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2011

CAN CROSS-PLATFORM APPS FIND AN ANSWER WITH YAHOO COCKTAILS?

November 4, 2011 0

Yahoo might be facing a few major issues to keep itself high and up in the market, but it still has not stopped putting its best foot forward, wherever and whenever it can. This time, it has worked out on a unique thought, which would give the web developers an opportunity to drop down their frustration while writing applications. Some call it the ‘magic elixir for web developers’, which must display on multiple devices.

Nowadays, a million applications are being developed on various platforms, which might be across various devices and browsers and the number is only growing. Especially, when we note the applications made for Android, iOS and other devices, which hit the market every second minute. Noting the standardization, there is not much to talk as there are myriad screen sizes and features just within the Android universe.

Yahoo has come up with a cocktailed mix for the developers as its two-part “Cocktail” offers comprises Mojito, a JavaScript application framework and Manhattan, a cloud-based Mojito hosted environment, which layers higher-level services atop a basic Node.js server-side execution engine. Speaking on the Yahoo video, Daryl Low, Yahoo principal software engineer announced the products and even noted a few details in regards to the Node.js. He stated that putting Node.js on the server and a “100 percent” JavaScript execution environment on the device would allow the whole experience migrate back and forth.

Another update form a Yahoo official had Yahoo Senior Product Manager, Renaud Waldura noting, “Developers often write much of their client code in JavaScript, but often have to resort to other languages — Java, Ruby, Python — when it comes to writing server code that runs on the backend. Being able to use a single language for both, is “Nirvana” for developers.”

These technologies have been put to use by Yahoo itself, as they build their new Livestand iPad magazine, which went live on Wednesday.

A Cambridge, Mass., developer who requested anonymity because of his company’s media policies, said “For iPhone and iPad, sometimes you can use the same code for both, but if you target Apple and Android, or even just all the Androids, it’s a real pain in the neck. You usually have to tweak a ton of your code and there’s really no way to test that code on all the Android versions out there.”

The Internet giant, Yahoo seems to have impressed quite a few reactions as Carl Brooks, senior analyst with Tier1 Research, said, “It’s nice to see Node.js in there, underpinning a collection of web development tools. This is pretty much a grab bag designed to make neat-o web sites and mobile services, which is, to be fair, a pretty hot area.” However, he concluded noting, “Anyway, it’s Yahoo! showing off some neat tricks. Not sure it’s going to save their business, but this is a stab at a state of the art webscale developer platform. Bonne chance.”

Nowadays, consumers heavily rely on mobile devices for their social and work computing. Yahoo’s tools in such an environment would only help as the need for easier development will only grow.