Tag Archives: java

adobe, apple, microsoft, software, software development

Living in an App Store world: what are the implications?

A few recent events prompt some reflections on the rise of app stores and the implications for developers and for the IT industry.

One is Apple’s OS X Lion release, available only through the Mac App Store; and the removal of the optical drive on the Mac Mini, making it hard to install shrink-wrap software.

Another is Adobe’s closure of its InMarket service and AIR Marketplace app store. Some app stores are doing better than others.

A third is TechCrunch reporting that book apps such as Nook and Kindle are being hobbled or removed from the Apple iOS store. While I cannot verify this at the moment – I still see the Kindle app in the store, and it still has a link to the Kindle web store – it is in tune with Apple’s announcement in February:

… publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

Enforcing this on an app such as Kindle promotes Apple’s own iBooks app and store.

There are lots of app stores out there, though one fewer with the forthcoming closure of AIR Marketplace, but how many of them matter? Here is my pick of the top three:

  • Apple iOS and Mac App Store – arguably two different stores, but since you access them with the same account I bracket them together.
  • Google Android Market – not a lock-in like Apple’s store, but still the primary store for Android.
  • Windows vNext marketplace – how this will work is not yet public, but the existence of a new app store in Windows 8 is widely rumoured and might be expected to tie in with what is already in place for Windows Phone 7.

Perhaps I am overstating the importance of the Windows 8 marketplace, given the failure of the Windows Vista marketplace, but given that Apple has now shown the way I find it hard to see how Microsoft can fail with this one.

Note that an app store is not just a marketing ploy. It is a software deployment and update tool.

App Stores score well in terms of usability. Another advantage is that users have a centralised mechanism for software updates, managed by the operating system. That is good for security, because it is unlikely to be disabled, and good for usability as it should mean fewer third-party updaters like those from Adobe, Oracle Java, Symantec and others.

App Stores typically enforce certain conditions on developers. In essence they must be well-behaved. For examples, the Mac App Store prohibits apps that request escalation to root privileges. Apple also rejects apps that use “deprecated or optionally installed technologies”, including specifically Java and by implication Adobe Flash or other runtimes.

This is great for security. In principle, if you decide that you will only install apps from the App Store, you can be confident that all your apps are well-behaved. On the Mac this is interesting; on Windows it would be a revolution.

What are the business implications though?

  • First, it is a significant source of new revenue for the operating system vendor. It gets a cut of everything.
  • Second, it gives tremendous empowerment to user ratings and reviews. On iOS or Android, if you want an app, you automatically search the app store and take note of factors such as user ratings and popularity. Most of us can figure that if there are few ratings or reviews, the app is not popular.

If you are a software company, getting high ratings and good reviews on app stores is now a key challenge, even more so than it is already with the likes of Amazon.

  • Speaking of Amazon, the third point is that app stores will not be welcomed by software resellers. They are simply being bypassed. Amazon is addressing this with its own App Store for Android; but can it really win against the official Google Android Market? Its MP3 store is better value than Apple’s iTunes, but has smaller market share.

Amazon has other business to fall back on, but specialist software resellers will be watching the growth of app stores nervously. Apple resellers in general are already hurting and diversifying, thanks in part to Apple bypassing them with releases like OS X Lion.

The app store revolution is good for users in many ways, especially as prices seem to end up lower than before, but there are worrying aspects. In particular, the ability of the operating system vendor to tilt the store in its own favour is a concern, and we will hear more complaints about that.

Finally, it is interesting to speculate how this may impact enterprise software deployment. Will Microsoft aim to link its forthcoming Windows app store to other deployment mechanisms such as System Center Configuration Manager? What about volume licensing sales, will resellers be able to keep hold of those? Maybe we will learn more of Microsoft’s story on this at the Build conference in September.

adobe, apple, business intelligence, flash, internet, java, microsoft, professional, Web, web authoring

Wolfram announces Computable Document Format for interactive docs

Wolfram has announced the Computable Document Format (CDF), a document format that enables live computation to be embedded within it. “It’s a new way to communicate the world’s quantitative ideas much more richly than we have in the past, and in doing that a new kind of active document,” says  Conrad Wolfram, Strategic Director of Wolfram Research. That said, the technology here is not really new. There is a close relationship between CDF and Mathematica, Wollfram’s tool for creating mathematical calculations and simulations. The authoring tool for CDF is Mathematica:

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The announcement then is really about a new player for Mathematica content and applications, to broaden their usage. The CDF player is free, though there are some limitations. If you charge for your document, or want to display it without the player chrome, then a paid licence is needed. A CDF document can also be compiled into a standalone executable, blurring the distinction between document and application.

