Icenium itself is a product borne out of Telerik, a global provider of software development tools that, for the past 10 years, has been all-Microsoft. Seeing the quantum shift to mobile, the company has shifted pririties to being cross platform – it also released Kendo Ui recently, a cross-platform mobile frame work for building mobile, desktop and web apps; and Test Studio for iOS, a free app to test web, hybrid and native iOS apps.

So what benefits is Icenium promising to developers and businesses? For developers:

• A decoupling of mobile development from proprietary mobile languages—if they can code for the web, they can build a mobile app
• The ability to target the most popular platforms and mobile-device form factors using just one tool
• The ability to move away from multiple SDKs. The Icenium platform is all that is required
• The ability to work on projects anywhere with a machine and an Internet connection
• The ability to build once, target many. No need to build, deploy, and maintain multiple versions of the same app

And the benefits to business:

• Build line-of-business apps that meet the unique business requirements
• The ability to make mobile apps within a reasonable budget and time frame, get to market faster, and see a swift ROI
• Adapt to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies without adding another layer of device management
• Leverage in-house skillsets to get the job done without the cost of outside consultants

The value prop for Icenium makes sense – to target the most relevant platforms, developers need specific Mac and a Windows environments, as well as all of the individual proprietary platform SDKs. Alongside this it takes time, energy, and resources to learn Objective-C for Apple iOS and Java for  Google Android, not to mention building for one of those platforms, only to rebuild for the other. Clearly, the platform providers care more about their technology than the developers’ need to work across all platforms. One solution for this is building to only one platform – this is a viable strategy for some use cases but for other not so much, which is where hybrid apps come in. Icenium enables the creation of these hybrid apps, but without any platform-specific work or toolsets. Of course the obvious question is what about the non iOS and Android platforms – one assumes that as they gain adoption, Icenium will roll them out also.

Key features of Icenium include:

• The ability to use existing HTML5 and JavaScript skills
• Individual SDKs are part of the Icenium platform hence developers can forget about them
• Icenium includes device simulation and debugging
• The simulator includes real-time updates across all supported devices
• Version control built in to the product
• Deployment automated via the Ion app in iOS
• On-platform support for publishing to both the Apple App Store and Google Play

…‡‹—•‹’Ž‹

3scale Free Plan

3scale have launched a free plan for organization that have less than 50000 API calls per day. With this plan customers get full functionality – including access to the full content management system that sits behind 3scale. Using the API portal, users can control the majority of management variables around the API and developer signup to it. That’s useful since the free plan is limited to 250 developer accounts.

The Documentation Bandwagon

3scale has integrated Swagger Active Docs into the platform – essentially this produces correctly formatted and described API documentation including documentation published to JSON for re use.

New UI

3scale has rolled out a new user interface that should make it easier and more friendly for developers to manage all of their API related activities.

New Support Portal

3scale has eaten their own dog food (or at least taken advantage of what they know best) to build a new support portal on top of their own product – this covers an architecture 101,, tutorials, reference guides and online help.

MyPOV

Luckily 3scale has introduced some substantive stuff (the free plan is cool and the new UI is nice) because, frankly,I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly but I’m intrigued that a number of API vendors of late have come to me announcing their API documentation offering. While I realize that the documentation required for API management is more involved, more technical and potentially more dynamic than, for example, documentation for a SaaS application, I find it strange that anyone is shouting about something which should be standard.

Without effective documentation an API service is essentially useless, and hence an existing product crowing about the launch of a documentation service is slightly counter-intuitive. I put this rant to 3scale CEO Steve Wilmott who is, luckily for me, a nice guy and was prepared to humor my rant for awhile. He agreed that, at least to an extent, simple things get overhyped by vendors, but in defending the release as newsworthy, he asserted that;

Good documentation is key for an API and vendors like us should definitely seek to provide good tools, that’s what we’ve done by adding swagger. Our release is going to name it as a feature but we’re not hyping just that. Our main aim is just to make it easy to do this. For me what we’re doing also goes a bit beyond just documentation. Swagger has a JSON spec behind it to generate the docs. Our portal will also expose the JSON spec and this is a big deal because: others (e.g. programmable web but could be anybody) can pull in this spec and explore the methods on offer on a given API generate their own views of the docs potentially use them to build better services directories.

Wilmott was keen to accentuate that this release is all about creating an end-to-end platform that developers using APIs need – the offering covers all the core API needs including keys, rate limits, analytics, full CMS for the developer community, docs, payments. He also talked up the fact that it’s self serve, that it can be deployed in most infrastructures and that it’s free to use for volumes which may be sufficient for many uses.

