How RIA can give freedom of rapid application development

Professional portal development demands special knowledge of Flash, JavaScript, Java-applets and ActiveX-components. All these technologies are not supposed to complicate your life. But sometimes it’s not so easy to enrich user experience going beyond traditional tasks and at the same time ensure great results in a short space of time. On this point Rich Internet Application and RIA development offers revolutionary possibilities that combined in a single runtime environment.

What does it mean for users? It means “all in one” or integration of content, communications, user interface and a set of custom components and. Of course, all these units work in real time.

What does RIA mean for programmers? First and foremost it opens doors to Rapid Application Development or RAD. Developers use advantages of Ajax GWT programming and in the shortest possible time create new web portals based on reusable program components.

Beyond question, web is a dynamic, vibrant platform, where it is very important to reduce the time from birth of new ideas to their realization. That is why such RIA components as Ajax Toolkit will be in great demand. They allow to make fast and easy changes in new applications, giving developers what they want at this very moment for this very project.

Microsoft adds new features in Eclipse for PHP and Java developers

Eclipse Summit that was organized in Germany brought fresh news: Microsoft together with its partners Tasktop and Soyatec are going to release a range of tools and updates for Eclipse.

• Eclipse will support Windows 7 and all its new interface functions;
• Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) will be expanded to work with new features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2;
• The open source tools Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse will be available for PHP developers;
• The open source Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) will be available for Java developers;
• The Eclipse Tools plug-in will be available for Silverlight.

So, Windows Azure SDK for Java allows leveraging Azure storage service while developing Java applications. Its logical architecture is quite simple:
It is reported that according to the voting (see The Open Source Developer Report 2009 based on Eclipse Community Survey), conducted among Eclipse users, more than 64% are using it in Windows OS. It’s obvious that PHP and Java programmers will appreciate this significant commitment from Microsoft.

Top Web Trends in 2009. Structured information on the Internet

This year Tim Berners-Lee said that the Internet is becoming more  informational and now we are using information from the Internet  rather more often than documents and files as it was before. W3C, the  organization, which Tim Berners-Lee heads, supports two major  initiatives that focused on making the Internet more informational:  Semantic Web and the recent Linked Data.

Over the past few years we have seen some interesting examples of how  to structure data and provide the possibility to use it. The best  example of it is Twitter, which API is responsible for 90% of the  service activity, thanks to third-party applications, of course.

The basic principle of the informational Internet formulated by Alex Iskold has not changed: Unstructured information will be structured  and it will open the way to more reasonable use of the Internet. Web
application developers should remember this rule and provide only  easy-to-use and convenient applications to manage company  documentation, processes, and workflows. Companies, on the other hand,
should choose developers who offer only custom web application  programming services with easy content management.

How to learn any new programming language faster then ever

It’s always difficult to learn something new. Nevertheless, there are some techniques and tricks that can be very helpful for beginners who want to become Java, .Net, php, flash programmers, etc. So using them you can learn any new language easier, faster and more efficiently:

Set your time commitments

Don’t think that you can learn a new language, giving it only half an hour every day. It’s much better (more productive) to read textbooks devoting the whole day to this activity (better 1-2 days a week then 30 min a day).

Use cribs
Cribs may be more valuable than it might seem at the first glance. Writing cribs is one of the most useful methods of learning (they are not only reminders, but also your samples and tips).

Collect all the necessary material
There are many resources for any programming language: Flash and Flex, AJAX, coding for mobile applications and others. Some of them are very good, others are not. Collection of numerous textbooks and internet-sources will allow you to choose the best authors and the easiest approaches. So, use Google and collect guides and manuals for programmers, articles in different media, post in popular blogs and respected forums.
And the last point: make sure that you understand the basis of language, before you will begin to work with examples. You wont be able to built a house without foundation.

The Challenge for Java Programmers. Check Your Skills!

Testing new Java programmers who want to work in Oxagile we use different methods: interviewing, multiple-choice questions etc. We think that “classical” approaches to recruiting should be combined with new breakthrough technologies.

Let’s take certification of Java programmers as an example. It is well known that many tests for certification contain a large number of issues with different variants of answers (so called multiple-choice questions). Such tests are not very effective, because probationers can easily find many answers concerning API reading documentation or source code. In this way we can’t test their ability to program, which largely consists of the ability to think logical and to formulate algorithms in a proper way.

So betterprogramming.com, the company from San Francisco, decided to fix this problem. Its specialists published test that offers to solve several problems instead of answering the list of questions. Java programmers expected to implement some simple algorithms. Source code, written by a developer can be executed on the server, and then user can get his/her results (they depend on submitted code and time).

Average Salary of Developers in various countries

The question of the “Salary” is one of the most interesting and also mysterious question that almost every person is taking an active interest in discussion when pertinent time was come. And almost every person wants to know the great secret – salary of his colleagues to compare with own salary (may be boss underestimated his skills and the time to do meeting with boss is come), but how can he ask them?

Salary is also a very private theme to have a talk about. We try to lift the veil of mystery from this question and you will know not only about the salary of your colleagues but will have a possibility to compare your own salary with salary of developers in various countries. I hope you will take a good time while reading this
article.

First of all, let’s gossip about the salary of our neighbours, then will travel to America and the sweetest information about the salary in our country will leave in the end.:)