Science fiction author and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling passed along the interesting augmented reality video embedded below. It’s an iPhone app from the Japanese company Sazanami called Amazing3D that lets users augment still photographs with playful 3D objects which they can then interact with. While it’s not the most amazing example of augmented reality (actually it is pretty fun to play with), it did remind me that there have been several great kid-friendly AR applications developed recently. As augmented reality evolves and finds its most successful niche markets, toys, games and children could be some of the most efficient avenues to success.

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The app, which is obviously geared toward a younger audience, reminded me of some interesting AR apps aimed at children (I wish I could remember them all). One that comes to mind is whistleBox’s “Do Crew” augmented cartoons - a series of video stories that include interactive AR games. The games aren’t merely “lean forward” experiences on the desktop, they actually get kids up on their feet moving around and being active (much like the Nintendo Wii, or Kinect on the Xbox).

Other great augmented reality examples have been aimed at younger markets as well, including LEGO’s in-store project. A kiosk equipped with a camera and a screen lets shoppers (read: kids) hold model sets up to the camera in order to see a 3D representation of the finished project live on their box. Additional projects have brought augmented reality to baseball cards and game cards - bringing athletes and mythic creatures to life.

While at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference in San Diego earlier this summer, I met Andrew Cheeseman of Mattel who was on hand to demonstrate an augmented version of a classic game - Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Cheeseman told me that Mattel believes augmented reality is going to be a huge hit in the toy industry - and I agree. He also made the very good point that new technologies like AR help introduce fresh generations of kids to older games (like the aforementioned Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots).

So is playtime augmented reality’s ticket to bigtime? It’s likely that the younger demographics are certainly going to play a big role in the proliferation of the technology, but it probably won’t be the only successful sector. Hi-tech as already been making great use of the technology in automobile factories and in the military, and the healthcare industry could certainly be a terrific platform as well.

But never underestimate the power of needy kids when they set their sights on fun new toys. Just ask George Lucas how that’s going.

Discuss

Blogging platform WordPress has been working hard lately to increase a sense of community on the site. Last month, WordPress.com users got the ability to “like” each others’ posts and today, the site is introducing a subscription feature.

Last month we compared the addition of the “like” feature to Facebook and this month, we can’t help but notice that the subscription service brings WordPress a little bit closer to fellow self-publishing platform Tumblr.

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Just like Tumblr’s “Follow” feature, which allows Tumblr users to follow each other, WordPress’ subscription feature will allow users to subscribe to other WordPress.com hosted blogs. The feature is simple: Click “Subscribe to blog” on any WordPress.com blog you visit and the posts will appear in your subscriptions tab. Upon subsequent visits, users will be alerted if any blogs they’ve subscribed to have new content.

The site has also made it simple to get instant notification of new blogs posts via instant messenger.

Keeping subscriptions to on-site blogs is an important part of the feature, as it increases the reason for becoming a WordPress member, instead of running your own installation of the blogging platform. The feature is also good news for some bigger publishers, like technology blogs TechCrunch and GigaOM, which are both hosted on WordPress. As WordPress notes in its blog post, RSS feeds and readers “can be tricky to manage for a non-technical person”, and a subscription feature like this will make is easier for the non-techie.

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Today sees our first full interview here at ReadWriteHack, with Richard Clark, a web developer from New Zealand. Richard is a coder who runs a one-man business designing and implementing code, networks and systems for clients at every scale, from tiny silicon valley startups to national corporates and government departments.

He has designed and built web applications for problems as diverse as energy network modeling, social media, stock market tracking, video processing and intelligence analysis.

We caught up with Richard to ask a few questions about his web development career.

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ReadWriteHack: 1. How and why did you get into web development? How long have you been doing it for?

Richard Clark: There was never any question I was going to become a coder; I was writing code before I actually had a computer. The school library had some adventure style books where you could solve parts of the plot with a provided BASIC program. Since I didn’t have a computer myself, I spent unreasonable amounts of time modifying the programs and imagining how they would work.

When I finally managed to get my hands on an actual computer I could write code for I learned the same lesson we all do - computer interpreters are far less forgiving than our imagination! I still recall an early program I tried to write, which drew a lemon when I ran it. I was trying to draw a circle and to this day I have never been able to work out what I did to make it draw a lemon.

As computers became more available to me, I spent more and more time on them coding and playing games, but at the time the idea of Computer Studies at school involved being able to type and use a spreadsheet. It was only when I got to university that I actually had an opportunity to code for a purpose other than my own interest.

