In recent years artificial intelligence (AI) has returned to the forefront of technological debate. That debate has moved on from when, and even whether, computers will ever display intelligent behaviour to how smart they will get, how quickly, and what the implications are for society. Although there are multiple approaches to creating AIs, the ones that involve machine learning from large datasets are generally outperforming all others.

Earlier this year we polled more than 13,000 developers during our biannual Developer Economics survey (updating now), and 11% of those developers told us that HTML is their primary development language – that’s Hypertext Markup Language to the uninitiated. This response immediately begs the question: can HTML really be considered a “programming language” at all, or if we should consign to being a tool for the layout of JavaScript functions?

Every six months we ask developers around the world those four questions, to see how the industry is evolving. Now in its 9th edition the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey reached out to 13,000 developers, from 149 different countries, and the results are available in our biannual report.

JavaScript is not the world’s most elegant programming language. So much so that one of the world’s top experts on the language wrote a book about “The Good Parts”. Even so, JavaScript has rapidly become one of the most popular languages in the world and it is steadily gaining ground on mobile. Will it eventually dominate there too?

Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The latest Developer Economics survey showed that 38% of mobile developers were using C# for some of their work and 16% use it as their main language. Those developers are not all focused on Microsoft platforms by a long way. So what are they doing?

Finding a comprehensive comparison between any kind of JavaScript Frameworks, Libraries or Extensions is not hard these days. Especially when it comes to Javascript MV* Frameworks, which are used to develop single-page applications (SPAs), and their notorious representatives, i.e. AngularJS, Ember, Backbone.js and newcomer React. A simple Google Search offers a plethora of technical comparisons to choose from. What they don’t usually mention, though, is the overall features those frameworks provide and how they compete for different use cases.

The most surprising thing to come out of Apple’s WWDC event this year was a new programming language for iOS and Mac development. To the sceptical this might not seem like anything more than a way to entice more new developers to build apps exclusively for Apple platforms and lock them in. While investment in developer tools is always partly about making a platform attractive to developers, this move has far more benefits and strategic implications.

The web is losing and apps are winning. At least that’s what the most recent data from Flurry says – 86% of time on mobile devices is spent in an app other than the browser, up from 80% last year.

App development is becoming more and more popular, as web and software developers are migrating to the mobile industry. Secure development on mobile applications, however, has not shown the same level of growth or maturity. This article sums the best ways to build secure apps. It concentrates on OWASP top 10 (and similar) vulnerabilities, as these are most commonly found in mobile apps.

Although the debate on HTML5 versus native apps seems to be favouring native apps currently, particularly in terms of user experience and performance, average developer revenues tell a very different story. Our survey data shows the mean average revenue for developers who consider HTML5 for mobile devices their primary platform is the highest of all platforms, just over twice that of the next nearest (iOS)*. However, the rewards are very unevenly shared, with the median average revenue for the same developers under half that of their iOS counterparts. Diving into the data we can see significant differences in revenue depending on how mobile apps built with web technologies are delivered to users and the categories they target. Understanding these differences could improve your chances of succeeding with HTML5.