application development

application development - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

  • Stop the funeral! Objective-C is alive and kicking

    Objective-C may no longer be the stylish language choice for Apple iOS and Mac OS development -- that mantle is being assumed by Swift, <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929599/application-development/believe-it-or-not-swift-debuted-a-year-ago-today.html">introduced in mid-2014</a>. But proponents of Objective-C don't expect it to go away quietly anytime soon.

  • Sick of Flash security holes? HTML5 has its own

    HTML5 has been billed as the natural, standards-based successor to proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe's Flash Player for providing rich multimedia services on the Web. But when it comes to security, one of Flash's major weaknesses, HTML5 is no panacea.

  • Why R? The pros and cons of the R language

    The R programming language is an important tool for <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2922073/analytics/how-to-put-the-r-programming-language-to-work.html">development in the numeric analysis and machine learning spaces.</a> With machines becoming more important as data generators, the popularity of the language can only be expected to grow. But R has both pros and cons that developers should know.

  • Java at 20: The programming juggernaut rolls on

    What began as an experiment in consumer electronics in the early 1990s celebrates its 20th anniversary as a staple of enterprise computing this week. Java has become a dominant platform, able to run wherever the Java Virtual Machine is supported, forging ahead despite the rise of rival languages and recent tribulations with security.

  • Coding for cars: The next generation of mobile apps

    For several decades, enterprise developers had to support one simple platform: computers on desks. Then the smartphone came along and we had to find ways to deliver the data to a smaller, more mobile rectangle. All of these challenges, however, prepare us little for the next big platform to come: the automobile.

  • Put your API on a JSON diet

    Last week I discussed design considerations for APIs, given that APIs aren't applications and shouldn't be treated as such. At small scales, APIs that come along for the ride with bulky Web frameworks might be fine, but beyond that you're asking for trouble. If you're building an API that will serve a large number of clients, your API code should be thin and tight, as well as make liberal use of caching. Otherwise, the future headaches will be crippling.

  • How machine learning ate Microsoft

    At the Strata big data conference yesterday, Microsoft let the world know its Azure Machine Learning offering was generally available to developers. This may come as a surprise. Microsoft? Isn't machine learning the province of Google or Facebook or innumerable hot startups?

  • Node.js goes pro: New opportunities -- and risks

    In its mere five years of existence, Node.js has transformed from a technological curiosity to a technology stack all its own, providing a major building block for everything from microservices to APIs.

  • TypeScript: Industrial-strength JavaScript

    Historians who reflect on JavaScript's emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting Donald Rumsfeld: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might wish to have."

  • Functional languages rack up best scores for software quality

    Language design makes a difference in software quality, and <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2843393/application-development/functional-programming-tradeoffs-efficiency-learning-curve.html">functional languages</a> offer an edge when it comes to building quality software, a study of programming languages and code quality in GitHub reveals.

  • What's new with Java

    I'm sick of Java, as you probably are too. That said, there have been a number of changes to Java lately that may have flown under the radar. So, here is what you need to know about where things stand.

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