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.

Nowadays software development services have received another one. Starting the launch of the iOS 5 platform and the iCloud service deeply integrated into it, Apple set up a special website iCloud.com. Now users can enter the new iCloud.com and create an iCloud account using their own Apple ID, the identifier used for purchasing in the Apple App Store.
After entering the system, the user will be offered to choose a language and a time zone, then they will have to choose from five options. A user can check its mail, view his contacts, calendars, use the function «Find My iPhone» and get the access to the web version of iWork.

With starting iCloud, the documents from the Apple iWork application for iOS (page layouts, tables, presentations) will be stored online and will be constantly updated. Thanks to this, users will be able to get access to the latest versions of documents irrespective of the device they are using at the moment.

The iCloud service will replace its predecessor MobileMe. In comparison with MobileMe, the usage of iCloud will be free for all iOS 5 and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion users who will be offered 5 5GB of free ‘cloud space’ (additional space is paid).

Software developers have been testing iCloud together with the apps for iOS 5 and Lion for the last several months. At present iCloud is available for wide usage.

The debut of iCloud took place simultaneously with the release of the iOS 5, however, iCloud started functioning a few hours earlier. The new operation system iOS 5 is available for downloading for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users.

The microblogging service is preparing a new special site for software developers developing third-party applications.  According to the representatives of the company, the site will be launched in July.

According to Ryan Sarver, the head of the Twitter platform development, the popular service is going to provide apps developers and their partners with a free access to the information.

The Twitter management expects that with the help of this new site they’ll be able to establish a contact with developers. The site will publish recommendations and tips on software development services. Moreover, the site will have a forum for developers where the microblogging service officials will leave their comments.

As one of the reason for launching a new site is a rapid growth in the number of developers interested in Twitter, connected with the service integration into the mobile platform Apple iOS.

On June 30 Twitter announced that the number of messages sent by users has increased three times for the last year. Every day microbloggers leave 200 mln messages in Twitter.

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.

PHP bug #53632 in floating point numbers has been dealt with. The bug is deemed to be a fault in the x87 floating point unit, which showed up on PHP 32-bit systems. It was detected by a computer scientist Rick Regan, who described the flaw in his blog.
This flaw issue made PHP security systems vulnerable to potential DOS attack and could have complicated the process of serving PHP-based pages. Though, Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend Technologies, reassured that this PHP bug was unlikely to cause severe problems on a large scale as major PHP running systems are 64-bit.
The PHP language developers have come up with the solution to this problem, which they bypassed in the new PHP releases (PHP 5.3.5 and 5.2.17), while Zend technologies provided for Zend Server users prompt response to the problem until the bug was fully fixed by the PHP development team.
PHP is frequently used by software companies in web application development projects and new PHP 5.3.5 and 5.2.17 versions allow web application developers to sidestep the problems, connected with the floating point bug in the previous PHP releases.

According to the recent survey held by Web metrics firm comScore, heavy snowfalls on the East Coast of the USA contributed to the increase in online retailer sales over the last week before Christmas. The total sales of online stores during this period soared by 17 % in comparison with the same period last year. On the whole the revenue gained by online retailers during the holiday season amounted to almost $31 billion.
The holiday season was launched on Cyber Monday after Thanksgiving and proceeded well into Free Shipping Day (last Friday before Christmas with free delivery offers) when the online shoppers enjoyed their purchases on free delivery terms.
Apart from blizzards and free shipping offers there are other incentives and reasons to make ecommerce thrive. Today with hustle and bustle of the modern life many of the customers are simply pressed for time and would prefer to go on the Christmas shopping spree on the Internet, where they can find everything at hand, rather than shop around at physical stores and trade centers. Moreover, this way of shopping saves not only energy and time but may turn out to be economical as well.
The boost in credibility of online retail business among shoppers fosters the growth of web app development segment and creates ever growing demand for ecommerce app development services, offered by software companies.

Microsoft introduces HTML5 Labs where early HTML5 specifications will be showcased and web developers will be able to test them and share their experience of leveraging the new generation of web standards in their web development projects. Software companies and developers will be able to make suggestions on the possible ways to improve HTML5 standard, which will favour further development of web technologies based on HTML5.

Some of the draft specifications like IndexedDB, WebSockets are already on display in HTML5 labs for developers to review them. IndexDB allows storing large amounts of structured data, while WebSockets provides for enhanced bidirectional communications and W3C standardized API.

HTML5 is a web standard that accelerates web sites work, provides more articulate syntax and allows to discard the use of plug-ins and third-party APIs to manage graphics and multimedia. Dean Hachamovitch, the Corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, pinpoints the necessity to make a clear distinction between HTML5 specifications under development and well-established standards.

Microsoft has also demonstrated its HTML5 prototypes with Christmas themes – Santa Workshop and HTML5 Blizzard. The corporation employs in its demos such technologies as SVG graphics, HTML5 audio, HTML5 canvas, CSS3 and Web Open Font Format fonts. Despite the fact that HTML5 and Silverlight are considered to be competing technologies, Microsoft is determined to develop both of them.

In the near future cloud computing will drastically contribute to the development of 5 major EU economies (Germany, Spain, Italy, France and the UK). According to the CEBR forecasts this technology is likely to bring €763bn revenue and create 2.4mln jobs in these national markets.
Cloud computing services are becoming commodities – nowadays more and more companies instead of maintaining the whole IT infrastructure choose more lightweight IT solutions. This technology provides IT services on demand via the Internet. Hence, various businesses may opt for serving their IT needs at reduced costs. Companies don’t have to invest wads of cash at once to get an IT solution and, instead, get a monthly subscription for software services and pay for them in installments. In this case a company shifts from a more flexible in-house IT solution to more scalable and powerful cloud computing services.
Currently the U.S. administration is also considering adoption of more cost-effective cloud technology – the Obama’s administration has set a goal to implement fewer proprietary IT projects and take advantage of cloud-based technologies. The federal agencies are to switch to a new system from 2012. For this purpose, US government has given software companies a chance to showcase cloud computing services on its online portal Apps.gov.

Microsoft announced the release of the fifth version of the Silverlight multimedia platform.  At the conference Silverlight Firestarter 2010 Scott Guthrie, a vice-president of the Microsoft Developer Division, presented the new functions of Silverlight 5.

The new version of Silverlight has an improved support of HD video. Thus, according to Guthrie announced that using Silverlight plug in users will be able to watch HD video on the netbook screens with the reduced load on the system resources. It will contribute to a longer time of the offline work of the devices.

Thanks to the option Trickplay, users will be able to change the speed of music and video presentation and launch them in the reverse side. Also Silverlight 5 will have a remote control support.

The beta version of the platform as well as the corresponding plug in will be released in the first half of 2011. The final version will have been released by the end of 2011.

Silverlight is one of the main competitors of the Adobe Flash platform and is used for creating multimedia content and interactive elements for web pages. For reproducing the content, users have to install a special plug-in. The first version of Silverlight was released in December 2006. At present Silverlight exists in the versions for Windows and Mac OS X as well as for the browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Silverlight is very popular among web application developers.