Organizations concerned about the growing popularity of bring your own device to work policies may be comforted by the release of RADE3. Retriever Communications, a provider of mobile force field automation, released its newest development environment this week. RADE3, which stands for Retriever Application Development Environment, allows developers to create device-agnostic native applications for a variety of business workflows.

Developers, according to Mary Brittain-White, CEO of Retriever Communications, can create applications on RADE3 without having to go outside of the environment to deploy the code.

RADE3 writes an abstraction lawyer above the OS-specific API and then enables the applications to allow end-users to have full control for editing assets, adding information or receiving notifications, Brittain-White said.

Brittain-White said that Retriever’s write-once, deploy natively approach does not include HTML5 mobile Web-based applications that are wrapped, as many of the other development and deployment tools do. She said it is important for these enterprise applications to have a larger database running in the background to allow full support for in the field workflows, such as a contractor who needs to input data into an insurance claim form. These types of workflows cannot be supported by HTML5 mobile Web-based applications, she said, because they need to work instantly and correctly for each and every transaction. Lag time is not acceptable for many organizations creating business applications at the enterprise level, she said.

RADE3 and the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), which powers the write-once deploy natively feature, is available as a free download. These applications are built with a GUI interface that delivers a dynamic user experience even when users are offline or in an area with sporadic coverage.

If you haven’t noticed, software development faces some severe challenges right now. Serious problems face us – not in some hypothetical time-frame, but right now. And I am sorry to say that the tool vendors and thought leaders we count on are letting us down. They’re focusing on other matters entirely.

I don’t mean to pick on Java, but that’s the example that comes to mind. A year from now Java will support lambda expressions. The big brains directing the evolution of what is arguably the industry’s most important language surveyed the computing terrain and decided the best thing they could do for developers was add syntax for lambda expressions.

Are you freaking kidding me?

To be fair, the Java team is also grafting modularity-control features onto Java via the Jigsaw project, and these features could be of real benefit to Java programmers. But still…lambda expressions?

Here are the things we developers ought to be focusing on.

Security

Yes, I know. I’m a broken record on this issue. But we don’t face a bigger challenge, and the days of shrugging off security as an operations concern are over. If you have a wireless router in your company, a bad guy in your parking lot can have access to your network in two or three hours using off-the-shelf tools and a $350 laptop.

You think your firewalls and strong passwords are sufficient protection? You’re dreaming. The U.S. military spends billions defending its servers, and last week it told the Senate Armed Services Committee that these security measures have failed. The military now assumes that hostile forces have network access, and it is shifting its focus from controlling access to protecting data. “[W]e have to go to a model where we assume that the adversary is in our networks,” said Dr. James Peery, director of the Information Systems Analysis Center at Sandia National Laboratories. “It’s on our machines, and we’ve got to operate anyway.” Anonymous has demonstrated it can compromise pretty much anyone it targets. If your network hasn’t been compromised yet, it’s because the bad guys haven’t selected you as a target yet. When they do, your security measures will fail.

This isn’t just an operations problem. It’s everyone’s problem.

Development processes

The Agile movement is popular – and why not? It’s a feel-good set of aesthetic principles unencumbered by a development process. XP, Scrum, and Kanban let us throw off the chains of heavyweight development methods and get back to coding.

This is no way to achieve reliable, repeatable results. It’s de-evolution in action, a return to the days of late-night hack attacks and reliance upon the heroic contributions of uncommonly talented superprogrammers. Too many companies are betting their futures on this family of untested, unproven non-methods.

CASE tools and formal methods were no fun – I get that. They sacrificed flexibility and improvisation and even personal fulfillment for reliable, repeatable results. They weren’t the fastest way or the most enjoyable to get from Point A to Point B, but they did guarantee you’d get there. You can’t say that about Scrum.

Platform fragmentation

It was a big deal when we went from building Windows apps to building net-enabled apps that split program logic along the well-established seam between lightweight clients and back-end servers. But that was nothing. In the very near future, we’ll be asked to deliver apps that run properly on arbitrary hardware with dramatically varying specs, all running different operating systems. It’s an unprecedented challenge for the software development community.