I wrote my very first web application at university in 1997. The task was simple, I was to write a “library program” that let the user check in or check out a book. This was done on Sun systems in C++, and the expected interface was a simple line by line menu on a terminal. At the time, however, I was too young to understand the concept of “Scope creep”, and as my despairing tutors looked on (they had to mark all the code) I wrote a web server into my code so I could use Netscape Navigator as the interface instead of a terminal.

This taught me a number of valuable lessons, including the fact that despite the presence of a fully-fledged web server, my lecturer was not going to give me marks if he got a segfault when he tried to check out a book. Even all these years later, I still use that example in my head whenever I start to get a bit too carried away with the “cool” bits of a project.

Shortly after that I was offered a position as a programmer at an ISP and never looked back.

RWH: 2. What are your preferred languages, frameworks and tools?

RC: The real answer to that question is “it depends”. Every project has different demands and one truth I hold dear is that it is easier to learn the right tool for the job than it is to bend the wrong tool into a job-shaped pretzel. A good example of this was an expert system for querying an intelligence database that I wrote as an employee. The problem involved a great deal of text parsing and I wrote the original prototype in two weeks using perl. The prototype was well received by the user and the full project was given the go ahead, with one caveat: all production code had to be written in Java.

Those familiar with perl understand that text parsing was one of its true strengths (the other being the ability to produce source code that closely resembled line noise). Java…not so much. The final java production version was completed six months later.

Since then I’ve done my best not to replicate that mistake in my own business. I generally work with clients who are platform agnostic; I get to choose the tools I feel are most appropriate. Right now most of the projects I’m working on use Pylons, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Prior to that I wrote web apps in perl, PHP, and even C. I fully expect that I will end up using a completely different language and platform within the next 12 months. Perhaps NodeJS?

RWH: 3. You have quite a range of skills, such as coding, system admin and networking. Is there a reason why you do everything yourself rather than delegating certain tasks to other people?

RC: Hah. Well, lets start with the history. In 97/98 the net/web industry in New Zealand was still quite immature, and certainly there wasn’t a lot of money flying around. As a result people were building whole ISPs and webhosts on a shoestring. This meant both very cheap hardware/software (Linux and FreeBSD were enormously popular) as well as people like me who had no idea what they were doing but could learn fast and were willing to work for peanuts.

Of course, we all found ourselves well and truly in the deep end. I learned everything because there was nobody else to do it and it needed to be done.

Now 13 years after I got started, I do things myself because I want to and I can get paid for it. That’s not to say I don’t delegate, but I don’t tend to delegate to *people*. There was a time when I’d have built a server out of parts, these days I rent virtual machines, use nettica.com for DNS and Gmail for email.

RWH: 4. How long is your to-do list and how do you prioritise your workload?

RC: My todo list is infinite. There isn’t actually an infinite number of things on it but there might as well be, I could not possibly work fast enough to overtake the volume of incoming. My workload is prioritised in a kind of triage fashion - emergencies go to the top of the list, everything else goes in order of urgency. Many things never see the light of day, but I’m ok with that.

One big benefit of running your own business - your clients give input into how serious something might be, but with the exception of emergencies they don’t get to dictate what you’re doing. As a result I often get to work on tasks that suit my mood at the time.

RWH: 5. Do you attend any developer events? How often do you attend and what do you get from them?

RC: Not really, no. I’m really quite the geek in that way - I like my information delivered via text for the most part, because I can skip through it to get the nuggets I want. Talking is so slow!

That said, occasionally I like to go to the odd thing because of the talking (which is in direct conflict with what I just said above but Important Developer Lesson #6 is: People are the best kind of hypocrite. So that’s ok).

I like the Python User Group here in Wellington for example, there are some smart people there with a diverse array of experience and the structure is so loose we can go off on an interesting tangent for more than an hour and nobody minds at all.

RWH: 6. New products and technologies are being developed all the time. How do you keep up? What’s your preferred method of learning new skills?

RC: I find the most effective way of inspiring myself to go out there to find and learn new tech is to cultivate an overwhelming hatred for whatever I’m currently using. This is normally quite easy to achieve, and when it fails I know I’m onto a winner - at least for now.

Once I’ve decided to work with something the key to learning is doing. I really have to throw myself at a project using a piece of technology in order to get a feel for how it works. My business is good for that - I have new projects arriving constantly so I get to put new technology to the test on a regular basis.

