The Eclipse Foundation's annual Release Train will be in the spotlight later this week, but first a bit of that metaphorical illumination should fall on a new Foundation project. Announced on Monday, the newly organized Eclipse Science Working Group (SWG) is being described as "a global collaboration for scientific software." It aims to bring together groups from academia, industry and government to create open software that can be used in basic scientific research.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 24, 20140 comments
GitHub.com this week unveiled an update of the application it launched two years ago to support Windows developers who want to use the Linux-centric code-hosting platform and its namesake revision control system for their projects. The company is describing Windows for GitHub 2.0 as a major update, emphasizing a new streamlined interface designed to help users focus on their work.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 13, 20140 comments
The amount of both mainstream and tech press generated by Apple's annual World Wide Developer Conference, winding down in San Francisco today, always catches me by surprise. It shouldn't, I suppose, but everyone covers this show. I agree with the argument that Apple has earned the attention with its bleeding-edge, category-creating, market-overhauling innovations over the past couple of decades, but it's still true that somewhere around 90 percent of all PCs worldwide are running Windows. Maybe I should look at the coverage of the WWDC as further evidence of the receding relevance of the PC as a personal computing platform.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 6, 20140 comments
Would you be surprised to learn that 82.5 percent of Java developers responding to a recently conducted survey said they favor the JUnit testing framework? Or that 70 percent reported an affinity for the Jenkins CI Server? Or that 69 percent prefer Git for version control? Or that 48 percent of developers reported using the Eclipse IDE? Yeah, me neither. But those were just a few of the stats -- both expected and surprising -- assembled from the latest survey of in-the-trenches Java developers by RebelLabs, the research and content arm of Java toolmaker Zeroturnaround.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on May 28, 20140 comments
A federal appeals court sided with Oracle on Friday, ruling that the 37 Java APIs at the center of the now four-year-old Oracle v. Google patent infringement lawsuit are, in fact, protected under U.S. copyright law. The appeals court overturned the 2012 ruling of Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California, and referred the case back to that court, which will now take up the question of whether Google's use of those APIs in Android constitutes fair use.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on May 12, 20140 comments
I suspect that we'll remember Heartbleed as one of the few security vulnerabilities to have its own logo and URL. But we should remember it for the wake-up call it sounded for users of open-source software (OSS).
Heartbleed, as everyone who hasn't been camping in the wilderness for the past month knows, is a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library. OpenSSL is popular and widely used, so the vulnerability, which the Web site states, "allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions," was a big news even outside tech media. We're talking hundreds of thousands of Web servers and products potentially affected. Security analyst Bruce Schneier characterized the seriousness of Heartbleed on his blog this way: "On a scale of one to 10, this is an 11."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 28, 20140 comments
Back in January I talked with Eric Knipp, who manages Gartner's Application Platform Strategies research team, about some of the opportunities and challenges he saw on the horizon for application developers. During that conversation, he mentioned an intriguing idea that he was exploring: That crowdsourcing could be much more useful to enterprise app dev organizations than most people currently recognize.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 17, 20140 comments
On Tuesday, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) sent out a graduation announcement of sorts. The Apache Olingo project, which provides generic Java and JavaScript libraries designed to implement the OASIS Open Data Protocol (OData), has had a status upgrade from Incubator to Top-Level-Project (TLP).
Olingo is a standardized protocol for creating and consuming data APIs. By implementing OData, which is REST-based and uses HTTP, AtomPub and JSON, Olingo is able to use uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to connect with feed resources. The aim is to simplify the querying and sharing of data across disparate apps in the enterprise, the cloud, and on mobile devices. Using OData makes it possible for Olingo to provide a uniform way to expose full-featured data APIs.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 9, 20140 comments
News about Java Specification Requests (JSRs) don't usually make it to the front page, but the announcement that JSR-107, the spec request for a Java Temporary Caching API, better known as JCache, has earned final approval should be top-of-the-fold news -- if for no other reason than the time it took to get there.
The JCache project summary explains that the spec standardizes in-process caching of Java objects "in a way that allows an efficient implementation, and removes from the programmer the burden of implementing cache expiration, mutual exclusion, spooling, and cache consistency."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 25, 20140 comments