Another great event for Android developers, web development enthusiasts, and those looking forward to juicy Google news has come —annual Google I/O, which is held May 15-17 in San Francisco. There has already been a lot of fuss about the event as people as usual expect Google to show some latest developments both in software and hardware sectors.
Key Lime Pie is going to be announced; at least Android latest iteration, which is to start from K is rumored to have that odd name. In comparison to its early versions Android is a mobile platform that is neither a toddler, nor a child any more. It provides both welcoming functionality and steady and qualitative performance rates. However, there is still room to develop and grow. Apart from some trivial things like a longer battery life and several productivity increasing issues, the rumors keep going about improving Google Now, oiling Project Butter and some other staff, which should provide a bit of room for Google Glass that we are hoping to get in 2014. However, that’s not all we are expecting from the event in San Francisco. Google iterations keep on being released each year. So, just another one coming is quite a predictable piece of news.
Most users are eagerly anticipating the event to learn the very truth about Nexus. Is it going to be released? If yes, what Nexus will it be? The same opinion is shared by those who are looking forward to new portables from Motorola. In one of his interviews Larry Page did spill some news on what ideal phones should be like — a better battery and higher durability, faster and easier. All that is what millions of phone holders have been craving for so long and Motorola has a chance to implement all those dreams in an armored never-dying gadget. At least, let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Yet, another thing to think over during Google I/O is Google TV. Google has been keeping silent on the topic for quite a while. The market niche already seems to be overcrowded — Apple TV, Roku, Kinect. They all want a piece or several pieces of the pie at the same time providing better services than Google can offer. However, Google is not known for breaking promises or giving up intentions so this year we are anticipating some hot fights at the market.
In general, this year Google has been quite tight-lipped. So, we can expect there’s something up its sleeve, the proverbial rabbit from a hat. The audience is already thrilled and awed. Beware! Too many emotions can be harmful for people’s hearts!
While common users are still preoccupied with security issues and threats that Java usage can expose them to, Oracle and Java developers are more interested in tools, which ensure their joining the crowd of iOS developers.
Despite the renowned Apple’s ban to run Java apps and applets on iOS devices, there has always been a range of tools which helped port Java applications to the iOS gadgets. The list of such tools, which include third-party open source frameworks as well as Oracle’s ADF (Application Development Framework) Mobile, has been expanded by another Oracle release.
Google offers open source J2ObjC translator for Java code to be translated into Objective-C source code, which Apple desires to see on its devices.
Other services which allow Java developers to see their masterpieces on Apple devices are Codename One and Vaadin. Codename uses cloud services for building apps for an Apple device, while Java development and debugging takes place locally. Vaadin is at hand to build apps for the iPad, mainly web apps to be precise. Although the functionality of the service might seem a bit limited, it was quite handy at the launch of the iPad when everybody was crazy about having an app on the device. That array of tools more or less filled the gap and allowed Java developers to join the development whirlpool for Apple mobile devices.
However, the time has come for Oracle to care for its followers once again. New Java Native Interface Proposal was created last month and meant to modify the JDK and provide Java developers with a possibility to pack a Java runtime, native application code, and Java application code without shared libraries. Many Java experts view the release as a kind of an advantage, which will expand Java developers’ abilities within the iOS environment though at the expense of some prior releases such as Java Micro Edition.
The new advances prove that despite security breaches of which Oracle was blamed just a month ago, the company is determined to guarantee its Java developers a comfortable place in the iOS development community. Apple, though not particularly happy with Java apps on its portable devices, so far kept silent on the issue.
Last week at the conference Web 2.0 developers presented the new platform Singly 1.0 that will allow users to control where and how to use their data. Singly lets users collect the information published about them on the Internet and choose the data that can be used by third parties. Singly 1.0, introduced in the framework of the Locker Project, is an open source platform and is financed by the WordPress general director Toni Schneider and the Best Buy technical director John Battelle.
It should be noted that Singly and Locker Project are Jeremy Miller’s developments who is the developer of the XMPP protocol used practically in all instant message exchange programs based on XML. Jeremy Miller started working on the Locker project in February. According to Battelle, the aim of these developments was to provide users with a possibility to control confidential information.