RWH: 7. What’s your #1 tip for web developers?

RC: Remember that, in the end, it all comes back to people. This is the true sign of a professional web developer - that they understand that software is built by people, for people.

It’s built by people - often us. This involves all the things that people are. As Larry Wall famously said: the three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. You will find all three of these in every project, and you need to optimize for that at every stage.

It’s built for people - as soon as you start believing that some aspect of your software can change human nature, you might as well just start rubbing the egg all over your face. The projects I’ve been most proud of in my life haven’t been the ones with the shiniest technical tricks or the most users, but the ones where I have done the best job of creating something that melds with the user in a way neither they, nor I, could have dreamed of before we started. I love it when that happens.

RWH: Thanks Richard for answering our questions!

Discuss

RSS is not dead, but with Bloglines, one of the most venerable web-based RSS readers is about to close shop next month. According to a report on TechCrunch, Bloglines’ parent company IAC will make an official announcement later today and shut the service down on October 1. In the early days of RSS, Bloglines was the go-to feed reader for early adopters. Over the last few years, however, the company struggled to innovate and hold on to its users.

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Bloglines was founded by Mark Fletcher in 2003 and acquired by IAC/Ask.com in 2005. While it was one of the early success stories of the RSS movement, the service never managed to get its groove back after the launch of Google Reader and a number of technical issues that made Bloglines very unreliable for a while.

There are also issues inherent in the market for RSS readers that, as Ask.com’s president Doug Leeds told TechCrunch, make running the service a losing proposition for the company. According to Leeds, IAC’s market research indicates that the number of people consuming RSS feeds has declined as people shift their news consumption to other sources like Twitter. Indeed, as we noted last December, one of the most interesting trends of 2009 was the gradual decline of RSS readers.

A Monopoly for Google Reader?

Back in 2008, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Bloglines was an important part of the RSS ecosystem and that “Google should not have monopoly control over RSS readers.” Now, after Newsgator and Bloglines have shuttered their web-based tools, Google Reader does effectively have this monopoly over web-based RSS readers. On the desktop, though, you still have numerous excellent options, including NetNewsWire for the Mac and FeedDemon for Windows. With Fever ($30) and Tiny Tiny RSS (free and open source), you can also host your own web-based RSS reader on your own server.

Are You Going to Miss Bloglines?

Most of us here at RWW switched away from Bloglines a long time ago. Will you miss Bloglines? Or did you switch away, too? Did you move to another RSS reader or did you abandon RSS altogether?

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Last April, Apple changed its developers terms of service to restrict the use of third-party development tools in creating apps for iOS, the operating system behind the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. The restrictions essentially banned the use of Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, which allowed the creation of apps using Adobe Flash. Yesterday, Apple relaxed those restrictions and today Adobe is calling Apple’s move “Great News for Developers”.

Is the move too little, too late, or will Adobe developers come running back to make apps for Apple’s mobile devices? Was it the last straw or is the draw of Apple’s dominant mobile platform too strong to resist?

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“This is great news for developers and we’re hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store,” Adobe said in a blog post this morning, noting that it will resume development of its Packager for iPhone tool.

We asked around (using Twitter and our new ReadWriteWeb Quora account) and found a mixed bag of enthusiasm and hesitation regarding whether or not Flash developers would come running back to the platform that had scorned them.

Mariano Carrizo, a self-proclaimed “Flash Platform lover” echoed Adobe’s sentiment, saying Flash development’s return was an exciting prospect.

“Finally we (Flash Platform devs) could use our tools and language to make really cool stuff, and take iOS as another platform,” tweeted Carrizo, asking if Apple allowing Flash-packaged apps was “not a dream?”

But some are saying that the time for Flash developers on iOS has passed.

“I think the window of opportunity for Flash development for iOS has largely been missed,” said Brian Jeremy Kupetz, the Director of Technology at JUXT Interactive. “The hardcore mobile developers that were keen on using Flash to develop for iOS lost interest after investing a great deal of time just to be stopped dead in the tracks. This subset of flash developers has either learned to play by Apple’s rules or moved on completely.”

Ribbit, a company that provides “open, scalable, cloud-based global phone network/APIs” using Flash, told us that it “will be interesting to watch, we know a lot of Flash developers who felt burned…but expect many to go back to Apple.”

