Greetings, Testers. Over the past several weeks, we've been talking about four technology trends that have been identified as disruptive, and Peter & I discussed them in our recent webinar. For example, there's the cloud, "a colloquial expression used to describe a variety of different types of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected through a real-time communication network such as the Internet." [wikipedia's description] In real terms, for us that means one or more virtual systems that we can use to host our data or applications without adding IT staff or hardware in ...

There’s no doubt that JavaScript, CSS, images and other resources are becoming larger and larger and HUGELY McHUGENATOR sized these days (just take a look at any popular website you visit!). To make matters worse, though, we also have more people accessing these monstrous websites with 50megs of animated jiffs (pronounced “gif”), 10megs of JavaScript and more CSS than an MS-Word document’s “export to HTML”. Things are a bit of a mess, quite frankly. But there’s hope, even with the monstrously sized sites and ever-increasing number of mobile users. Content-Delivery Networks (CDNs), while not a silver bullet by any means, can help you to reduce the amount of time that it takes to deliver your website assets around the world.

An easy-to-use Back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) can make rapidly developing your app not only a possibility, but an enjoyable experience. A good BaaS will work for simple "CRUD-based" (or "forms-over-data") apps as well as more complicated scenarios. The trouble is that when your app outgrows the simpler scenarios, you often need "hooks" on the server side for things like validation, record transformation and more. When you're using Everlive, this is where "Cloud Code" comes in.

Do developers know a hybrid app when they see one? It turns out, if the app is written well, they aren’t so sure. Last week we posted a video on YouTube of a fun project we ran. We wanted to see how much perception can play into people’s opinion of an app’s performance We got inspired by Jimmy Kimmel’s “Starbucks taste test” video, and we captured this video with developers taking the same hybrid mobile app for a ride.