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The first release of Firefox with support for WebRTC is right around the corner and Mozilla is encouraging web developers to go ahead and start experimenting with what Mozilla refers to as “the real future of communications.”

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work in your browser.

WebRTC support is already baked into Firefox for Android. Both the getUserMedia API and the PeerConnection API — key components of WebRTC and the cornerstones of web-based voice chat — are already supported though you’ll need to enable them in the preferences. See theMozilla hacks blog for more details.

There are benefits to rooting your Android smartphone, but it can be a tricky world for beginners. Here are some tips.

For all of the flexibility and customization that comes with an Android device, there are still plenty of restrictions in place. While Android technically is an open-source platform, the final product is still the result of a phone maker's skin, the carrier or manufacturer's preloaded software, or even sometimes, a few disabled features.

There isn't anything wrong with most out-of-the-box experiences, but more daring and tech-savvy users who tire of being at the mercy and discretion of carriers and handset makers might be interested in pushing theirAndroid devices to new limits. This where the practice known as rooting comes into play.

One of the more common reasons to root a phone is to replace the operating system with a ROM, another developer's version of the OS that also gives you more control over details. In rooting culture, we'd call that "flashing a custom ROM."

The process of rooting an Android phone varies for each device, but seems to have been streamlined over time. Google's Nexus line of phones, such as the LG-made Nexus 4, appeals to developers and techie types and are among the most often rooted models. With that in mind, you'll also find that popular devices like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X+ have plenty of custom ROMs to choose from.

Note that rooting will void the device warranty; however, flashing a stock ROM can revert things back to their original state.

TinyWebDB is an App Inventor component that allows you to access the web from an Android app. You can use TinyWebDB to access a data source (API) or to store the app’s  data persistently in a web database.

These notes show you how to do the latter– set up a web database, and set it up in the cloud using Google’s free App Engine service. With the sample code provided here, you can set up a web database that lives on Google’s servers in just minutes, and you need not be a programmer to do so.

Note that App Inventor also provides a TinyDB component. TinyDB stores data directly on the phone and is simpler to use.  TinyWebDB is required only if data needs to be shared between phones and apps (e.g., social apps, multi-player games).

By default, the TinyWebDB component stores data on a test service provided by App Inventor, http://appinvtinywebdb.appspot.com/. This service is helpful for testing, but it is shared by all App Inventor users, and it has a limit of 1000 entries. If you use it, your data will be overwritten eventually.

For anything other than tests, you’ll want to create a custom web service that isn’t shared with other App Inventor apps and programmers. You need not be a programmer to do so– just follow the instructions below and you’ll have your own service within minutes.

This post will take a look at our REST API by creating a Python script to interact with the entity endpoint.

One of the key benefits of using standard technologies, formats, and protocols is the incredible amount of existing tooling that you get for free. Since we’ve been busy building our new service, backed by our ever changing database, we haven’t gotten around to client libraries yet.

However, we do speak JSON through REST over HTTPS. Every language already has battle hardened libraries for working with those. For Python, it doesn’t get much better than the requests library. Their motto is HTTP for Humans and it makes working with RESTful services a breeze.

When we started with Source Code Management (SCM) – at the time – we still had a virtual Windows server running with QualityHosting.de.

So a friend set up VisualSVN for us on this box. This got us started with Subversion.

A few years later I got started with git. Then I got into it a bit more with git submodules. Those were the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.

Two years later we decided that was enough of procrastrinating. Finally the time had come to switch to git for good.

Subversion served us well, because – seriously – it had several attributes that I chose to interpret as advantages. Specifically for my components I wanted to have a central place that I am controlling acces

Having grown up with a parent who is a web designer and a software engineer, gave me an early look at programming languages such as Python, Ruby, C++ and Java. Unfortunately I was never really inte...

Efforts like the recently launched Code.org try to make programming more appealing to students -- an admirable goal -- but if we're serious about expanding computer science in schools we need to start talking to teachers.

