Codepope's Development Hell

Over the weekend, the Ember.js team announced the final release of Ember.js 1.0 after two and a half years in development. The big thing with Ember.js is that it aims to get back to a web where URLs were sharable and bookmarkable and away from the modern idiom for webapps of one URL and the server saving logins and state. In the process of creating that, the developers also put together auto-updating Handlbars templates that keep themselves up to date when the underlying data model changes, added Web-Component-like custom HTML tags and made the process of JSON to field mapping easy.

Haskell for iOS: Haskell is turning up all over the place and now its turned up on iOS. In an announcement on Haskell-cafe, Luke Iannini and Stephen Blackheath have said you can now build native binaries for iOS using GHC. The cross-compiling process is detailed on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler wiki and generates a “universal ARMv7/ARMv7s/i386 static library to drop straight into an Xcode project” Ink open sources iOS apps: The developers of Ink, a set of frameworks for connecting iOS applications with each other, have released four applications as open source.

Editors and their users create their own communities, no matter if the editor is open source or closed, its what editor users do. Sometimes they form communities within companies, like the Vim editor’s group of enthusiasts at Square who have announced that they have taken all the settings, shortcuts and plugins that they have created and put them all in a single repository, dubbing the project Maximum Awesome. So what’s in Maximum Awesome?

Unity gets Native 2D: The Unity 3D game framework and tools is getting native 2D support. 2D’s been hackable from the framework in the past by fixing the camera and arranging things so it all looks 2D-ish. But now, the company has announced actual 2D support with autoslicing sprites and an integrated 2D physics engine in Unity 4.3 which has just gone into beta. Mozilla’s Brick: Mozilla has put Brick, a collection of reusable UI components which can be introduced into web pages using custom HTML tags, into beta.

In the aftermath of Google’s bone-headed-but-determined execution of Google Reader, there has been some great work done developing alternatives to Google’s service. One open source implementation was NewsBlur, but at least from our experience at codescaling.com, it was a bit tetchy and the user interface was idiosyncratic. Among the other services we tried was Feedbin, with its clean stripped down user interface, growing app support and good RSS pickup speed.

From the “Well, that took a while” files, 10Gen have announced they are changing name to MongoDB Inc. This is heralded in a new era of confusion between open source software and the company that develops it. MongoDB Inc says the 10gen name belonged to a time in the past (2007) when the company was going to build a open-source cloud stack and MongoDB was the data storage layer… well the rest of the stack didn’t arrive, people like MongoDB and thats why they changed.

YÚN Soon: The Arduino YÚN, a version of the microcontroller board with an added MIPS processor running Linino driving a Wi-Fi chipset, is now heading towards distributors and should be on sale on 10 September, a bit later than the originally planned June release due to the complexity of the project. The board has also been upgraded, according to the Arduino Blog will now sport 16MB of Flash and 64MB of RAM on the MIPS side.

The latest release of SQLite, the powerful, embeddable public domain SQL database which has found its way into so many applications, is version 3.8.0 which switches over to the project’s “Next Generation Query Planner” (NGQP). Query planners break down the users SQL queries and work out the best way to get the required results based on the planner’s knowledge of the database tables, indicies and other gathered statistics and a generous helping of the planner’s authors skills in creating effective ways to deduce what to do with that information.

GitLab 6.0: The open-source alternative to GitHub, GitLab has just been updated to version 6.0 with improved group management for projects which can associate users to the group, merge requests between forks of a project and the original project, branch pruning and creation from the GitLab UI and lists of other enhancements. Version 6.0 also sees the introduction of an enterprise edition of GitLab. Git 1.8.4: The latest update to Git itself comes in the form of Git 1.

Yeoman, a collection of tools and practices for creating and developing web applications, has reached version 1.0. Written using Node.js to host the command-line tools, Yeoman combines three independently developed major components, Yo, an application scaffolding tool, grunt, the build tool, and bower for package management and brings them together as a way to speed up application building with community contributed code generators, including Angular, Wordpress, Backbone, Ember, Firefox-os and many more.