Jason from Google just posted the top 50 mobile applications which where selected in the challenge part 1, round 1. Looks like there are a lot of companies and people from Europe – like the Zelfi AG in Germany. So, innovation is not a Silicon Valley only phenomenon I’m really curious to get more information on all the top 50 apps.

Congratulations to all the developers behind the to 50 apps!

Just now Vodafone published a press release, that the Vodafone Group will sell the Apple iPhone in the following 10 countries:

• Australia
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• Greece
• Italy
• India
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• South Africa
• Turkey

… wow. There is still an open question, which rates Vodafone will offer with the iPhone – and whether Apple will go on with their strategy of working with national exclusive partners. Whatever we’ll here in the future – that deal will boost the market for mobile iPhone applications.

So, let’s see what will come next …

From June 9 to 13 it’s all about the Mac and iPhone developer community in San Francisco under the warm sun of California: At the Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference the whole hardware and software developer community is gathering to get and exchange Mac and iPhone first-hand insights.
The company is running a scholarship program for students developing for Macs and mobile iPhone and iPod-touch devices. This year, 400 students will get scholarships to enter the conference for free (a US $ 1,595 value). But coming to California has to be arranged by the student him- or herself.
Application deadline is April 10, 2008 at 5:00 PM PDT – so, if you are a student and want to join the conference, apply now.

Source: development.apple.com

Looking back into an extremely successful year 2007 with 1,600 participants at the RailsConf 2007 and 800 participants at the RailsConf Europe 2007, the year 2008 will be the year of the Rails-2.0 conferences.

April 4th/5th 2008: ScotlandOnRails, Edinburgh, Scotland
http://scotlandonrails.com
conference language: English

May 29th – June 1st 2008: RailsConf 2008, Portland, Oregon, USA
http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/
organized by O’Reilly – conference language: English

June 9th/10th 2008: Rails-Konferenz.de, Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.rails-konferenz.de
conference language: German

June 10th 2008: Ruby en Rails 2008, Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://2008.rubyenrails.nl
conference language: Dutch

September 2nd-4th 2008: RailsConf Europe, Berlin, Germany
http://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/
organized by O’Reilly – conference language: English

There are probably a lot more conferences focussing on Rails … just drop a comment so the list can grow

Zend Framework reached Version 1.5 since the last article about Zend or Rails. Ruby on Rails also did a big step towards version 2 – 2.0.2, too be precise
So, who is my personal winner in this race? Which framework suits best for fast and innovative web application development?
To say things first: My personal favorite is Ruby-on-Rails!

But the burning questions is: Why!

1. Ruby instead of PHP: At first it sounds rather loose to cold-shoulder the sweat and tears of learning PHP – and dig deeply into a quite young and a pure object oriented language. But everybody I talked to in the last months who came from Java or PHP just told me the same story: It’s no big deal to learn Ruby – and the benefits are overwhelming. Ruby enables you to write elegant, readable and easy to maintain code.
2. Vision-Driven-Community: No matter where you get in contact with the Rails community – at a developers conference or in a mailing-list: The basic mood and vision of the community is friendly, catching, international and productive. It’s all about creating something new, something better and more elegant with the power of the community … take a look at the RailsConf 2007 keynote of David Heinemeier Hansson in Portland.
3. Scalability: By now, there are several examples of high scaling web applications with rails. The only con of Rails applications compared to Zend framework apps is the need of a little bit more hardware. But the pros are worth it: faster development and easier maintenance. Twitter, Qype and Xing show it. Especially, the Twitter developers love to twitter about scalability, like Britt Selvitelle auf der RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin.
4. REST: Version 2.0 is a big step towards the principle of Representational state transfer. Now REST is deeply implemented into the Ruby on Rails framework. This makes it easy to create consistent interfaces to other systems. REST was nearly buried in oblivion but it’s a sophisticated and strong feature based on the http protocol. Find out more by the free PDF-book of b-simple focusing on RESTful-Rails.
5. Database-Migrations: Rails offers a powerful script based tool to create and redo database structures called migrations. For projects following the principles of “pragmatic programming” this is a perfect tool to create and improve the whole database schema and fill tables with data. Zend want to have a feature like that, too. There is a proposal for that feature – but nobody knows when this will be implemented and how it will function.
6. Test-Driven-Development: Rails still is one of the leaders in TDD by it’s built in creation of test infrastruktur for automated unit- tests, functional tests and integration tests. Zend Framework tries to catch up with its ZFTestManager – but a conclusive integration into the framework is still missing.
7. MultiView: Within Rails, content can be presented in different ways according to the type of request. You easily can create different views to show the data as a CSV file, an RSS feed, a classical HTML page or as a special iPhone page. SlashDotDash shows, how easy it is to create a special iPhone optimized user interface for a rails app.

But there are some specific projects, which are not well suited for Rails Mehr …