Developer tools

Quora, an increasingly popular question-and-answer site with a social networking angle, has released an application programming interface that opens the door for third-party software to use the service.

The API, announced Friday, has very limited features and is only an alpha release that the company doesn't promise will remain stable. But it's an important milestone nevertheless for the company as it charts a course through the complexities of building a business on today's Net.

That's because an API, if rich enough, means people using a service don't necessarily have to use that services' Web site. … Read more

Adobe Systems' Flash Media Server software is now available as a pay-as-you-go option on the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing technology, the companies announced Wednesday.

Flash Media Server 4 lets customers send streaming video across the Net. By using it hosted on AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, customers don't have to worry so much about installation and configuration details.

The service costs a flat rate of $5 to set up and $5 per month to use, with variable costs according to the video-streaming capacity needed and data transferred. For example, an extra-large server instance that can manage up to … Read more

It probably wouldn't have helped WikiLeaks' struggle to stay on the Web last week, but Amazon.com has launched a new service for companies whose Internet operations need Domain Name Service.

DNS is technology that connects the Internet address that people use, such as www.flickr.com, to its numeric address, 68.142.214.24. It's that numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address that computers and network gear need to route data over the Internet. DNS functions not unlike a phone book, where you can find a phone number by looking up a person's name.

Now Amazon is … Read more

Strobe, a start-up focusing on publishing tools that employ a new generation of Web standards, has secured first-round funding.

Chief Executive and co-founder Charles Jolley announced the move today but declined to share exactly how much Hummer-Winblad and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures bestowed upon his company. The company's technology is based on a project called SproutCore that Jolley has been working on for years, including several while at Apple. Jolley left Apple in July.

SproutCore uses JavaScript and other Web tools to endow Web pages with user interfaces more like what one would expect of a native application. It … Read more

Sencha, a start-up trying to make a business out of open-source tools for building Web applications, has begun an important new phase of its business with its first foray into the hot mobile browser market.

The new Sencha Touch 1.0 software is a JavaScript programming framework out of which mobile Web apps can be built. It joins the company's earlier products, the Ext JS and Ext GWT frameworks and the Ext Designer developer tool.

The tools are designed for those who need to build user interfaces out of dialog boxes, pop-up windows, sliders, charts, check-boxes, and all the … Read more

Reflecting a growing trend in the tech industry, Amazon Web Services has added a new computing style that uses computers' graphics chips.

AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) lets people pay to use different varieties of online computing resources, paying as they go. EC2 began with a conventional business server setup, but Amazon has been adding different instance types tuned to particular computing needs.

The new Cluster GPU Instance is a server with two quad-core Intel Nehalem-series Xeon X5570 processors, two Nvidia Fermi-series Tesla M2050 graphics chips, 22GB of memory, 1.7TB of storage, and a 10 gigabit per second Ethernet … Read more

Yahoo is joining efforts by Microsoft, Google, and legions of developers to wean the Web of Internet Explorer 6, reducing its support for how well its Web programming tools works with 2001-era browser.

Yahoo announced the IE6 demotion last week for its Yahoo User Interface (YUI) tools, an open-source project that supplies Web developers with code modules they can use to build sophisticated sites. Yahoo, naturally, is among its users.

IE6, introduced in 2001, lacks support for many Web standards--many old ones as well as a host of important new ones--and is feeble at processing Web-based JavaScript programs essential to … Read more

Google has released the first significant update to its WebM video software, bringing better performance and adding a duck-related code name.

The new software, called Aylesbury after the domesticated duck breed, is better at both encoding and faster at decoding WebM videos, said John Luther, Google's WebM product manager, in a blog post last week. Luther plans to detail Aylesbury this week at the Streaming Media West conference, which will include a detailed status report and a discussion of how it fits into the new HTML5 standard for Web pages.

More specifically, Aylesbury is between 20 percent and 40 … Read more

OSLO, Norway--Good news for anybody with a newspaper who needs to reckon with Internet publishing: the man behind a key Web technology has your needs in mind.

After years of relative obscurity, the Web formatting standard called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets has come into its own, taking a starring role as the mechanism for building a new generation of interactive, elaborate Web pages. CSS is growing in new directions now, and the technology's original creator believes its next direction for improvement will be dealing with more complicated Web page layout chores.

"There is important work left to … Read more