Technology moves fast. Understanding how the mobile space has developed can help us understand where we are today, and why we need the tools and capabilities a modern development framework can provide. Here is an outline of how the mobile ecosystem evolved to the present day.

BlackBerry or bust. It wasn’t that long ago that when an enterprise needed mobile devices for some of its employees, it would buy BlackBerrys, set them up, and issue and maintain the devices and apps. Employees had no say in the matter, and the devices and apps were for official use only. The user experience was tightly controlled. Those were simpler times. Centralization made things easy for corporate IT, and it worked. Never mind that the user experience was typically not very good; there was no alternative. Employees lived with whatever capabilities and limitations were built into the enterprise’s choices.

The mobile minority. In addition, since employers bore the entire expense for the devices, applications, provisioning, and IT support, they typically would make mobile devices and applications available only to those employees with traditionally “mobile” jobs, such as sales or on-site service personnel. Other employees remained tied to their desktop computers or dependent on bulky laptops for travel.

Enter the iPhone. Apple changed everything with the iPhone. For the first time, people were willing to pay $199 (with a contract) for their very own device, because for the first time there was a device that offered a compelling and satisfying user experience. The number of mobile apps for productivity, communication, and entertainment mushroomed, and before long the iPhone and iOS themselves had competitors. And all of these devices and applications provided better experience than corporate mobile phones.

You can’t get toothpaste back in the tube. It quickly became apparent that it was not practical for employees to carry two phones, one for personal use and one for official use. As soon as it was possible to do so, employees started to use their personal phones to access corporate networks and applications. Enterprises tried to stem this use of personal phones but found it impossible or impractical to do so.

Bring your own. At the same time, IT learned that employees’ use of personal phones came with a significant benefit: It allowed the enterprise to reduce the costs associated with procuring, provisioning and maintaining devices for their staff. So BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) became an accepted practice, even if sometimes unofficially.

Security. To address the security issues that arose with BYOD, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) companies stepped in. These firms supported BYOD initiatives and helped enterprises keep corporate information as secure as it could be in a mobile environment.

Multiplicity. BYOD had a profound impact on how enterprises designed and developed mobile applications. They could no longer build an application for a particular mobile operating system. Instead, they had to support the most popular operating systems and devices used by employees. Finding it cost-prohibitive to build, test, and maintain applications for multiple platforms, they began a frantic search for a cross-platform solution.

Web apps to the rescue? HTML5 emerged as the apparent savior, but enthusiasm was short-lived because of performance issues and browser fragmentation. In addition, employees were not pleased with the user experience in web applications. In the end, even companies like Facebook and LinkedIn abandoned their HTML5 efforts. It was now clear that enterprises needed to build native mobile applications.

Overwhelmed. The problem with building native applications is that it involves dealing with multiple operating systems, multiple development languages, multiple form factors, and multiple user experiences. To compound the problem, enterprises typically do not have the skills in-house to build mobile applications using these new development environments.

Today’s cross-platform world. That's why cross-platform development frameworks like Appcelerator have gained popularity. They make it much easier for companies to use existing web resources to build native applications that target multiple platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Tizen, Mobile Web, etc). Appcelerator allows enterprises to build connected secure native mobile applications and satisfy their desire for rich native UI.

My next post will show you how the Appcelerator platform solves a variety of problems enterprises face in the mobile space.

Watch a demo to see our open, cloud-based enterprise platform in action.

Redwood City, Calif. – May 16, 2013 –Actian Corp. (“Actian”), a leader in next-generation big data management and creator of the analytic database Vectorwise, today announced that 3K Technologies, LLC has partnered with Actian to offer Actian Vectorwise technology to its business intelligence, visual and predictive analytics, business integration and cloud services customers. Now with access to the Vectorwise analytic database, 3K Technologies can harness extensive variations and massive amounts of data to help its customers make better high-stakes decisions faster.

