According to the latest statistics from Google, around 2/3 of the search comes from iOS alone. Apple has already sold 200 million iOS devices. And latest reports confirm that Android devices are taking up the market share. This definitely shows the change in peoples preferences. PC's will definitely be there but mobile would be preferred/pampered. Mobile has traveled along way from just a medium of communication to medium of unlimited knowledge. Times are gone when user could sit in-front of his PC to check his mail or do other tasks. He now prefers it to be done on the go.

Have you ever wondered why Social Networking sites created  apps which only gives restricted features to the user than its web version? Please try your favorite on your mobile, you will know it. With touch screen devices its hard to click on a link without any errors. Most of the time I tried I couldn't do it properly. I move to the wrong content. As far as a user is concerned these are really annoying stuff and its also wasting his time.

Mobile apps are designed confirming to device standards, A daily user wouldn’t have any confusion using it,  Apps would actually do a lot of stuff for him too.

When I open my Tab I gets instantly updated. I get alerts, notifications, mails etc.. Earlier I had to spend around half an hour now I lose only 5 mins.

From a service providers perspective too there are lot of advantages. You have an new offer for your customer and you need to notify him. Earlier you would send a email, even if user sees it there is no guarantee that he would check it, he might be busy. With specialized apps and notification this is just as easy as checking your SMS. Well that would definitely make your customer check it. The response you receive is almost instant, getting a head start is always better when you have competition. 

( Jackson Sunny Rodrigues is an extremely talented iOS Programmer at Software Associates. Follow him on twitter at @jaxsonrodrigues, or catch up with him on Facebook at Jackson Rodrigues. )

Before storyboard came into the picture, we had to use independent XIB files in-order to form the UI design but with this storyboard we can make our UI very easily as it is possible to incorporate all the XIB files into one XIB file, which is basically our new storyboard (represented as MainStoryboard.storyboard' in the xcode) .It basically holds the collection of XIB files, which allows you to visually control all the views in it and how those views will segue between each other. Thus, the entire flow of your app's interface can be modeled and visualized through your single storyboard file.

You can easily implement new ideas in your design all in one glance. There by you will be able to identify and refine the good ideas.

Furthermore, it is easier for you to make changes in the design, as the story board allows you to make all the connections /relationships with the view controllers/views there itself. Many new features are available now in the story board that helps you in doing that.

Storyboarding can also enable you to create table view cells and table view controllers with simplicity. Using storyboard instead of XIB flies will let you cut a lot of code out of your project. A project built with Storyboarding will be compatible with IOS 5 and greater.

(Anu K , is a passionate iOS Developer at Software Associates. Catch up with her on Facebook at Anu Karayil) 

Safety of files while uploading to a web server has always been a headache for PHP developers. Because of lack of experience and expertise, I have seen many cases where naive developers, end up giving complete permissions for the files being uploaded on the PHP servers. Seldom do they realize that the consequences can be lethal, and a lot of things are on stake when they make this mistake.

If the security concerns during the file uploads are not properly dealt with, there is always a probability of someone snooping at it. It can be easily hacked. What more? You lose your data, money, time and effort. You lose trust of your client. Organization's reputation as a great web service provider is at stake. All because of immaturity of most of the PHP service providers, who seldom worry how much client's data is worth, and only worry about quantity of work not the quality of it.

Recently, we had a hands on experience with one of such situations, which I feel is worth sharing with you all.  In this case, the website was created long back by some naive PHP service providers, who certainly lacked maturity in understanding the security needs of the end client. After getting more insight over their website, it was very clear to our team that the website is in for the trouble and can be hacked at any instant, thanks to the way immature service providers, who lack experience and expertise and empathy to clients. Once our team, at software associates recognized this need for revamp, we readily jumped into it, so that our client could get a safe and secure manageable web site; the service that our client really deserves. 

From our experiences with these issues, I will really suggest that the both PHP service providers and the clients should take utmost care regarding this issue. Naive PHP service providers should never be trusted for your website development as they will never understand your needs for better safe and secure service. Only the service providers who understand the value of your information and work towards making your business successful should be trusted with this task.

(Jayan A is Operations and Resource Manager at Software Associates. He is a PHP guru and technology enthusiast.) 