The traditional approach has been for IT to set up a list of approved hardware and software platforms, and thereby to limit the demands on application developers. But that discipline has broken down. You can’t keep your company’s workforce from bringing in their new tablets and smartphones, and from demanding that these devices be given access to corporate apps. The security concerns alone are daunting – how do you keep your network secure when the CEO misplaces his iPad in an airport lounge on another continent?

And don’t get me started on cloud computing. The security implications alone should give you serious pause. Rearchitecting your apps may not take as long as you fear, but the split between your resources and your cloud vendor’s servers will remain brittle. I lived in San Francisco long enough to know you don’t build something important on a fault line.

Inadequate tools

If I read the surveys correctly, you probably don’t remember the transition from DOS programming to Windows. I remember it well – I was at the heart of it. The programming tools and languages that had served us well in the single-tasking, character-mode environment were inadequate to the demands of GUI programming. The industry responded with visual programming environments, object-oriented programming languages, application frameworks, and plug-in reusable modules. Eventually these tools allowed us to cut the challenges of Windows programming down to size.

What tools and languages are addressing today’s challenges? Python? Ruby? C#? Honestly, they all seem to be addressing niche problems. It seems to me we’re being sent into this battle empty-handed. Or am I missing something?

Yes, these state-of-the industry rants are supposed to be posted in December or January. I’ve broken one of the unwritten laws of tech bloggers, and the authorities will no doubt crack down on me. But I had to get this off my chest.

Am I the only one who has noticed that we’re in deep, deep trouble?

Web recommendation: The evocative phrase “Internet of Things” always catches my attention. Here’s a rare substantive discussion of what the term refers to, by Google’s Vinton G. Cerf, a U.S. Medal of Technology recipient, ACM Turing Award winner, Japan Award winner, etc., etc. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He has rediscovered the joy of peanut butter.

Have you seen the YouTube video of the violin recital interrupted by a ringing cell phone? Take a moment to watch it – honestly, it’s very entertaining. The violinist is a good sport, all things considered. His ability to improvise on the Nokia ring-tone theme is pretty impressive too.

The video highlights a fact of modern life: There are times you don’t want your mobile phone to ring. Nor to chirp when you receive an e-mail, nor chime when you receive a text-message.

You could mute your phone, of course, but then you’re in some danger of missing an important call. There must be a better way.

The innovative engineers at Nokia must have been pondering this problem for some time. They’ve have come up with an answer nobody but cyberpunk authors saw coming: vibrating tattoos.

According to a recent patent filing, Nokia engineers have figured out how to mix electromagnetic particles with pigment just right so they can make the ink vibrate according to a signal forwarded from a mobile phone. You could receive a fast wiggle for an incoming call, a couple jolts for a text-message, and so on.

The patent describes a method of printing the magnetic ink on a wearable patch, but it also discusses the potential for drawing or tattooing the ink directly onto the skin.

Truly, we live in an age of miracles.

Web recommendation: This blog post, written by the son of Macintosh designer Jef Raskin, is absolutely heartbreaking. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He thinks it would be a fine thing to burn a bit of incense now and then.

Apple is regaining a place of central importance in the technology world that it hasn't held since the 1970s.

For decades, it was easy to dismiss Apple as a niche vendor of overpriced boutique systems – nice systems, but not mainstream, and certainly not viable targets for most development projects. But that view is obsolete. Apple's dominance of mobile platforms, and its ability to leverage that dominance across the laptop and desktop markets, make the company a formidable force in our field. And, increasingly, a magnet for development efforts.