Because Vectorwise technology delivers high performance on low-cost, commodity hardware, 3K Technologies can offer its customers access to large-scale real-time data at a fraction of the cost of other leading solutions. Now, 3K Technologies clients can connect to, analyze and take action based on real-time data to improve business decisions.

“3K Technologies has worked with companies that are leaders in their markets to leverage business data to sustain and grow their competitive advantage,” said Fred Gallagher, GM of Vectorwise, Actian. “By joining forces with Vectorwise, 3K Technologies customers can gain real-time insights from their data take automated action, without breaking the bank.”

“By adding Actian Vectorwise to our portfolio of technologies, our customers can gain maximum value from their massive amounts of data,” said Krishna K Chittabathini, co-founder and CEO, 3K Technologies.

With more than 10,000 customers worldwide, Actian is a leader in helping companies analyze big data in industries ranging from retail, ecommerce, healthcare, manufacturing, finance and social media.

About Actian: Take Action on Big Data
Actian Corporation enables organizations to transform big data into business value with data management solutions to transact, connect, analyze and act on data. Actian helps 10,000+ customers worldwide take action on their big data with Vectorwise analytics database, RushAnalytics Hadoop accelerator, DataCloud platform for cloud and on-premises data integration, Action Apps lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions, as well as Ingres, Versant and PSQL transactional mission-critical databases. Actian is headquartered in California with offices in Austin, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, New Delhi and Melbourne. Stay connected with Actian Corporation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

About 3K Technologies
3K Technologies, LLC is an INC 500 company, and is listed as one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States of America. 3K Technologies customers are the world's best-known Fortune 500 and Global 1000 brands, spanning a variety of industries -- high tech manufacturing, social media, e-commerce, financial services, logistics, entertainment, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods.

Founded in 2002, 3K Technologies helps enterprises to solve business challenges while focusing on the development and implementation of technology: Business Intelligence, Visual & Predictive Analytics, Big Data, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software Product Engineering and Cloud. More information about the company is available at www.3ktechnologies.com.

Actian, Action Apps, Ingres, RushAnalytics, Vectorwise and Versant are trademarks of Actian Corporation and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

India's developer conference gains ground

If software is configurable, it often means that the software relies on dynamic content – dynamic content is typically based on dynamic identifiers (IDs). Using dynamic IDs often leads to problems in test automation because they are newly generated each and every time an element is displayed. This blog post will illustrate how easy it is with Ranorex to overcome this frequent problem in test automation in an automated way.

• What is the Problem?
• Identify Dynamic Content
• Add a Weight Rule
• Add a Condition to the Weight Rule
• Conclusion

What is the Problem

Ranorex decides which attribute will be used for object identification based on predefined attribute weights (or “RanoreXPath weights”). Usually the ID of an object will be the best and most stable attribute for identifying and object and therefore has the highest weight. But when facing dynamic IDs, the ID cannot be used to identify an element anymore because it changes each time the element is reloaded/displayed. That means that you manually have to change how the objects are identified in your repository (which might be previously created by the recorder). This blog post will illustrate how you can add so called “weight rules” (RanoreXPath weight rules) allowing you to continue using the recorder and no longer changing your repository manually afterwards.

Identify Dynamic Content

First of all we have to identify in general whether we do have a dynamic ID problem or not. Let’s have a look at yahoo.com which is based on YUI (Yahoo User Interface library), a free open source JavaScript and CSS library. This library uses dynamic IDs by default. To analyze the occurrence of dynamic contents you can use Ranorex Spy from the start menu. Use the “Track” button to analyze an element of the web page.

When you take a closer look at the attribute “Id” of the just tracked element, you will see that it contains dynamic content (yui_3_8_1_1_13679224741219_543).

That leads on the one hand to a poor readability, and on the other hand destroys the testability of the page as the element cannot be identified by its ID anymore after reloading.

