Paul Krill

Unconfirmed reports say that Android 5 "Jelly Bean" could be released this fall, featuring such improvements as Chrome browser integration, better enterprise security, better power management, and maybe dual-booting support for Microsoft's Windows 8. Google did not respond to requests for comment about its future OS plans.

But Android developers at this week's AnDevCon developer conference were too busy dealing with current releases like Android 4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" to stall their development efforts for yet another OS upgrade. "You have to deal with what's available now," said Chris Morris, a developer for the Weather Channel.

Mozilla Marketplace, which is Mozilla's entrant in the online application store arena, is set to move to a public beta stage in a few weeks, a company official said on Tuesday.

The browser-accessible marketplace will feature applications built using Web development technologies, including HTML5 for structure; Cascading Style Sheets for layout, visual aesthetics, and visual behaviors; and JavaScript for logical implementation. The store will accept multiple types of applications and is not limited to mobile device software, said Mozilla's Joe Stagner, at the AnDevCon III conference in Burlingame, Calif. Mozilla announced in February that the marketplace was open for developer submissions.

With more employees using smartphones and tablets for business, enterprises are setting up their own app stores for application distribution, leveraging a consumer model for mobile application access that is tuned to the workplace. Instead of saddling already overburdened IT personnel with getting applications to individual devices, these app stores provide a central distribution mechanism for employees to download applications themselves.

App store technologies from companies such as AppCentral, App47, and Apperian mimic popular consumer app stores such as Google Play (formerly the Android Market) and Apple's App Store but provide access to applications needed in the workplace. Organizations control access to the stores, which can be cloud-based. Users then access the stores directly from their devices, whether corporate-issued or self-purchased, and view a palette of applications, which can either be developed by third parties or in-house.

Microsoft on Thursday is spinning out a wholly owned subsidiary to bridge the gap between proprietary Microsoft technologies and non-Microsoft technologies in mixed IT environments by engaging with open source and standards communities.

Called Microsoft Open Technologies Inc., the subsidiary is intended to advance Microsoft's investment in interoperability, open standards, and open source. "The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft's proprietary development processes and the company's open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities," said Jean Paoli, who becomes president of the subsidiary after serving as Microsoft's general manager of interoperability strategy.

The Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools is eyeing July as the release date for the 1.0 version of its Orion browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which will be discussed at this week's EclipseCon 2012 conference in Reston, Va.

Unlike the signature Eclipse desktop IDE, which is geared to Java and C++, Orion is intended for HTML and JavaScript development, said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse vice president of marketing, in an interview. "The benefit [of Orion] is your development tool is where your apps are running," he said. Orion is particularly useful for cloud application development, Skerrett added.

Momentum is building for the Graal project, an implementation of a dynamic compiler in Java to produce excellent code quality without compromising compile time and memory usage in the Java Virtual Machine.

Participants in the OpenJDK email-based discussion group, including representatives from Oracle, have been advocating for the Graal project. The effort would explore implementing a dynamic compiler that can be used in a native JVM such as HotSpot or a metacircular JVM such as Maxine. On its project site, Oracle describes the Maxine VM as a next-generation platform written in Java, compatible with modern Java IDEs and the standard Java Development Kit, and featuring a modular architecture. The Graal compiler from the Maxine code base would serve as the starting point of the dynamic compiler project.

In an effort to improve security in its Android Market, Google has been using a service providing automated scanning of applications submitted to the mobile application store, Google revealed on Thursday afternoon.

Code-named Bouncer, the service scans the market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience or requiring developers to submit to an application approval process, said Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice of engineering for Android, in a blog post:

Google technicians want an overhaul of the Web's TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) transport layer and are suggesting ways to reduce latency and make the Web faster.

The company's "Make the Web Faster" team is making several recommendations to improve TCP speed, including increasing the TCP initial congestion window. In a blog post on Monday, team member Yuchung Cheng called TCP "the workhorse of the Internet," designed to deliver Web content and operate over a range of network types. Web browsers, he said, typically open up parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests." This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable," he said. "Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We're experimenting with several improvements to TCP."

Jane Silber is on a mission to get the Ubuntu Linux distribution onto mobile devices and TVs, rather than be stuck on desktop PCs. The CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu) took over from the previous CEO, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in March 2010, but has been with the company since shortly after its 2004 founding. Right after New Year's Day, she paid a visit to InfoWorld offices in San Francisco to talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Canonical's ambitions in the mobile market as well as reflect on Canonical's successes and what separates it from rivals.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Canonical has been looking to attract mobile application developers to its platform. | Read InfoWorld's Mobile Edge blog for the latest perspectives on mobile technology. ]

Mobile application developers are set to gain an industry association that would promote their interests, enabling collaboration and product testing while offering education, cloud hosting, and governmental lobbying on their behalf.

Being led by Jon Potter, former executive director of the Digital Media Association, the Application Developers Alliance is set to get off the ground with promotions at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas next week and elsewhere. While Web developers also would be welcome, the alliance is initially geared to mobile development for platforms including Apple iOS, Google Android, and RIM BlackBerry. The alliance is looking to recruit thousands of developers. "We're going to be at the meetups all around the country, we're going to be at conferences, we're going to be talking to folks, we're going to be polling people," said Potter.

Sometimes if you can't beat 'em, it's better to join 'em. Take what Adobe is doing in the HTML5 space, even though momentum behind standards-based HTML5 presents a serious challenge to Adobe's own Flash rich Internet plug-in technology.

Adobe's Flash has been used to present videos and multimedia on the Web. But the technology is proprietary and leverages Adobe's own ActionScript programming language. With HTML5, developers can use just use the open JavaScript language, cascading style sheets (CSS), and of course HTML to build applications. The HTML5 "family" features a set of specifications that also includes CSS3, Canvas 2D tags, and WebSockets, for interbrowser communications.

Even as questions remain about Microsoft's commitment to its Silverlight rich Internet plug-in platform, the company made available on Friday version 5 of the technology, featuring a variety of new capabilities.

Silverlight 5 includes hardware decode of H.264 media, which improves performance with the decoding of unprotected content using the GPU. Also featured is Postscript Vector Printing to improve quality and file size, and an improved graphics stack with 3D support using the XNA API on Windows gains low-level access to the GPU for drawing low-level 3D primitives and vertex shaders, Microsoft's Silverlight team said.