ReadWriteWeb

The mobile development ecosystem is a large, complicated space. There are innovative startups making tools for native and mobile Web apps along with large enterprise-grade companies that offer solutions from cloud support to frameworks and developer environments. For a mobile developer, it can be confusing to know where to turn and what to use to make the best app possible.

Mobile "backend-as-a-service" startup Kinvey created a map for ReadWriteMobile to help developers understand the ecosystem. Kinvey brackets the mobile ecosystem between two primary pillars: the service providers and the original equipment manufacturers. In between lies the meat of the environment from the "as-a-service" providers (platform, infrastructure and backend) to mobile software developer kit and application programming interface sources. Who has acquired what? What partnerships dominate the ecosystem? Use the map below as a resource when developing your next mobile app.

Mobile marketing platform PlayHaven released new tools today to help app developers maximize the success of their mobile games. Oftentimes game developers will enter their games into an app store and see an initial spike of traffic only to see downloads and engagement flat line over time. PlayHaven believes it has the tools to help developers maintain traffic numbers for an extended period of time.

PlayHaven is also announcing that they have signed one of the biggest game development companies, Glu, to use the platform. Glu makes some of the most popular games for Android and iOS including Gun Bros and Eternity Warriors. PlayHaven's new dynamic overlay tools and analytics could help games like that stay in the top of app store rankings.

The tenth gathering of Agile programming devotees (can it be that long?) began this week in Salt Lake City, chosen for the site of the original conference that kicked off what was then a revolution in programming concepts, and now is de rigueur.

Agile programming, the ability to write small bursts of code quickly and revise frequently, is everywhere, and a number of announcements from the conference this week are noteworthy. The original manifesto was created by programming luminaries such as Ward Cunningham, one of the originators of object-oriented and extreme programming and Jim Highsmith, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, who were early agile book authors.

If you used the Internet using Windows in the early to mid 1990s, chances are you connected with a little program called Trumpet Winsock. It was one of the only ways to get dial-up access using Windows 3.1. I, like so many others, connected to the Internet for the very first time using it. And I, like so many other, had completely forgotten about that program until today.

Hacker News reader Jacques Chester discovered that Peter Tattam, the developer of Trumpet Winsock, actually made very little money from his creation. It was shareware and was widely distributed by ISPs and magazines, but very few people paid for it. Chester contacted Tattam and is now leading a fundraiser on Hacker News. You can send a donation to Tattam via PayPal at the address payments@petertattam.com.

Paul Irish and Anton Kovalyov have launched an online tool for checking your JavaScript code for errors and problems. JSHint aims to be more flexible and support more environments than JSLint, a similar tool created by Douglas Crockford.

Regarding the difference between JSHint and JSLint the JSHint website says "The most important difference is that JSHint is developed and supported by the JavaScript developer community and not by one very opinionated person."

Hate writing regular expressions? Of course you do. That's why txt2re exists.

Billed as "headache relief for programmers," txt2re let's you input a string and and then use a simple wizard that generates a regex program in Perl PHP, Python, Java, Javascript, ColdFusion, C, C++, Ruby, VB, VBScript, J#.net, C#.net, C++.net or VB.net.

AppSumo, which is sort of like GroupOn or MacHeist for web apps, is offering $1,543 worth of credits towards developer tools and services like Linode, Heroku, Recurly and MongoHQ for $47. Most significantly, they're offering six months of SendGrid's e-mail deliverability service, valued at $479. If you've been meaning to check out any of these tools, this might be a good opportunity to do so, but please do note that these offers are mostly only available for new users.

These days you can do pretty much everything in the cloud - why not manage your entire development process there too? Many are already using GitHub or hosted SVN solutions, so the concept isn't radical. Cloud hosting can ease collaboration outside the firewall - whether that's with remote team members or business partners or clients. Floruit aims to give developers and managers a unified view of projects by uniting offering a single Amazon AWS hosted SaaS suite that includes bug tracking, change management, knowledge management, etc.

Today Google released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module that automates many of Google's Page Speed optimization recommendations. The mod currently offers 18 configurable filters. You'll probably need root access to install this on your server, but Google is working with GoDaddy to bring this to shared hosting customers. Hopefully, other hosts will follow. Google is also working with CDN provider Contendo to bring mod_pagespeed to its service. If you use WordPress and want to implement some of these fixes without root access, you can try the W3 Total Cache plugin (which is still in pre-1.0 release).

Location-based check-in applications are hot, or at least that's what the media keeps telling us. However, studies have found that while location-based users are passionate, adoption is limited.

That said, developers, advertisers and marketers still need to be aware of the general trends in this area. These apps may be small now, but usage is growing. Foursquare, for example, has 3 million users who have checked in 185 million times as of September - an increase from only 40,000,000 check-ins in May.

Now is the time to experiment before these services hit the mainstream. Below are two new tools for doing just that.