As you may have seen, Amazon announced their new lineup of Kindles today, from the $79 base version to the $199 Kindle Fire, a rival to Apple’s iPad. One thing that piqued my interest about the Kindle Fire is that it includes a new, custom Web browser, named Silk. Amazon posted an introduction to Silk, along with a six-minute video, on their site today, too. A lot on that page and in the video is marketing hype, but they raise some interesting points about the fact that Web browsers are fundamentally the same as they were 15 years ago, and aren’t ideal for today’s use, especially with all the mobile devices. Now the solution they came up with seems to be something akin to a reverse CDN: Whereas a CDN takes the load off of one server and shares it across a network of servers, Amazon Silk uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reduce the load on the device. From just what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like they’ve addressed a problem with browsers, but rather with the HTTP protocol, introducing their own gateway to improve the communications. It’ll be interesting to see what impact this new approach has, and how, if at all, it affects Web development in the years to come.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Storing Uploaded Files in Multiple Directories
• On the Web => NoSQL Standouts
• On the Web => Optimizing Web Page Performance
• On the Web => Dive into HTML5?
• On the Blog => How Web Hosts Prey on Beginners
• What is Larry Thinking => Looking Both Ways
• Book Giveaway => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” (4th Edition)
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition) and “Modern JavaScript”

I’m pleased to say that on Friday, September 9th, I received my hardcopies of the latest edition of “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide”. This would suggest that the book should be available for purchase, or in bookstores, now or very soon. For details about the book, please see its corresponding pages. I’ve also created a new forum for this edition.

Thanks to everyone for their interest in the book!

InfoWorld just posted a good and long article discussing the particular strengths and weaknesses of various NoSQL (aka, non-relational) databases. If you’re intrigued about what NoSQL databases are all about, and maybe even thinking about starting to play around with one, it’s well worth your time to read.

As for me personally, CouchDB and MongoDB are still most attractive, in some part due to their use of JavaScript and JSON, and in part because of existing PHP libraries for interacting with these database applications.

Some time back I posted a link to an article I read on the Chicago Tribune’s Web site (the article was later pulled from that site, for an unknown reason). The article discussed how the Financial Times and ESPN created “mobile apps” using HTML5 instead of native code. It’s an interesting concept:

• HTML5 offers many features of conventional apps, such as support for gestures, ability to handle video, local storage capability, and offline usability.
• The same application will be virtually guaranteed to work on multiple devices (mobile devices by their very nature use extremely current browsers).
• Apps can be updated without the user having to download and install anything (and, actually, the user never installs anything anyway).
• HTML5-based apps can be “distributed” without going through proprietary systems like Apple’s App Store.

It’s this last point that impacted the Financial Times’s decisions to go with a Web app, as detailed in this recent article at Macworld.