September 3rd, 2008
Chrome is 42x faster than IE7, 9x faster than FF3
I’ve been testing the new Google Chrome browser and one thing’s for sure: they weren’t kidding about great JavaScript performance in this beta. Check out these numbers I got from running Google’s V8 benchmark suite (higher is better):
- IE7: 30
- FF3.0.1: 131
- Chrome Beta 1: 1279.6
That’s a whopping 42.6 times improvement over IE7, and 9.7 times over FireFox 3. Keep in mind that these benchmarks were chosen by the team that wrote Chrome’s JavaScript engine (V8). Other benchmarks show a lesser, but still significant, improvement.
Unlike Adobe’s Tamarin engine, which is used in Flash and will appear in a future version of FireFox, V8 (see project page) does not rely on static typing to achieve its excellent performance. It dynamically figures out what data types you’re actually using as the code executes and optimizes for those types. Conventional wisdom says that dynamic types are slower than dynamic, but the V8 team in Denmark has demonstrated that’s not necessarily the case.
For more benchmark results see:
September 2nd, 2008
Google Chrome: Steal this browser
Google announced a new web browser today called Chrome. Analysts who wonder if this spells “doom” for Firefox, or if it’s an “IE killer” are missing the point. Like Gears, Chrome is Google’s latest attempt to lead by example, and push the envelope of the web experience.
[ Read: Google bets future on improving Client, Connectivity, and Cloud ]
First of all, Chrome is a new browser but not a new rendering engine. What’s the difference? A rendering engine just draws words and graphics to a rectangle on the screen. A web browser is all the stuff around that rectangle including menus, tabs, favorites, searching, and so forth. Rendering engines are hard, quirky, and tedious, so for Chrome Google picked the WebKit engine used by Safari, Adobe AIR, iPhone, and Android instead of writing their own. Web developers will be relieved to know that they don’t have to worry about yet another engine to target.
So what is Chrome and why should you care? Read the rest of this entry »
August 29th, 2008
New Android Market is YouTube for mobile applications
Google released early details yesterday about their plans for Android Market, an online bazaar for programs that run on Android phones. Essentially an Android version of the iPhone’s popular App Store, it offers three key advantages over Apple’s offering:
- It will follow the YouTube model of instant gratification: just upload and publish. Your content will appear immediately in the Market. By contrast Apple requires each iPhone app to be vetted and approved. Android’s multi-level security model will help protect your handset from malicious or just plain broken programs.
- It will provide developers with a dashboard and analytics to “help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings”. All iPhone devs get right now is a daily count of downloads.
- If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it! Unlike the iPhone, if someone comes up with a better store interface with their own catalog they are free to do so. Of course the Google one will be pre-installed on phones, which gives it an immediate advantage. But in theory a 3rd party store could work out their own deal with carriers and have theirs bundled too.
Initially all content in the Market will be free, but the next phase will include paid apps, probably purchased through Google Checkout. Google hasn’t said what their “cut” of the price for non-free programs will be, but it will most likely be less than the 30% Apple takes from App Store sales.
You can find high resolution screenshots of Android Market after the break…
[ Catch the latest Android news and opinion on Planet Android! ]
August 27th, 2008
Suddenly, Android is hot again
After months of silence, the double-whammy of new software and hardware has gotten everyone talking about Android again.
Earlier this month Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch was wondering if anybody cared about Android any more. Now TC is practically gushing over the mobile platform. What happened? Two things:
First, Google released a long awaited update to the Android software development kit. Developer Advocate Dan Morrill wrote:
The beta SDK that we’re releasing today is the first big step on the SDK’s road to compatibility with 1.0. Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0. However, the APIs are now pretty stable and we don’t expect any major changes. If you’re one of the many developers who were waiting for something a bit more mature, this might be a good time to take another look.
You’re probably wondering what’s actually new in the SDK. Well, you should read the Release Notes, the Change Overview and the API Delta Report for all the details.
Unfortunately the details released by Google were, shall we say, incomplete, but the good folks over on the Android discussion groups have been striving to fill in the gaps.
The second thing that happened is that news started to leak out about the new G1 phone from T-Mobile (formerly known as the HTC Dream). A shout-out goes to the folks over at AndroidGuys who broke the story. Rumor has it that the phone will be available for pre-sale in September and we might have it in our hot little hands by October. Of course, if a demo unit were to *happen* to be sent to a certain ZDNet blogger before then, that would be much appreciated (hint, hint). Hopefully current SunCom customers will be able to use it too.