To illustrate this behavior, add the analyzed element to the repository (using the context menu), reload the website and add the element again. You will see that the same element will occur twice in your repository having different RanoreXPaths based on different IDs. Highlighting the first (red) repository element will not work as an element with the given ID is not available anymore. Also, the second (blue) element will only work until you reload the page again and a new ID is generated.

So this way we identified that we do have a dynamic ID problem. (For the sake of completeness: In most of the cases the attribute “Id” leads to dynamic content issues, but of course there can be other attributes creating identification problems as well.)

Add a Weight Rule

What we know now is that we will run into a problem when choosing the attribute “Id” to identify elements. Now we have to identify where our dynamic ID belongs to and create a rule on the base of that. As we can see in the “Overview” tab of Ranorex Spy, it belongs to the capability “WebElement”:

Write down the capability and the belonging attribute.

After identifying the correct capability and its attribute, we add a path weight rule to “filter out” the dynamic content and use another property for object identification. To do so, make sure that all other Ranorex instances (Studio, Recorder, Spy, etc.) are closed and only the currently using Spy instance is open. Then open “RanoreXPath Weight Rules” editor from settings dialog and add a new weight rule by pressing the “+” button:

Choose an appropriate rule name, select the previously identified capability as well as the attribute, and set the weight to 0:

Have a look at the attribute overview (“Show Attribute Overview…”) to get a feeling for the existing attribute weights. In order to navigate to a specific capability, simply press the initial letter of the capability’s name on your keyboard.

As you can see in this dialog, the weight of the attribute “Id” is set to a value of 200. When lowering this weight to “0″ the attribute “InnerText” will be used to identify the element as it’s the next higher value of 140. If no other attribute is available (because the weight is set to zero or it has no value) the index of the element will be taken to identify it (e.g. [1]).

(For the sake of completeness: In addition to lowering the weight of attributes you don’t want to use, you can also raise an attribute’s weight to favor the use of this specific attribute for object identification.)

Add a Condition to the Weight Rule

By lowering the weight of the attribute “Id” for the capability “WebElement”, the attribute “Id” will no longer be used for object identification in general. This rule will not only filter out dynamic IDs on yahoo.com but also all other IDs for all other web pages which might not be what you want to achieve.

To overcome this behavior, you can add a condition by pressing the “Add Condition” button. This defines which IDs should be filtered and which shouldn’t.

You might have found out already that dynamically generated YUI IDs always have the prefix “yui” followed by “_” and a number for x times. This can simply be represented by the regular expression

yui(_[0-9]+)+

The matching expression must start with the string “yui” followed by “_” and a number for one or more times. The whole “_” and number stuff must occur one or more times. For further details about regular expression have a look at the regular expressions wiki page or the chapter RanoreXPath in our user guide. Select the attribute you want to match against the regular expression from the dropdown, and then enter the regular expression.

Check whether the newly created rule in the left sided list is enabled, and save your changes by pressing the “OK” button.

You can check whether the newly added RanoreXPath weight rule works or not by tracking the element again on the website. You will see that the attribute “Id” is no longer used to identify the element, but by the “InnerText” attribute now.

You can best see the difference by adding the element to the repository again (green).

Conclusion

Using the RanoreXPath Weight Rules can assist you in automatically creating a robust repository which is the fundament of a robust test automation framework.

Also, it gives you the great advantage to continue using the recorder, and no longer being forced to change all your dynamic UI-elements in the repository manually. Just re-record and you will be fine.

Since you created a global “path weight rule” for your object identification, the rule will also be applied if you create a repository manually (as described in the blog post “Did you know… that you can manually generate a recording?“).

Ranorex successfully held two test automation workshops in Tampa on 6/7 and 9/10 May 2013. 

We enjoyed having this valuable opportunity to provide a comprehensive presentation covering the theoretical side of software testing as well as presenting approaches to practical implementation using Ranorex Studio.  

To all those who took part, we hope that everything you learned will be helpful in meeting the challenges you face.

