2016 Dev Predictions, Part 1: DevOps, APIs, Microservices, More

My annual, informal survey of industry watchers about challenges and opportunities for enterprise developers in the coming year led me this year to a group of Forrester analysts (Jeffrey S. Hammond, Kurt Bittner, John R. Rymer, Diego Lo Giudice, Jost Hoppermann, John M. Wargo, Randy Heffner and Michael Facemire) who made some predictions back in November in a must-read report, "Predictions 2016: Modern Development Goes Mainstream").

Posted by John K. Waters on January 22, 20160 comments

Google Is Smart to Leverage OpenJDK

The impact of Google's decision to use Oracle's OpenJDK in upcoming versions of its Android OS remains to be seen, but reaction to the news in the tech community has been cautiously optimistic.

RedMonk analyst James Governor's take was typical: "[A]fter a long hiatus, Java is finally improved with some significant new functionality -- notably lambdas in Java 8," he observed in an e-mail. "Java, the language, still has strong legs, as RedMonk data clearly show, and it makes sense for Google to embrace that ecosystem's ongoing strength. OpenJDK has made considerable progress as a community and codebase, so why not tap into that momentum?"

Posted by John K. Waters on January 12, 20160 comments

TIOBE Names Java 'Programming Language of 2015'

Whatever else you can say about the past year, 2015 was a good'n for Java. The language turned 20 with much fanfare and well-earned acknowledgement. (Oracle marked the anniversary with a great Web site. Java 8, with its game-changing support for lambda expressions, was adopted at a record-setting pace. And though the release of Java 9 was pushed back, modularization became real.

Posted by John K. Waters on January 7, 20160 comments

Governance Model for Open Container Initiative

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) unveiled its technical governance model this week. The nascent coalition of industry leaders and users seeking to establish common standards for software containers is just over six months old, and the establishment of a governance model is a big step in its evolution.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 9, 20150 comments

GitLab Beefs up its Enterprise Edition, Supports Git LFS

GitLab, the company behind the open source code collaboration platform of the same name, has released a new version of one of its Git-based offerings with some additional enterprise muscle, and the company is using the occasion to throw stats at the press like ninja stars in a Kung Fu movie.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 2, 20150 comments

Another Java 9 Delay Proposed

The Chief Architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, Mark Reihold, is asking for a six-month extension of the Java 9 release schedule. The reason: Jigsaw, of course.

Despite the "good progress" made over the past 18 months on the project that will modularize Java, Reinhold said in a post on the OpenJDK mailing list, doing it right will take just a little bit longer.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 1, 20150 comments

Spring Social Vulnerability Fixed by a Newcomer

While I was talking with people last week about the recently published proof-of-concept exploits that threw a new spotlight on a well-known vulnerability in the Apache Commons Java repository, I had the opportunity to chat with Mark Thomas, a member of the Apache Software Foundation security team and long-time Apache Tomcat committer.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 16, 20150 comments

JetBrains Switches to Subscription Model

"Today is a big day ..." the PR note in my inbox proclaimed. As of Monday, JetBrains, maker of the venerable code-centric Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, is bundling all its desktop developer tools into the JetBrains Toolbox, and selling those products via a subscription model.

The company announced its plan to switch from a perpetual licensing model to a subscription-only model on Sept. 3, and the news generated more than a little negative feedback from its customers. JetBrains argued at the time that the change would simplify management of its product licenses and ultimately cost less. But unconvinced customers complained about the pernicious spread of software "renting" schemes and the risk of committing to tools they don't actually own.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 3, 20150 comments

BSIMM6 Reflects the State of Software Security

It's been seven years since a group of software security mavens set out to create a "fact-based" set of best practices for developing and growing an enterprise-wide software security program. That set of practices, known today as the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM ), was the first maturity model for security initiatives created entirely from real-world data.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 20, 20150 comments