Reddit's "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) forum has attracted some brave souls since the "I Am A" (IAmA) subreddit was established in 2009. Everyone from Snoop Dog to Donald Trump (set to host an AMA on July 27) has signed up for this unique, almost-anything-goes public Q&A. Last week Google's Android engineering team took the AMA plunge for the first time, just a few days after the release of the fifth and final developer preview of Android Nougat (v7.0).
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 26, 20160 comments
Sonatype has just released its second annual report on managing open source components. The "2016 State of the Software Supply Chain" report is available now, and well worth reading.
Among the things I like about this report is that it's based on the analysis of 31 billion download requests of open source software components from the Central Repository, which Sonatype manages, and that it's the result of an analysis of the patterns and practices of more than 25,000 developers and 3,000 organizations.
The company started out as a core contributor to the Apache Maven project, which is now the largest public repository of open source Java components. That 31 billion figure represents an increase of 82 percent between 2014 and 2015, according to the company. Sonatype also introduced repository managers into the software supply chain with its Nexus products.
Easily the most disturbing revelation in this report is that defective components in the software supply chain are routinely making their way into applications, which is costing enterprises millions of dollars. In fact, 1 in 16 downloads from the repository had a known security defect, the report's authors found, and 6.8 percent of components in use among the 25,000 applications analyzed had a known security defect.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 13, 20160 comments
Oracle has finally responded to my -- and I'm sure many others' -- requests for comment on the future of Java EE, on which the formation of the Java EE Guardians threw a spotlight a few months ago. A member of the Oracle PR team sent me an e-mail in which Mike Moeller, Oracle's vice president of marketing communications and global public relations, offered the following:
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 8, 20160 comments
The Java EE Guardians launched their public Web site last week and simultaneously posted a petition on the change.org Web site aimed at Oracle executives.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 22, 20160 comments
Apple announced the first Developer Preview of Swift 3.0 at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco (WWDC) this week, marking the next phase in the rapid evolution of this increasingly popular open-source programming language. The growth of the Swift ecosystem among third-party developers is something of a phenomenon, and IBM appears to be leading that burgeoning pack.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 15, 20160 comments
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is inviting open source developers to write and contribute code to The Machine project, an effort to juice up its ambitious plan to reinvent computing. During my reporting on that news I had the opportunity to talk with a real veteran of the Open Source Wars. (Not officially a thing, I know, but it should be.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 13, 20160 comments
Oracle's decision to shut down the java.net and kenai.com collaborative Web sites by next April has the Java community -- especially the Java EE community -- buzzing. The company announced plans last year to move the content and services of Kenai to java.net, but now says both portals will be "sunsetting" on April 28, 2017.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 8, 20160 comments
The recent decision by a federal district court jury that Google's use of 37 Java APIs in the development of its Android OS was a "fair use" of that technology and did not infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights came as a relief to the developer community, generally speaking, if a temporary one. The reaction of Josh Juneau, a Chicago-based app developer, blogger and author, was typical:
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 6, 20160 comments
Containers offer a number of advantages over traditional virtualization software, but easy visibility isn't one of them. Modern modular application architecture has, in fact, created a kind of "black hole" of complexity swarming with packages and dependencies developers can't readily sort out.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 24, 20160 comments