latest technology: June 2016

Monday, 27 June 2016

free wifi in delhi

Over 500 locations across East Delhi will be made high-speed Wi-Fi zones by the end of this year allowing access to free internet till a pre-determined limit daily, the Delhi government announced today. Providing free Wi-Fi across the national capital was one of the key poll promises of ruling Aam Aadmi Party. Ashish Khetan, vice-chairman of Dialogue and Development Commission (DDC) of Delhi which is an advisory body to the government, did not spell out the limit but said that it would be consistent with the average daily usage of an individual as defined by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The IT department will be the nodal agency in implementing the project, tenders for which will be floated soon, Khetan said. The government has also decided to lay down a common fibre-optic network across the city to make it possible for Delhiites to access the web in gigabit speed, Khetan said. He suggested that 1,000 hotspot zones (Wi-Fi--enabled) in around 521 pre-identified locations in the trans-Yamuna region will cater to around 1,20,000 people at any given moment.

The Delhi government has prepared the Wi-Fi project, which is set to be the largest such project in the world. These 571 pre-identified locations will have 1,000 hotspot zones. Each hotspot zone will have three access points and will cater to around 120 people at a time, Khetan said. Khetan said that 3,000 more access points will be added if needed.

Friday, 24 June 2016

Xamarin, native platform solutions with C#, even with java

Xamarin has announced its acquisition of RoboVM, a momentous step for both companies which means C# and Java developers need only look to a single development solution for native deployment across each of the major platforms.

The software has been a beloved tool for C# developers for some time as the only solution which enables native iOS and Android development. RoboVM offered the same ability to deploy Android and iOS applications natively, but for Java developers. Bringing the C# and Java languages together – the most used languages in enterprise development – provides a path to mobile for most developers.

Nat Friedman, CEO and Xamarin co-founder, said: “If Xamarin built a Java solution from scratch, it would look like RoboVM because they took the same native-first approach in their design. If you love Java, you are going to love RoboVM for iOS and Android development.”

Xamarin is able to address the two largest ecosystems

Between five and seven million developers use Java as their primary development language, according toIDC. Java is often used for enterprise software and data center operations, Android development, and powers a range of devices beyond mobile such as wearables, cars, drones, TVs, refrigerators, and many other IoT devices.

This acquisition will be a huge deal for Xamarin because of the large developer base who can now use a single mobile development platform to deploy across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac using a C# or Java codebase.

In particular, this will help organisations with both Android and iOS applications which have few in-house developers to keep software updated. Forrester reports that 50% of organizations have fewer than five developers in-house, barely enough to field a single mobile team.

According to Al Hilwa, Program Director for IDC's Application Development Software research, “Using a cross-platform application development approach has emerged as one of the most popular approaches for building enterprise mobile apps, especially when coupled with generation of native platform code. Xamarin is able to address the two largest ecosystems for native mobile application development today with its support for C# and Java.”

Xamarin itself has been rumoured to have been in acquisition talks from Microsoft – the creators of the C# programming language. Considering the recent support of Android and iOS from Microsoft, this could incentivise further talks in the future. For now, RoboVM will leverage Xamarin’s growth models in developer marketing, sales, and customer success to scale their business; whilst RoboVM customers will benefit from Xamarin’s enterprise-grade mobile expertise and full mobile lifecycle offerings.

Today's acquisition marks a big step in Xamarin's future and is a groundbreaking development for the industry as Xamarin now controls the cross-platform mobile development market for the most widely adopted languages capable of native, client-to-server, and cloud-to-mobile development.

IBM introduces tool for IoT development

IBM has launched an open source tool called Quark, offering help to programmers and manufacturers looking to build applications based on IoT sensor data.

Quark is based on IBM Streams, a product for processing large amounts of live data. Juniper Research predicts the number of IoT devices – each creating new data – will reach 38.5 billion in 2020, up from 13.4 billion in 2015. Such a staggering amount of data will need a solution with a proven track record, and Streams is able to provide that.

Dr. N. Stewart McIntyre, professor emeritus of chemistry, said about Streams: “You can begin to treat your data with a fair degree of discrimination and refine data concerning multiple phases in a way that was not previously possible.”

For the IoT to reach its potential, it needs to be reliable. This is especially true in circumstances which could involve life or death – where connected devices could be of great assistance when they work, but have disastrous results if they fail.

An example of this in action could be a miner wearing a helmet with sensors live reporting his current health and environmental conditions to other miners, and people working above ground. If the helmet reports a danger or incident, potentially lifesaving action could be taken quicker. If the helmet fails, or even lags, it may be some time before anyone realises to help.

Quark is just beginning, although IBM is hoping that by making it open source the community will catch on and help with its development. IBM has an existing suite of tools and services useful for the IoT – such as Watson – but it’s clear the company plans to continue its leadership and won’t slow down progress as competitors like Cisco bolster their own enterprise-level IoT solutions.

IBM has submitted a proposal to the Apache Foundation for Quark to be an incubation project and help ensure its continued development to become a standard data processing tool for IoT development.

android moves to framework

Google's ambitious plan to put an open source OS on as many devices as possible was always going to lead to Android's notorious fragmentation.Just over 2% of Android devices in the wild are running the latest OS, compared to 80% running the latest version of iOS.

For developers, this has proved troublesome over the years. Not only do you have to ensure your app can run on the multitude of forms and hardware variations, but there's less guarantee your app will have access to all the latest platform features and APIs of the most recent operating system release.

