April 2012 Archives

Take note of Sencha: an application-centric HTML5 framework and IDE, now with native packaging

April 27, 2012 4:44 PM

Tim Anderson

I have been spending some time with the recently released Sencha Architect 2. This is a development environment with three core components:

Ext JS 4.0 Framework: an HTML5 application framework for desktop browsers
Sencha Touch 2.0: an HTML5 application framework for mobile browsers
Sencha Architect IDE: a visual development tool for both Ext JS and Sencha Touch
Architech is a commercial product, but there are free and open source versions of Ext JS and Touch with various licensing and support permutations available.

I installed Sencha Architect on Windows, which works though I cannot quite describe it as Windows-friendly; there is a Mac flavour to the documentation and nothing quite works in Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari is recommended.

What you get though is an elegant IDE which is focused 100% on applications, rather than general HTML design. It is not Eclipse-based, which I found interesting having recently also tried the latest Titanium IDE from Appcelerator, which is built on Eclipse. Although Eclipse is a wonderful thing, it does add complexity and overhead compared to a lightweight, dedicated IDE like Sencha Architect.

The frameworks are also interesting. Both Ext JS and Sencha Touch (which are similar in many respects) are based on a Model-View-Controller design, and this is neatly expressed in the IDE which shows Controllers, Views, Stores, Models and Resources in its Project Inspector. A store is essentially a collection of model instances, and might for example be an Ajax proxy retrieving JSON data from a remote URL. The image below uses this technique to show bars in London. The app is designed for a smartphone, though I am displaying it in Google Chrome to test.

A great feature of the latest Sencha toolkit is that you can package apps as native apps for Android or iOS. Support for RIM Playbook is also planned. You can even package for iOS on a Windows machine, though of course without the benefit of the iOS simulator. Sencha's approach to native packaging is similar to Phonegap/Cordova, in that it uses the embedded browser on the device. However Sencha is not using Phonegap, but as far as I can tell, draws on technology acquired from Nimblekit, a small company specialising in native apps for iOS with HTML and Javascript acquired by Sencha.

These frameworks are not the easiest to pick up quickly, but I was struck by the clean design of both the code and the IDE. Further, Sencha apps generally look good and in many cases the visual components come close to what you can achieve with native code.

From what I can tell, the pressure on developers to create apps that play nicely with a variety of devices, from Windows desktops and laptops through to iPads and Android smartphones, will only increase. Sencha is worth a look.

Let's unfriend corporate Facebook snoops

April 10, 2012 3:00 PM

Danny Bradbury

0 Comments

Does your cat know what you do on Facebook?

Would you let an employer look at your Facebook profile? Apparently, many would like the privilege.Facebook's chief privacy officer Erin Egan has warned employers against demanding access to candidates' Facebook accounts.

It seems to be a prevalent problem in the US, where press reports indicate that some companies are asking people outright for their login credentials. The thinking seems to be that, by looking at the private Facebook accounts of a job candidate, an employer will be able to get a better sense of the kind of person they are.

This is, of course, dangerous territory. It is dangerous not just for job candidates' privacy, but also for employers.

Let's say that an employer decides to log in to an employee's account, and finds out a piece of otherwise private information. Perhaps, for example, a female candidate might be planning a pregnancy. Someone could be gay, but only out to a group of Facebook friends. Perhaps someone is a member of online groups or has made status updates indicating that they are HIV-positive. Or maybe they are a member of some other minority group.

It then becomes very difficult for an employer to prove that they haven't passed up that candidate in favour of someone else, based on discrimination over something they read in their Facebook profile. Decided not to hire me for that Java developer position? Prove, then, that it isn't because you suddenly found out that I'm thinking of trying for a baby with my partner within the next few months, and you're scared of having to grant me paternity leave.

In the US, some companies have tried to skirt around the controversy by simply asking potential candidates to let them shoulder surf as those candidates look through their own Facebook profiles. But this fails to get to the nub of the problem, which is that surfing peoples' private social media accounts is an extremely bad idea, and people who do it should be burned at the stake.

Facebook itself has warned companies not to do it, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office has warned UK employers that it would have "very serious concerns" if companies in the UK nosed around people's Facebook pages. The Officer points to the UK Data Protection Act, arguing that it explicitly says organisations shouldn't hold excessive information about individuals.

In the US, some job applicants have said that they have allowed companies to intrude on their privacy in this way, because they needed the job in question. However, ITJobLog's readers are hopefully not in the same position, living on the breadline and looking for work from week to week. If a potential employer tried to do the same to our readership, we hope that candidates would decide that they didn't want to work for an organisation with such an egregious value system.

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