3scale is an interesting vendor that, despite sometimes making less noise than its better known competitors is quietly but steadily building traction. By offering a compelling product to developers with low volume API requirements they’re positioning themselves well for future growth.

Website performance company Torbit has seen this disconnect and is today releasing Torbit Insight, a user management tool that delivers insights into actual loading times for the real world visitors to a customer’s website. It also closes the loop and delivers insights into how website speed directly relates to the conversion rates enjoyed by the site owner.

Insight takes advantage of browser advances that give them the ability to pull end user speed data and aggregate it back at the server end to deliver these insights. So what insights are being delivered? Torbit is giving website owners transparency over;

• Real time data reporting and live map view
• Histogram of user load times including key metrics like your median and top percentiles
• Performance metrics on your best and worst performing pages with customized  suggestions on how to make them faster
• See how performance varies across different browsers and geographies
• Correlate your website speed to core business metrics like bounce rate, conversion rate and revenue

Torbit itself is a performance company that focuses on the front-end of websites where 80-90% of performance issues are on most websites. Torbit’s other product, Site Optimizer, offers Dynamic Content Optimization to automate the front-end optimizations that make websites fast. it’ a similar proposition to that offered by other vendors – in particular Aptimize, recently acquired by Riverbed, was playing in this space. However for vendors aiming to optimize the websites of small organizations, it is often difficult to prove the need and hence show the value of the optimization proposition – a service such as Insight is useful both as a standalone monitoring offering, but also as a business acquisition tool for the actual optimization product.

Insight is a simple Javascript snippet that site owners drop into their site code. This then delivers insights on the Torbit self service website. insight is free but has paid plans with additional features.

The website delivers up some graphical information about performance, but what really interested me was the integration with Google Analytics. The diagram below shows a composite graph of website speed with actual conversion rates – that’s a pretty compelling proposition for anyone who runs a website.

The website optimization space is busy and is largely made up of vendors looking to achieve a trade sale – in particular the CDN vendors are likely candidates to acquire these sorts of players as they look to build out extra functionality on top of the delivery network offerings.

Torbit is making a smart move with the new offering – it will be interesting to see how the business progresses over time.

An announcement today from FeedHenry speaks to this fact. FeedHenry provides cloud-based Mobile Application Platform solutions that ease the development, deployment, integration and management of secure mobile apps for business. Their mobile platform-as-a-service allows apps to be developed in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS and deployed across all major mobile devices from a single code base. The node.js backend service offers a complete range of APIs designed to simplify and secure the connectivity of mobile apps to backend and third party systems which is where this announcement comes in -  they have just announced the creation of a mobile application platform build on top of the Cloud Foundry PaaS. In articulating the need for a solution like this, FeedHenry speaks to my contention about the different development roles saying that’;

developers are building mobile frontend applications separately, and integrating with backend services manually. To leverage the benefits of PaaS for mobile applications, developers need a way to develop, deploy and scale these cross-platform applications on the PaaS in a seamless manner.

Essentially this integration sees FeedHenry continue focusing of frontend functionality, and abstracting much of the backend responsibility to a PaaS provider and in doing so reduces the need for their customers to spend time worrying about infrastructure-level issues. Jerry Chen from VMware speaks to the coming together of frontend and backend operations that offerings like this bring saying that;

We are seeing a shift to mobile-first development within enterprises, which requires their PaaS solution to provide an integrated mobile development and deployment platform. FeedHenry’s cross-platform mobile development solution can make it easier and faster for Cloud Foundry developers to build and deploy these applications.

Of course simply integrating frontend and backend development platforms doesn’t answer all the issues around bringing together these two worlds. But with tight integration, at least the technical barriers to a more cohesive development framework will be overcome. FeedHenry looks to be a good step in this direction.

Key details of today’s news are as follows;

Node.js

• Engine Yard is enabling support for Node.js applications on Engine Yard Cloud as its first Engine Yard Labs release
• Node.js is a popular event-driven framework written in JavaScript that is ideal for low-latency, real-time applications
• JavaScript is the 9th most popular programming languages (Tiobe index, Nov 2011). The language has moved from #11 to #9 in the past year
• Event-driven frameworks such as Node.js are ideal for highly interactive websites and will be particularly useful for companies building real-time, interactive applications

Engine Yard Labs

• Engine Yard Labs is a new program that will let customers try out experimental new features and capabilities
• This program will accelerate the pace of innovation by involving customers in the vetting of new ideas, incorporating feedback, and rapidly bringing the most promising features into Engine Yard products
• Features released through Engine Yard Labs are not officially supported and may or may not become supported as part of Engine Yard products in the future