2009/06/03
InfoWorld: Sun moves to simplify Java phone development
by Robert McMillan
Sun Microsystems, Orange, Vodafone Group, and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications are taking steps to make it a little easier - and cheaper - for software developers to bring Java programs to mobile phones.
At Sun's annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco Tuesday, they released new open-source testing tools and said they were enhancing the five-year-old Java Verified program used to certify Java ME programs on mobile devices. The goal: to simplify the process and reduce the number of tests that software developers have to run in order to be sure that their programs will run properly on different phones.
"Nobody likes testing," said Martin Wrigley, director of technology with Orange's partner program, at a press conference. As the market for mobile applications matures, developers will do more of the testing themselves, he said.
The problem is that different network operators have different requirements and sell different devices, so any software developer who wants to reach a large audience has to do a lot of testing. And that can be expensive. A single test can cost $200, and while that may not sound like a lot, it can add up quickly. Wrigley knows of one applications developer who maintains 14,000 versions of his product. With the new testing methodology "we have seen reductions in up to 50 percent in the costs of testing," he said.
Sun has been pushing Java on mobile phones for about a decade now, but in recent years the platform has been overshadowed by the iPhone and Google's Android.
The most popular applications on Orange's network are very simple Java apps like Pullface and Bob the Belcher, but there's no reason why Java couldn't be used to create the same kind of applications that are being downloaded from Apple's App Store, Wrigley said.
In fact, as Java ME programs become more sophisticated, testing will become even more important, he said. "When you have more complex applications ... that requires more testing to make sure it works for the customers."
There are about 200 million high-end handsets on the market, and that number will quadruple in the next few years, said Carl-Eric Mols, director of software strategies with Sony Ericsson. Still, while high-end products such as the Blackberry and the iPhone get a lot of attention, "the big majority of handsets out in the rest of the world are regular phones with Java ME," he said.
Both Mols and Wrigley declined to comment on what effect, if any, Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems will have on Java ME or their new initiatives.
CNet: Cloud services to get supercharged
by Dong Ngo
When it comes to backing up your computer, it's probably safest and most convenient to use a cloud storage service where you store data at remote location via the Internet. However, there's a big obstacle: bandwidth. With most existing broadband services, it can take a couple of hours to upload a few gigabyte of information.
This might change in the near future.
Asankya, a network service company, announced Wednesday that it has improved its parallel networking technology to deliver up to 40 times throughput improvement for Internet-based applications. This, if true, would solve the biggest challenge that hinders the growth and global scale of cloud- and SaaS-based services.
Asankya's new networking technology is a set of patented parallel networking algorithms that significantly increase bi-directional Internet Protocol performance and accelerate encrypted traffic delivery for both ICP- and UDP-based applications. It aggregates throughput across the Internet by using multiple available pathways and removes duplicate packet transmission. The breakthrough algorithms were first funded through grants by the National Science Foundation.
The technology has been deployed by the U.S. government for real-time, interactive video applications delivered over wired and wireless IP networks. It now has been commercialized-that means soon you will be able to take advantage of it.
This is exciting news as cloud computing has been on the raise in the last few years. According to the research firm IDC, the cloud computing industry is going to be a $42 billion business by 2012.
TheRegister: Google eyeballs planted on 92% of top websites
by Cade Metz
A new privacy study says that Google-controlled web bugs are tracking users on 92 of the net's top 100 sites and about 88 per cent of almost 400,000 other domains.
Using a Firefox browser plug-in called Ghostery, three graduate students in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley recently examined the use of cookies, beacons, and other trackers on 393,829 distinct domains across the web, and Google trackers appeared on 348,059 of them.
Google Analytics was used by over 71 per cent of the domains, Google AdSense by over 35 per cent, and Google DoubleClick by over 26 per cent.
The study was conducted in March of this year. And preliminary numbers from April indicate that Google trackers appeared on roughly 80 per cent of 766,000 distinct domains on the net. The researchers call Google "the most dominant player in the tracking market."
Cookies for Microsoft's Atlas service, Redmond's DoubleClick competitor, appeared on 60 per cent of the top 100 websites (compared to DoubleClick's 70 per cent). But it turned up on less than 3 per cent of the nearly 400,000 total domains examined. Omniture and Quantcast cookies appeared on 57 per cent of the top 100 and less than 6 per cent of the 400,000.
The study does not imply that Google is combining data across its various tracking services. "We are not claiming that Google aggregates information from each of these trackers into a central database, though it does possess the capability to do so," the researchers write in their study, available here.
Speaking with the New York Times, Google took issue with that last bit. The company said that Analytics cookies are different for each site using the service, so it can't track users across multiple sites. And The Times has a Google managing counsel saying that contracts with customers don't allow the company to aggregate data from services like DoubleClick and AdSense.
Google did not respond to our requests for comment. But the DoubleClick-AdSense situation is at best a gray area. The two ad services are now using what would seem to be identical cookies, and to date, despite repeated questions, Google has not given us a direct answer on whether users are being tracked across both services.
If it's not tracking across both services, it would indeed be trivial for it to do so.
According to the Berkley study, only 36 of the top 50 websites acknowledged the use of third-party web bugs in their privacy policies, and all 36 stated that their policies did not cover third-party tracking. Meanwhile, some sites couldn't get their story straight.
"Within the same privacy policy, we often found that a site would say 'We don't share your information with third-parties' but then elsewhere in policy they'd say 'We do permit third-party tracking via web bugs,'" Brian Carver, the professor who oversaw the study, tells The Reg. "To the average web user that's a contradiction."
What's more, the study says, 46 of the top 50 websites share data with their affiliates. And despite inquires sent to each site, it wasn't clear how many affiliates each site has. "Most stated that they do not disclose corporate information. Some companies did offer a little information... Based on our experience, it appears that users have no practical way of knowing with whom their data will be shared."
MySpace, the study points out, is owned by News Corp., which has over 1,500 subsidiaries. Bank of America has 2,300.
"The law on affiliate sharing generally is more permissive. Incentives for security and fair treatment of data are assumed to exist among affiliates," the study continues. "However, given the large size of affiliate networks, the fact that many affiliates are essentially unrelated entities with different business models in entirely different fields, and the practical challenge of identifying their size and scope, the more liberal treatment of affiliate sharing should be reexamined." ®
