Dynamic languages have changed the landscape and their only downfall is speed compared to native languages like C and C++.  C/C++ have had a bit of a resurgence with embedded devices and such sucesses as the iphone and ipod touch.  To get the most out of these devices native is the way to go.  Both iPhone SDK and Android NDK are native based.  The best games and graphically intensive applications need hardware rendering and the fastest way to get there is native. Larger companies like Google need to take advantage of speed to market and fast execution.  The outcome of that appears to be the Go language.

Native applications are more complex to manage, so lots of work like Unladen Swallow getting Python running with LLVM, PyPy and others to make CPython faster.  Google has supported Unladen Swallow.  But a company the size of Google has massive scalability problems to solve, and maybe they are looking to go more native?  The go language is now available from Google and it is deemed “Python meets C++”.  Where Apple has Objective-C (which is actually as old as C++) which is a bit more message and event driven, Google has Go which is much like Python and other dynamic languages but much closer to C++ speeds.

We will learn more about Go over time but it looks like it is taking the best of both the dynamic and native/static worlds in programming languages which is a great evolution in technology.

Mono 2.2 has been released.  Mono is a really great open source version of .NET and it is finding its way into many platforms that need to support multiplatform code such as Unity3D. 

This update brings in some great stuff like routing controllers to use the ASP.NET MVC architecture, csharp inteactive shell and other great performance enhancements to an already speedy C#.

Mono 2.0 the open source .NET framework has been released.  Mono has made it’s way into many great systems by now from websites to even 3d engines such as Unity3D. It is great to have a toolkit that is powerful, has a great language set from C# to Boo and that is available on multiple platforms.  From Windows, to *nix to of course Mac OSX built on unix, it all just works.

Having 2.0 solid and complete is a great step to making production apps run off of it.

Microsoft Compatible APIs

• ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.

• ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.

• Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.

• System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.

• System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

• System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.

• System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Mono APIs

• Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
• Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
• Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
• Mono’s SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
• Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.

Third Party APIs bundled with Mono

• Extensive support for databases: PostgresSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
• C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.

Compilers

These compilers are part of the Mono 2.0 release:

• C# 3.0 compiler implementation, with full support for LINQ.
• Visual Basic 8 compiler.
• IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.

Great news!  Mono has made it to .NET 3.0 support and this includes some of the latest stuff like LINQ expressions.

I am pleased to announce that Mono C# compiler (gmcs) has now full C# 3.0 support. Most of the features has been available since Mono 1.2.6 release. However, with the upcoming Mono 2.0 release we will also support complex LINQ expressions and mainly expression trees which is fairly overlooked new feature with a lot of potential.

For anyone interested in compiling and running this LukeH’s slightly extreme LINQ example I have good news. It compiles on Mono and it runs as fast as on .NET.

Is Microsoft going baseplane? Lots of people are going towards web based office in many ways, it is wise to release and allow people to export to these formats cleanly.

Microsoft Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) File Formats

Published: February 15, 2008

The documents listed below are covered by the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Microsoft Word

Word 97-2007 Binary File Format (.doc) Specification PDF | XPS

Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint 97-2007 Binary File Format (.ppt) Specification PDF | XPS

Microsoft Excel

Excel 97-2007 Binary File Format (.xls) Specification PDF | XPS

Excel 2007 Binary File Format (.xlsb) Specification PDF | XPS

Office Drawing

Office Drawing 97-2007 Binary Format Specification PDF | XPS

Supporting Technologies

See Supporting Technologies

Yes you have reached the twilight zone… do-de-do-do.

baseplane is a technology tentacle of drawk, a digital design and development company that produces web applications and games.

The goal of baseplane is to deliver tools that help developers, users and creating a level playing-field in a world of software where platform and company religiosity is breaking standards, simplified software entry points and going against the main rule of software, to minimize complexity.

With such great changes in software happening and so many platforms to consume, tools to simplify and make broad platforms to help manage bigger services it is key to take control of these services as the web generations advance.

baseplane has tools to help with social networks (Open social wrappers and other services), blogging aggregation (XMLRPC, metaweblog), code generation (data, to activity to apis to services to service modules like JSON services), consistent architecture spanning multiple platforms (.net, php, java, actionscript (as3) and ruby,python.

Stay tuned!