When Apple first enacted the changes, there was a lot of talk about abandoning Apple forever, but now that Apple has changed its tune (for whatever reason), will developers stick to their guns? For many, the change in developers terms last April meant an abrupt end to projects they’d spent countless hours working on and the issue now may be one of trust - how can you trust a company that suddenly takes away your ability to develop for its platform, out of what seems like spite?

Perhaps, the whole thing will end up exactly as Apple seems to want - with it appearing open in the end but without all of that pesky Flash-derived code on its mobile devices.

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V3 is running an interview with Google director of security Eran Feigenbaum. Feigenbaum makes some interesting points about cloud security and the possibility that cloud solutions might actually be more secure than on-premise solutions. What do you think? Are these valid reasons to migrate to the cloud, or just marketing talking points?

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Feigenbaum encourages IT to trust users to find the tools that they need to do their jobs and help them find a way to use them safely in the workplace. “The role of security is to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of business data, but now there must be a way to say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’ because users are smart and they will find ways around your controls.”

This fits with Cisco’s mid-year security report finding that 27% of users had modified settings to access a blocked application or site. Cisco also recommended IT embrace employees use of non-standard applications and focus on educating users instead blocking access. We’ve been seeing a general shift away from uniform technology standards at companies like IBM and Intel as well.

As we’ve mentioned a few times, shadow IT seems to be a major part of Google’s enterprise strategy.

Moving to the Cloud Shifts the Patch Management Burden Away from IT

Feigenbaum notes how difficult keeping up with patch management can be for IT. “If you move to the cloud, there are no more servers to patch,” he says - there by shifting the patch management burden to cloud providers like Google.

It’s an interesting case to make, as security remains one of the biggest stumbling blocks for cloud adoption, whether it should be or not.

However, solutions such as IBM’s BigFix may mitigate some of the problems IT managers have with patch management and minimize the benefit of moving to the cloud.

Google Often Blocks Viruses Hours Before Anti-Virus Vendors Do

Feigenbaum made an interesting claim in the interview: because Google sees two billion email transactions a day, it puts them in an advantageous position for sniffing out viruses. Feigenbaum claims Google often blocks viruses hours before major anti-virus vendors do.

Google does seem to do a better job at spam filtering than most vendors selling anti-spam solutions - which itself probably cuts down a massive number of viruses. Even though malvertising, social media spamming and SEO are eclipsing e-mail as a vector for malware, there are still nasty outbreaks like the current “Here You Have” virus.

Disclosure: IBM is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

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Recently, we have talked a lot about how hackers can use social networks to get users to download malicious software to their computers. The most effective way for viruses to spread, however, is still email and the “Here you have” email worm that is currently making the rounds makes it abundantly clear that most users are still not able to spot and protect themselves from these threads. The email, which has already affected the networks of major organizations like Comcast, NASA and Wells Fargo, comes with the subject line “Here you have” or “Just For you” and includes and appears to include a link to a PDF file.

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This file, however, is not a PDF document but a malicious .SCR executable file. Windows uses the .SCR extension for screensavers and this file can only be read by Windows machines. Mac users are - as is so often the case - safe from this threat.

Here is the text that appears in these emails:

Hello:
This is The Document I told you about, you can find it Here. <link to .SCR file>
Please check it and reply as soon as possible.
Cheers,
<name>

As is so often the case, the text is socially engineered to ensure that users - especially in a corporate environment - will be drawn to opening the file immediately. As the worm seems to come from a reliable source and points to what at first glace appears to be a legitimate document (and most users don’t associate PDF files with security threats), a lot of users are prone to opening it without even thinking twice.

What Does “Here You Have” Do?

According to security firm Symantec’s Brian Ewell, here is what the worm does:

• Spread through mapped drives through autorun
• Spread through email by taking contacts from the address book
• Spread through instant messenger
• Disables various security related programs

As it manages to disable the antivirus products of numerous vendors, the virus can then propagate with relative ease. Besides email, the virus also uses open drive shares on a home or office network to spread itself even further. According to Symantec, just opening a folder that contains this file will launch the threat.

The link inside the original emails has now been taken offline, but a number of variants are already taking its place now.

Image credit: Flickr user eviltomthai.

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Earlier this week, Apple announced it was rolling back previous restrictions on the use of third-party development tools for building applications for the iOS mobile operating system and that it would be, for the first time ever, publishing its once-secret “App Store Guidelines” for all to read. These guidelines explain, in detail, how Apple determines which apps are granted acceptance into its ever-growing iTunes Application Store, now home to around 250,000 mobile apps.

