Yogi Land

Up and Running With Node, an as-yet-unpublished tome on Node.js, is available as an online preview for all interested parties — especially helpful and constructive commenters.

O’Reilly Media’s first “animal book” on the increasingly popular framework Node.js should be hitting store shelves sometime this summer. What you can see now is author Tom Hughes-Croucher’s text, images and code samples, all of which are currently open for comments.

As Hughes-Croucher writes in the Author’s Note for the preview, “What you’ll find within this first release is not necessarily the final work that we will publish. We hope by making this book available as it’s written we’ll get your feedback, ideas and thoughts on what I’ve already written and what else we should be covering.”

Node.js is rapidly evolving — almost too rapidly for the printed page to keep pace — so Hughes-Croucher, who is also a Node core contributor, is doing all he can to ensure the book is, at press time, current with the available versions of Node.

As O’Reilly describes it, “This book introduces you to Node, the new web development framework written in JavaScript. You’ll learn hands-on how Node makes life easier for experienced JavaScript developers: not only can you work on the front end and back end in the same language, you’ll also have more flexibility in choosing how to divide application logic between client and server.

“Node is already winning the hearts and minds of many companies, including Google and Yahoo. This book shows you why.”

Among other things, the book attempts to teach devs about Node’s approach to event-driven programming and its support for databases and data storage tools. Readers will also find best practices for the still-nascent framework and get examples of how to use the APIs.

Node has also captured the imaginations of many of the developers we talk to on a regular basis; we’re excited to see what Hughes-Croucher is bringing to the table.

The author told us via e-mail that he’ll be updating the preview every two weeks. Anyone can read and comment on the book until it’s published.

And if you already know you’re going to want a hard copy, it’s available for pre-order for $34.99.

More About: developers, development, node, node.js, o'reilly, tom hughes-croucher

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If you’re a developer interested in earning some passive income for blocks of code, or if you’re a dev who’d like to save time by buying someone else’s code, we’ve got an interesting proposition for you.

Binpress is a new site that hopes to act as a marketplace for source code. Its goal is to bring web developers “high-quality and high-level source-code solutions for development projects and web ventures,” and it promises that all code sold is “mature and tested,” a promise that’s fulfilled in the company’s developer screening and selection process.

You can go buy — or sell — a JavaScript image manager or an auction system coded in PHP, the little code packages that might make your projects a little bit less of a headache and your work process a little bit faster.

For example, if you’re working on an e-commerce app, you can buy this Paypal API abstraction class for Express Checkout and Direct Payment features. It’s written in PHP, and you can buy a single-site license for $25; a multi-site license will run you $200.

And once you buy a code package, you will receive all future updates and fixes of that code. You’ll have the opportunity to contact the developer if you need to, and you also get a money-back guarantee.

On top of all that function, we have to admit that the form is pretty nice, too:

Binpress seems like a lot less effort for everyone involved than “rent-a-coder”-type outsourcing or contracting solutions, and it generally costs less, as well. Some code is even free, and with many packages, you can see a demo of the code in action before you buy.

In addition to single-language, stand-alone components, Binpress also offers code packages for web frameworks such as CakePHP and Django and platforms such as WordPress and Joomla.

Binpress is a fairly new initiative, and its marketplace offerings are slender so far. So to kick things off and incentivize devs to sell their code on the site, the company is running a programming contest with more than $40,000 in cash and prizes for winners. The contest’s sponsors include Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Amazon Web Services, Conduit, O’Reilly, Tropo, Media Temple, uTest and others.

Although the idea of a “code marketplace” is hardly new, it’s timed well for the current development market. We saw a lot of similar ideas floating around in the early 2000s; however, web development and the dev ecosystem and communities have changed significantly since then. It’s long been time for a new, better way to buy and sell code packages and snippets, and Binpress is a good-looking, functional site that meets the need. If enough devs flesh out its code package inventory, we can see the site being of great use to developers, both those who buy and those who sell.

Binpress comes from Lionite, an Israeli web dev shop with a focus on great design.

In the comments, please let us know if Binpress is the kind of resource you’d use, either as a buyer or seller, and why or why not.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jgroup

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PHP Fog, a PaaS (platform as a service) startup for PHP developers, has just secured a $1.8 million Series A led by Madrona Venture Group and joined by First Round Capital, Founders Co-op and other prominent angels.

