According to tweets by Scott Barnes Microsofts‘ former Product Manager for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Microsoft Internet Explorer development team are intending to make some heavy windows specific extensions to the HTML5 spec for IE9.
“HTML5 is the replacement for WPF.. IE team want to fork the HTML5 spec by bolting on custom windows APi’s via JS/HTML5″
The problem with this is clearly stated in a clarification tweet he made later on.
“To clarify : html5 with ie9 specific Apis could carry 90% of lob wpf/silverlights workload today. But it’s an ie9 lockin though”
So we could see IE9 taking over a lot of what is currently being done in Silverlight, we could also see IE9 living on for another 10 years once applications have been written to specifically depend on these extensions in IE9 much like we see hundreds of thousands of people still locked into IE6 simply because applications were written that depended on IE6 specific functionality instead of being fully standards compliant.
We can but hope that application and front end developers have learnt the lessons of IE6 and shun requiring these IE9 specific extensions in order for their applications to work as required and stick with best practise open standards design and development to prevent a web 2.0 browser still living on into a web 5.0 world
September 10th 2010 Uncategorized
It is quite strange when you take the time to step back from being an experienced developer and have to look at things from the perspective of someone just starting to learn to code.
My partner has taken the decision to learn HTML and PHP and so far is doing very well at it. This has lead to a few questions which I am more than happy to answer, I just have to try and think about how to explain things.
You see after years of development things are just things. A variable is a variable, an array is an array and functions, methods, objects etc. well, they just are what they are. So stepping back and trying to explain that a variable is just a box you can put something in, an array is just a bigger box that you can put other boxes (variables) in and actually thinking about how to explain things can get quite esoteric.
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May 20th 2010 Uncategorized
Whilst many people were looking at the Brit awards last night, a different top list has also been released. Instead of counting up the awards for artists, it was counting up the risk and impact of common development errors
The top 5 include
- Cross site scripting
- SQL Injection
- Buffer overflow
- Cross site request forgery
- Improper access control
All of these issues have been known about and well understood for some time, however developers are still regularly making mistakes in these and the other top 20 areas.
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February 17th 2010 Uncategorized
Today I have been reminded about the importance of having no single point of failure in your systems.
With news that one hosting company providing both dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers (VPS) has now been offline for 5 days, you need to consider what would happen to your systems if you were solely reliant on a company that also had such an outage.
HostV are not the only people to suffer from outages with several major UK datacentres going offline for shorter periods at some time of another over the past 10 years, it is only prudent to ensure you do not rely on any single company or site for all your hosting.
Commonly called disaster recovery, you plan and prepare for the worst. Ensuring that if it happens, it is no longer a disaster but a just an inconvenience to implement your prepared plan.
To take a worst case scenario, if terrorists blew up a datacentre with the complete irrecoverable loss of all hardware and data on site, could you keep going?
Most importantly take offsite backups and test them. Offsite backups can at least enable you to restore your data to a new server if all else fails. Just make sure that you have regularly tested that your backups are usable and that they contain all the data that you think they do. There is nothing worse than finding out your backups were corrupted or did not contain some vital bit of data at a time you need to use them due to a failure.
Ensure that you have a backup or disaster recovery server in place and online at a different facility preferably in a different country so no single fibre or backbone outage can affect both. This server does not need to be as powerful or as highly redundant as your main servers, it just needs to be able to carry on critical functions during an outage of your main live systems.
Keep the disaster recovery server synchronised with your main live server, you can use systems like rsync and database replication to ensure file and databases are maintained in sync and ready to go at a moments notice.
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February 10th 2010 Infrastructure
Today is European Safer Internet Day 2010. If this fact has passed you by, then you are not alone as it does not seem to have been publicised much at all.
The stated aim is to encourage safe and responsible use of online technology and using mobile phones, which is an aim I can certainly agree with, having a young child who is currently learning about email in school.
The theme this year is “Think Before You Post” and I am sure that there are many more experienced folks as well as the children and young people who the day is most aimed at, who have forgotten to do this now and again. I personally have made the mistake of forgetting to remove an address from the CC field of a less than complimentary email I intended for internal eyes but unintentially delivered to the people who had contracted the services of the company discussed in the email.
So if you are a seasoned internet hand, or someone new to the internet and mobile technologies, take a minute to “Think before you post”.
www.saferinternetday.org has all the details.
February 9th 2010 Uncategorized