Here's what's new at Apple:

2011 iOS sales surpass 28 years of cumulative Mac sales. A Finnish market analyst named Horace Dediu, who blogs at asymco.com, plucked some statistics from a presentation made by Apple CEO Tim Cook at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco last week. The really interesting conclusion is that Apple sold more iOS-based devices in 2011 than it sold Macintosh computers, ever. It's an astonishing accomplishment, and I think it's something developers should be thinking carefully about. You can read the transcript of Cook's presentation here and Dediu's short analysis – which includes a killer chart – here.

iOS apps are quietly acquiring and storing user data. Apple is the latest company to get stung by this sort of problem. It turns out that a bunch of the most popular apps in Apples App Store upload user data – including the user's entire contact list – to the software vendors' servers. The vendors hang on to this information indefinitely. The public outcry has been intense, and members of Congress are questioning Apple about the apps. This kind of bad behavior is already prohibited by Apple policy. iOS apps are supposed to notify users that their data will be uploaded and ask for permission. But vendors have not always observed the policy. Apple says it will address this issue, but no one really knows what that means. It could issue a statement to the development community, it could police the App Store more strictly, or it could modify APIs to require that permissions are acquired (and that data is encrypted before transmission). There's a pretty good article about this at Ars Technica.

OS X Mountain Lion will include iOS features. Apple is readying the next version of its OS X operating system for the Mac. Like all recent releases, it is based on the NextStep OS Apple acquired when it bought Steve Jobs's Next Computing and restored Jobs to Apple's top job. But the new version of the OS will apparently include a bundle of programs ported from iOS, including Messages, Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Spare Sheets, OS-wide Twitter integration, and AirPlay Mirroring. Many of the apps will allow synching between OS X and iOS devices. Registered Mac developers can download Mountain Lion now.

Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper feature generates controversy. Apple has built a controversial feature into the new version of OS X. Gatekeeper is a “security feature” that, in its default configuration, prevents users from installing apps unless the apps come from Apple's App Store or a certified OS X developer. Users who wish to install other applications – those written by members of the IT department, say – must override Gatekeeper's default settings. It's one more way Apple is trying to isolate and maintain control over its users.

New iPad(s) to be introduced in early March. Rumor-mongers – including the Wall Street Journal – are predicting that Apple will introduce at least one new iPad in the coming weeks. The consensus is that the iPad 3 will have LTE support for 4G connectivity. Apple may also introduce a lower-priced version of the iPad with an eight-inch screen, perhaps to steal sales away from Amazon's Kindle Fire.

A labor rights activist group will audit Apple's manufacturing facilities in China. As you know from my previous posts, Apple is receiving lots of criticism for low pay, bad working conditions, and terrible living standards at the Chinese companies that manufacture, assemble, and package its hardware. (The same companies also work for other high-tech firms, but Apple has taken the brunt of the criticism because its connections with the Chinese firms have been widely publicized.) The most widely known of the Chinese companies is called Foxconn. Apple responded to the criticism by asking the Fair Labor Association to conduct an audit of its Chinese partners. Meanwhile, Foxconn has raised its workers' hourly wages, which were already high by Chinese standards. The Fair Labor Association's CEO has conducted a preliminary visit to Foxconn, and told reporters, “We're finding tons of issues.”

New CEO changes Apple culture in at least one tangible way. Under Steve Jobs, Apple was notoriously stingy when it came to charitable giving. Tim Cook appears to be changing that. One of the new CEO's first actions was to establish a matching program for employees' charitable donations, under which Apple will match employees' donations dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000 per year. In a recent companywide address, Cook detailed corporate level giving, including $50 to Stanford's hospitals and another $50 million to Project RED.

There's plenty more news. Apple has posted a new getting started guide for iOS on its Web site for developers, the iOS Developer Library. And every day brings more news regarding patent lawsuits, both those directed toward Apple and those initiated by Apple and directed toward others. The iPad is legally banned in some Asian locales because judges have ruled that the name infringes on a Hong Kong company's trademark, but it appears that Apple jumped through all the right hoops when it acquired the trademark a few years ago. And much much more.

Keep hacking.

Web recommendation: Long before the Agile Manifesto was written, Mark Twain was advocating Agile principles – or so say the troublemakers at Agile Scout, a site that mixes occasional humor with serious news about Agile development. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He has been studying the field of business intelligence and has come to think this technology has real promise.