Recently we had a requirement in one of our projects to implement a RESTful web service for consumption by end client which can be an iPhone application or a php application. The acronym REST stands for Representational State Transfer.  As its name indicates, REST services are stateless and hence easily scalable.  REST is a lighter weight and less feature rich approach to building web services.
In a simple sense, any interface using Xml over HTTP can be considered as RESTful.  It may also use JSON, YAML, plain text etc instead of Xml. The Web, HTTP and URIs are the only relevant instance of a REST architectural style.

FEATURES OF RESTFUL SERVICES:

RESTful services adhere to a set of constraints and architectural principles like:
•    RESTful services are stateless. According to Roy Fielding, who defined REST, “each request from client to server must contain all the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.”
•    RESTful services have a uniform interface. Only HTTP operations like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are allowed in a RESTful service.
•    Each resource should be uniquely identified by a URI. Clean and well defined URLs is one among the many benefits of REST. They can be very long or very short, but must have a meaning.
•    All resources share the same constrained interface for transfer of states and content types. You can focus on the resource rather than how to access/manipulate each resource.
•    Constrained interface and meaningful URLs make it easier for end users to use RESTful services. Hence the simplicity of design is another major advantage of REST.

BENEFITS TO THE USER:

One major point to note is that the application you are developing should deliver the content in a readable format for end-users. REST allows choosing a standard content type which works for your application and this in turn enhances the ease of use.

Another requirement was to secure each REST API calls using HTTP Authentication over SSL. HTTP Basic Authentication takes advantage of the well-defined authentication related headers in HTTP and it has an added advantage that it is supported by all web browsers. Basic authentication can be accomplished by passing username and password as a colon separated string and in a Base64 encoded format in the authorization header of HTTP request. Since the credentials can be easily decoded, it is highly recommended that basic authentication can be used only over SSL secured connection. When the client requests for a resource the credentials provided in the header are decoded and verified against the database from server side and returns the resource if authenticated or returns a ‘401 Unauthorized’ if the user doesn’t have the rights to access the requested resource. This approach is easy to test using browsers. You'll get a username/password prompt by just connecting to the web service using a browser.

BENEFITS OF USING REST DESIGN:

In general, the fundamental aspect of REST design pattern is that every distinguishable entity is a resource.  A resource may be a Web site, an HTML page, an XML document, a Web service, a physical device, etc., each resource being uniquely identified by a URL. Apart from all these RESTful web services have an advantage that it has less overhead and less duplication, because every call need not be wrapped in SOAP envelope as in the case of SOAP web services. REST services are also more standardized as the HTTP operations are well understood and operate consistently. Also, it is more readable and easier to test. The fact that REST is much more transparent makes it more preferable for public APIs.
 

The Umbraco 4.6 Beta release comes with a robust skinning engine that allows users to create customized skins easily.

Implementation of skinning in Umbraco:

There are multiple aspects of the skinning feature – i) Development of a new skin, ii) Making an application ready to wear different skins iii) Changing of skins. In order to make use of the skinning feature, the UI needs to use the skin template. One can navigate to the Settings section and select the Master Template. On clicking the Modify Template Skin button, Umbraco will launch the Skin Customization dialog in the Canvas Editing mode.

A skin changes only the CSS and related images and scripts for a site. In order to apply the skin, the user only needs to select the desired skin from the skin dashboard in the site’s settings section. 

How does it work?

A skin is located in a unique folder which contains all the required files. Skin CSS and skin script files are stored in the default Umbraco folder locations, /css/ and /scripts/respectively. Skins for Umbraco are zip files containing the following:
CSS Files
Javascript files
Images
A skin manifest
One or more .master template files

Skins provide a lot of flexibility for the developer to design the website whereas in conventional designing the developer has only limited control. Instead of specifying a style sheet for each component or page, a skin can be supplied for the entire application. The style specified in the skin is automatically used by all components. It is also easy to apply different skins to different pages. Skins also offer automatic support between changes in browsers. Skins could prove to be a little difficult to use in the beginning, but once we are used to it, we can find that it comes with a lot of advantages.

Let us briefly look at how a skin can be created and used in Umbraco.

Follow the steps described below for creating a simple skin for the Simple Starter Kit.

Install the Starter Kit Developer Package
Create a Stylesheet
Include Images – Create a dedicated folder for them under /css/.
Modify the Template HTML
Prepare and Package the Skin 

Copy the sample skin.xml file from the skin documentation to a new folder created under the /masterpages/ folder. It is necessary that this file be named skin.xml.