The release of Singly 1.0 will allow software development companies a possibility to create applications with the help of which it will be possible to search, sort and provide users’ contact data as well as the links used by users online. Moreover, the applications developed on the Singly platform will allow searching by the content of the links, sent to the users subscribed to some account in social services.
In future, software developers are planning to expand the functions of the new platform and let is gather financial information and data about the users’ state of health.
Fabien Potencier and SensioLabs have started a new initiative to foster further development of Symfony community and recognize every single contribution, made by Symfony devotees either it’s a new piece of code or just an active support of Symfony development values in the online community.
The Symfony project has such a success with IT development companies and professional web developers not only due to the intellectual investment of experts in Symfony development, who write new Symfony plugins. It’s also the efforts of those, who promote Symfony development knowledge exchange and best practices. They also make web application development with this framework as smooth and convenient as it is now.
That’s why the founders of the Symfony project have decided to acknowledge the Symfony volunteers and aficionados in a game fashion. Fabien Potencier and SensioLabs have introduced a new profile-based network of the community members, enhanced with badge-award system. Now the community members can be awarded with different badges for their contributions to the development of the Symfony framework.
But Symfony project acknowledgements are not limited to badge exchange, SensioLabs also announced its Symfony Community Awards in the following nominations:
• Best blogger.
• Best support on mailing-lists.
• Best support on the forum.
• Best support on IRC.
• Best evangelist (awarded for the best networking effort).
• Best contributor (awarded for coding efforts and debugging).
• Personality of the year.
The results will be made public at the beginning of 2012 and will be based on the votes of the community members, who evaluate the contributions of their counterparts.
Further improvements from Symfony developers have seen the world. On November 2, 2011 Symfony contributors introduced another set of workarounds and programming solutions for Symfony framework in its 2.0.5 version.
Symfony is one of the preferred PHP development tools, no wonder that with such a think tank, supporting this technology, the framework is constantly being refined and with every new release it offers hands-on solutions to the most common web application development issues and makes Symfony development easier.
This time programmers’ community made the following Symfony patches:
• Doctrine (DoctrineBundle unit test, a catch for Doctrine Bridge, Doctrine UniqueValidator to support associations).
• Added Doctrine and Twig dependencies to Composer.
• Fixes to HttpKernel (patches to profile saving and profile parent/children processes).
• Routing enhancements (PHP matcher dumper, deleted unnecessary variable).
• HttpFoundation improvements (query call, PHP 5.4 regression).
This is just a very brief example on what work has been done by Symfony developers to make their daily Symfony development tasks easier and faster. To see the full list of changelogs, compare the new Symfony release to the previous one, leave your comments or share your Symfony development ideas, go to this development contributors’ community or to official Symfony development framework website.
Eclipse has rolled out Orion, a new web development tool that will enable web application development in the cloud. Unlike Eclipse flagship products Orion is a browser-based tool designed to support widely-used web technologies and take these technologies to the cloud.
At the moment, Orion enables only JavaScript web development, though the software development company is planning to expand web developers’ expertise and include the support for such languages as HTML, PHP and Java.
As emphasized by Mike Milinkovich, CEO of the Eclipse Foundation: “Orion is a brand new, browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the Web, in the Web”.
The Eclipse Foundation has concentrated its efforts on releasing updates every 6 months to improve the initial release and to add new features in order to provide software development companies and web developers with new capabilities. Therefore, the specialists will be able to take advantage of Orion’s new features for web application development in the cloud.
Web development services is inseparably linked with online business. So our next two projects are connected with e-trade. Today no one doubts the effectiveness of online trading. Sales through the Internet shopping minimize costs, allows to enter new markets, and attract customers.
But before to make profit from website you must launch your customized online store. And this process will be related to the right choice of CMS. It is cheaper and safer to use a ready-made software for the most common and typical tasks of online business.
The best solutions among open source e-commerce systems are Magento and X-Cart. These products help to create e-shops and obtain multifunctional, high-tech sites for easy sales. Moreover they can be managed without special knowledge in programming. These are ready web sites for electronic commerce. You can add additional features or modify design according to the peculiarities of any specific business.