The CDF player is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. There is also a browser plug-in for embedding CDF documents into web pages.

It is easy to find use cases for CDF. It is for documents where there is value in performing calculations or interacting with data within the page. An example is pension planning:

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We have all seen those documents with a series of projections based on different assumptions about retirement age, contributions, investment growth and so on. This works better as an interactive chart where you can enter whatever values you like.

Other examples are statistical analysis and business intelligence, textbooks and course books where students can interact with equations and simulations, business proposals where you want to show how financial projections change based on different assumptions, or even general news reports where instead of a static chart you might want to show interactive graphics that let readers drill down into the data that interests them, or see real-time results.

Along with the computation engine, CDF supports a decent range of traditional content formatting features including cascading stylesheets.

Wolfram is correct in assuming that this kind of interactive document is important, and something we will increasingly take for granted in the era of the Web, eBooks and tablets. But can it succeed in establishing its own new document format when we already have HTML, Adobe PDF and Flash, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, and other formats which are also capable of embedded interactive content?

That is a key question. Wolfram offers a table which claims to show the benefits of CDF versus competitors such as HTML and PDF, but it is as skewed as these tables usually are. Wolfram says a PDF document cannot be compiled as a standalone executable, for example, but a PDF in an Adobe AIR application comes close. It is also worth noting that you can embed Flash in PDF, which would be an obvious route to something like the pension planning document mentioned above.

Nevertheless, CDF does have advantages. In particular, it has Mathematica, and whereas authoring a Flash applet requires programming and design skills, Mathematica is more approachable presuming you have the necessary mathematical, scientific or financial skills; and if you do not, you should not be authoring the document. Mathematica will construct a user interface automatically. It also has a huge range of built-in algorithms, functions and charts. Wolfram claims that authoring a CDF should be within reach of anyone who can work with an Excel macro.

The challenge Wolfram faces is how to make CDF usable across a broad range of devices and clients. Having to install a player or plug-in is a considerable deterrent. PDF or better still HTML5 has broader reach and works on Google Android and Apple iOS as well as on desktop PCs.

I tried the CDF plugin and player on Windows 7 and encountered several issues. The plug-in does not play nicely with Internet Explorer’s Protected mode and I saw this dialog frequently:

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I also had some issues with the player. I could not get an example document on Gulf Oil Spill Estimation to work:

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The player is currently for Windows, Mac and Linux – what about Apple iOS? Wolfram says it is working on this, with a two-pronged approach. One idea is presumably based on some sort of app, I’d guess either a player if Apple allows it, or some way to compile a CDF into an app. The other idea is to render the interactive parts server-side, so you could use them in a web page without a plug-in. This second idea could also remove the need for a plug-in on the desktop. You will get a performance hit because of all those trips back and forth to the server, but this could be mitigated by high performance computing on the server that will perform calculations more quickly than your client.

I can see CDF being popular within its niche, but whether it can transition into being a mass-market format I am not sure. Established plug-ins and runtimes such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Java on the client are all under pressure, particularly as Apple’s iOS spreads its reach; it is not a good moment to launch a new format that has a plug-in or runtime dependency. I wonder if Wolfram is exploring the possibility of compilation to HTML5 and JavaScript?

Despite these reservations, the broader vision behind CDF seems to me spot-on. There are many cases where we currently see static charts, that would be better served by an embedded computation engine.

.net, development, microsoft, mobile, mono, open source, professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring

The strategy behind Mono has shifted: ten years of open source .NET

Yesterday, SUSE and Xamarin announced, in effect, the transfer of all things Mono to Xamarin.

The agreement grants Xamarin a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Xamarin will also provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products, and assume stewardship of the Mono open source community project.

Xamarin is a startup formed by Mono founder Miguel de Icaza following the acquisition of Novell and SUSE by Attachmate, which ceased Mono development.

Attachmate acquired Novell in November 2010. Mono has been plucked from the abyss with impressive speed.