The next chance to attend a Ranorex “Test Automation in Theory and Practice” workshop will be on the 9th and 10th and on the 12th and 13th of September 2013 in Ismaning, Germany.

Software AG has launched Software AG Live, the first cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) suite. With this launch, Software AG is now extending its offering from enabling enterprise-wide and on-premise solutions to creating agile and cloud-ba ...

Image: Story URL: http://advance.blackducksoftware.com/content/ARGartnerOSSAdoption

Google recognizes Kendo UI as a trusted HTML5 framework and partners on key initiatives around Chrome OS

WALTHAM, MA, May 15, 2013 – After 18 months of market penetration, Telerik announced today significant success with Kendo UI, the framework for building HTML5 and JavaScript websites, desktop and mobile apps. In less than two years, the framework has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, is in use in more than 200 countries and has been acknowledged by leading authorities as a framework of choice for application development. Moreover, for its proven capabilities, Google has continued to work with Telerik and the Kendo UI team on the creation of HTML5-based apps that will support its cutting-edge Chrome OS platform.

The goal of the collaboration and subsequent release of the Camera App, shipping as part of Google Chrome OS and delivering a full-featured photo booth style application, is to demonstrate the importance of and Telerik’s commitment to developer choice.[1] “We believe very strongly that developers should have a choice in how they create and develop tomorrow’s latest and greatest technologies,” said Todd Anglin, EVP of Cross-Platform Tools & Services at Telerik. “Application development is not a zero-sum game, HTML5 is a viable and valuable option to those who want to take a write once and deploy many strategy. We along with Google recognize this and will work together to deliver all the tools necessary for developer success.”

Telerik has conducted intense analysis to get a more complete view of the market as it relates to HTML5 – including two industry-related surveys with a combined 9,000+ respondents. The results clearly indicated time and again, that “the modern web” is advancing at a rapid pace. Because of this, Kendo UI has been strategic in the design and development of its technology, offering key features such as web app and mobile app development frameworks, rich UI widgets and server wrappers for programmability. It offers several unique competitive differentiators including:

• A deep history in providing professional developers technology tools and frameworks that benefit the enterprise as well as large-scale deployments.
• Kendo UI is supported by a world-class services organization. This is in contrast to open source counterparts that lack the support required for large-scale deployment.
• Telerik Kendo UI is based on the most popular JavaScript framework in the world (jQuery), providing a distinctly lower learning curve and further simplifying HTML5 adoption.

As a result of a concentrated effort to put forth the best technology possible and to partner with those who have like-minded goals, such as Google, the market has taken notice. In the last year and a half, 7.7 million people visited the Kendo UI web site to learn more. Of those, more than 100,000 people downloaded and are actively using the framework. In the first three months of 2013 alone, there were 20,000 new trials and a 300% increase in sales for Q1 2013 compared to Q1 2012.

“When we brought Kendo UI to the market, we knew we had a winner on our hands,” commented Todd Anglin. “HTML5 will continue to grow in importance and our framework has already helped many developers bring to bear some incredible and exciting apps. As the market continues to shift, due to disruptive mobile technologies, the Kendo UI team will push the envelope, ensuring our technology stays ahead of the competition in innovation, usability and customer adoption.”

Details on Telerik Kendo UI can be found at www.kendoui.com. Kendo UI and the Chrome OS Camera App will also be on display this week in the Developers Sandbox at Google I/O.

About Telerik Kendo UI
Telerik Kendo UI is everything professional developers need to build HTML5 and JavaScript websites and mobile apps. Based on jQuery, Telerik Kendo UI delivers a rich UI for the web, HTML5-powered data visualizations, and tools for building native-like mobile apps with HTML5. The leading-edge framework delivers everything in a unified, compact package, backed by industry leading professional support. For more information about Telerik Kendo UI, please visit www.kendoui.com or follow @KendoUI on Twitter.

