Multichannel Development Platform Simplifies App Creation

Michael Garrity — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:15:00 GMT

Optimizing mobile content is becoming an important issue for Web developers, which presents a need for a product that is able to competently utilize popular existing technologies and deploy a single application across multiple platforms.

This week Yahoo! launched Livestand for the iPad. This product is powered by "an exciting new technology" for Web developers called Yahoo! Cocktails, a mix of HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3, JavaScript and some additions by Yahoo! engineers. Soon, the company is looking to turn over its first two Cocktails, Mojito and Manhattan, to developers so that they, too, can leverage this mix of Web technologies.

For the unfamiliar, Livestand is "a personalized living magazine optimized for the iPad" that is made for users to have a tailor-made content-aggregating experience that promises "beautifully presented articles, photos and videos that bring your favorite topics to life."

In order to create this rich content-consuming experience, Yahoo! turned to some of the most prominent Web technologies available, combining them to form the aptly named Cocktails that support features from a variety of sources. Mojito is an environment-agnostic JavaScript Web application framework; Manhattan is the hosted platform for applications that are based on the Mojito framework.

As a framework, Mojito allows developers to run their apps on both the browser and server sides, meaning there is no need to write different code for the backend and frontend. This does away with issues like Web pages saying that "JavaScript enabled is required," because apps built in the Mojito framework can simply run on the server side on the same code base.

This Cocktail is a unique mix of module, as it is a self-contained package of business logic, and widget, because it appears as a visual element of the UI with which users can interact. By building upon various proven technologies, Mojito is able "to run equally well" on browsers, hybrid native/Web runtime or servers using Node.JS.

Manhattan is the server-side hosting environment run by JavaScript that houses Mojito-based apps that run on Yahoo!'s Cloud. In extending Node.JS, Manhattan is able to provide fault-isolation, fault-tolerance, scalability, availability, security and performance and provides a simple interface for developers to manage and deploy "multiple versions of their Mojito-based applications" using the massive tech infrastructure that belongs to Yahoo!

The current plan is to release Mojito as an open source through the Yahoo! Distribution Network in quarter one of 2012. The company wants the Cocktails to become "one of the leading Web frameworks going forward" so that developers can start creating applications that work well on both browsers and servers.

With the release of these Cocktails, Yahoo! is attempting to establish a unified framework and deployment platform that can create and host almost any necessary Web applications to be run on desktop and mobile browsers. Should the experiment prove to be successful, it could have big ramifications on the future of Web development, especially as users continue to go mobile and developers increasingly need to build comprehensive apps that will work adequately on browsers across mutliple platforms.

Firefox and Chrome Team Up for Web App Compatibility

Michael Garrity — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If only the rest of the world could be this peaceful.

Late last week the news broke that the developers at Mozilla and Google were going to work together on a framework called Web Intents, which is designed to allow Web apps to easily become compatible with both Firefox and Chrome, each company's respective brower. Web Intents was initially conceived by Google developer Paul Kinlan.

The basis of Web Intents comes from an already existing capability in Google's Android mobile operating system. What it will do is provide Web apps with the opportunity to express a simple call for an action, such as 'share' or 'edit,' and all receiving apps will be designed to use these. To make things easier for developers, these apps will not need any specific knowledge of the APIs of the other browser. So now, there will no longer be a need to code for each specific app that one might want to access, as developers can just use these simple requests that Web Intents provides, and they are already going to be built into the browser.

The Chrome and Firefox teams are each working on integrating this functionality into their own browser while also combining their designs to use just one API for Web app developers to be able to reach both platforms.

According to Kinlan, the goal with Web Intents is "to allow developers to build applications and services that could work with each other, but not need to explicity know about each other."

Google has succeeded with similar technology in the past, as Android has utilized comparable capabilites for some time to help make life a little easier for mobile app developers. Since the company is looking to advance its Chrome browser, including attempting to bolster its Web app store, Web Intents will be coming around at a great time.

This sort of broad capability among two of the most popular browsers in the world could mean big things for the Web application development community, as it will severely diminish the time it will take to create an app and get it online and in the hands of millions of users around the world.

'Net Features : web app development

Multichannel Development Platform Simplifies App Creation

Firefox and Chrome Team Up for Web App Compatibility