The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

Here’s the behind-the-scenes story about how Uber Engineering’s Driver Team continues to develop our virtual onboarding funnel to get hundreds of thousands of driver-partners on the road earning money with Uber.

The Consequences of Scale for Driver-Partners

Our team cares …

The post How Uber Engineering Massively Scaled Global Driver Onboarding appeared first on Uber Engineering Blog.

Uber Engineering

Uber’s mission is transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone. Last time, we talked about the foundation that powers Uber Engineering. Now, we’ll explore the parts of the stack that face riders and drivers, starting …

The post The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part II: The Edge and Beyond appeared first on Uber Engineering Blog.

What do the acronyms I18N or L10N stand for? What do they mean for developers of mobile applications in particular?

I hosted a session about localizing mobile applications at Developer Week 2014 in Nuremberg. It covers — among other things — text, numbers, date and time, images, and other localizable resources.

See the codecentric blog for slides and some more details.

The post and the slides are also available in German.

After speaking about the topic the Developer Week 2013 in Nürnberg this week, due to some scheduling coincide I repeated it today for our codecentric "Dev-Friday" in which internal or external speakers present some topic to the whole company.

For a while we have been recording these for colleagues on vacation or otherwise occupied during the talk to watch it later. Several of them are available on codecentric's YouTube channel publicly. As of a few moments ago, so is my "Man in the Middle? – No, thank you!" talk on the possibility of – and countermeasures against – man in the middle attacks against SSL connections.

For your convenience, here is the video:



The …

Today social media applications plays an important role in our day-to-day activities as a result of the Web 2.0 revolution that took place in the Internet. It has revolutionized the lifestyle of almost all the individuals and business entities, for the majority of them spending at least few minutes with it has become an integral […]

Those who are familiar with me know I've a dream.

5 years ago I decided to leave a systems integrator where I was doing great. Why? I wanted to be in a company with the same growth prospects that Oracle had in the 80s. I dreamed to be in the Oracle of 30 years ago and, as time travel wasn't affordable, I decided to join MySQL AB to help expand the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A few years later my dream came true, but in a slightly different sense. Sun acquired MySQL and was later swallowed by Oracle giving me the opportunity to join the company I wished I could have helped build.

Oracle is an amazing …

In Ausgabe 3/2012 der Fachzeitschrift JavaSPEKTRUM wurde kürzlich ein Artikel mit dem Titel "SOA-basierte NoSQL-Lösung im Mobile-Umfeld" veröffentlicht, dessen Co-Autor ich bin. Er beschreibt, wie eine mobile Java-Applikation mittels kreativer Ansätze und einem Mix aus moderner und altbewährter Technik zum Erfolg gebracht wurde.

Der Volltext kann entweder im Browser auf der codecentric Homepage unter der Rubrik Kompetenzen/Publikationen gelesen werden, steht aber auch als PDF zum Download bereit.

(Tested with Android 2.3.3 SDK)

Sometimes, you need to simulate an incoming short message for your app. For instance, an encryption app could need to intercept incoming SMS using a BroadcastReceiver, then check if the SMS was encrypted and if so, decrypt it. Then the decrypted SMS and not the original one should be processed further (show up in SMS app etc.).

The usual way is to create a BroadcastReceiver, intercept the SMS_RECEIVED broadcast on the incoming message and abort the broadcast if necessary (if the message was encrypted or somehow else only for your app). Then you could generate a notifcation and put the SMS into the inbox:

Putting an SMS directy into the native inbox database

You will need the WRITE_SMS privilege.

public static final String SMS_EXTRA_NAME = "pdus";
public static final String SMS_URI = "content://sms";

public static final String ADDRESS = "address";
public static final …

1. Networks Blocking Google TV -- the networks are carrying over their old distribution models: someone aggregates eyeballs and pays them for access. In their world view, Google TV is just another cable company. They're doubling down on this wholesale model, pulling out of Hulu and generally avoiding dealing with the people who ultimately watch their shows except through ad-filled shows on their corporate sites. (via Gina Trapani)
2. Mobile Market Snippets -- lots of numbers collected by Luke Wroblewski. After the Verizon iPhone launched …