The company is still in a closed beta and is accepting applicants for its waiting list. The cloud-based platform helps PHP developers deploy and scale their web apps, a lot like what Heroku does for Ruby apps and developers”

“PHP Fog provides simple one-click installations of some of the most popular PHP applications out there… You get full access to the source code of your PHP application through git. Push your code changes to us, and we will publish these changes to the cloud.

“We handle deployment, failover, database maintenance, scaling, and all the other plumbing that can take an army of programmers and systems administrators to handle. Automatically. You pay only for what you use.”

As you’ll recall, Heroku was recently acquired by Salesforce for the staggering price of $212 million. As we predicted a month ago, this was likely to be a big signal to investors that developer-oriented products and services were worthy investments.

Especially when one considers the relatives sizes of the PHP and Ruby communities, an investment in a PHP PaaS in the wake of a Ruby PaaS’s acquisition makes perfect sense.

But enough about Heroku. Portland-based PHP Fog founder Lucas Carlson said in an e-mail that the idea for his company started when he was “hacking around with some code seeing if I could create something useful for my PHP programmer friends.

“I got a prototype working to prove that it’s possible. Then I put a landing page up that described the promise of PHP Fog. A single link on Hacker News went up the next day and 800 people signed up for what I built. That was the day I knew I had to go all in.”

PHP Fog gives developers dedicated (as opposed to shared) resources for their apps. Its N-tier horizontal scaling purports to give apps reliability and scalability, allowing for independent growth of web and database layers, which will likely come in particularly handy for early-stage projects and companies.

PHP Fog embraces existing PHP standards such as Apache and MySQL, and it integrates licensing costs for installations such as Magneto and SugarCRM, which Carlson says makes it “easier to re-sell.”

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Reviews: Hacker News, PHP

More About: developers, first round, founders co-op, madrona, PaaS, php, php fog, series a

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The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

In the comments, we’d love to know what stories stood out most to you this year, partly to indulge our sense of gratuitous end-of-year nostalgia and partly to help us hone our coverage for 2011, when we hope to bring you more fascinating web dev news than ever before.

What were your favorite dev-related headlines of 2010?

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1. The Release of Rails 3.0

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Early in February, the Ruby on Rails core team took the wraps off Rails 3.0, a long-awaited release of the popular Ruby framework.

Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson wrote on the Rails blog, “We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since 2.3 to get here. Yet still the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand.

“It’s a great day to be a Rails developer.”

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2. Salesforce’s Acquisition of Heroku

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Earlier this month, Salesforce bought Heroku for a staggering $212 million, giving another token of legitimacy to the growing Ruby community as well as to cloud-based programming tools.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time, “The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time… Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

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3. Facebook’s Release of HipHop for PHP

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In February, Facebook rolled out HipHop, an internal open-source project intended to speed up PHP for large-scale applications.

HipHop isn’t quite a compiler. “Rather,” wrote Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao, “it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.”

The project was the culmination of two years of work by a small team of engineers; in the end, it got a thumbs-up from PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, who said, “”I think it is a cool project and it will certainly be a good option for some sites.”

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4. The Rise of Node.js

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Node.js has been around for a couple years, but 2010 was the year awareness and use of the JavaScript framework really blew up.

Commits have grown, as has the number of committers. Traffic to the project website has steadily climbed through the year, and downloads for Node.js from GitHub have predictably grown, as well.

As the organizers of the annual Node Knockout wrote, “It’s at the bleeding edge of a technology stack that allows developers to blur the lines between software, the web and the new like never before.”

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5. Microsoft’s Release of Visual Studio 2010

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The latest version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a big release by any standards, launched this year to impressive reviews from all corners of the web. InfoWorld said the release “marks a major advance in functionality and ease,” and The Register wrote, “It is hard not to be impressed by Microsoft’s tool suite.”

The IDE was overhauled, completely rewritten from the ground up. Support for Silverlight was added, and Microsoft also took this opportunity to release F#, a new programming language developed by Microsoft Research.

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6. Facebook’s Release of the Open Graph API

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Facebook and social app developers have long wrestled with Facebook integration for third parties. In the spring at its f8 developer conference, Facebook rolled out a brand new model for tapping into the social web, and it did so to unprecedented fanfare.

Dubbed the Open Graph, Facebook’s changes brought instant gratification and familiarity for Facebook users as they surfed the web — and they brought a fast and easy way for devs to integrate with the social network, as easy as a single line of HTML in many cases.

