Category: Internet & platforms (Page 4 of 8)

Adobe announces end of PhoneGap development

August 10, 2020 / NewsShark

Adobe announced the end of development for PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build and the end of their investment in Apache Cordova. The PhoneGap Build service will be discontinued on October 1, 2020. PhoneGap’s goal has been to bring the full power of the web to mobile applications and enable mobile developers to create performant apps with a single codebase. Since the project’s beginning in 2008, the market has evolved and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) now bring the power of native apps to web applications. PWAs are increasingly bridging the gap between web and native mobile apps through capabilities such as offline support, push notifications, home-screen icons and full-screen view control without the need for containers. In the context of these developments and declining PhoneGap usage, Adobe is focusing on providing a platform that enables developers to build, extend, customize and integrate with Adobe products.

Apache Cordova, the open source fork of the PhoneGap project will continue to exist and offers a great pathway for most developers. Refer to the Cordova getting started guide for building locally as an alternative to PhoneGap Build and using Cordova-based tools as an alternative to the PhoneGap-specific workflows. Adobe has worked with Ionic to help customers with the transition experience and to enable them to continue to build their applications in the cloud. Refer to this documentation for best practices on moving your application to Ionic Appflow. There are also a number of alternative products to which you may want to consider migrating your PhoneGap app including:

Monaca (refer to their PhoneGap Migration Guide) & Onsen UI (front-end UI framework)
Framework
NativeScript
Ionic Capacitor
Progressive Web Apps

https://blog.phonegap.com/update-for-customers-using-phonegap-and-phonegap-build-cc701c77502c

Gilbane Advisor 7-14-20 — perceiving, DSM, web 3.0, microservices

July 14, 2020 / Frank Gilbane

Dear Reader:

I hope all is well.

We have been busy updating our website and I thought you deserved a quick update. In mid-May we woke up “NewsShark” and re-activated our curated news service which hasn’t been active for a while. It is available on our site here, as a feed, and on Twitter. We publish news multiple times a week, and will check with you at some point to see if you are interested in an email version. We have consolidated all of our content on our main site, improved site navigation, added back search, and have a new simplified category structure – all available from any page. Finally, we are using schema.org markup and experimenting with some additional features that it allows — you’ll notice some of them as you poke around. We’ll update you as we formally roll them out.

Now to this issue’s recommended reading…

Comparing human and machine perception

This article is a wonderfully clear and concrete example of how easy it is to incorrectly interpret data from comparisons between deep neural networks and human perceptions, and how to think about further experiments to expose potential misinterpretations. There is also a broader lesson here for evaluating machine learning algorithms.

There is a link to the full paper, but this summary by the authors is a valuable resource for non-specialists. Read More

Decentralized web developer report 2020

The decentralized web is an amorphous collection of technologies and projects that are not a near-term threat to today’s imperfect and increasingly centralized web. But it is encouraging to see so much activity dedicated to a more open web, and this report by Fluence Labs’ Evgeny Ponomarev is an excellent way to get a feel for the landscape of the players, the challenges, and what software engineers, researchers, and others think. This is not one of those promotional market research reports, and doesn’t gloss over the challenges. The raw survey data is included. Read More

The seven deceptions of microservices

Software architectures are not the sort of thing you create or change lightly. Even if you’re convinced a different approach would be better, there are inevitably unforeseen developmental and operational consequences / costs which can quickly multiply scarily as a function of the number of moving parts. Software architects and experienced software engineers know this, but the whole team should understand the pros and cons of such a change. Software engineer Scott Rogowski suggests some things to watch out for when considering moving to a microservices development model. Read More

Online content sharing – pay to play?

Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the “DSM Directive”), introduces a new content management and liability regime for online content-sharing service providers (“OCSSPs”) … Article 17 is one of the most controversial provisions of the DSM Directive. Its supporters view Article 17 as facilitating more licensing of copyright protected works online to generate remuneration for rightholders whose works are shared by users on profit generating online platforms, while its detractors argue that it goes too far and will have an adverse effect on freedom of expression and the proper functioning of copyright exceptions online. Read More

Also…

Not that any of you need this, but maybe someone you know… CMU researchers develop an automatic politeness engine for text-based communications via Techcrunch
Caught in the mushy middle: How Quartz fell to earth via digiday
Do you really know what “RESTful” is supposed to mean? Roy Fielding’s Misappropriated REST Dissertation via TwoBitHistory.org
From the level-setting AI department… Where are all the robots?… via Techcrunch

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We do not sell or share personal data.

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ProQuest streamlines discoverability of subscription and open access content

June 16, 2020 / NewsShark

ProQuest is improving the accessibility of subscription and open access content on its platform with a series of enhancements designed to boost research, teaching and learning outcomes. These enhancements include:

A new starting point for research: Now, users can begin their search from the open web by visiting search.proquest.com. Through their search results, they’ll be delivered straight to the resources their library subscribes to.
New preview feature: Users can search, find and preview the content of nearly a billion ProQuest documents directly from the open web for better discoverability.
Broader discovery of open access content: Researchers can access an ever-expanding universe of scholarly full-text open access sources directly – all indexed and delivered with the same level of quality and precision as ProQuest’s subscription content.

These enhancements are now live, with no action required by libraries or their users to activate. They’re part of ProQuest’s larger, ongoing initiative to add value to its solutions, expand pathways to access and help libraries increase usage of their resources.

https://www.proquest.com

Jamstack

Web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, APIs, and markup.

The Jamstack is not about specific technologies. It’s a new way of building websites and apps that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. Pre-rendered sites can be enhanced with JavaScript and the growing capabilities of browsers and services available via APIs.

https://jamstack.org

Automattic invests in open decentralized comms ecosystem Matrix

May 21, 2020 / NewsShark

Automattic, the open source force behind WordPress, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and Tumblr, has made a $4.6M strategic investment into New Vector — the creators of an open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. New Vector also developed a Slack rival (Riot) which runs on Matrix. Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed reference implementations.

New Vector’s decentralized tech powers instant messaging for a number of government users, including France — which forked Riot to launch a messaging app last year (Tchap) — and Germany, which just announced its armed forces will be adopting Matrix as the backbone for all internal comms; as well as for KDE, Mozilla, RedHat and Wikimedia, and others.

https://vector.im, https://matrix.org, h/t: Techcrunch

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up which uses, promotes and helps develop the open source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work. Solid technically is is new level of standard at the web layer, which adds things never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.

Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

Static web page

A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page) is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application. Consequently a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so.

The Gilbane Report

The Gilbane Report on Open Information & Document Systems (ISSN 1067-8719) was periodical launched in March, 1993 by Publishing Technology Management Inc. which was founded by Frank Gilbane, its president, in June, 1987.

The Gilbane Report was sold to CAP Ventures Inc in December 1994, who published it until May, 1999, when it was bought by Bluebill Advisors, Inc. a consulting and advisory firm founded by Frank Gilbane. Bluebill Advisors continued to publish the Gilbane Report until March, 2005. The Gilbane Report issues from 1993 – 2005 remain available in either HTML or PDF (or both), on the Gilbane Advisor website, which is owned by Bluebill Advisors Inc.

Below is a link to the first issue of the Gilbane Report. There is also a PDF version.

Gilbane Report Vol 1, Num 1 – Imaging, Document & Information Management Systems – What’s the Difference, and How Do You Know What You Need?