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
Much of the press around this year's Google I/O event focused on the company's day-one consumer app-economy announcements, but there was plenty of news for enterprise developers in the opening keynote.
The most immediately relevant announcement was the launch of Preview 1 of Android Studio 2.2. The upcoming version of the official IDE for Android app development includes a rewritten layout designer, an automated test recorder, a Firebase plug-in, and the latest updates of JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA and CLion development environments, on which the IDE is based.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 19, 20160 comments
The Java EE Guardians this week unveiled a public draft of their charter, and it's worth reading for anyone interested in the future of enterprise Java. The charter makes and supports the argument that Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) continues to be essential to the long-term health of the Java ecosystem, and then it lays out compelling evidence that Oracle is "conspicuously neglecting Java EE."
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 6, 20160 comments
It's official: Jenkins 2.0 has arrived. Available today, this is the first major release of the open source continuous integration (CI) server in 10 years, and the excitement surrounding it is palpable. (Sorry, that was my Apple Watch telling me to stand up -- again.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 26, 20160 comments
The big news in the evolving container ecosystem this past week was Mesosphere's announcement that it will be open sourcing its flagship Data Center Operating System, rebranded as DC/OS. (The company will also offer a commercial Enterprise version.) Among the long list of companies partnering with Mesosphere on DC/OS beta is a startup called Avi Networks, which got my attention at the Container World 2016 conference.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 25, 20160 comments