighter pilot’s helmet or some kind of monitor inside a submarine periscope. Basically, this is the stuff of mission-critical aerospace and defense applications.

Maybe it’s just the way the term is structured that makes it feel uncomfortable. Wouldn’t DSO be better as Optimisation Software for Devices? It’s too late now I guess.