That said, the strategy behind Mono has shifted. Mono exists because de Icaza liked what Microsoft announced back in 2000 when it introduced C# and the .NET Framework. Microsoft made a show of standardizing the .NET CLI (Common Language Infrastructure), which made PR sense at the time since there was controversy over Sun’s ownership of Java, though nobody really believed that Microsoft knew how to steward an open source development platform or indeed believed that it was really serious about it. History largely justifies that scepticism; but de Icaza called Microsoft’s bluff and forged ahead with Mono, implementing not only the CLI and C# but most of the .NET Framework as well.

The goal of Mono, as I recall, was to bring the benefits of C# and .NET to Linux developers, and to enable developers to move applications freely between Windows and Linux. Apple OS X was also on the radar, though it took longer to become much use. Recalling Mono’s early days, de Icaza said:

Mono to me is a means to an end: a technology to help Linux succeed on the desktop.

Mono worked remarkably well from quite early on, but never quite well enough to persuade mainstream developers it was a sensible choice for applications that would otherwise have run on Windows. It did emerge as a viable and productive toolset and platform for Linux and a number of Mono applications became popular, including Beagle search, Tomboy notes, and F-Spot photo management. Some ASP.NET applications run on Mono; I have one on this site. Another Mono success was its use as the scripting engine in Unity, a game development platform.

A big problem for Mono though was the lack of a business model. There was support and servicing of course, which must have generated some revenue for Novell, but most Mono use is free. Novell possibly had in mind that Mono could be significant as an application server, but it has never become a really trusted platform in the Enterprise. For example, as Alan Radding (Dancing Dinosaur) notes:

DancingDinosaur has not found any SUSE on z user that has successfully implemented .NET apps on the mainframe. A few have tried but reported that Mono on z wasn’t ready for prime time.

Even among the free software and open source community, Mono was hampered by suspicion of Microsoft. If Mono became successful enough to threaten Microsoft, would lawyers appear? Given the way Microsoft is currently behaving with Android, filing legal actions and signing up licensees, those fears might not be unwarranted.

So what is Mono today? The answer is that Mono is now primarily a mobile platform. The Xamarin home page makes this clear, as well as making it apparent that the Mono team has discovered the value of a business model:

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Xamarin is tapping into two real business needs. One is the need for a cross-platform mobile development platform that works. The second is a way for Windows developers to use their existing C# skills for mobile development, given that they might not be happy with the tiny market share currently achieved by Windows Phone 7.

When I had a quick try with Monotouch I was impressed, and I would like to spend some more time with it and with Mono for Android.

Mono has touch competition though. In particular, PhoneGap, Appcelerator’s Titanium, and Adobe AIR. I was interested to see that Adobe is coming up with a packager for AIR on Android, which may significantly improve it as a cross-platform mobile toolkit.

Still, Xamarin is small and nimble and I expect it to succeed. It has also has Visual Studio integration, which is an advantage. One of the pieces Xamarin has now licensed from SUSE is Mono for Visual Studio.

The downside of these latest developments is that if you depend on Mono for the desktop or for ASP.NET, you may find these parts of the Mono project getting little attention from the new company. But Mobile is all that matters now, right?

I write this on July 19 2011. According to Wikipedia:

Recognizing that their small team could not expect to build and support a full product, they launched the Mono open source project, on July 19, 2001 at the O’Reilly conference.

Well, if there was a launch there it was low-key. It is not mentioned in this report. But de Icaza does recall:

We planned the announcement to come by July 19th 2001, so we could announce this at the O’Reilly conference, as Tim O’Reilly had been very supportive of this effort, and had offered his help since the early stages, when it was still a very young idea. When we announced the project launch we had our team in place, and we were shipping our metadata framework and our C# compiler as well as a few initial classes So officially the Mono project was launched on that date, but it had been brewing for a very long time.

Happy Anniversary!

adobe, cloud computing, design, development, internet, professional, software development, Web

RESTful and modernised: making sense of Adobe’s new Enterprise platform

Adobe has announced its Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management. My tip to Adobe: that is too many words with too many syllables for busy IT people who are trying to get their work done. What on earth is it? The same old stuff repackaged, or something genuinely new?