Here's an astonishing fact. According to a series of studies conducted by the Pew Research Group, nearly a third of all American adults own tablet computers or e-book readers.

Pew says holiday gift-giving was responsible for rapid growth in the installed base. In just two or three weeks—from mid-December to early January—the percentage of adults who owned tablet computers nearly doubled, rising from 10 to 19 percent. The percentage of adults owning e-book readers likewise grew from 10 to 19 percent. Pew says the number of Americans owning either a tablet or an e-book reader reached 29% in January.

This is good news for tablet makers, obviously. Apple says it sold 15.43 million iPads during October, November, and December of 2011, resulting in record revenues and profits. Sales have been strong for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Samsung as well.

It's not clear at this point whether sales will continue at December's pace, or if the installed base experienced a one-time growth spurt due to holiday gift-giving.

In either case, the tablet/reader world is now too big to ignore. Apps, Web sites, and net-enabled content all need to take tablet form factors and user-interface quirks into account.

What the new mobile platforms lack is the kind of “killer app” that rocketed previous platforms to success. That's an opportunity for developers. There's a substantial pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow for the firm that creates a gotta-have-it app for tablet/reader systems, whether for consumer or business use.

It's time to put on your thinking cap!

Web recommendation: Who doesn't love geeky t-shirts? I laughed out loud at some of the designs at Sexy Geeks and I bet you will too. J.D. says check 'em out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He currently suffers from a stiff neck, no doubt because he spent all day hunched over the screen of this laptop.

Nielsen's director of research, Don Kellogg always digs out fascinating information about the smartphone market. Yesterday, some new charts from his workshop were released that show smartphone sales over the past three months. Long story short: Android is still leading, but iOS is making a comeback.

It's a funny thing. Android is the undisputed best-selling mobile operating system, but Android developers seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. Especially when their apps are compared to software that runs on that other platform. You know the one I mean. The highly polished, tightly controlled, immaculately curated, stylistically homogenous, Steve Jobs-inspired iOS platform. Who can compete with that, right? I mean...Jobs was a legend.

Google is addressing the Android development community's stylistic shortcomings with a new Web site. Android Design is an illustrated set of principles for Android 4 developers. Some of site's advice is a little cheesy – it suggests you you consider these goals when designing your app: “Enchant me,” “Simplify my life,” and “Make me amazing.” But as you delve deeper into the site you'll find real, tangible information that will be of great helpfulness in making your apps run and look better on Android.

In particular, the site does a good job of identifying new features of Android 4.x – Ice Cream Sandwich – and explaining how they should be used in apps. Some of Google's advice sheds light on innovative new interface widgets and how they can make apps better, and some is just good sense. But in both cases, the style guidelines serve as important reminders of how consistent style can improve the user experience of platforms and apps.

Bottom line: Android Design is more than just a good idea. It promises to be an essential resource for Android developers.

Web recommendation: IBM researchers have succeeded in storing a bit of information in just 12 atoms. It's unclear how long it will take this innovation to reach the field, if ever, but it's an astonishing achievement. You can read all about it here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wore no shoes during the composition of this post.

Forrester recently released a report entitled "Building Mobile Apps? Start With Web; Move to Hybrid," to help developers answer the question of where to start with mobile development. 

We've written about this topic a lot in the last year -- we've discussed compiler tools that wrap native code in HTML5, like SenchaTouch, and we've also discussed building applications for the individual platforms to give designers and developers more control over what they are creating. 

At the end of the day it really comes down what you're willing, and able, to support as a development team. 

Can you maintain multiple applications? Or is it more feasible for you to create one "mobile" version and then build out from there? 

What do you think will be the trend for mobile development in 2012? Share your ideas, and best practices, with us. 

I often find myself experiencing something in real life -- good or bad -- and immediately want to share it on my networks. I take out my iPhone and instantly share it with my networks. Depending on which "app" I open, I could share it with 720 people (many of whom I've never met), 350 people (many of whom I know in real life) or over 500 business associates. These networks define us, the generation that shares (my new definition of Gen Y), but how do you deal with this mentality when creating your applications? Do you ever think about "saving us" from ourselves? 

