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Short Takes: May 1, 2010

By SD Times News Team

April 28, 2010 — (Page 1 of 2)
The trouble with 6.0
6.0 seems to be a difficult number to reach. Last year, MySQL 6.0 was canceled when the community decided everything scheduled for that version should just be added in the 5.x branches. The same fate has just befallen the PHP community, where a rogue core committer moved the entire 6.0 branch into the trash on the project's subversion server. It was a ham-fisted attempt to draw attention to the problems remaining the 5.x trees. The specifics of that debate revolve around Unicode support, an increasingly contentious issue for developers around the world.

This is mirrored in Perl's 5.12 release, the first for that language in a number of years. Most of the big minds in Perl have been thinking very hard about how to make 6.0 awesome. Unfortunately, they've been thinking and coding for almost 10 years now, and the remaining issues in Perl's 5.x branch were increasingly ignored. Updates were slow and infrequent, though new project management has pledged to make them more common. And in 5.12, the big fixes are almost all related to Unicode.

One more 6.0 release was Windows Vista, right? Maybe there's some sort of 6.0 curse. — Alex Handy

Apple drops the ball
Apple made a terrible decision to ban cross-compiled applications from the iPhone. The company made a fiercely competitive move, but it is restricting developer freedom, eliminating portability and making it costlier to target the iPhone.

From a practical standpoint, there are far more C# programmers than there are Objective-C programmers. C# programmers are cheaper to hire. Apple is also effectively isolating itself from innovations in programming. Rest assured that the next big programming framework will not be supported in the iPhone SDK; HTML5-based applications also cannot be submitted to the iPhone store.

Strangling developers with restrictions and barring applications from the App Store on questionable grounds is not a way to win support for your platform from developers. Shame on Apple. — David Worthington

More mobility for Twitter
Twitter recently announced its purchase of Tweetie, a third-party Twitter client for the Mac by Atebits. Twitter plans to rename the app “Twitter for iPhone” and offer it for free in the iTunes AppStore (as opposed to its current US$2.99 purchase price).

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