Some of the language in the developer agreement is rather strong and very direct. For example, Apple proclaims that it has “lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.”

Apple also says: “we don’t need any more Fart apps,” but it couldn’t be more wrong about that, and here’s why.

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Amateur Developers: Apple Says Stay Away

It’s almost unimaginable that a company whose developer community has, in a large part, contributed to the success of its mobile application business, would call out a portion of its newest developers as “amateur hour.” Everyone is an amateur at first, after all. But that’s typical of Apple. The company has a reputation for quality products, but the flip side of this desire for “being the best” has an air of exclusiveness about it. “If you want in our App Store, you had better be good” is message Apple is now sending its developers.

It’s a shame, though, that rejection and the disparagement of its own community is how Apple is addressing the very real issue of “app overload” that has come from a flourishing mobile application ecosystem. Now more than ever, mobile development is where so much of today’s technology innovation is taking place and the growth rate for application stores across the board is incredible. Depending on what analyst report you read, mobile app stores could be either a $2 billion or $7 billion marketplace by the end of this year, or a $17.5 billion market by 2012. Why restrict it?

Here’s What Apple Should Do Instead (But Won’t)

Apple doesn’t need to lay down the law in such Draconian terms. Instead of rejecting apps because there are already “plenty” of them out there, Apple should develop better filtering, ranking and recommendation algorithms for displaying available applications to interested users.

Currently, if you search for an app by keyword via your iPhone’s App Store interface, there’s no way to tell why results are placed at the top, at least to the untrained eye. They’re not necessarily the highest rated applications, it seems, or the ones with the most downloads. Instead, Apple uses a weighted average ranking mechanism that first matches keywords and then ranks applications based on their popularity on a four-day average with the current day having the highest weight.

While that may be good enough for the default view, it’s definitely not a good enough system going forward as the number of mobile applications surges deeper into the hundreds of thousands, and maybe one day, the millions.

What Apple needs is a search engine interface for finding applications. You should be able to search not just by keyword alone, but by a combination of factors. Through a clean user interface (the user experience designers at Apple, some of the best in the world, could simplify this process, we’re sure), users could find apps through the use of advanced and detailed queries. Want only top-rated apps that have been around for at least 6 months? Done! How about only apps with more than 20 positive reviews? Ta-Da! Only apps that work offline and have been downloaded more than 5000 times? Here you go! And so forth and so on.

That’s not Apple’s plan, though.

Who Will Figure Out Mobile App Search First? Our Money’s on Google

Google, the company behind the soon-to-be number one mobile operating system in the world, is surely going to figure out mobile application search before Apple does, given that it is, in fact, a search company.

Even though the Android Marketplace search interface currently leaves a lot to be desired, the combination of its open submissions process and rapidly growing market share will quickly lead to the exact same problem facing Apple today: how do you separate “amateur hour” from quality?

Google has a bit more time to figure this out than Apple does, of course. There are only 80,000 Android applications available now compared with Apple’s 250,000. But Google will likely figure out an algorithm-based methodology that works. We would be shocked beyond belief if it did not. Apple, meanwhile, will simply reject “amateur” apps. Or those it has enough of. Or those it feels the need to censor. Etc., etc., etc.

But I Don’t Care About “Fart” Apps!

That means that the next big thing in “Fart” apps won’t show up on iPhone, it will show up on Android. But who cares about “Fart” apps?, you may ask. Lots of people do - kids, especially, of course. But also the hair-brained parents who will download anything that gives them a few minutes of peace-and-quiet.

If you personally don’t care for “Fart” apps, and say “so what?” to this news, you’re missing the point. “Fart” apps were used to illustrate this particular aspect of Apple’s policy. It’s not going to be just “Fart” apps that will be affected, sadly. Apple is relying on a staff of human reviewers to determine what belongs and what doesn’t. Don’t we already have too many of X app? Rejected! This app does the same thing as that one. Rejected! This app is inappropriate! Rejected!

This system of application review prior to acceptance is actually Apple’s main selling point for its App Store, but also its Achilles Heel. Apple is offering a “curated” collection of applications instead of all of them. Apple fans will tell you, unequivocally, that this is what’s best. This is the way to do it. But curated directories didn’t end up working for the Web and they won’t end up working for mobile application discovery, either. There is a point where browsing through lists is no longer efficient, only search is.

