Bruce Armstrong's blog

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

How long before HTML5 is ready for prime time for Line of Business (LOB) applications?

Here's a take on the future of HTML5 from a leader in the gaming community:

"It's very early days for HTML5. If you think about the order of it maturing, it's first going to mature for periodicals, magazines, newspaper-type applications. The Financial Times already moved there and the NYT already moved there. A year or two beyond that you'll start to see other simple apps like the Bloomberg financial apps, weather apps, that kind of stuff all makes sense for HTML5. Beyond that, another year or two down the line, you're going to have simple casual games that are going make sense to be programmed in HTML5. Glu's approach is to play at the exact other side of the spectrum here. We build apps that require 100-200-300 megabyte downloadable clients. Things like 3D FPS. For our style of games, you're five years away if not 10 years away from being able to deliver a comparable bandwidth and hardware experience using an app model vs. an HTML5 model. We choose to partner and build a style of games that take advantage of the latest hardware."

http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/glu-mobiles-ceo-spills-why-html5-isnt-future/2012-06-11

I'd argue that line of business applications require UI capabilities somewhere between casual games and the kinds of games that Glu does. So we may be looking at anywhere from 2 to 10 years.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Upcoming PowerBuilder.TV Episodes

Appeon Mobile Sneak Peek - Catch-up session -- Armeen Mazda
June 19th 2012 at 12:00 AM EST (New York) - 18h00 CET (Paris)

Thursday, June 07, 2012

PowerBuilder Developers Conference announced, including call for papers

The PowerBuilder Developers Conference! The conference will be held October 15-19, 2012 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, concurrently with SAP TechEd.

Interesting take on measuring the popularity of programming languages

Particularly if you have some issues with the method that TIOBE uses.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/06/5-ways-to-tell-which-programming-lanugages-are-most-popular.php

Not sure they address the problem as far as PowerBuilder is concerned though. For example, the first method measures data from StackOverlow and GitHub. The first makes sense. I doubt there are many if any PowerBuilder projects on GitHub though, which doesn't mean the language isn't used, it just means it isn't used with GitHub.

Similar issues with one of the sources that one of the commenters on the article makes. They recommend looking at data from itjobswatch.co.uk, at least as far as popularity within the UK.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=3&sortby=0&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618

You won't see PowerBuilder on the list, but if you search for PowerBuilder separately you'll get hits. Apparently the site doesn't categorize PowerBuilder as a language. That's actually fair, it's a tool, not a language. But it demonstrates the problem using most of these statistics to try to determine where PowerBuilder fits in.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Haiti 2012

One of the things is was great to see was the amount of progress that has been accomplished since I was in Haiti last June.

Sybase TechWave content split between SAP TechEd and another event yet to be announced.

The Database and Mobility portions of TechWave are being incorporated into SAP TechEd which will be held October 15-19 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.

The Application Development Tools portions of TechWave will be held in a separate event at the same time and general location. To ensure you are informed of updates specific for the Application Development Tools event, you can register your interest at http://response.sybase.com/forms/2012TechEdAppDevToolsEvent.

Thursday, April 12, 2012