Tag Archives: JavaScript

Facebook snaps up Parse to accelerate mobile app development

Facebook + Parse

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has acquired software development platform Parse, signaling the social networking giant’s entry into a new business category: Premium application development tools and services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but multiple reports indicate the cash-and-stock agreement is valued at about $85 million.

Facebook acquires software development platform Parse.

Founded in 2011, Parse offers support for cloud-based data storage services, identity management and log-in tools, push notifications, social interactions and custom code. Applications leveraging the Parse platform run across operating systems including Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 8 and JavaScript, as well as Windows 8 and Mac OS X for the desktop.

Parse currently powers more than 60,000 apps, according to TechCrunch. Basic services are free; a Pro version including additional requests and pushes, as well as collaboration, security and marketing tools is priced at $199 per month, and Parse also offers advanced enterprise services at custom annual prices.

Facebook will offer Parse services alongside its existing Facebook Platform APIs and developer tools. "By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices," said Douglas Purdy, Facebook’s director of product management. "Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences."

Purdy added that Facebook will continue offering Parse’s products and services. Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar said that Parse apps will not be affected "in any way" and adds that apps are not required to integrate Facebook functionality.

Parse has raised $7 million from investors including Ignition Partners. Sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that in recent months, the startup was raising a financing round that would have valued its business at $50 million. Insiders added that file hosting platform Dropbox also bid for Parse, and that both Google and Yahoo additionally expressed interest in the firm. Spokespeople for Google and Yahoo declined to comment; Dropbox did not respond to a request for comment.

John Connors, a partner at Ignition Partners, told the Journal the deal will allow Facebook to offer a range of "data and services for mobile developers" overnight. Parse "had a lot of potential for creating a really big company–a number of enterprise and telecom companies had been evaluating them very, very closely," Connors added.

Source: http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/facebook-snaps-parse-accelerate-mobile-app-development/2013-04-26

Did you like this? Share it:

Firms overlooking dangers of attack kits

Concept image representing virus malware

An increasingly elusive and sophisticated class of online attack kits is posing a far greater threat to enterprises than most realise, according to researchers with HP.

Jason Jones, an ASI team lead for HP’s DV Labs security division, told V3 that exploit tools, such as the Blackhole platform, are becoming harder to track and detect for security researchers and anti-malware vendors.

Through the use of techniques such as obfuscated code in Javascript, attackers are able to hide their activities and target recently disclosed vulnerabilities which have yet to be patched on many systems.

In some cases, researchers are finding attacks capable of infecting as much as 80 per cent of the systems targeted.

"They are able to hide the exploit code from detection whole its passing over the wire," Jones explained.

"You have to really pay attention to how they are doing it, the wi’ll change the way they are doing it so the are not detected very well."

Further complicating matters, said Jones, was the growing complexity and sophistication of the malware market. As cybercriminals invest more money in attack kits, developers are able to provide improved management and support systems, such as regular software updates, analytics and web management portals.

The growth is occurring at a time when many firms are preoccupied with the growth in advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. With incidents such as the Shady RAT and Flame outbreaks dominating headlines,

Jones believes that by fixating on APTs and zero-day attacks, many firms are leaving themselves open to infections from the far more prevalent crop of web-based exploit kits.

"People are worried about the zero-days and they do not remember that other vulnerabilities are patched, but are your systems patched?" he asked.

"Making sure you are patched first and then worrying about the unknown would be a better mindset."

source:http://packetstormsecurity.org/news/view/21250/Firms-Overlooking-Dangers-Of-Attack-Kits.html

Did you like this? Share it:

JavaScript founder dismisses Google Native Client

Questioning Google’s Native Client development efforts, JavaScript founder Brendan Eich argued on Wednesday that JavaScript is sufficient for the needs Google is trying to fill.

Speaking at the O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, Eich dismissed Google’s technology and also promoted the upcoming upgrade to the official JavaScript specification, ECMAScript 6. With Native Client, Google is offering an open source technology to run portable native code securely in a browser.

But Eich doubted whether Native Client would get support from browser vendors Apple, Microsoft, or Mozilla, and he touted JavaScript as sufficient.

JavaScript is accessible and offers benefits like memory safety, said Eich, who is CTO at Mozilla. "Java can sandbox, too. We don’t need Native Client," Eich said. He also cited the Low Level JavaScript project, which offers a C-like type system with manual memory management and memory safety, as negating the need for Native Client. Low Level JavaScript compiles to JavaScript.

ECMAScript 6, meanwhile, is intended to be better for applications, libraries, and code generators, according to Eich. "ECMAScript 6 is under way," and parts of it are already showing up in the Chrome browser and Mozilla’s Spider Monkey JavaScript engine, he said. "We don’t want to change the language too much. I’m sensitive to people who think we’re going to change it into Java or something. We’re not doing that."

Specific improvements eyed for version 6 include string interpolation, the use of default values instead of undefined values, indexing of objects via another object, and elimination of the arguments object. For libraries, better modularity as well as proxies, for meta-programming, are anticipated. Eich also touted code generator capabilities, saying, "I think we’re finally ready for it." Developers of JavaScript, he said, also want to make it a better compiler target language.

Also under consideration for inclusion in JavaScript at some point is parallel JavaScript, for data and task parallelism; this is still a research project, Eich said, noting that JavaScript is now 17 years old. "The cool thing is people are using it in ways I couldn’t foresee," he said.

A JavaScript developer in attendance lauded a planned "let" keyword due in the JavaScript standard. Let, said Steven Olson, software architect for the Church of Latter Day Saints, enables developers to declare a global variable that stays in a namespace and cannot be copied. "The benefit is you don’t have the confusion between global and local namespace in your program."

Also at the conference, 4D announced Beta 2 of Wakanda, which is intended to be a turnkey JavaScript development platform featuring an IDE, client framework, NoSQL database, and server capabilities. A production release of Wakanda is due in June, with prices starting at $35 for a single developer using the vendor-supported commercial edition. A free, community edition also will be available. "[Wakanda] allows the developer to really create applications for the Web and mobile applications really fast," without having to deal with integrating different software development components, Michel Gerin, chief marketing officer at 4D. "It’s all working together really nicely."

Source:http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/javascript-founder-dismisses-google-native-client-194467

Did you like this? Share it: