InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Controversial Opinions on Software Patents - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Patents are quite often in the news these days, most notably the ones related to smart phone vendors like HTC, Samsung, Google and Apple. This also holds for the rather emotional and controversial discussion about software patents which some consider as a means to ensure innovation and others as a kind of weapon. Do software patents cause more harm than good, or vice versa?
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Mozilla Favors Web Over Native Application Development
Mozilla has started working on WebAPI, a set of APIs for accessing device functionality usually accessible only for native applications in an attempt to develop a cross platform solution that will enable developers to write web applications once for all mobile OSes.
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Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture Review announced by OASIS
OASIS has just announced a public review for Reference Architecture Foundation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA-RAF), which defines SOA as an ecosystem supporting concerns of both business and IT.
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM As Development Platform
The Dynamics CRM SDK, which allows Dynamics CRM to be customized using .NET framework, opens the entire object model to developers to build solutions against. It does this using reusable application services and a multi-tenant architecture and allows to build multiple Line-Of-Business xRM applications on a single platform.
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Movements in Mobile Web
Last week was saw a number of significant changes in the mobile ecosystem. First, Google bought Motorola Mobility, leading to questions on whether Android would continue to be developed in an open manner, and then HP pulled the TouchPad at the end of last week. Where does this leave mobile devices?
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OpenSocial 2.0 Gets Some Traction in the Enterprise
OpenSocial 2.0 comes with new features – new container, OAuth 2 support, embedded experiences, activity streams – and it has got some support among enterprises – IBM, Jive, SAP-, as an alternative to Facebook platform.
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Cooperation between European Space Agency and Lero
As announced on 18th August 2011, the Irish Software Engineering Research Center (Lero) has signed a €300.000 contract for a research project with the European Space Agency (ESA). Goal of the research activities is to provide a solution framework for future space missions.
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Is it Difficult to Write REST Clients?
Adam DuVander, from the Programmable Web, reported last week on a survey of API experiences which raised some of the largest problems developers encounter in consuming Web APIs, including the most popular APIs.
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W3C Launches Community and Business Groups
W3C has opened up their infrastructure and expertise to the world to create Community and Business Groups useful to develop specifications and tests or simply hold discussions around web technologies. W3C Community Groups are open and do not require any fee, and all proceedings are public, while Business Groups do require a fee. Interview with Ian Jacobs, Head of W3C Marketing and Communications.
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Microsoft Slows Down Release Cadence for Entity Framework, Adopts Semantic Versioning
Since .NET 4 was released Microsoft has been pushing an ever faster release cadence for its .NET libraries with new features coming out every few months instead of every few years like it had done in the past. As a result of a recent embarrassment, the ADO.NET team is moving back to using beta releases and, to reduce future confusion, adopting the concept of Semantic Versioning.
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What’s Next for Android?
Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5B, getting 17,000 patents plus another 7,500 in the process of being granted, most of them related to communication. Android gets more litigation protection, but Google is now a hardware manufacturer, unsetting the balance in the Open Handset Alliance, the organization promoting Android. Will Android partners move to other OSes?
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Five Candidate Patterns Promoted To The SOA Patterns Master List
Five candidate patterns were promoted to the SOA Patterns Master List, which will appear in the upcoming "SOA with REST" book from Thomas Erl and Prentice Hall Publications. This news item gives a brief overview of each of these patterns which are common distributed system patterns applied to services at the messaging layer.
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Behavior Driven Development In .NET
Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is being increasingly seen as an alternative way to approach Test Driven Development. SpecFlow and NSpec are popular frameworks for BDD in .NET. They help create test specifications that are easy to read even for non-programmers and allow the design of the software to be driven by it’s purpose.
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Kevin Montrose on the History and Mistakes of the StackExchange API
Creating a public API for an existing website is always a risky venture, and StackExchange’s open editing policy makes it even riskier than most. In a recent series of articles, Kevin Montrose talks about what decisions went into the StackExchange API and what lessons they learned along the way.
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Lack of Software Engineers Bears Risks
Although many products and solutions increasingly leverage software as an essential fundament, software engineers are becoming a rare species in Western countries. The problem with scarce availability of well-educated software engineers is that many companies require more engineers then they can get and if that gap widens, this could damage the leading edge of some companies.