New Products

The authorial team of Joey Lott, Kathryn Rotondo, Sam Ahn and Ashley Atkins are riding the Adobe AIR wave with their new book Adobe AIR in Action, published by Manning. Adobe AIR, which also is available for the Linux platform, is a cross-platform runtime environment that allows Web developers to use their existing skills to start building applications for the desktop. The example-driven book introduces AIR to developers familiar with Flash and Flex, showing them how to build solid AIR-driven desktop applications. Readers will learn the essential features of the AIR API. The book shows how to create and customize native windows, as well as how to read and write files and folders on the local filesystem. Adobe AIR in Action also shows how to set up and connect to a local database, detect network connectivity and connect to Web services, bridge ActionScript and JavaScript, and deploy and update their applications.

www.manning.com

Will Google's Android mobile OS live up to its billing and shake up the world of mobile devices? Judge for yourself with the help of Chris Haseman's new book Android Essentials from Apress. Intended for professional software engineers seeking to move their applications into the mobile space, this book is a “no-frills, no-nonsense, code-centric run through the guts of application development” on Android. Rather than cover the entire Android catalog, Android Essentials focuses on only four main topics: the application life cycle and OS integration, user interface, location-based services and networking. Among other things, readers will learn how an Android application functions and communicates with the handset that hosts it, the complexities of timers, services and multimedia playback and much more.

www.apress.com

Protecode is a software-development solution for governance and IP management that utilizes so-called protecoding, a unique methodology to ensure software pedigree tracking. The company says that the latest release “enables commercial software developers and open-source creators to accelerate managed adoption of open-source code in a simple, painless process”. Protecode automatically generates records of software content, identifies and reports associated pedigree and licensing information by checking its properties and compliance against an organization's policies, establishing IP ownership and creating a software Bill of Materials (BOM). The tool brings forward the detection of license policy violations to the developer's desktop, where they can be addressed before becoming deeply embedded into the product. A complimentary one-year subscription to Protecode currently is available to anyone working actively on an Eclipse Project.

www.protecode.com