March 22, 2011

All thirteen members of the Executive Committee for Java SE/EE have voted to approve the Jave Enterprise Edition (EE) 7 specification that was submitted by Oracle. Members of that committee include Google, VMware, Intel, SAP, IBM and HP, but not the Apache Foundation, which resigned in protest late last year.

Google has added a new application statistics dashboard to the Android Market Developer Console that should give developers more insight into the audience for their apps. The dashboard displays each app’s total downloads, as well as its distribution across Android platform versions, devices, countries and languages. It also includes aggregate

The Unified Testing Initiative (UTI) is a non-profit organization focused on mobile application quality, and its members include AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle, Orange, Samsung and Vodafone. The group has just released its Best Practice Guidelines for Developing Quality Mobile Applications a set of cross-platform standards for improving apps. “Developers

Despite the number of job postings for “software architects,” Craig Larmon believes that “Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don’t construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden.” This idea has been around since the 1970s, when Harlan Mills made a similar point. Today, it’s particularly

In the movie The Social Network, potential Facebook interns were asked “If you were required to write code after becoming intoxicated, could you do it?” Whether or not it actually happened, the story points out that candidates for development jobs are sometimes asked ridiculous questions. At the top of the

On January 7, 2011, Apple launched its Mac App Store with about 1,000 apps. Since then, the store has swelled to pass 4,000 apps, even as developers continue to express reservations about the model. For developer TechSmith, the Mac App Store has been a success so far. Offering its video

Developers looking for an alternative to Oracle-owned MySQL have a new option. Drizzle, an open-source fork of MySQL has reached the GA release stage. Because Drizzle is based on MySQL code, “applications that use MySQL can usually be converted to use Drizzle relatively easily,” says Andrew Hutchings, a Drizzle developer

Google has plenty of Android-related legal troubles in its lawsuit with Oracle, but the current lawsuit not Android’s only potential problem. Google’s handling of Linux code also raises issues. That’s because Linux is released under GPLv2, which requires that any code based on Linux also be released under GPLv2. However,