On navigating to the <install> section we can see that an ‘AddStyleSheet’ task is added to the list by default. Inorder for the Starterkit to get the new style sheet modify the style sheet name to the skin’s CSS file name. The skin is complete now.

 In order to allow a skin to be distributed again, it needs to be contained in a package containing the files and folders for the skin. 
On publishing a skin package, the skin can be downloaded as a .zip file that can be installed on any system, provided that it has a Starter kit installed.

Testing a Skin:

For testing a packaged skin, install it to an Umbraco instance with Starter Kit installed. Navigate to the content root of the Starterkit site and right-click the Homepage node, then select Edit in Canvas. Click the ‘Edit skin’ button on the tool bar for selecting the skin and installing it.

End user benefits of Umbraco skinning:

The user gets to customize the way the website looks to them according to their preferences making it more interactive and user friendly. Applying a skin changes a piece of website's look and feel, potentially making the website easier to use. That was about skinning in Umbraco. Stay connected for more such posts.

In web domain, web services are meant to facilitate the communication between two different platforms over the internet. We can easily exchange data between various applications by making use of this technology and there are so many ways to implement it. The security of web services is equally important as its implementation. The most widely and frequently used kinds of web services are SOAP and REST.

Securing SOAP web services:

SOAP was not designed with security in mind; SOAP messages can be viewed or modified by attackers as the messages traverse the Internet.  The most basic thing to be done to secure a web service is to implement SSL over the channel. As a result, the message gets encrypted and difficult to understand for a third party who is monitoring the data transmission over the wire.

Next step is to authenticate the sender of the message. WS-security is the best protocol/framework that can be used for the authentication, message integrity and message encryption. It is a security architecture introduced by IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign, which introduced the concept of security headers.

Hence WS-Security describes how to Sign SOAP message, how to encrypt SOAP message and also shows how to attach security tokens to make sure of the sender's identity.

A SOAP header element <Security> is the entry point to WS-Security. It holds the security-related data and information for implementing mechanisms like security tokens, signatures or encryption. This element can be present as many times targeting different receivers. The <Security> element is declared with the use of another element <role> which specifies the type of recipients for which the message is intended for. These are implemented in different header blocks, i.e. if a <role> value is specified for a header then that message can be consumed by only those having the privilege. A header without a <role> value can be consumed by anyone.  

By signing a SOAP message it ensures message integrity, i.e. the recipient can be certain that the message he received has not been altered during transmission. This is achieved by the use of XML signature specification, which defines the methodology for cryptographically signing XML. The element <Signature> will be used as a security header. The signature is created based on the SOAP message content and the security token; hence the chance of being hacked by external party is less.

Encrypting the SOAP message gives assurance that the data cannot be read during transit. Here XML Encryption specification is used for encrypting SOAP message content. All the portions including headers, body blocks, and substructures, will be encrypted. Encryption and Decryption is done using symmetric keys shared by the sender and receiver.

Benefits to the user:

User data like credit card information, passwords will be secure and no third party interference is possible herewith. The site will be trust worthy and reliable due to the implementation of the web service security. If your application requires the customer to share sensitive information, it is very important that all the necessary measures are taken in order to secure this data. By implementing web service security we can assure the users that their data is encrypted and not vulnerable to external attacks. 

Recently, we had the opportunity to work on a project where developers from two different locations –India and UK- where working on the same code base. To make things easy, we made use of Assembla an online software-development version control and management tool. We placed the source code in the Assembla central repository and decided to use Mercurial, a distributed source control management tool, instead of subversion; considering it to be more suitable for scenarios like this.

What we did first was configure mercurial repository in CCNet, which initially looked like a lot of work; but it turned out to be easy and hassle free. The whole setup process is similar to that of CI setup of a web application with subversion.

We cloned the repository and edited the hgrc file in the .hg folder. In the hgrc file we added the authentication section as follows.

[auth]
bb.prefix =repository path
bb.username = username
bb.password = password

Where “bb” can be any name which is used to group arguments into authentication entries.

Task Block

It contains two MsBuild tasks.

The first MsBuild task builds the solution file and the second MsBuild task copies the files into the integrated testing server.

References

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgrc.5.html

http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Mercurial+Source+Control+Block

The newly available features are:

• Improved User Interface
• USB peripheral Connectivity
• Advanced WiFi Connectivity
• Updated set of standard apps like Browser, Gallery, Calendar, Contacts and Email
 
From a developer’s point of view, the new advancements are:

• Open Accessory API for interacting with external peripherals like robotics, controllers, musical devices, home appliances, etc.

