When Wayne Citrin and his partners founded JNBridge back in 2001, Java was about five years old, .NET was still in beta, and the term "cross-platform interoperability" wasn't exactly rolling off the tongues of software vendors. But what seemed like irreconcilable differences at the start of the 21st century looked to Citrin and his partners like opportunity.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 12, 20170 comments
Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, kicked off Eclipse Converge 2017 this week with an update for attendees on doings at the 13-year-old organization.
The Foundation grew over the past year to 331 projects, Milinkovich said, and the rate of increase seems to be accelerating. "In the past couple of quarters, we've had more new Eclipse project proposals than I can ever remember," he said. Milinkovich underscored the quality of the ongoing projects at the Foundation with a reminder of how vigorously his organization separates the wheat from the chaff. "We think it should be pretty easy to start an Eclipse project," he said, "but if it's not going well or there's not a lot of activity, we're going to garbage collect every summer."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20170 comments
I'm not sure what I expected when I finally connected with Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Anne Thomas last week to discuss a research note she co-authored that took heavy fire from critics in the enterprise Java community. But her chipper, glad-to-help-out response to my interview request shouldn't have surprised me; in the roughly two decades since we first met, I've found Thomas to be a responsive and thoughtful industry watcher with a relatively thick hide.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 16, 20170 comments
Oracle's latest Critical Patch Update, the first of 2017, left Java security maven and Waratek CTO John Matthew Holt scratching his head about Big O's fix for a particular vulnerability: CVE 2017-3241, which affects Java SE, Java SE Embedded, and JRockit, and earned a CVSS score of 9.0 out of 10.0 (very bad).
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 24, 20170 comments
Talking with Siddhartha Agarwal, Oracle's VP of product management and strategy, about the trends his company expects to impact developers in the coming year, I couldn't resist the obvious pun.
"So, you're Oracle's oracle?"
"You could say that, I guess," he said. "But these predictions are based not on my thinking, but on many conversations we've had with our customers, mostly large enterprises. Not many people tell us, for example, that they are currently using containers in development and production. But many people tell us that they want to use containers and they are starting down that path."
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 12, 20170 comments
Researchers at Gartner dropped something of a bomb on the enterprise Java community just before the holidays in the form of a new report in which analysts claim, among other things, that Java EE is fading from relevance and those responsible for modernizing enterprise application infrastructure should "develop a strategy to deal with the obsolescence of Java EE and other three-tier application frameworks."
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 3, 20170 comments
Reza Rahman delivered the opening keynote at App Dev Trends 2016 (part of Live 360!) Tuesday morning, giving attendees a deep, contextual history of enterprise Java and issuing something of a call to arms.
"If we are going to ensure the future of enterprise Java, we must remain alert, stay engaged, and participate in the community. You have to do these things anyway, of course, but it's more important now than ever. Java EE is a maturing technology. If we don't reenergize it now, as a community, the investment in this technology we have made over the years will go away."
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Posted on December 6, 20160 comments
The election results are in! No, not that election. I'm talking about the 2016 Fall Executive Committee (EC) election of the Java Community Process (JCP).
Each year roughly half the seats of the 24-member EC are up for ratification/election. The EC oversees the work of the Expert Groups that define Java specifications, essentially guiding the evolution of Java. The committee picks the JSRs that will be developed, approves draft specs and final specs, approves Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) licenses, approves maintenance revisions and occasionally defers features to new JSRs, approves transfer of maintenance duties between members, and provides guidance to the Program Management Office (PMO).
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 15, 20160 comments
The debut of AppDev Trends 2016, our first-ever industry conference, is less than a month away! We're part of the very popular Live! 360 conference, scheduled for Dec. 5-9 at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. This is a multi-conference event that includes Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, Office/SharePoint Live!, Modern Apps Live!, TechMentor -- and us.
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 9, 20160 comments