The answer is a bit of each. Adobe has made several big acquisitions over the last few years, starting with the Macromedia merger in 2005 that really formed a new Adobe, bringing together digital publishing and the Flash platform. In September 2009 Adobe acquires Omniture for web analytics, and in October 2010 Day Software. This last one seems to be having a huge impact. Day’s product is called CQ5 Web Content Management and is built on CRX, a content repository which conforms to JCR 2.0 (Java Technology API 2.0), a Java API. Here’s Roy Fielding, formerly at Day and now Principal Scientist at Adobe, from this white paper [pdf]:

The Content Repository API for Java Technology (JCR) is poised to revolutionize the development of J2SE/J2EETM applications in the same way that the Web has revolutionized the development of network-based applications. JCR’s interface designers have followed the guiding principles of the Web to simplify the interactions between an application and its content repository, thus replacing many application-specific or storage-specific interfaces with a single, generic API for content repository manipulation.

JCR is a boon for application developers. Its multipurpose nature and agnostic content model encourages reuse of the same code for many different applications, reducing both the effort spent on development per application and the number of interfaces that must be learned along the way. Its clean separation between content manipulation and storage management allows the repository implementation to be chosen based on the actual performance characteristics of the application rather than some potential characteristics that were imagined early in the application design. JCR enables developers to build full-featured applications based on open source implementations of a repository while maintaining compatibility with the proprietary repositories that are the mainstay of large data centers.

Adobe already has an application platform based on LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, which you will notice now redirects to the Digital Enterprise Platform. Ben Watson, Adobe’s Principal Customer Experience Strategist, explained it to me like this:

The core of the platform now becomes the repository that we got from the Day acquisition. We are also following their leadership around the use of RESTful technology, so changing how we do our web services implementation, how we do our real time data integration into Flash using data services. There’s really four technologies at play here. There’s CQ5, Adobe LiveCycle which is all the business process management on the back end, the online marketing suite with Omniture, and Creative tools which allow to both design and develop all of this content and assets … We had two Java platforms and we brought them into one.

adobe-slide

You can read up on the Digital Enterprise Platform here or see a chart of capabilities here. Much of it does look like rebranding of existing LiveCycle modules; but as a statement of direction it is an interesting one.

Is this for on-premise deployment, or cloud hosted? Adobe has a tie-up with Amazon for hosted deployment, though there is no no multi-tenant hosting from Adobe yet; I got the impression from Watson that it is being worked on.

Adobe is aware that it does not stand alone, and there are several connectors and integration points for third-party applications, such as a SAP data services connector.

Adobe also has a series of “solutions”, which are permutations of web content management, analytics, document processing, social media and so on.  There is also a Unified Workspace, currently in beta, which is a dashboard application.

The company’s line is that it is well placed to address the challenge of the mobile revolution, and to bring greater usability and social interaction to business applications, the consumerization of IT.

Although that sounds a strong pitch, melding all this together into something new while keeping hold of existing developers and designers is a challenge. Another issue for Adobe is that the company’s strong presence in design, multimedia and marketing makes it hard to appeal to more general enterprise developers. Nevertheless, the combination of Fielding’s influence and Adobe’s strength in design, documents and cross-platform clients makes this a platform worth watching.

adobe, cloud computing, google, mobile, professional

Chromebook: web applications put to the test, and by the way no Java

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Yesterday Google announced the availability of the first commercial Chromebook, a Linux computer running the Chrome browser and not much else. There are machines from Acer and Samsung which are traditional laptop/netbook clamshell designs, with an Intel Atom dual core processor, 16GB solid state storage, and a 12.1” screen. Price will be a bit less than $400, or organisations can subscribe from $28 or €21 per month in which case they get full support and hardware replacement. There are wi-fi and 3G options. Nobody is going to be excited about the hardware.

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The Chromebook may be the most secure computer available, if Google has got it right. The OS is inaccessible to the user and protected from the browser, and system patching is automatic.

The strength and weakness of the Chromebook is that is only runs web applications – the only exception being utilities that Google itself supplies. Are we ready for a computer that is little use offline? I am not sure; but this will be an interesting experiment.

The Chromebook is a compelling alternative to a traditional PC with its susceptibility to malware and dependence on locally installed applications and data. If you lose your PC, getting a new one up and running can be a considerable hassle, though large businesses have almost cracked the problem with system images and standard builds. Lose a Chromebook, and you just get another one and sign in.