According to the latest update, the T-Mobile G1 handset will pack a ton of features including:
- A slide-out QUERTY keyboard and trackball
- 3 megapixel camera
- Dedicated YouTube player
- SMS and MMS support
- 3G for fast Internet
- 3.17″ screen (480×320 resolution)
Two features which aren’t confirmed yet but everybody is assuming the G1 will have is GPS and a touch screen. Remember that this is just the first Android phone; because Android is an open platform any number of manufacturers will be free to create their own version.
New software… new hardware… Android is back, baby! (Now if they could just find someone to update that crappy OHA web site…)
[ Read: More about Android on Dev Connection ]
August 20th, 2008
Life without the Internet: Zapped off the grid
In my last article I described what it feels like to have your house struck by lightning. Luckily there were no injuries or structural damage (thanks for your kind words in the comments), but our gadgets and other electronics inside the house weren’t so lucky. This is their tale.
The first thing I noticed was that my computer wouldn’t come on. I thought that was odd, since it’s a laptop that works on battery power. A catalog of all the files I had neglected to back up flashed before my eyes. Materials for a book, family photographs, personal documents. Some of it I could recover, some I couldn’t. Lesson learned. I glanced over at the wireless router. It was completely dead. Cycling the power didn’t help. What else? I was about to find out… Read the rest of this entry »
August 18th, 2008
Surviving a lightning strike: Shock and awe
Swaddled in air-conditioned comfort, sipping a Diet Coke I hardly noticed the late afternoon thunderstorm that blew in last Friday. They’re a common occurrence in central North Carolina in the summer time; so I continued with my work secure in my technological web. In the background I could hear the kids watching another cartoon on the Tivo. Email flashed on the screen thanks to a high speed cable connection, which also brought VoIP telephone service. Entertainment, information, and contacts with friends and relatives through the Internet had so pervaded our lives that we had become spoiled by it, taking it for granted. That was about to change.
[ Don’t miss part 2: Life without the Internet: Zapped off the grid ]
What I’ll remember most is the sound. To call it “loud” is simply not an adequate description. The sound was a physical force, a sledgehammer to the chest and a blow to the very foundations of reality. There was light as well of course–the whole world turning white for an instant–but light I can deal with. There is no number on the decibel scale that can do justice to that sound. It was so sudden and unexpected. You’re supposed to see the lightning first, and then hear the thunder. 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3, count the seconds to tell how far away it is. Not this time. Impossibly, the sound seemed to happen before the flash. Time stopped. And then there was silence, and darkness. Read the rest of this entry »
August 15th, 2008
LWUIT vs. JavaFX Mobile
The light-weight user interface toolkit for Java ME (LWUIT) has been released as open source under the GPLv2+classpath exception license. LWUIT is a library that helps content developers in creating rich and consistent Java ME applications. LWUIT supports visual components, theming, transitions, animation, and more. Sounds similar to JavaFX doesn’t it? I asked Dave Hofert, group manager, Java platform marketing at Sun, to explain the differences.
According to Hofert, while both LWUIT and JavaFX enable creating a better and more compelling user interface for mobile and other devices, there are really two target audiences / handset profiles: Read the rest of this entry »
August 4th, 2008
The astounding $14million Ethernet extender
I was helping a friend find a good price on a powerline Ethernet extender like the one I bought a few months ago, and stumbled upon this bargain:
Luckily I found one cheaper here:
When I showed this to my friend his first comment was “For 1/5 of a mil you’d think they’d include shipping”. True, but at least there was no tax.
I don’t have any inside knowledge on how the shopping site gets its prices, but I suspect they’re using a method called “screen scraping“. In this method you just fetch every product web page and try to parse out the HTML to find where the number you want is located. This is fairly straightforward but it doesn’t always work, especially if the site you’re scraping changes its format. Also some sites don’t appreciate being used in this manner.
A better solution is to use a web service. Web services are sort of like web pages in that you access them with an “http://something” address. But instead of returning an HTML page they return the answer in a form that is easier for a computer program to understand, like XML or JSON. If the site you’re querying provides a web service then you can write a program (like a price comparison server) that calls the service and gets the result.
