Ready for a shot of "Vitamin V"? If you're one of those Java jocks with no access to a local User Group, that's just the professional supplement you need, say the folks at Zeroturnaround's RebelLabs. The Java toolmaker's research and content organization has launched a new virtual Java User Group (vJUG) that aims to provide "a central online hub of Java-related knowledge, accessible to developers everywhere regardless of location," according to the company.
Although it was officially unveiled Tuesday, this online version of the real-world social component of the Java community already has almost 400 member signups. The vJUG initiative is sponsored by RebelLabs and it was launched by the company's technical evangelist, Simon Maple. "Whether you don't have access to a local Java community, your current JUG isn't active, or you are simply looking to expand your network, vJUG is the modern solution for today's developer," Maple said in a statement. "You can think of us like a supplement for existing JUGs, 'Vitamin V' if you will…."
JUGs have long been a valuable community resource for Java professionals, not to mention a great place for cheap beer and pizza. These volunteer organizations create opportunities to share information and to network with other Java practitioners. Most have some kind of Web presence, of course, and there are virtual groups out there. But the essential purpose of a JUG has been to get people together, in the flesh. (And to drink beer and eat pizza.)
"We're not looking to steal the spotlight [from] local JUGs," Maple said, "which we love. In fact, the opposite: we want to work with JUGs to expand the benefits of membership and give the community more content, ideas and reach."
And yet, in its announcement, RebelLabs sort of damns the status quo with faint praise. To wit: "While traditional Java User Groups act as the main official Oracle/Java-endorsed vehicle for collaboration, conversation, and various opportunities within local developer communities, vJUG provides a central online hub of Java-related knowledge, accessible to developers everywhere regardless of location."
And then there's a comment in the press release that I think is attributed to Oliver White, head of RebelLabs (the punctuation makes that unclear): "Local Java communities benefit most from remaining tight-knit, and we're excited bring support to a community that some say has lost much of its former strength and voice. Through vJUG, we hope to reinforce the global JUG community with more interaction, stronger networks and a louder voice."
The Java community can always use more resources and opportunities for interaction, and if vJUG fills a real need, it should get a big thumbs up. And I get that they're going for a global version of the local organizations, an entity that "aims to close the geographic constraints among Java developers around the world."
I'm not sure, however, about this idea that the existing JUGs are losing their "strength and voice." According to Patrick Curran, chair of the Java Community Process (JCP), the recent success of the Adopt-a-JSR program has been largely due to the efforts of JUGs around the world. In fact, as I reported last month, that program is considered "JUG-lead," and was the brainchild of two user groups: the London Java Community in the U.K. and SouJava in Brazil. Both are voting members of the organization, which gives them a pretty big voice. The list of participating JUGs also includes GoJava (Brazil), Houston JUG (US) and Chennai JUG (China).
Also, it's hard to get excited about virtual beer and pizza.
BTW: The java.net Web site maintains a nice list of JUGs and JUG resources.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 5, 20130 comments
Earlier this month GitHub, the hosted collaboration platform that all but defined "social coding," launched a new portal site designed to encourage governments and public organizations to connect and share best practices. The new government portal is "dedicated to showcasing the amazing efforts of public servants and civic hackers around the globe," the company says.
The new portal was just announced, but we got an early peek when San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee revealed that the city's municipal code would be posted on the GitHub platform on September 30 during the grand opening of GitHub's new South of Market headquarters. Lee used the event to kick off the city's second annual "Innovation Month," which celebrates the burgeoning tech-industry presence in San Francisco. (The festivities officially started on October 11.)
Posting SF's municipal code on GitHub will make it easier to navigate the dense layers of laws and amendments that affect the city's streets, parks, vehicles, building activities, land use, and public safety, Lee said. More access fosters greater understanding, he said. But more to the point, making the code available in "modern, programmer-friendly formats" opens a new, extremely creaky door to innovation.
"One of the things we're doing together is to get data out of the hands of bureaucrats, who just seem to want to sit on it and protect it...to where people can really use it," the mayor said.
GitHub has deep roots in San Francisco. The founders started their enterprise almost six years ago, the story goes, in a bar just a block from their new offices. The company's new digs, a restored dried fruit storage facility that withstood the 1906 earthquake and fire, includes a ground-floor space set aside for tech talks, meetups, and non-GitHub activities. The company hopes the space will foster what CIO Scott Chacon called "the serendipitous interactions that result in companies like ours."
"I don't think GitHub would exist if it weren't for the vibrant tech culture that exists here," Chacon said. "And we wanted to give back to that community."
From those roots a big organization has grown. The company has expanded its staff from an initial handful of employees to 210 today. More than 4 million users are currently collaborating on GitHub on 8 million projects, and the site sees 16 million unique visitors every month, according to the company.
GitHub, has become one of the world's most popular social coding sites. As I've pointed out before in this space, developers love the Git distributed version-control system developed by Linus Torvalds, and GitHub has played no small role in the growth of that popularity. The service has also enjoyed endorsements from the likes of the Eclipse Foundation, which has begun to allow the hosting of its projects on GitHub to attract new and maturing projects.