You sign into Google of course, and that is a worry if you would rather not be dependent on a single corporation for your digital identity and a large chunk of your data.

The problem for the Chromebook is that Apple’s iPad and numerous Google Android tablets and netbooks offer security that is nearly as good, and local applications as well as web applications, for a not dissimilar cost. These devices are also easy to restore if they break or go missing, slightly less so than a Chromebook but not much.

The choice looks a bit like this:

  1. Chromebook: Web applications only
  2. iPad/Android: Web applications and local apps

Put like that, it is difficult to see the advantage of the Chromebook. The subscription scheme is interesting though; it is a new business computing model that brings the cloud computing principle of operating expenditure instead of capital expenditure to the desktop.

The offline issue may be the worst thing about a Chromebook. When I travel, I frequently find myself without a good internet connection. The word “offline” does not feature in either the consumer or business frequently asked questions – a question Google would rather you did not ask?

Yet there is 16GB storage on board. That is a lot. In theory, HTML 5 local storage should solve the offline problem, but few web apps, including Google’s own, make this seamless yet.

A few other observations. While there are no user-installable client apps, Google is adding some utilities.

VPN is coming:

We’ve heard from our pilot customers that VPN is an important feature for businesses and schools, and we’re working very hard to bake this into Chromebooks soon. Support for some VPN implementation is already in the product and we’ll both extend support for more VPNs and get these features to stable soon.

Remote desktop access is coming:

we are developing a free service called Chromoting that will enable Chrome notebook users to remotely access their existing PCs and Macs.

Apparently this is based on Citrix Receiver.

There is a bias towards Adobe Flash:

Chromebooks have Flash support built-in, but they do not support Java or Silverlight.

Another blow for Java on the client.

apple, gadgets

Google seeks to automate the home

Google made a bunch of announcements at its Google I/O keynote today. It showed off the next version of Android, called “Ice Cream Sandwich”; it announced its Music Beta, a service which looks a lot like Amazon’s Cloud Player, in which you upload your music collection to the cloud; it announced movie rentals.

The most intriguing announcements though were about how Android devices will be able to connect to other devices in future. The Open Accessory API lets manufacturers create devices which talk to Android over USB, and in future over Bluetooth, in a standard manner. The idea is that if you have an Android-compatible device – Google demoed an exercise bike – you can attach your smartphone and do some clever stuff, such as controlling it, analysing its data, or whatever is appropriate.

A related idea is called Android@Home. Google has developed a new lightweight wireless protocol which will let manufacturers create household devices that can communicate with Android:

We previewed an initiative called Android@Home, which allows Android apps to discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in your home.

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The automated home is a grand concept where almost any device, from a light to a coffee maker to a fridge or a door becomes available to control and program. However, the examples Google gave were not exciting: playing a CD by waving it at a player, coding an alarm clock to turn the light on gradually. Big deal.

It is not really a new concept. Sun had ideas to develop Java as a universal runtime and language to automate the home. Microsoft has similar thoughts, maybe using the .NET Micro Framework. So far none of these efforts have come to much – will Google’s initiative be different?

Probably not; but there is something else going on here. I travel a bit, and it is now common to find an iPod dock in your hotel room. If you have an Ipod or iPhone you just plug in and go; if you have a non-Apple device, you are out of luck. That is a kind of pressure exerted on every guest, a hint that they might be better off with an Apple device.

Google wants to do the same for a variety of other devices, but with respect to Android. Here is a refrigerator, and by the way, if you have an Android device you can do this other clever stuff like, I don’t know, alerting you if the temperature goes too high, or letting you peek at the contents from your smartphone so you can see if you need to buy milk.

Same with the Open Accessory API. If Google can sign up enough manufacturers, it will be increasingly difficult for non-Android devices to compete.

That said, we did not hear much about Google TV at today’s keynote. Why? Because it has flopped; a reminder that not all Google’s efforts succeed.

azure, cloud computing, software development, web authoring

Getting started with VMWare Cloud Foundry

I have been meaning to post about VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, a new cloud platform for Spring Java, Ruby on Rails and Node.js applications. Good, incidentally, to see Node.js getting increasing attention – see my post from December when I heard Ryan Dahl present on the subject. I signed up for Cloud Foundry when it was announced, since it has free participation in the current beta.

