Java, Open Source, SOA & WS* on Top of Indian Developer's Radar

Himanshu Goyal heads Academic Initiative, developerWorks and Globalization initiatives for IBM India/South Asia. Under these initiatives, he is responsible to evangelize, skill and certify on the IBM Software to Engineering Students, Faculties, Developers and senior IT professionals in the Industry. Under Globalization he is responsible for the availability of IBM software in local languages in India/South Asia. Himanshu spoke to DeveloperMarch about the 27-city road show ‘Develothon 2010’geared towards skilling the Indian developers on emerging technologies and trends, the mission for developerWorks going forward and the technologies that is keeping Indian developers excited in 2010.

Google Coming to your Idiot Box?

Google is set to invade your living room as the company puts its finishing touches on technology that lets software developers build applications for televisions in much the same way as they do for smartphones. Google is planning to unveil an Android-based 'Google TV' at the Google I/O conference, which open in May, San Francisco. Intel and Sony are also involved in the platform, which is rumoured to be open source, in keeping with the Android operating system. "(Google) hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones."

Symbian to Fully Endorse HTML 5

Symbian has released a set of web application development tools for the recently open-sourced Symbian platform. These tools aim to aid the development, distribution and installation of web applications on Symbian devices, using technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. "Symbian Foundation is fully embracing HTML5. Symbian^4 will take a big step forward and we’re encouraging our contributors to move as fast as possible. Check this out for a snapshot of the progress," says the Development Tools Manager at Symbian Foundation.

C Programming Knocks out Java from #1 Position

After more than 4 years C is back at position number 1 in the TIOBE index. The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX script that is now approaching the top 20.

RIM Updates for Java and Web Tools Make Blackberry App Development Easier

The BlackBerry Java Plug-In for Eclipse v1.1 and the BlackBerry Web Plug-in v2.0 offer new capabilities that make it even easier to create feature-rich applications. The BlackBerry Widget SDK (Software Development Kit) v1.0 and the BlackBerry(R) Java SDK v5.0, which includes more than 20,000 APIs, provide unparalleled access to BlackBerry(R) smartphone hardware features, native BlackBerry software applications and other unique system capabilities of the BlackBerry Application Platform.

3PAR Unveils Utility Storage in India

3PAR, a global provider of utility storage, has launched its first sales and customer service office in India and has named Arvind Khurana as country manager. This move into India is intended to position 3PAR to meet growing demand for technologies to support cloud computing, the virtual datacenter,green IT initiatives, and enhanced infrastructure agility in an economy that has been expanding in the midst of a worldwide recession.

The Future of Distributed Computing Rests with Hadoop

Moore's law has finally hit the wall and CPU speeds have actually decreased in the last few years. The industry is reacting with hardware with more cores and software that can leverage "grids" of distributed computing resources. Hadoop is a suite of Open Source APIs at the forefront of this revolution and is considered the gold standard for the divide-and-conquer model of problem crunching. Learn how to use this well-travelled Apache Hadoop framework, leveraged by prominent names such as Yahoo, Amazon, Adobe, AOL, Facebook, Google and Hulu.

GPUs Revving Up to Obliterate the CPU

The computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years. So the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now GPU computing can be used for solving a variety of problems in game computing including game physics, artificial intelligence, animation, post-processing effects and others. Rev Lebaredian, Director of Engineering in Nvidia, says that as GPUs grow and become more general purpose, more and more of the game is going to be shifting over to the GPU. The final goal is to have the whole game run on the GPU. The Director of Engineering in Nvidia, Rev Lebaredian, says we are not able to depend on the same speed ups that we are getting year after year with traditional CPU architectures. So GPUs will obliterate the CPU.

SAP, IBM and Others Face Oracle's Double Barrel for India 2010 Reporting Tools Glory

Constant development of technology has made the storing and processing of ever growing data volumes considerably cheaper. Therefore the idea of economizing on data volumes has lost its importance for most companies, as even the storing of the 'production' of systems producing thousands of records a day does not bring along considerable costs. On the other hand, growing data volumes call for more efficient reporting and analysis tools. Read on to find out what reporting tools Indian developers prefer.

Game Development Spawns cool Engineers

The computer game and hardware industry is advancing at a rapid pace, both in terms of technical innovation and sales. Nvidia is working towards expanding the market reach for games and to continually advance the state-of-the-art in visual computing. Saltmarch Media spoke to Nvidia's Ashu Rege and Keita Iida about the much awaited release of Nvidia’s Fermi architecture based GPUs. Nvidia's latest graphics card, based on Fermi architecture, is the company's first DirectX 11 graphics card. DirectX 11 is the next generation of graphics technology. Ashu firmly believes the Fermi architecture can truly exploit the possibilities of Direct X 11. Ashu and Keita share their thoughts on optimal Direct X 11 support becoming a deciding factor in terms of GPU sales in the coming years, how Fermi will fare against ATI’s HD5800 series, the most significant result of the AEGIA acquisition and whether modern games getting too dependant on high end hardware. When quizzed on the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work Ashu says Indian developers should develop a passion for being involved with game development to be truly successful. They should also look at going into high end game development, because what has actually become a critical bottleneck for studios worldwide is talent.

Red Hat Upgrades Middleware Platform with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0

Red Hat has updated its middleware portfolio with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 that it says can provide improved web services and cloud integration. The company claims businesses can use JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to customise the platform deployment to suit their specific needs, including using the entire solution, its individual components and even integrate it with third-party open- and closed-source products and tools. Early adopters of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform cut across a wide swathe of industries including financial services, transportation, telecom, government and entertainment.