On its own, the software development process has numerous hazards and obstacles that require navigation in order to successfully launch a product. The last thing that any engineer wants is challenges resulting from the language or tool that is being used. It often makes sense or is necessary for the hardware designer to write code to test that the hardware is working or in resource constrained cases, develop both hardware and embedded software.

The language of choice is still C and despite the advances in tools and structured programming, time and again basic mistakes occur that lead to bugs and maintenance nightmares. In an attempt to avoid these C programming pitfalls, here are 10 C language tips for hardware engineers. 

Visual Studio Tools for Git 0.8.0.0. Install this release to get not only fixes to numerous bugs, (for details see the release notes on the gallery page), but also an enhanced conflict resolution experience.

Jelastic Launches Version 1.9 of Java and PHP Cloud Platform. Cloud hosting provider Jelastic announced on Tuesday it has launched version 1.9 of its Java and PHP cloud hosting platform, following US web hosting partner...

What is Intel up to? It has just released a set of really good HLML5 tools, potentially the best yet, that allows you to create  apps that are platform independent. This raises more questions that it answers. Why is an "Intel Inside" sticker on HTML5 so important?

If you are creating or thinking of creating a Web app using JavaScript then you need to know about what Intel is up to. Its latest offering makes it possible, and in fact easy, to create a web app that will work on mobile and desktop devices and then package it for all of the app stores you want to support. If this is as good as it seems to be, it is a winning tool and a way to really make apps that are write once and run everywhere.

Intel took the opportunity of launching its revamped developer offering for HTML5 apps at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing in April. The aim is very high as you can tell from the title of arecent blog post - "One Code Base to Rule Them All". You might think that this is a null claim as HTML5 is standardized, but this is to miss the point that an HTML app running on different platforms has a very different runtime environment. The APIs available in a desktop browser aren't the same as those in an Android Phone and there are even differences between a Chrome and a Firefox packaged app. 

Google's WebP image format promises smaller images and in turn faster web pages, but so far only a few web browsers support it. That would change though if Firefox jumps on the WebP bandwagon.

Want your website to load faster? Slim your images. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

We recently covered how you can cut down your website’s page load times using Google’s image-shrinking WebP format. Unfortunately, one of the downsides to WebP is that only Opera and Chrome support it. But that may be about to change — Firefox is reconsidering its decision to reject WebP.

The change of heart makes sense since most of the objections Firefox developers initially raised about WebP have since been addressed. However, Firefox hasn’t committed to WebP just yet. As Firefox developer Jeff Muizelaar writes on the re-opened bug report, “just to be clear, no decision on adopting WebP has been made. The only thing that has changed is that we’ve just received some more interest from large non-Google web properties which we never really had before.”

Whatever the case, if Firefox does land support for WebP it would help the fledgling format cross the line where more browsers support it than don’t, which tends to be the threshold for wider adoption.

If you’d like to experiment with WebP today, while still providing fallbacks for browsers that don’t support it, be sure to check out our earlier write-up.

SourceTree is a free Git desktop client for developers on Windows. Say goodbye to the command line and use the full capabilities of Git through SourceTree’s beautifully simple interface (and stop being jealous of what your Mac friends are using).

Without orientation, deployments of Python applications can be tiresome and even painful. This talk attempts to replace anxiety and pain through informed annoyance.

When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found.

Web Applications using applets to transfer data between the client and server are hard to manipulate using security holes, because of the simple reason that code within the applet is difficult to modify. Although the code can be recovered by decompiling the applets, it is very difficult to get them recompiled back into a jar file after making the required changes. This is because the decompilation process always leaves codes portions that are not properly recovered and hence it needs to be reconstructed manually by the analyst, which is a very error-prone method. There will be a lot of dependencies that cannot be resolved and based on the compilation process, some information may be completely lost.

In this paper we’ll discuss a technique that can be used to modify code and without having to recompile the applet and it can be madeto run in a standalone manner so that it can be debugged live and the values can be manipulated to exploit security holes.

We’ll use a generally occurring deployment scenario:

In the next section we’ll discuss the basics about java virtual machine, and class file format.