• USB host API helps to interface USB peripherals such as input devices, music players and communication devices
• Input from mice, joysticks, and game-pads
• Re-sizable home screen widgets. The developers can create both horizontally and vertically re-sizable home screen widgets.
• Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) for developing applications that interact with PTP devices like cameras
• Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). This api  helps in developing  data streaming applications
 

What to expect from the next release?

The next version of android OS called Ice cream sandwich was announced by Google at their annual developer conference 2011. With this release, they are planning to bring the functionality of honeycomb into phones. This includes holographic user Interface and better multitasking. Unlike honeycomb, this will be a cross platform OS, which will run on tablets, smart phones and all other android devices. Another key aspect is that Google plans to minimize fragmentation. Currently, there are many android devices running on different screen sizes and different hardware configurations. This adds an extra burden on both designers and developers when developing application that suits multiple screen sizes. Google is planning to solve this issue with new APIs released with Ice cream sandwich. Developers can make use of this APIs to optimize their app for various screen sizes and device specifications. Another feature likely to be implemented is 3D facial tracking.

Basically cloud computing stands for the transformation of the industry, where everything viz application, platform, infrastructure etc are made available as a service over the internet. The major attraction is that, this change lets you focus more on the business rather than the running infrastructure. 

The three major areas, that the cloud has been divided into, are 

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which provides flexible ways to create, use, and manage virtual machines (VMs). 

• Platform as a Service (PaaS), focused on providing the higher-level capabilities—more than just VMs—required to support applications. 

• Software as a Service (SaaS), the applications that provide business value for users. 

In this series of posts, we will have a brief walk through SaaS, its significance, advantages and some implementation specific details, from our own experience.

Saas

SaaS (Software as a Service), is an emerging software distribution model, in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers as a service on demand, through a subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Here, the customer does not take ownership of the software but rather 'subscribes' to a comprehensive solution that is delivered remotely over the Internet. 

Why Saas

A lot of the advantages of SaaS based applications are akin to the benefits of any thin client (browser) based application. Below is a peek into some of them. 

• No Installation

The beauty of SaaS is that it does not require you to install anything onto your computer. It will run straight from your browser window when you log into your SaaS service provider’s website. Thus, it frees the customer from having to install the application software on their own computers thereby reducing the burden of software maintenance, installation, configuration, as well as from the ongoing operations and support.

• Location and Device Independence

Yet another big advantage of SaaS is that, the freedom it gives you in terms of when and where you choose to work. As all the data you use within that software, is stored on the servers of the SaaS provider, it can be accessed instantly where ever you are.  Carrying a device is no longer necessary, because as long as you are able to use a browser and access the internet, you can use the software.

• Latest Version 

Latest upgraded version of the software is always available to the user as there is only one version. There is no more worrying about the software being outdated or old. Also the SaaS provider is able to quickly make corrections if an error is found in the software.

In addition to these, there are advantages which stem from the fact that the customer does not own the software, he / she only has bought the rights to the services of the software. This is similar to taking a taxi trip as opposed to maintaining a car for the same service of a motor car ride from place A to place B. The customer is freed of the paraphernalia that accompanies ownership of the software and the service provider is bound to provide the use of the software, taking care of whatever it entails. 

Cost saving from a total cost of ownership point of view is one major advantage that the end customer gets to enjoy in a SaaS model software distribution model. This model enables servicing of a large number of customers with much lesser quantity of the various resources (hardware, software, knowledgeable personnel etc.) due to the fact that the model revolves around aggregation. This drastically brings down the actual cost at which the service provider is able to offer the service. For the customer, by switching to SaaS model, the traditional IT expenses such as purchasing and maintaining hardware, software, infrastructure etc. could be minimized to a great extent. The “Pay as you go” model also protects the customer against capital expenditure on infrastructure which does not give returns in lean periods.

Having talked about the advantages of SaaS model, it is to be noted that there do exist concerns among the customers about the privacy of their data while it resides side by side with other customers. Other concerns could be around the availability of the connectivity infrastructure, especially in emerging economies, as the whole model revolves around good quality connectivity.

With the invent of SaaS model, business application model itself is transforming to a subscription and outsourced model rather than the traditional ownership model. This is in turn bringing a silent revolution in the world of traditional software products. In the next post, we will look at some of the technical concepts that need to be taken into account while developing a SaaS application as opposed to a regular web application.