Forget Curating, Crowd-Source It

What will work is allowing us, the millions upon millions of smartphone users, to determine what’s best. This can be analyzed through a combination of download and usage numbers, rankings and other statistics an advanced search engine could surface.

So, as Apple puts its foot down, saying “we won’t allow this” and “we have enough of that,” mobile developers who are convinced they have the next great idea for a new app within a common genre of mobile applications will have no choice but to develop for Android.

And Google, being Google, will soon figure out how to properly surface those new apps and other top results via a “PageRank” algorithm designed for especially for surfacing the best mobile apps.

Apple, through its desire for quality or its arrogance, depending on how you view the company, is betting against developers of mobile apps and the consumers who download them, believing instead that only Apple knows what’s best. That philosophy is hard-wired into the company, but when it comes to mobile applications, it may not be the right one to embrace.

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Like we said earlier this week mobile enterprise space is heating up. This week alone saw the launch of three new tools for building mobile enterprise apps. Forrester has given some advice to enterprises for how to get started in mobile enterprise development, which the firm suggests needs to move into the mainstream of enterprise development. Here’s a brief guide to some of the new tools enterprises have at their disposal for mobilizing their work force.

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MobileIron

MobileIron announced the release of its Virtual Smartphone Platform 3.0, including an API for mobile application developers to use MobileIron’s device management platform to build their own mobile enterprise applications.

In addition to allowing enterprises to add-on functionality to MobileIron servers, developers will now be able to:

• Trigger MobileIron device management actions from other enterprise systems
• Build mobile security services based on MobileIron’s rich set of device, behavior, and app compliance data
• Create new analytical tools for understanding the real-time activity and service quality experience of end-users

Of particularly note is the ability to access geolocation data through MobileIron.

LeapFactor

On Wednesday stealth startup Leapfactor launched its new cloud-based mobile enterprise application platform. LeapFactor helps enterprises build single purpose apps that connect with existing enterprise software platforms as simply as possible. For example, enterprise developers could build an “expense approval” app that interfaces with the company’s SAP or Oracle ERP system.

In fact, SAP is one of Leapfactor’s customers ­ Leapfactor built for SAP an iPhone app called SAP EcoHub that provides access to and interaction withSAP’s web-based EcoHub Solution Marketplace

Couch One Mobile

Couch One Mobile is the new mobile app development platform from CouchDB corporate sponsor Couch One (formerly known as Couchio). We covered its launch on Wednesday. According to Couch One:

CouchOne Mobile is the top choice for native data store on any wireless device because it’s lightweight and saves battery life by keeping data offline. With CouchOne Mobile, developers can easily write web applications one time, scale vertically and share data and applications across the computing platforms and mobile devices they choose.

Based on CouchDB, CouchOne Mobile is way more than a database. It’s a full-stack web app deployment environment with a database, a JavaScript interpreter (middleware layer) and a mini web server (web tier) all in one convenient carrying case.

DragonRad

DragonRad from Seregon is a cross-platform enterprise-focused mobile application development platform launching at BlackBerry DevCon 2010 this month.

DragonRad provides a drag and drop environment for app creation, so developers need not learn the native programming language of each platform they want to build native apps for.

Rhomobile

Rhomobile, a Ruby-based cross-platform enterprise application development platform, is less new (version 2.0 was released in June), but it’s definitely worth a mention. RhoMobile’s metadata schema makes it easier to create mobile apps that work with enterprise applications with custom databases.

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Backing up your database is absolutely vital if the data is of any importance. This will save you in the event of an accidental deletion, either due to a slip of the finger or a major failure in your code.

If you’re familiar with phpMyAdmin, then you may be able to export and import your database from there. But this approach doesn’t work too well if you have a large database. For large databases, you’re better off using the command line.

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Backup Your MySQL Database

Log in to the server you wish to work with. The command you’ll need to run is as follows:

mysqldump -u username -p database > file

Replace the username, database and file parameters with the values that match your database. For instance:

mysqldump -u root -p mydatabase > /home/backups/mybackup.sql

If all goes well, you’ll be prompted for the password, and then the backup file will be created.

Note that in the above example, the /home/backups folder must exist. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to create it first.

Restore Your MySQL Database

Be careful with this, because any existing data will be overwritten. You’ll need to do the following:

mysql -u username -p database < file

If we wanted to restore from the file we just created, here’s what we’d do:

mysql -u root -p mydatabase < /home/backups/mybackup.sql

Once again, just enter the password, and the database will be restored from the file you supplied.

Photo by Tim Morgan

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