I’ve recently started looking at developing a mobile application. Looking at the popular platforms it seems that I’m going to need to write the same application multiple times if I want to support

• Android,
• iPhone,
• Symbian, and
• Windows mobile

Is there a cross platform development environment that will allow me to write my application once and compile it for each of these platforms?

For the last year I’ve been involved in organising this years Open Source Developers Conference with a really great bunch of people. This years conference is almost here leaving me both excited and glad that we’ve made it. On Tuesday we’re hosting the Google Hackfest Day (free to OSDC attendees who registered for the hackfest too) with the conference itself running from Wednesday to Friday. If you’re in Sydney and into Open Source then you should really consider attending.

This year our keynote speakers (sorted by last name) are:

• Anthony Baxter (Python release manager)
• Chris DiBona (Google Open Source Manager)
• Andrew Tridgell (rsync, Samba)
• Larry Wall (Creator of Perl, patch and rn)
• Pia Waugh (Waugh Partners & OLPC Australia)

The full program is also available online if you still need a reason to attend.

Almost three months ago I decided to learn Java. Over the last few weeks I’ve finally found the time to start reading about Java, J2EE, Servlets, etc. Today I ported the MVC component of my custom PHP framework to Java. I decided to do this so I could get a feel for both how to perform common tasks in Java and how fast it is. The results surprised me:

PHP 5.2 without APC – 350 requests/second

PHP 5.2 with APC – 1,300 requests/second

Java using Tomcat 5.5 – 3,500 requests/second

I finally gave in a joined Twitter. http://twitter.com/richbuggy