About Telerik
Telerik is a market-leading provider of end-to-end solutions for application development, automated testing, agile project management, reporting, and content management across all major Microsoft development platforms. Telerik’s award-winning software development products enable enterprises and organizations of every size to generate tangible productivity gains, reduce time-to-market, and stay on time and under budget. With tens of thousands of users in more than 90 countries around the world, Telerik’s customers include numerous Fortune 2000 companies, academic institutions, governments, and non-profit organizations. For additional information about Telerik, please visit www.telerik.com or follow @telerik on Twitter.

###

Press Contacts:

Carmen Hughes
Ignite Public Relations
Tel: 650.227.3280 #101

carmen@ignitepr.com

Erica Burns
Telerik, Inc.
Tel: 888.365.2779 #154
Erica.Burns@telerik.com

[1] http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/exclusive-sundar-pichai-reveals-his-plans-for-android/

Ranorex is back from a highly successful STAREAST 2013. 

At the conference we had the chance to meet personally with some current and future customers. We hope we were helpful in answering all of your questions about our product and its test automation capabilities. 

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High performance analytic database to tackle mounting data volumes in real-time

London, UK, 15 May 2013 –Actian Corp. (“Actian”), a next-generation leader in big data management, today announced that they have signed a reseller agreement with Halpenfield, a specialist business intelligence practice in the U.K.

Under the agreement, Halpenfield will provide Actian Vectorwise, the superfast analytic database as part of business intelligence solutions it delivers to its customers in retail, leisure and travel industries. Seeking a high performance analytic database capable of providing turbo-charged business intelligence, Halpenfield decided to partner with Actian because of Vectorwise’s stellar performance, plug and play feature and compatibility with front end BI applications.

“In today’s highly competitive business environment, access to real-time or near real-time analysis is the key to tackling expanding data volumes. With most data residing in data marts, real-time analysis is hindered by data transformation, a process that converts data from an organization’s data warehouse into a format compatible with an analytic database,” said Andy Hopcraft, practice director at Halpenfield. “In order to realise the benefits of real-time analysis, organizations need to bypass the data transformation process which can be a bottleneck and delay access to fast business intelligence.”

“With Actian Vectorwise, businesses can take advantage of an amazingly quick analytic database that can also cope with raw data without the need to transform it. Performance, agility and most importantly compatibility with front end BI tools such as Tibco Spotfire and Tableau Software, which are offered as part of Halpenfield’s BI portfolio, makes Actian Vectorwise an ideal BI tool for us. In addition, Actian offers extensive support and technical expertise not only at the time of sale but also post-sale.”

“Real-time analysis is the key to deriving benefits from the growing data volumes. Actian Vectorwise, the record breaking analytic database provides rapid-fire analysis and it can be deployed behind a number of front end analytical applications making it the preferred business intelligence solution,” said Steve Crosson Smith, client director NEMEA at Actian Corporation. “We are delighted to welcome Halpenfield as our latest partner and we look forward to delivering supercharged business intelligence to its customers.”

About Actian: Take Action on Big Data
Actian Corporation enables organizations to transform big data into business value with data management solutions to Connect, Analyze, and take automated Action across their business operations. Actian’s innovative portfolio of solutions for big data include cloud integration for frictionless connection to any data; analytical solutions specifically engineered to handle the extreme speed and scale of data intensive computing; Action Apps for automated action on business events as they happen and managed B2B exchanges that automate business processes in select industries. Headquartered in Redwood City, Actian helps clients worldwide manage and understand their business operations through offices in Austin, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Stay connected with Actian Corporation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Actian, Action Apps, Ingres and Vectorwise are trademarks of Actian Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

About Halpenfield
Halpenfield is a specialist Business Intelligence Practice that has business users in mind. The company’s solutions provide social & collaborative BI so that companies gain insight and make better decisions together. For more information, go to www.halpenfield.co.uk.

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