Programming news: Google API changes, major Zend updates

Language/library updates

Changes to Google APIs

Google changed and updated many of its APIs, added some new ones (including custom search and translation), and cleaned up its documentation.

Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - November release

The Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit is updated and is available on CodePlex.

MEF 2 preview

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a way of allowing your applications to be added onto by third-party developers. The preview for the next version of the library is now available.

ASP.NET MVC 3 release candidate

The release candidate for ASP.NET MVC 3 is available. It includes the new Razor view engine.

F# November 2010 release

F# has received a minor update, but it is important if you are working with F# on Mono or WP7.

Prism 4.0

Microsoft released Prism 4.0. Prism is essentially a starter kit for WPF, Silverlight, and WP7 applications.

Tools and products

Major Zend updates

Zend released Zend Studio 8 and Zend Framework 1.11. Zend Studio 8 is a major upgrade, with VMWare Workstation integration to enable local testing within a Linux VM, and improved AJAX support (jQuery, Dojo, Prototype), JavaScript debugging, and a Web request profiler. In addition, the price has been dropped from $399 to $299. The changes to Zend Framework include simple cloud APIs and mobile support.

Google mod_pagespeed slashes page load times

Google released a free Apache module called mod_pagespeed, which can reduce page load times by as much as 50%. If you host on Apache, you need to take a look at this module.

Intel updates tools for parallel, cluster development

Intel released Intel Parallel Studio XE 2011 and Intel Cluster Studio 2011 for working with parallel code and cluster code, respectively.

Quova Developer Portal opens

Quova opened its Developer Portal, a free tool for working with its IP geographic location APIs.

Morphlabs offering hourly Zend Server

If you are looking to work with PHP apps in the cloud, Morphlabs has announced that its mCloud offering can now provision Zend Server instances on an hourly basis. Good for testing and "spiky" traffic patterns.

CloudBees provides Hudson continuous integration

A new company called CloudBees is selling the Hudson continuous integration system as a service.

SmartBear's four new tools, two of which are free

SmartBear released QAComplete and DevComplete. QAComplete is test case management software, and DevComplete focuses on requirements gathering, defects tracking, and other project management tasks. SmartBear also released QAPlanner and DevPlanner, two online free tools that are lightweight versions of QAComplete and DevComplete.

Eclipse Virgo 2.1 released

The Eclipse Foundation released Eclipse Virgo 2.1, an application server for deploying OSGi applications.

m-Power improved

The m-Power development tool has been updated to improve the creation of executive dashboards.

rPath Builder 5.8

rPath updated its rPath Builder product to version 5.8. rPath Builder allows you to create automated deployment and update packages for Windows applications.

Nuxeo CMS updated

Nuxeo's flagship enterprise content management system has been updated to version 5.4.

Editorial and commentary

The bloat/speed conundrum

SMBC has a comic that perfectly summarizes the race between computer horsepower and code bloat.

New Microsoft awards program

Microsoft has started the Community Contributor awards program to reward those who are especially active in the Microsoft community doing things like moderating message boards.

Tips and tricks

New Silverlight data Quickstarts

Microsoft released some new Quickstarts showing you how to work with data in Silverlight.

BizSpark clarifies "graduation"

The Microsoft BizSpark program has made it clearer what happens when your three-year membership is over.

Free WP7 development book

Microsoft Press is making electronic copies of Charles Peltzold's latest book on WP7 development available for free.

Events

PHP'n Rio 10 conference

There is a free PHP event in Rio de Janeiro on November 20. The site is in Portuguese, so it is tough for me to get more details.

EclipseDay in Valencia, Spain

EclipseDay is coming to Valencia, Spain November 30 - December 1.

J.Ja

Disclosure of Justin's industry affiliations: Justin James has a contract with Spiceworks to write product buying guides; he has a contract with OpenAmplify, which is owned by Hapax, to write a series of blogs, tutorials, and articles; and he has a contract with OutSystems to write articles, sample code, etc.