Ian Skerrett is probably best known for his role at the Eclipse Foundation as vice president of marketing, but for the past two-plus years he's also been leading the Eclipse effort to foster an open-source community around the Internet of Things (IoT).
"If you look at the Internet today, it's run on open source," Skerrett told me. "Linux, Apache and open standards like HTTP are the building blocks. If we're really going to get an Internet of Things, we need a set of core building blocks that anyone can use to develop commercial or internal solutions."
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 17, 20140 comments
There's a difference between a bug and a flaw, and an impressive group of software security mavens thinks it's time to pay more attention to the latter. To shift some of the industry's focus away from finding implementation bugs and toward identifying common design flaws -- "the Achilles' heel" of security engineering -- the IEEE Computer Society has formed the Center for Secure Design (CSD).
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 2, 20140 comments
There's nothing like seeing the final agenda go up on a Web site to drive home the reality that you're chairing your first technology conference.
Gulp…
Fortunately for me, that agenda -- the one for our first ever App Dev Trends conference coming in December in Las Vegas -- is filled with workshops and sessions led by some of my favorite enterprise software experts, industry mavens, market watchers and serious codederos. I might be as nervous as a nerd at the prom about stepping onstage in my chairing duties (man, that simile brought up some bad memories), but I couldn't be more relaxed about our kick-ass presenter lineup.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 20140 comments
Java toolmaker ZeroTurnaround's software release automation tool, LiveRebel, is a little less live than it was a week ago. The company pulled the plug on the three-year-old sibling of its JRebel JVM plug-in (and newly birthed XRebel Java profiler). Company founder and CEO Jevgeni Kabanov, delivered the news in a blog post, though he says customers were contacted before he posted.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20140 comments
Enterprise developers struggling with the challenges associated with mobile application development may not be settling on a single, one-size-fits-all tool or platform just yet, but they are approaching those challenges more strategically. That, according to IDC analyst Al Hilwa, writing in a recently published report: "Negotiating the Mobile Disruption: Approaches for Multiplatform Application Development."
Hilwa, who is a research director in IDC's Application Development Software group, told me that he's trying to be the voice of reason in this report, offering "concrete, realistic advice to enterprises."
He first states the obvious, that "the central problem in mobile application development is addressing the variety of platforms and devices that employees can bring into the enterprise in a productive and agile manner…"
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 7, 20140 comments
How are shifting consumer behaviors, new digital channels, application standards, and open source trends influencing current approaches to customer-facing software development? That's a big, scary question, but the panel of experts assembled to answer that question during Actuate's iHub F-Type launch in San Jose recently weren't intimidated in the least.
In fact, customer strategist Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar, took issue with the title of the panel -- "Building the Next Big App" -- arguing that the next big app could very well be small.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 28, 20140 comments
Actuate signed on with the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer back in 2004, just a few months after the organization was founded. The South San Francisco-based company proposed the industry's first open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project (BIRT), and a decade later, BIRT is one of the best known open-source initiatives for data-driven development.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 24, 20140 comments
Typesafe this month marked the five-year anniversary of Akka, its open-source run-time toolkit for concurrency and scalability on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Written in Scala and used to build highly scalable, fault-tolerant applications in both Scala and Java, Akka has gained serious traction since Swedish programmer Jonas Bonér pushed out the first public release (v.05) on July 12th, 2009. The company now includes some big names on its Akka user list, including Amazon, BBC, Cisco, Credit Suisse, eBay and more.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 14, 20140 comments
The annual Google I/O developer conference, which wrapped up this week in San Francisco, packed its usual punch with a number of announcements and free stuff for attendees.
We saw the first example of Android Wear software for wearable devices, coming initially in LG's G Watch and Samsung's Gear Live, and later in Motorola's Moto 360. We saw Android TV, which Google will make available to new television sets from vendors like Sony and Sharp.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 27, 20140 comments