I was very impressed with Meteor, but it is very new and isn't really bringing anything of substance to the table yet. Everything (other than client-side database interaction, which I am confused about who would want), that they spotlighted can be duplicated easily with backbone, node, and socket.io...right now. Moreover, backbone, in particular, is clearly a tool, like a screwdriver, that does a few things well and gets out of your way, whereas Meteor, like rails used to be, is more like an electronic lockpick...awesome magic for the limited scope of applicability, but not currently useful for most of the things you want to do in real life.
I know some jurisdictions treat hacking tools the same as burglary tools, which is really dumb if you're just trying to test your own system's security.
This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.
Yep, it may not be in 5 years but it's only a matter of time, no matter what native app developers would like you to believe. If we learned one thing from desktops, it was don't underestimate the web. Good to see things start coming back full circle with the mobile web.
I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.
I've been rewriting my latest released Android game in Html5 and Coffeescript for PhoneGap, which lets me deploy on iOS and Android, plus Blackberry and other platforms, but I'm focusing on iOS and Android for now. I'm doing that because I need to make an iOS version, and would rather spend my dev time adding more features or developing more products rather than redeveloping the same product on multiple platforms. This approach also opens me up to the possibility of having a web version, perhaps a Facebook and/or Google+ module. I'm astounded on how much smaller my code is in Coffeescript than Java. It's about 1/2 the size of its Java counterpart.
Many people will of course not move on to HTML5 app development. Every time technology changes, lots of people don't migrate. But it really is an amazing way to go. Coffeescript solves a lot of problems and makes the code very small. Jasmine unit testing helps with the scary feeling of not having type safety. PhoneGap lets you deploy it as a native app. Chrome has a surprisingly awesome stepping debugger built right in. Vim + the cofeescript plugin automatically compile the Coffeescript every time you save. The difficulties of debugging in Coffeescript are mostly overstated in my experience, and countered by the feeling that I'm developing code faster than I ever have before in any other language.
It's not all cake and ponies, and I've had to figure out a number of things. But it's a really fantastic way to develop apps. Try it.
One obvious idea that I can think of is returning sanitized jsonp directly from the database to the controller. The database will nearly always be faster at formatting data in different ways, than the controller.
I would not be surprised if the government directly began to subsidize facebook, just for the incredible amount of personal information they could mine. Another scary thought is a company like equifax, buying into facebook.
1. You didn't provide any source for this (and I can't find anything online to back it up; granted I only searched for a few minutes). Facebook isn't listed in their portfolio, for example: http://www.carlyle.com/Portfolio/Alphabetically/item8774.htm.... And I couldn't find any mention of the Carlyle Group in the Facebook S-1 filing, either. You could be right, but I'd like to see the evidence.
2. The Carlyle Group is a huge private equity firm that owns all or part of hundreds of companies around the world. Suggesting (without any evidence) that they own these companies as some shadowy method to share private data across them is ridiculous. Your edit makes it even more clear that you're more interested in some kind of conspiracy theory than the obvious truth, which is that the Carlyle Group either didn't invest in Facebook or did so because they thought they'd make good money. And if they invested early, like you say, then they were right.
Thanks for the reply. I'll try to look up connections, but for right now it seems to be impossible with Google SERPs including Facebook mentions of Carlyles the world over. That is, search for anything "facebook" on Google and you'll get a million FB pages due to the word "Facebook" in every page title.
It is pretty amazing that nearly all of the western first world nations agree on one thing...they are pretty ok with KGB style spying or monitoring of their citizens. It doesn't seem to matter if they are on-the-fence-socialists, outright socialists, or dyed-in-the-wool capitalists.
And that they cooperate to avoid legal difficulties of spying on your own citizens.
ECHELON was a group of 5 nations. The US couldn't spy on Americans, so the US would give a list of names to the other four nations who would do the spying on those people.
The industrial espionage that happened because of ECHELON is amazing too.
Really? I'm curious about what countries allow this kind of thing, since I haven't heard of it outside of the US, Britain, Russia, and only a select few other countries. Can you really generalize it to "nearly all western first-world nations"?
I've come to think of it in economic terms. Some incredibly valuable companies -- Google and Facebook come to mind -- are built around nothing more than the economics of your personal information and mine. Seemingly innocuous information has proven to have great commercial value, and that's also why the government is so interested in accumulating it. If your preferences, vital statistics, purchases, and opinions were valueless, Google and Facebook wouldn't want to know anything about them, and neither would Uncle Sam.
2012 is making my head explode. Two things that used to be hard and out of reach for the "poor" are becoming mainstream and easy for anyone to access....college level education and mapping. I'm going to be honest, mapping-for-all is more surprising to me than the recent education explosion. It is traditionally considered a "hard" problem, that requires understanding or mastery of a few different disciplines just to whip it into shape. Absolutely amazing! I haven't been this excited with tech development since the "old" tech bubble. (ask your parents!)
