Forget Flash, Silverlight is coming to the iPhone. Even though Flash was self-sufficient, Microsoft developed Silverlight to create it’s own market. But it was  never as portable as Flash, but the horizon seems to be changing. Microsoft already announced Silverlight for Symbian and iPhone seem to be the evident, though from Microsoft’s rival. With Moonlight, Novell’s open source, cross-platform Silverlight implementation, Read further »

For application developers who are hunting down to rewrite GUI for every other OS, there is a simple and yet, an elegant solution : Qt Qt (pronounced “Cute”) is cross-platform application and UI framework developed and maintained by telecom giant, Nokia. As far as I can tell you, this is the most portable, and yet most feature-ful UI, I’ve seen lately. Surprisingly, it works on both PCs and mobiles, alike. It supports embedded-Linux, Mac OS, Windows, Read further »

It was predicted long back that RIA (Rich internet Applications) no longer needs Flash’s domination. AJAX/ JQuery, HTML 5, CSS will together form the best army against the closed Flash (which can’t be open sourced). Though few predict that HTML5 would kill Flash, it’s more evident that HTML5 will innovate new web applications Read further »

In the need for speed, Facebook had been working under the hood to boost PHP runtime to crazy levels which were not possible before. Facebook has now Open sourced the underlying code, as predicted. The PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, but it comes with an extra effort: The PHP is translated to C++ (which is of course more efficient) which is then compiled with g++. The project is called HipHop and has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past 2+ years. With HipHop, Read further »

PHP offers a light-weight runtime for small-to-medium sized webapps. If you are not a PHP developer, you will be surprised to know that PHP doesn’t support multithreading natively, though there are ways to make it possible. People have often come up with solutions to mock multithreading but still PHP sucks at performance as far as large applications are concerned. Update: Facebook’s PHP Runtime HipHop, now Open Source Most industry applications fallback Read further »

A typical full-fledged OS could ranges from 1-20GB before/after installation. But How small can it really get? Few Megabytes? Kilobytes, perhaps. BareMetal is an open source CLI-based Operating system. The OS is written entirely in Assembly while applications can be written in Assembly or C/C++. BareMetal is not intended to be a full-featured Operating System by any means. The two main purposes of BareMetal are for educational uses in learning low-level OS programming in Read further »

From what I heard, Steve Jobs had been working hard to develop a killer device that would change the face of the industry. Well, I blogged live for iPad launch event but I didn’t see that coming. Was it really unveiled ? All I saw was a fancy eBook Reader that can’t even run full web. Some one rightly said, iPad is a golden calf Read further »

Oracle recently announced that Approval from EU for the Oracle-Sun merger. Rumors of layoffs may have just started, but there is a move from the CEO before it all happens. Sun’s CEO Jon Schwartz’s recent all-hands memo (read below) to employees had all the sentiments embedded that hinted his farewell. Sources close to Schwartz tell that he will soon resign as CEO, leaving the company in the hands of new owner Oracle. Schwartz’s departure will likely coincide with final approval of the deal and official change in control of the company. Schwartz joined the CEO position Read further »

The long going controversy over the MySQL objection raised by EU finally seems to settle down. Previously, MySQL Founder and EU wanted Oracle to sell MySQL. Now, things have started to favor Oracle for good. Oracle announced on Thursday that it had received regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Read further »

Closed Technologies have had the enough, the future is bound to be open. I can’t think of a stream where Open source has not contributed. In few of the relatively newer streams, like telecom, Open source is still catching up. I had been into telecom for a long time now, and had often heard a complaint from Telecom startups and sometimes even giants about the cost to go to the market in rural/developing areas. A simple BTS (a.k.a Read further »