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7. The Android/Java/Oracle Saga

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What a year it’s been for Java! Not only is the language a key part in the programming stack of the fastest-growing mobile OS out there; it’s also the star of a big, potentially spendy lawsuit between two of the giants of the tech industry.

Sun, which developed the language in-house back in the dark ages, was acquired by Oracle. That deal became official in January, and Oracle wasted no time in getting litigious with Google over that company’s use of Java in the Android platform and the Dalvik virtual machine that stands in for the JVM on mobile OSes.

The lawsuit began in August with Oracle claiming that Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”

Google quickly countered that it was shocked — shocked! — that Oracle would make such claims over an open-source technology. It followed with the assertions that Oracle’s patents are unenforceable and that if there had been “any use in the Android platform of any protected elements” of Java, Google itself “is not liable” due to the face that such violations would have been committed by third parties and without Google’s knowledge.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the lawsuit and on Java’s role in the Android platform throughout 2011.

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8. Apple Declares War on Flash

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Tensions between Apple and Adobe ran high this year, beginning in January when the iPad launched without support for Flash. Then in February, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told employees why: “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

These were the words that launched a thousand blog posts. Throughout the spring, the two companies waged a war of words — and one sweet antitrust inquiry with the Department of Justice over Apple’s banning of Flash for iPhone app devs.

Steve Jobs dropped the bomb of the year in a passive-aggressive missive on Flash in which the Apple co-founder stated that Adobe’s programming technology “no longer necessary” and waxed hypocritical about open technologies.

But while he may have been passive-aggressive and hypocritical, he also may have been right. With HTML5 making a strong showing early in its lifetime, it was only a matter of time before a public figure of Jobs’s stature would make a statement or two about the death of Flash.

Of course, this tension has made for a convenient cozying-up between Google and Adobe along the way.

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What Are Your Picks?

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Again, let us know in the comments what your favorite stories of 2010 were — and Happy New Year from the geeks at Mashable!

With special thanks to our Twitter friends who made suggestions for this list: Jordan Runnin, Leon Gersing and Jeremy Bray.

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Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, Mashable, PHP, Twitter

More About: 2010, developers, News, programming, Web Development

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When tech bloggers discovered an icon for the popular mobile game Angry Birds in a Windows Phone 7 promotional image, it seemed like confirmation that the game is coming to Microsoft’s smartphones, but the developers behind Angry Birds tweeted a denial of any commitment to the platform.

Microsoft reps then sent a note to TechFlash admitting that the image was a mistake. “It appears information was mistakenly posted to Microsoft’s website, and has been removed,” the statement said.

Microsoft will need developers like Angry Birds developer Rovio to make Windows Phone 7 attractive to iPhone or Android users who are accustomed to having a large selection of high-quality apps. Rovio said it was not thrilled because, “We don’t like others using our [intellectual property] without asking.”

However, we don’t want to overstate the blunder. We expect that Microsoft and Rovio will both move on and work together if the market for a Windows Phone 7 version of Angry Birds is there and waiting to pay for it.

Rovio even admitted as much in later tweets: “Nothing to do with if we do or don’t, it’s just that we decide that for ourselves … We could do a WP7 version of Angry Birds, not the issue. We have not agreed to do that (yet). Will support all relevant platforms.”

Angry Birds is a standard-setting iPhone game that also appears on Android, webOS and some Nokia phones. It has sold at least 6.5 million copies to date, so it’s a perfect example of an app store success story — a story Microsoft would like to see told on the Windows Phone 7 platform, too.

[Via Engadget]

More About: angry birds, apps, developers, games, gaming, Mobile 2.0, mobile games, rovio, smartphone, video games, windows mobile, windows phone, windows phone 7, wp7

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Web analytics firm Mixpanel has just launched real-time mobile analytics for the the Android platform.

Mixpanel Android analytics lets Android developers track events, do A/B testing and segment user interactions across their apps in real time. Mixpanel’s goal is to offer app developers more robust and granular data as opposed to the high-level-only statistics that many mobile analytics packages offer.

Android analytics support comes two weeks after Mixpanel launched its iPhone analytics library, and the Android offering integrates with applications in much the same way. Since its launch, the iPhone analytics library has received hundreds of sign-ups and is getting generally positive reviews.

I spoke with Mixpanel’s Jeremy Richardson about how the company’s approach to mobile analytics is different from its competitors’ and what benefits Mixpanel can offer developers. Flurry, one of the better-known mobile analytics firms, was criticized by Steve Jobs at the D8 conference for collecting too much personally identifiable information. This led to an updated terms of service for analytics trackers.