Google has taken a big step in helping to speed-up OS modifications from manufacturers.

The issue comes from manufacturers' decision to differentiate their products from competitors on a software-level by modifying each Android release from Google; which takes a lot of time and effort. After this process, the software update has to go through carrier testing just to slow down the process even further.

In order to help alleviate the problem of developers' applications not having access to new APIs on the many devices running older versions of Android, Google unbundled many of them from the OS itself and start delivering them in 'Play Services' updates deployed through Android's built-in app store.

There are fundamental platform changes and user-facing new features which cannot be deployed via this method and require an OS update, and that has remained a problem for Google as it unveils innovative new features in annual releases which most consumers will not have access to for months (or ever in some circumstances!)

In a fast-moving industry, Google knows it needs to speed-up Android releases. As of the upcoming 'N' update, currently in early developer preview, it appears Google has taken a big step in helping to speed-up OS modifications from manufacturers.

Just over 2% of Android devices in the wild are running the latest OS

Due to being an early preview and subsequent to change, we can only speculate on Google's plans based on the changes made so far. Looking at the file system, we're seeing more things placed into the vendor and OEM partitions — which should make it easier for these parties to customise and deploy a new OS update much faster.

By keeping the OS separate from the parts of the system for customisations, Google could allow manufacturers like Samsung to implement their UX vision without interfering with the core system processes and libraries. Updates for the OS, including security updates for exploitable system components like the infamous Stagefright library, could be pushed out separate to updates for the many aspects of the OS which Google allows manufacturers to customise.

Google appears to be completing Android's transition from an OS to a framework. Splitting the OS and its customisation makes a lot of sense for Android, and should free-up a lot of manpower to ensure updates get out the gate quicker.

new features in .NET

Progress has released some insightful research into the state of .NET development in 2016, based on the responses of more than 100,000 respondents. With major advancements being made by Microsoft - particularly in cross-platform development - the framework is ready to achieve new heights within the enterprise.

The survey was conducted by Telerik, a subsidiary of Progress which offers end-to-end mobile app development solutions. Telerik asked the developers for their views on key technologies and innovations across web, desktop, and mobile app development, and witnessed a sense of excitement around the open source push and cross-platform support for .NET development.

"Over the last year, .NET has moved further into the open source and cross-platform space. These moves allow .NET to continue to grow and thrive within the enterprise, and are in keeping with similar trends in cloud and mobile," said Brandon Satrom, General Manager for Developer Platforms and Tools, Progress. "As Microsoft continues to innovate across desktop, mobile and web, our survey findings indicate that many opportunities lay ahead for .NET and the .NET developer ecosystem."

A key discovery of the research is that developers are preferring the web as their choice platform; with 49 percent of respondents developing responsive web software, and 45 percent building desktop web applications. In comparison, just 30 percent said they are making Windows desktop applications. Half of the developers who identify as being web developers are employing responsive web techniques to produce apps for use on both desktop and mobile.

Xamarin, acquired by Microsoft earlier this year, represents the preferable cross-platform tool for the 62 percent of native mobile app developers. For the 43 percent of hybrid mobile developers, Apache Cordova equals the number one choice.

Excitement is building for cross-platform and OSS development:

38% of respondents think the opportunity to build and run .NET apps cross-platform is "amazing."
43% think that .NET Core being open sourced and cross-platform is a "dream come true."
63% of respondents won't touch a Mac, but 29% own iPhones.

Microsoft still appears to suffer an uphill struggle when it comes to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) adoption, despite slow gains. 44 percent of Windows desktop app developers report they are "unfamiliar" with UWP, whilst 41 percent of mobile developers and 58 percent of web developers also responded the same.

Nevertheless, it's clear that Microsoft is handling .NET well and the future looks bright for the framework. The latest moves by the company towards open source and cross-platform support have been met with a positive response by developers, and that's as good a sign as any.

The full survey, which features insights around IDE preferences, lightweight code editors, reporting, command line tooling, package managers, XAML, mobile hardware, and more is available here.

robomongo installation

Installing Robomongo on windows (intial setup)

MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database. In this tutorial I will explain step by step how to install MongoDB and Robomongo (cross-platform MongoDB management tool).

To download MongoDB open the official web site:http://www.mongodb.org/downloads
Select version and download it
Run the downloaded file
Now you have MongoDB installed. You can open the folder (in my case this is C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard)
Notice that there is a ‘bin’ folder here.

There are two main files inside:

mongod.exe – this is the database server
mongo.exe – this is the database client shell

Both are command line programs and each expects to be run in its own command line session.

Ok, the last thing that we should do before we start the server is to create the databases path. For example you can create an empty folder on D:\ and name it “MongoDB” (D:\MongoDB). Your databases will be stored here.
Open the command prompt (cmd): Start -> type “cmd” in the search field

cd C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\binAnd click “Enter”
mongod.exeand then "Enter"
mongod --dbpath=D:\MongoDB (We need to specify the databases path. I created "MongoDB" folder on D:\. If you created it somewhere else, set your path after --dbpath=)then "Enter"
Open new cmd (Start -> type cmd in the search field)
Type: cd C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\bin
Then mongo.exe and press "Enter"
Download Robomongo: http://robomongo.org/
Install it and run it
Create a connection:
Then select “Connect”
Now yo