April 13, 2012

RIM recently announced that it would end Android app sideloading for its PlayBook tablet, but now the company appears to have changed its mind. In a new blog post, RIM’s Alec Saunders clarified, “Sideloading on our platform is changing in nature.” He added, “Sideloading is a developer feature. It exists

SAP appears to be moving towards becoming a major player in mobile enterprise application development. The firm has announced that it has purchased mobile business development firm Syclo and signed partnerships with three others: Appcelerator, Adobe and Sencha. These firms offer mobile development frameworks and related tools. “By joining forces

Last week, word leaked out that Amazon was testing in-app purchases with a select group of developers. Now, the company has made the feature official and has announced that Walt Disney Co., Conde Nast, Gameloft and Dow Jones & Co. will be some of the first companies to offer in-app

A startup called Heirloom Computing has launched a new development platform that aims to make it easier to move legacy applications from the mainframe to the cloud. ELPaaS, as the service is known, includes an Elastic COBOL IDE which compiles applications written in COBOL or IBM’s CICS into Java code.

Last June, Apple asked a U.S. district court judge to allow the company to intervene in cases brought by Lodsys against iOS developers. Now, the judge has agreed. Widely considered a “patent troll,” Lodsys owns a patent on in-app purchasing, and last year it began suing mobile development firms and

VMware’s CloudFoundry platform as a service (PaaS) has always been open source, but the company has announced changes to its processes that will encourage more community participation on the cloud development tool. Specifically, VMware is using a new Gerrit code review system to streamline the process of making changes to