Richardson explained to me that Mixpanel’s approach is to track user behavior, not to collect personally identifiable information. Data is aggregated by default, and device data is never published. That ensures that Mixpanel complies with the iOS rules; the same considerations are in place for Android developers.

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An Actions-Based Approach to Analytics

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Mixpanel has always taken an approach that’s less about stats and more about actions and results when it comes to web and web application analytics tools. That is, instead of taking the Google Analytics approach of tracking page views, it tracks designated actions or “events” instead. In the web app space, this might be translated into how many users complete a survey or a level up in a game.

This can translate over to the mobile side too. Android developers can use the Android analytics library to add support to their projects. Then they can designate what actions or events they want to track. The Android walkthrough contains some examples of how this process works.

This video also gives an overview of Android analytics in action:

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Single Dashboard Overview

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When it comes to viewing your stats and reports, developers do it all from Mixpanel’s event dashboard. Event tracking, A/B testing, visitor retention analysis and funnel analysis are all selectable and data can be easily exported.

Here’s what we like about the mobile analytics libraries: They use the same dashboard as those for websites or web apps. This means that instead of having to go to different sites or log into different accounts as you would with some monitoring services, you can just select what app or website you want to view from the same main panel.

In this way, Mixpanel actually hopes it can gain some new customers for its social and web analytics offerings from its mobile users.

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Pricing

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Like all of Mixpanel’s offerings, Android analytics is free for up to 10,000 data points a month. After that, pricing starts at $50 a month.

For developers that are looking at understanding how users are using applications and what features or aspects of the apps are used more than others, we think that the system Mixpanel has in place could be invaluable. For game makers especially, having an overview of where people stop playing a game or what levels are completed most or least can really be useful when making future design or programming decisions.

The mobile analytics space is still relatively small, with very few companies taking an approach that is not associated with in-app advertisements. We expect to see this field blow up even more as mobile application usage continues to grow.

More About: android, developers, Mixpanel, mobile analytics, Web analytics

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On Monday, a database hang-up on a long-running query was causing problems for both Twitter.com and the service’s API, which in turn affected Twitter clients outside of the official website.

The site has grown at an incredible rate since its inception, and it’s always struggled to keep up (technically speaking) with user adoption. Ever since its userbase spread beyond the tech elite to more mainstream social media users, the site has been subject to a seemingly unending string of growing pains.

In response to a wave of failures last month during the World Cup, Twitter engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti posted that the company’s network was improperly configured, leading to downtime and trouble with features.

Cozzatti claimed that the company had doubled the capacity of its internal network, improved its monitoring and rebalanced its traffic to prevent future downtime.

“For much of 2009, Twitter’s biggest challenge was coping with our unprecedented growth (a challenge we happily still face),” he wrote. “But as this week’s issues show, there is always room for improvement.”

Apparently, the improvements made last month were not enough to keep up with user growth and their demands on the service.

Cozzatti posted again today to address Twitter’s issues Monday, comparing the engineering team’s work on scaling the app to “riding a rocket.”

Scalability and uptime are the team’s top priority; in fact, Cozzatti noted, other projects are being put to the side until these problems can be thoroughly solved. He stated that Twitter’s engineers have made more than 50 performance and optimization tweaks since the site’s World Cup woes, including doubling throughput to the database that stores tweets, improving how the app uses memcache and improving page caching of the front and profile pages, which helps to reduce page load time.

Nevertheless, “There are still times when we run into problems unrelated to Twitter’s capacity,” Cozzatti admitted.

Monday’s issues serve as a perfect example. During the database malfunction and restart — which covered a 12-hour period — users were unable to login, sign upor update their profile information and design. “In the end,” wrote Cozzatti, “this affected most of the Twitter ecosystem: our mobile, desktop, and web-based clients, the Twitter support and help system, and Twitter.com.”

While Twitter is getting its own data center this fall and is actively recruiting more engineering talent, the company clearly needs to implement the long-term solutions we’re reading about. To have the cultural cachet of a web service such as Google search, Gmail, Facebook or any of the apps we rely on for day-to-day work and life — and we have the distinct impression that Twitter does, indeed, hope to be part of that cadre — it must first and most importantly achieve an acceptable uptime ratio. All the partnerships, revenue and media buzz in the world can fall a bit flat when the app itself doesn’t work.