Today my account went live and I spent just a few minutes creating a first application using the steps here. Well, my first app is indistinguishable from a static web page; but having been immersed in Windows Azure for the last few days, with its accounts and subscriptions and certificates and the portal and the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg and the ServiceDefinition.csdef and all the rest of it, I admit to having a pleasant sense of “is that it?” when deploying the Cloud Foundry app.

I typed a few lines of Ruby code, saved the file to a directory, and then typed vmc push.

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Let me add that I like what Microsoft is doing with Azure, and that in combination with Visual Studio it makes an impressive cloud development platform that, from what I have seen, works very well; I think it is of major importance. I also like the fact that Microsoft has pushed down the cost of entry, with its Extra Small instances and more generous offers to MSDN subscribers, partners and others. It easier to experiment a bit with Azure than it used to be.

Nevertheless, Azure lacks the delightful simplicity of getting started that you can see in Cloud Foundry. After doing my Hello World app I look forward to trying something more advanced; and while I am sure that the delightful simplicity soon disappears as the lines of Ruby code increase, and as you try to make your application scalable and transactional and secure and all those good things, the fact that it draws you in is an advantage.

adobe, java, professional, software development

RIM announces Java and Android runtimes for the Playbook, beta of native SDK

RIM has announced several new options for developing apps for its PlayBook tablet.

RIM will launch two optional “app players” that provide an application run-time environment for BlackBerry Java® apps and Android v2.3 apps. These new app players will allow users to download BlackBerry Java apps and Android apps from BlackBerry App World and run them on their BlackBerry PlayBook.

In addition, RIM will shortly release the native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook enabling C/C++ application development on the BlackBerry® Tablet OS. For game-specific developers, RIM is also announcing that it has gained support from two leading game development tooling companies, allowing developers to use the cross-platform game engines from Ideaworks Labs and Unity Technologies to bring their games to the BlackBerry PlayBook.

It sounds as if the Android runtime will not be perfectly compatible with real Android:

Developers currently building for the BlackBerry or Android platforms will be able to quickly and easily port their apps to run on the BlackBerry Tablet OS thanks to a high degree of API compatibility.

Nevertheless, this will be an attractive route for Android developers looking for a quick way to port to the Blackberry.

The native SDK is currently in “limited alpha release” but RIM is promising an open beta for this summer.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS NDK will allow developers to build high-performance, multi-threaded, native C/C++ applications with industry standard GNU toolchains. Developers can create advanced 2D and 3D applications and special effects by leveraging programmable shaders available in hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 2.0.

The deal with Unity is important too. Unity is an increasingly popular toolkit for game development and adding the Blackberry to the list of supported platforms will boost its appeal. Ideaworks Labs makes the Airplay SDK, a cross-platform toolkit which already supports Apple iOS, Android, Symbian, Samsung Bada, HP webOS and Windows Mobile.

Note that the primary SDK for the Playbook has until now been Adobe AIR; and since the UI itself uses the Flash runtime this likely still makes sense for many applications.

RIM is doing a good job of opening up its platform. It is an interesting contrast to Microsoft’s “Silverlight, XNA or nothing” approach for Windows Phone.

google, java, mobile, professional, software development, web authoring

Computer book stats show resilience of Java as Android booms

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Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly has posted four articles analysing the state of the computer book market in more detail than most of us care about.  The overall picture is not too good – sales are down – and there are some interesting trends.

Here is a good one for anyone who thinks Java is dying. The programming languages post shows that unit sales of books on Java increased by 17.2% in 2010 vs 2009, whereas the next most popular language, C#, declined by 1.7%. Objective C, in third place, also declined slightly. JavaScript unit sales were up by 14.5%.

Why is Java booming? There is a clue in one of the two bestselling Java titles mentioned by Hendrickson: Professional Android 2 Application Development

Another trend that caught my eye is in the first post. Some of the Down categories surprised me:

Adobe Flash –84.43%

Mac OS –32.12%

Web Design Tools –53.2%

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has sold well as far as I’m aware so although books on Flash and Dreamweaver have not been selling well, it is dangerous to draw obvious conclusions.

The influence of Android is unmistakeable though. Something for Oracle to consider as it pursues Google for breach of intellectual property.