Here’s an example of a web service. When you click on this link, you will actually be calling a service from Google that translates the text “thank you” from one language to another, in this case English to French. Go ahead and click it; there’s no code that runs in your browser or anything dangerous. Here’s what I get:
{"responseData": {"translatedText":"merci"},
"responseDetails": null, "responseStatus": 200}
The answer comes back in a JSON format that can easily be loaded by Javascript, Java, or any other language. When web services first started out, most of them used a protocol called SOAP that wrapped both the request and the response in a standard XML “envelope”. This was very general, but also very cumbersome. Nowadays, many web services are “REST-ful”, meaning the query is encoded in a regular HTTP request (like the one in that link) and the results come back in a simple format.
You can see an example of code that uses web services in the downloadable examples from my upcoming book, Hello, Android. I wrote a program that prompts for some text, calls the service to translate it to another language, and then translates it back into your original language to see how it comes out. The examples are free; from the home page select the Code link, download the zip file, and open up the Translate project.
For more info on the Google Language API used in the example, including the terms of use, see their site.
[ Read: More programming tips on Dev Connection ]
July 29th, 2008
JavaFX Preview SDK to be released this week
Sun will release a preview version of the JavaFX Software Development Kit later this week,
fulfilling a pledge made at JavaOne this year. Joshua Marinacci writes:
I’m excited by what we’ve put together but also exhausted. We’ve done an incredible amount of work during the last year. Now I know what it was like in the early days of Java. Since JavaOne 2007 we’ve built (from scratch), a compiler for a new language with many non-trivial features, a GUI runtime with a new graphics and animation stack, new Netbeans plugins with code completion, utilities for graphic designers, a new kind of Javadocs (rewritten from the ground up), plus docs, samples, and demos. And that’s not even counting the many improvements that are going into JavaSE 6 update 10. Whew! It’s been a long year.
According to Simon Brocklehurst, a few features will not make the preview release but will be coming in version 1.0 due out later this year. These include: 3d vector graphics, the ON2 VP6 codec, streaming video, and local file system access. However all the basics are there including standard UI elements, regular and key frame animation, 2d graphics, and export from Adobe Illustrator to JavaFX.
That last piece is important to Sun if it wishes to compete against Adobe’s Flash and Flex products. People working on a particular rich internet application have different skill sets. Artists need a way to develop content, such as the skin of a video player, in a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator which is optimized for their creative talent. Then they need a way to pass that content to programmers to add the behavior behind the art. Flash has had this capability for years. Instead of trying to create artist tools from scratch, Sun will try to piggyback on top of the Adobe tools through exporters. The preview version will export from Illustrator, and the final 1.0 version will export from Photoshop.
Will JavaFX be enough to unseat Flash/Flex? At this point, I just don’t see it. Flex 3 is growing like gangbusters, and Adobe controls the whole tool chain. They have the workflow covered, and they have years of experience bridging the gap from designers to developers. More importantly, Adobe has earned the trust of those same designers and developers. It’s a shame, really, but after 10+ years of leaving Java applets to wither on the vine, it’s going to take many more years for Sun to prove that it understands rich internet applications and that it can deliver a compelling vision of the future. Tellingly, even the JavaFX home page doesn’t actually use JavaFX; it uses Ajax and Quicktime movies.
There are some niches, however, where JavaFX may flourish. In particular, consider environments like certain TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and mobile phones that already have Java running (sometimes as the only way to run programs). A scaled back JavaFX Mobile running on top of Java Mobile Edition (ME) will give JavaFX an instant base that can’t be ignored. It remains to be seen how much of the speed and functionality that we see on JavaFX Desktop will translate over to the mobile and embedded side, but Sun has a definite opportunity there.
July 24th, 2008
Google + Digg = ?
There’s a persistent rumor that crops up every few months about social news site Digg being acquired by ____ (insert company here). The latest, citing “multiple sources inside and outside Google”, says that Google will buy Digg for $200M. This is similar to a rumor in March that Digg was going to be acquired “soon” by Google or Microsoft or two other companies, according to “a source very close to the deal”. In 2006, it was Yahoo who was going to buy Digg for $30M, at least if you believed “two sources close to Yahoo”.
Whether the rumors turn out to be true this time or not, it’s a common pastime to imagine what the name of a merged company will be. Of course, it’s all but certain there would be no name change, and that each company or division would continue with its current name. But just for fun… what is your favorite?
Loading …Ed Burnette has programmed everything from device drivers and compilers to video games and multi-user servers. He is currently writing enterprise software in a variety of languages including C, Ruby, Python, and Java. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here.
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Recent Entries
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- Google Chrome: Steal this browser
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- Suddenly, Android is hot again
- Life without the Internet: Zapped off the grid
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