That being said, we’re certain Twitter can and will make the needed improvements for scalability, and growing pains are good pains to have.

Are you confident that Twitter can become reliable and stable in the near future? Or do you foresee more significant downtime from this service? What will it take for Twitter to grow as quickly as its users require?

More About: developers, down, downtime, engineering, scalability, twitter

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Today, Google has announced the launch of the Google Buzz firehose, which will give developers access to all public activity published on Buzz via a single feed with real-time PubSubHubBub syndication.

Google said the firehose was their most-requested features from developers. We’re also guessing that Google’s been eating its own dogfood, since they just launched Buzz results in Google Social Search a couple weeks ago.

In the announcement post, Google highlighted the pretty and mostly useless We Feel Fine-esque Buzz Mood, an app that parses Buzz updates for emotion-related verbs then relays them to the viewer with snappy, slide-y animations.

Partners for the firehose launch include some familiar names in the real-time space; both Collecta and OneRiot have integrated the firehose into their real-time search results, and Boulder-based social data firm Gnip was also among the first companies to use the Buzz firehose.

Buzz might not be the biggest source of currently available social data, but adding its firehose to a wider mix of real-time social update data can help expand and refine and application’s results.

Google is also releasing a few new API features today; users’ comments, users’ links and share counts will now be available via their respective feeds.

What do you have to say: Will you be using the firehose API in any of your applications? What do you find interesting or exciting about this development?

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Reviews: Google

More About: api, developers, firehose, Google, google buzz, real-time

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Twitter is beginning a preliminary run of annotations, a feature that will add an almost infinite range of data types to tweets.

Developers building apps using Twitter’s Streaming API will be the first to see the new functionality; end users may have to wait a couple weeks.

“We will test Streaming API Tweet Annotation as early as next week,” wrote Twitter infrastructure employee John Kalucki in a Google Groups thread relating to the Twitter APIs. “All streaming clients, including user streams preview clients, should expect empty annotations and the rare populated annotation during arbitrary test periods.”

If these tests are stable, Twitter will leave annotations on for the forseeable future.

Annotations were first announced from the stage at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference held in April.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s director of platform, said then that app developers would soon be able to add annotations of any kind to tweets. These annotations could include metadata of any kind.

Since annotations are just a format for attaching more data to a tweet, the ball has been left in developers’ courts to decide what kinds of apps they build to showcase what kinds of metadata. The idea is that emergent behavior and apps will surface in a trickle-up fashion rather than Twitter forecasting users’ wants and needs then dictating user behaviors by narrowing the spectrum of metadata available with tweets.

Tweets can contain multiple annotations of any kind as long as the attached information doesn’t exceed 512 bytes. Twitter has recommended developers start out with annotations about location, websites, reviews, music, films, products, securities (a.k.a. stock), events and a few other topics, as well.

To learn more, check out this slightly technical but comprehensible overview.

We can’t wait to see what developers come up with as annotations become a permanent part of Twitter’s API. What kinds of data are you most excited about being able to attach to your tweets?

[img credit: tsevis]

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Tags: annotations, apps, developers, twitter

In 9 weeks, 3 days and some change, Twitter will turn off basic authentication for apps, making OAuth the only way to connect to Twitter applications. The Twitter API team has even launched a countdown to what it calls “OAuthcalypse.”

Currently, there are two ways to connect to apps: basic authentication, where you provide your username and password to a third party, and OAuth, which allows you to connect to apps without giving away your account information. As part of a move to make Twitter more secure and stable, basic authentication will be removed on June 30th. Apps will no longer be allowed to ask for your username and password.

Twitter revealed the news and the countdown clock in an announcement on the Twitter API Google group:

“you’re going to be hearing a lot from me over the next 9 weeks. our plan is to turn off basic authorization on the API by june 30, 2010 — developers will have to switch over to OAuth by that time. between now and then, there will be a *lot* of information coming along with tips on how to use OAuth Echo, xAuth, etc. we really want to make this transition as easy as we can for everybody.”

It’s important to note that there is an exception to the new policy: the streaming API, which helps apps gain near-realtime access to certain sets of Twitter data, will still support basic authentication.

The change in policy and the launch of the OAuthcalypse countdown clock are good moves by the rapidly-growing company: it makes the entire Twitter ecosystem more secure while giving developers plenty of time and notice to switch over their apps to OAuth.

Do you think this is a smart move by Twitter? Be sure to let us know!

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: api, Countdown, developers, twitter