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Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.
Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.
Google’s Chrome web browser has only been around for two years, but with an almost frantic pace of development it’s already gone through more iterations in that brief time than many other software products do in a decade. Chrome is now up to version 6, and has a rapidly increasing share of the web browser market. It’s now in third place after Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Before Chrome arrived, Mozilla’s Firefox was the darling of the techie crowd (and in many regards it still is, but Chrome is a great, looming shadow on the horizon). Now, Firefox growth has flatlined. It’s still by far the largest web browser after Internet Explorer, but it’s no longer gaining market share.
It may be the start of a new trend, software that automatically upgrades itself silently in the background without ever bothering users. Google has been doing it successfully with its Chrome web browser, and soon Mozilla will jump on the bandwagon with Firefox.
You may love it or hate it, but for most users, software that automatically upgrades itself can be a blessing, and in more ways than is immediately apparent.
And it’s not just great for users, it’s great for developers because it allows them to innovate and develop at a fast pace, pushing out frequent updates without annoying their users with upgrade notices. In short, automatic upgrades let developers push the pace of innovation.
The two mobile platforms with the most apps are Google’s Android with around 95,000 apps, and Apple’s iOS with around 250,000 apps.
Those are impressive numbers, but this article isn’t about the sheer number of apps available. Instead, we wanted to focus on a very interesting distinction between the two platforms: The radical difference in the ratio between free and paid apps.
Google has made great strides with Android, and a ton of developers have flocked to the growing mobile platform. Not everything is rosy, though. One major concern among developers is that piracy levels are very high on the platform.
Google is of course not oblivious to this and recently announced plans to combat piracy with DRM methods that app developers can include in their apps. But there is one problem that is arguably much more problematic for Android developers when it comes to getting paid for their apps, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as we think it should.
At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.
If you’re using jQuery, a good thing you can do is to use the jQuery file hosted on one of the three public content delivery networks (CDNs) provided by Google, Microsoft and Edgecast (via MediaTemple).
This has several benefits:
So which of these free CDN options will give you the best performance?
McAfee had a nasty surprise in store for their customers a couple of weeks ago. An automatic update to its antivirus software suddenly pointed out a system-critical file in Windows XP as malicious. The result was that the file was removed, and Windows XP stopped working.
This crippled entire companies, which often have large sets of computers running XP. To make matters worse: every single computer had to be manually restored. Considering many companies had thousands of Windows XP machines, you can imagine the time it took and the outrage it caused.
Accidents such as these are uncommon, but they still happen way too often for comfort. And if you think the latest incident with McAfee was a one-off? Think again.
If Facebook has its way (and it usually does), over the coming years a ton of websites and online services will become part of the open graph that Facebook is promoting, with Facebook firmly planted in the middle. The concept is very interesting, and the potential for this web of data from a wide variety of sources is enormous. You could say that Facebook will tie all our information, and the whole web, together.
There’s just one problem (two, if you count privacy): When the web becomes “interconnected” with Facebook, it also means that when Facebook breaks, the web breaks. In short, Facebook becomes a single point of failure for the web.
Do you want to know more about how big websites like Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and others handle the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of visitors?
Well, you’re in luck, because many of those sites and services have engineering and/or developer blogs that share plenty of information about the challenges they have to deal with and the tools they use. This is an insider’s view that you usually can’t get anywhere else, giving us a unique view of what’s going on behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest web services.