As I took my daily Starbucks run the other day (I mean, I am a classic example of Gen Y, what did you expect? Dunkin Donuts??), I began chatting with a co-worker about AIM profiles. Remember the days when the Internet was brought to you in a nice, localized, safe package? Remember the AOL homescreen and the friendly "you've got mail" notification? 

For many of us those days are gone, but all of the new technologies we use today have origins in these older systems. Our Facebook profile, my co-worker and I realized, is really just an extension of our masterfully designed AIM bios. The only difference is that there's a lot more on the line these days; these days we're sharing our actual name. 

Not many people used their real name for screennames or MySpace profiles back in the day, but today's society demands that we share that -- and a whole lot more. 

Thinking about this, I started to wonder -- how does privacy and security fit into a culture that is bent on sharing every little thing that happens to them during the day? How can developers save us from ourselves? Is that even a possibility? 

Of all the applications on my iPhone, I think the best example of this is my Chase bank application. I log in, it remembers my username but never my password, and then I check what I need to and close the app. All other apps that I do this with (Facebook, Twitter, AIM) stay logged in. Chase (after 15 mins or so) logs me out. Even if I opened the application again, I wouldn't be able to do anything without putting my password in. 

Do you incorporate bank level security into your consumer apps? Or do you think it is up to the consumer to protect him/her self? 

How will you connect privacy, security and sharing in 2012? Tell us! 

Could 2011 possibly have been a worse year for Research in Motion Ltd. and its BlackBerry platform? Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong for the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry and PlayBook devices.

Here are some of the moments RIM would surely prefer not to press into its scrapbook.

First, of course, there were the BlackBerry service outages that outraged users and sent many customers to their nearest Apple stores. For a period of several days in October, RIM seemed unable to keep its BlackBerry network running.

Then there's the issue of stock price. RIM's share of the smart-phone market has dropped precipitously this year, from 24 percent of the U.S. smart-phone market last year to just 9 percent this year. The stock price has seen a similar drop. RIM stock traded for as much as $70.54 per share during 2011 before dropping to the low teens. The current price is hovering around $13.

RIM hoped to call the upcoming v. 10 of its BlackBerry operating system BBX – to emphasize its ties to the PlayBook tablet's QNX OS – but was thwarted by a U.S. federal court that concluded the BBX trademark was already taken. So the new release will go by the unexciting name BlackBerry 10.

In Julne the company responded to falling revenues by laying off 2,000 employees, about 10.5 percent of its workforce.

RIM's performance has been so bad that last week the company slashed the salaries of co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to $1 a year. This announcement was made at an analysts' briefing in which the company announced disappointing quarterly financial figures (a 71 percent drop in net income), predicted that no relief from poor financials was forthcoming, and admitted that its next-generation BlackBerry smart-phones would not ship until the second half of 2012. The company also revealed disappointing sales of its PlayBook tablet computer.

In November, two RIM vice-presidents traveling from Toronto to Beijing on business boarded the plane drunk and got so rowdy the flight was diverted to Vancouver so they could be booted off the plane – this after “chewing through” restraints airline personnel employed to keep them in their seats. The VPs don't work for RIM anymore, but the bad publicity won't go away.

As if all this weren't enough, a truckload of PlayBook tablets – about $2 million worth – was stolen while en route from Indiana to RIM headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., Canada.

RIM stock has rallied this week based on reports that Amazon, Microsoft, and Nokia have all considered purchasing the beleaguered company. There's no indication that any of these firms are still thinking about making an offer, however. But investors looking to cut their losses are selling and driving the stock price a bit higher.

RIM's BlackBerry products offer unique advantages to corporate customers. The company is still selling millions of phones per quarter. But it's going to take some kind of miracle to halt the plummeting fortunes that have plagued it in 2011.

Web recommendation: Want to see a simple IFRAME tag crash the 64-bit version of Windows 7? You can see the BSOD pop up here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He works from home, generally without shoes.