GitHub last week announced a new partnership with Yubico to expand its authentication system, unveiled a new directory of integrated applications, and made an extension for large binary files available on all repositories on GitHub.com.
CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath made the Yubico partnership announcement at his company's GitHub Universe event in San Francisco on Thursday. Yubico is a co-creator (with Google) of the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) open authentication standard hosted by the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance. U2F relies on USB-like tokens that generate login codes unique to the users and the applications being accessed. Yubicomakes the tokens, and the company's CEO and founder, Stina Ehrensvard, was on-hand at the event to give away about 1,000 of them to attendees.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 6, 20150 comments
The first early access builds of JDK 9 with Project Jigsaw, the initiative that's bringing modularity to the Java platform, are now available for download. Before you jump in, you should definitely read Mark Reinhold's rich and readable "The State of the Module System," which he published online earlier this month. The chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group calls it "an informal overview of enhancements to the Java SE Platform prototyped in Project Jigsaw and proposed as the starting point for JSR 376."
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 23, 20150 comments
Nginx Inc., the commercial provider of one of the most popular open-source Web servers, has released a new version of its namesake product with a fully supported implementation of the new HTTP/2 standard. Nginx Plus R7, available now, comes with the promise of an easier transition to the new standard, along with new performance and security enhancements.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 21, 20150 comments
The rumors are flying about the fate of some of Oracle's top Java evangelists, thanks to a tweet and a Reddit thread picked up by the press last week. These rumors follow hot on the heels of the departure last month of Cameron Purdy, who served as senior vice president of Oracle's Cloud Application Foundation and Java EE group.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 9, 20150 comments
The Java and Microsoft .NET Framework interoperability mavens at JNBridge have upgraded their flagship JNBridgePro tool to support both Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015. That was to be expected from the guys who have been helping to build bridges between "anything Java and anything .NET" since 2001. What stood out in this release for me was the new "Proxy By Name" feature, which was much requested by JNBridge users, company CTO Wayne Citrin told me.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 21, 20150 comments
What to do with sun.misc.Unsafe in Java 9? One side says it's simply an awful hack from the bad old days that should be gotten rid of; the other side says its heavy use is responsible for the rise of Java in the infrastructure space and popular tools still need it. The problem is, both sides are right. This week, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, offered a solution.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 7, 20150 comments
It's been almost exactly a month since a coalition of industry leaders and users joined forces to create the Open Container Project to establish common standards for software containers. Now known as the Open Container Initiative (OCI) (renamed to avoid confusion with another Linux Foundation project), the group has announced the availability for public scrutiny of a draft charter for the nascent organization and the addition of 14 new members.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 24, 20150 comments
O'Reilly's annual Open Source Convention, better known as OSCON, is in full swing this week in Portland. Among the more joyful attendees at this year's event is James Watters, vice president of Product, Marketing and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. How do I know Watters is a happy camper? His latest blog post, in which, among other things, he enthuses about the dramatic uptick in conference sessions on microservices -- 30 this year, up from only one last year, which Pivotal presented.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 22, 20150 comments
Now that the Supreme Court has decided not to review Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., the long-running lawsuit returns to the Federal Circuit Court in San Francisco, where Google will have a chance to argue that its use of 37 Java APIs -- now considered copyrightable becuase of the Supreme Court's pass -- in its Android operating system falls under the doctrine of fair use.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 8, 20150 comments