With the help of Oxagile software programming our customers obtained new online stores with pleasant look-and-feel:
An X-Cart based online store for a Canadian company that offers furniture, wall decor and home accessories.
As a result, we have gained experience in ecommerce and online business. So now we can easily attract more visitors and raise product sells for our customers.
What determines success in web development? Component of success are professional design, attention to customer’s needs and the correct choice of CMS. We have made certain of it from our own experience.
So we want to share the results of successful web development based on open source CMSes for our clients from USA and the Netherlands.
Let’s start with our favorite CMS Joomla. By the way, why so many webmasters choose this CMS for their projects? The answer consists of one word, and this word means “accessibility”. So accessibility has made CMS Joomla such a popular one. It is absolutely free of charge. But it does not mean poor quality or lack of functionality. In reality Joomla has incredible functionality and it was made as a software product of high quality.
So Oxagile has created two new fully functional websites and expanded its company portfolio:
CMS Joomla is very logical and consistent, developing software projects you can see it at all levels, starting with installation and finishing with text editing. It simplifies your understanding of how to work with site content.
Oxagile team is pleased to inform you that WordPress, one of our favorite content management systems has won CMS Award 2009. It’s not a surprise for us, WordPress-as-a-CMS provides great possibilities for themes, templates, widgets and modules development. This victory is a result of hard work, thousands of web designers and programmers created numerous additions for this product, developed high-quality and easy-to-use sites (from simple personal sites and web blogs to corporate portals and even online shops!).
So, here’s the distribution of prizes for Overall Best Open Source CMS Award:
The next category is Hall of Fame, it’s a special place for winners of the last years. Drupal and Joomla were the best systems in the year of 2008. This year balance of power remains the same:
• the 1st place – Drupal
• the 2nd place – Joomla
And at last we present you the Best Open Source PHP CMSes:
the 1st place – Drupal
the 2nd place – WordPress
the 3rd place – Joomla
It’s a strange fact that the main category has only two prizes: the second place was decided between two “competitors”, and the third place wasn’t given to anyone. We suppose that it was done in order to save money because organizers spent a lot on prize fund (Drupal took more than anyone ).
So we congratulate all the winners and wish good luck to all defeated systems.
With WordPress conditional statements your blog will stand out against thousands of others
Conditional statements can transform themes in something unrecognizable. Be sure, your readers will be amazed by such features in Wordpress blog design. There is nothing difficult in directory conditioned elements, they based on PHP code. So with the help of php programmers you will be able to realize your ideas. For instance, welcome block at the home page can be done with the following code: if (is_home()) {
echo ‘YOUR WELCOME BOX CODES HERE’;
} else { }
Theme framework is a timesaver for WordPress template customization
There are a lot of theme frameworks (Guerrilla Theme, Thesis, Thematic, WP Framework, etc.) that will help you to build custom templates in the shortest possible time. Use them with no hesitation!
WordPress widgets for better usability
With widgets you can easily customize the look of your theme, rearrange different blog areas (ad blocks, posts, headers, footers, etc.).
Say “no” to plugins and “yes” to PHP code
Using WordPress plugins you force end-users of your blog to download and install additional software. It’s not a good idea for quick and easy accesses to blog features and published information. PHP solves this problem and it also gives more know-hows for WordPress developers. Continuous learning is an indispensable condition of qualitative WordPress development
WordPress has a great blogging community, it’s even more then web community. So WordPress-as-a-CMS development can be just fun and easy work with some simple plugins, php code and official teaching material from tutorial sites. You can try a simple hack code that helps to reduce spam. It blocks all comments on your blog written by users who have come with “No referrer” result (for example, spam bots).
function check_referrer() {
if (!isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) || $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] == “”) {
wp_die( __(‘Please enable referrers in your browser, or, if you\’re a spammer, bugger off!’) );
}}
add_action(‘check_comment_flood’, ‘check_referrer’);add_action ( ‘check_comment_flood’, ‘check_referrer’);
Another great event for Android developers, web development enthusiasts, and those looking forward to juicy Google news has come —annual Google I/O, which is held May 15-17 in San Francisco. There has already been a lot of fuss about the event as people as usual expect Google to show some latest developments both in software and hardware sectors.
Eclipse has rolled out Orion, a new web development tool that will enable 
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