Developing Upwards

Most of the buzz about the App Engine has died down, except among the developers actually using the platform. When the first public announcements were made, I was a part of the original group of developers first given access. This privilege was wasted. I did nothing with it. This has changed, which is a topic for a different post. I thought I'd take a moment to make my mark on the "What I think about Google App Engine" wall. A proper review is difficult, for a number of reasons. Namely, there is a very vague understanding of the difference between this "Preview Release" and what we'll have when it launches with all official status and commercial potential. We can only hope that any big changes won't interfere with our existing applications. If that does happen then existing players might turn to AppDrop for help, although any mass migration is highly doubtful. In any case, what everyone is talking about is what App Engine is now , not what it might turn...

So, the twittersphere is in an uproar about those dropped follower counts. Is everyone more afraid of the lost high-count vanity or that so many people follow without thought that we might never regain many of the legitimate follows? Either way, there is a lot of complaining about the apparently service mishap from the company that we shell over so none of our hard earned dollars to. The mistake is one thing, but I see quite a bit of sentiment against the very method they undertook to combat the spam problem. I challenge that claim, because I think they're on the right track limiting follows, and I'm going to explain why. For Popular People This Means... You're popular by how many people follow you, not the other way around. You can go on your way, with thousands of people hanging on your every toilet flush, and Twitter can still limit those damn spammers from following you along with ten-thousand other ego filled, txt-fingered masters of the twitterverse. For "Communi...

Atul writes: Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive. The next steps Scott took are the most interesting, because he starts using this to build stock Python and Ruby runtimes that are hosted on Tamarin. This is a fascinating solution to one of our biggest itches: more languages on more platforms. Imagining the sheer number of languages (most) this opens up to running on any Tamarin run-time (Flash and Firefox 4) is mind boggling. Go on, let your mind be boggled. Combine this with the basic idea being targetted to other platforms and you've got a lot of possibilities. Target other bytecode, like Java or .Net, and you open up more possible cross-builds than you can count. Platforms begin to fade on the borders. At the same...