It's probably the most popular development tool you've only kinda-sorta heard of. Oracle's Application Express (APEX) rapid Web app development tool has been around for more than a decade in one form or another, and it enjoys enormous popularity within the Oracle community. The latest incarnation, APEX 5, was released last month. The company spent two years and seven months re-engineering the tool, and according to its creator, Michael Hichwa, vice president of Oracle's Software Development group, it was time well spent.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 11, 20150 comments
Things have quieted down quite a bit on the Java security front during the last year or so. Rare these days are the heart-stopping revelations of zero-day vulnerabilities; and fewer are the grumbling editorials about the lack of end-user update hygiene. (Although, as far as I'm concerned, that issue is still quite grumble-worthy.) Oracle's click-to-play feature was at least partly responsible for a 2014 in which there were no major zero-day Java vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in the wild.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 8, 20150 comments
JFrog has joined the ever-expanding Docker ecosystem with new support for the container technology in its Bintray distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. Developers use the popular platform to publish, download, store, promote, and share open source software packages.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 25, 20150 comments
The San Francisco EclipseCon saw some interesting product/project announcements. From the Foundation itself came the milestone releases of two key IoT projects: Paho 1.1 and Mosquitto 1.4. They were actually released ahead of the conference, and I reported on them here. I wanted to highlight some other announcements to come out of the conference.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20150 comments
The Java community is still rolling around in the awesomeness of the long-awaited Java 8 release, with its support for lambda expressions, virtual extension methods and streams, compact profiles, the new the date/time API and so much more (but mostly that stuff). It was the largest-ever upgrade to the programming model, and by some accounts, it has been the most rapidly adopted update in the history of the platform.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 13, 20150 comments
The San Francisco edition of the Eclipse Foundation's user conference, EclipseCon 2015, gets under way next week (March 9-12). I'm looking forward to catching some sessions and keynotes on a range of topics, but I'm particularly intrigued by the foundation's activities around the Internet of Things (IoT). The Eclipse IoT momentum just keeps building. In fact, two open-source projects that are part of that effort, Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto, announced new releases this week.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 6, 20150 comments
During last October's JavaOne conference, I attended the post-keynotes Java panel, where leaders of the various Java organizations within Oracle, along with JCP chairman Patrick Curran, lined up at one end of the press room to answer reporters' questions. It's a traditional part of the event, this panel, and I've been to more than a few of them, so you'd think I would have noticed immediately the dearth of questions about the security of Java, which had kicked off the Q&A for the last few years. But it was Henrik Stahl, vice presidentof product management in Oracle's Platform Group, who observed at the end of the discussion that there had been no security questions at all.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 24, 20150 comments
German Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider Bosch Software Innovations (BSI) is acquiring ProSyst, a Java- and OSGi-based software vendor specializing in middleware for the IoT, the two companies announced this week. BSI, a subsidiary of the Bosch Group, specializes in the development of gateway software and middleware for IoT.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 19, 20150 comments
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare's Juliet asked. Quite a lot, actually. Take it from me: the other John Waters. Another example: service virtualization. The name is so close to the most well-known and widely implemented type of virtualization -- server virtualization -- that it's gumming up the conversation about using virtualization in the pre-production portion of the software development lifecycle.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 9, 20150 comments