The delays are over, the final approvals are in, and the general availability release of the Java Platform, Standard Edition, 8 (Java SE 8) is right around the corner. What has been called a revolutionary upgrade of one of the world's leading software development platforms is due on March 18. Mark Reinhold, chief architect in Oracle's platform group, has described Java SE 8 as the largest ever upgrade in the history of Java, covering the programming model, as well as a "carefully coordinated co-evolution" of the virtual machine, the language, and the libraries.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20140 comments
The long awaited, much anticipated release of Java SE 8 is nearly upon us. March 18th is the official release date, though numerous "launches" and other events will follow. A lot of work went into this release, with contributions coming from many quarters -- including Java User Groups (JUGs) around the world who participated in the Adopt-a-JSR program.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20140 comments
There was a time when enterprise application development teams simple threw their code over the wall to the people charged with the task of localizing it. Those days are fading, of course; software developers in medium to large companies have been generating ever greater percentages of their organizations' revenues outside the West for the past decade. And the pressure to "go global" faster is ever increasing.
Consequently, say the industry watchers at the Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm Common Sense Advisory, it's time for the team responsible for adapting U.S.-made software to other languages and cultures (a process called localization) to join the Agile team.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 7, 20140 comments
I've been covering tech trade shows and user conferences for more than two decades, and last week's RSA conference was the first in my experience to include a comedic keynoter who actually understood the technology and the issues surrounding it. Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," gave the conference closer in San Francisco on Friday to a packed house, and killed.
"RSA developed this conference in 1991 as a forum for cryptographers to gather and talk shop," Colbert said, "and I assume breed with one another. Of course officially that's called exchanging private keys."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 3, 20140 comments
It's been a while since I attended a conference keynote presented by a speaker as apparently pissed off as Nawaf Bitar, senior vice president and general manager at Juniper Networks. His RSA Conference talk, entitled "The Next World War Will be Fought in Silicon Valley," was seasoned with infuriation and rife with get-off-your-butt admonitions.
"Our privacy is being invaded," he said. "Our intellectual property is being stolen. The public trust is at an all-time low. The attack on our information is outrageous. But you know what? I don't think we give a damn. I'm fed up with talking about outrage. It's easy to talk about outrage."
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 26, 20140 comments
It was during a break in the action long ago at the 2004 JavaOne conference that I found myself sitting in the W Hotel restaurant in San Francisco across from an earnest Canadian dude whose name I mispronounced twice during the interview, as he explained how IBM would really (no, really) keep its Big, Blue mitts off its relatively recently open-sourced, Java-based tooling platform, code-named Eclipse.
"They'll be involved, of course," said Mike Milinkovich, the first (and to date, only) Executive Director of the then-spanking-new Eclipse Foundation, "but as a member of the community only, without undue influence. With a little time, we'll prove that. We want people to have confidence in this technology."
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 3, 20140 comments
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The coming year is fraught with challenges for enterprise developers, but it's also full of opportunities, say top industry analysts -- if you keep your eyes on a few key trends.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 28, 20140 comments
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Now that the confetti has settled, I thought it would be a good time to talk with industry mavens about what lies ahead in the coming year for developers, both the challenges and the opportunities.
Not surprisingly, many of the industry watchers I spoke to agreed that machine-to-machine learning (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) offered enormous opportunities for developers to get into the embedded space. "Having the Java people get involved will make it easier for those not familiar with this space," said Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, "but [coding for] real-time systems is a skill and requires some domain expertise. It's not a pure software space, but demand will be huge for the skills."
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 21, 20140 comments