The company points to a number of existing GitHub projects now incorporated into the new Government portal, including the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada's Web Experience Toolkit, which allows for the creation of a set of shared templates for all government Web sites; and the City of Chicago's invitation to coders to issue pull requests from its Open Data Portal of bike routes, bike racks, pedway routes, street locations, and building footprints.
The new GitHub offices also include what I'm pretty sure is a unique reception area: It's a replica of the Oval Office, but instead of the Seal of the President of the United States, the rug features the company's multi-armed feline mascot/logo, the Octocat.
CEO Tom Preston-Werner explained the design to me at the office ribbon cutting: "Who are you if you're sitting on one of those couches in the real Oval Office? You're someone very important, and that's exactly how we want visitors to GitHub to feel."
I understand that a few industry wags have used this whimsical design as an example of high-tech-company wastefulness. I think it offers a peek into the workings of some creative minds.
Posted on October 21, 20130 comments
When the Java Community Process (JCP) set out four years ago to take advantage of the Oracle acquisition to implement some much needed reforms, the Java standards organization started with what JCP Chair Patrick Curran referred to as the "low-hanging fruit."
That first Java Specification Request, JSR 348, was all about transparency, participation, agility and governance. It was approved without much fuss. A year later, the JCP sought to merge the two JCP Executive Committees (ECs) -- the SE/EE EC and the ME EC -- under JSR 355. That plan was also approved.
By 2012 the JCP was ready to reach a bit higher in this metaphorical fruit tree, into a tricky tangle known as the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA). Issuing JSR 358 ("A major revision of the Java Community Process") around last year's JavaOne, the JCP started the process.
Reworking the JSPA is a much bigger challenge than anything the JCP has done so far in this multi-year makeover, so no one expected the organization to be finished by this year's JavaOne. JCP Chair Patrick Curran was on hand again at this year's event, and he reported that there has been progress, but offered no specifics.
"The JSPA is big, and it's scary," Curran said. "And you have to be careful what you touch. It's just like modifying legacy code. Sometimes you don't know why some language is in there, so you've got to be careful."
The JSPA sets forth the basic legal structure that allows companies and individuals to participate in the development and distribution of specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits (TCKs) within the JCP. The current version was created in 2002 through JSR 99. A lot changed in the decade that followed, and sponsors of JSR 358 argue that it's high time for the JCP "to revise this document to ensure that it meets our current needs."
Part of the reason the JCP is working to reform its sign-up contract is that the organization wants to make it easier for individuals to participate in the community, Curran said.
"They're the ones who are actually doing the work," he said. The JCP wants to attract more individual members, he said, because they produce JSRs that are more likely to fit the real needs of Java developers, and decrease the number of "ivory tower" JSRs.
Toward that end, the JCP launched the "Adopt a JSR" program, which encourages individual members of the community to "adopt" a spec request by following its progress, supporting its expert group, and/or reporting back to the wider community on its progress and evangelizing its benefits.
The primary vehicle for the Adopt-a-JSR program is the Java User Groups (JUGs), which can reach out to their memberships and promote participation. In fact, the program is considered "JUG-lead," and was the brainchild of two user groups: the London Java Community in the UK and SouJava in Brazil, who approached the JCP with the idea. Both are voting members of the organization. The list of participating JUGs also includes GoJava (Brazil), Houston JUG (US), and Chennai JUG (China).
The program has been very successful, Curran said: 11 JSRs have been adopted so far, and 18 JUGs are contributing to the Java EE spec.
"This is one of the best things to happen to the organization," Curran said. "It has added some great energy and real enthusiasm."
Posted by John K. Waters on October 9, 20130 comments
The San Francisco-devouring tandem tech shows, Oracle's OpenWorld and JavaOne, attracted more than 60,000 attendees last week -- and bunch of vendors displaying new and improved tools and toys. Here are a few announcements that caught my attention, though not many headlines, as I scurried back and forth between the two:
Azul and MS Open Tech Launch Zulu
One announcement that did grab some press attention concerned a development in the evolving partnership between Java runtime maker Azul Systems and the Microsoft Open Technologies group (MS Open Tech). The two companies launched Zulu, an OpenJDK build for Windows Azure. The free, open source JDK is integrated with MS Open Tech's Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse Java tooling. It's Java SE 7-compliant, verified using Java SE 7 OpenJDK Community TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit). And it works with Jetty Java and Tomcat servlet containers. The two organizations first announced the collaboration back in July. Azul is best known as the maker of Zing, a 100 percent Java-compatible JVM. MS Open Tech is an independent subsidiary of the software giant focused on open source.
Oracle Partners with Freescale on the IoT
Great attention was paid at this year's events to the Internet of Things (IoT). Arguably, the biggest news to come out of either show in that category was Freescale Semiconductor's announcement of a team-up with Oracle to support Java as the IoT standard. Freescale plans to join the Java Community Process (JCP) and work with Big O to "drive standard technical specifications for the Java platform." The semiconductor maker will focus initially on Java for resource-constrained processing platforms, the company said -- that's things like the low-cost, small geometry microcontrollers that provide the embedded intelligence for IoT-enabled products. Nandini Ramani, vice president of development in Oracle's Java Platform group -- one of the execs who's deeply into embedded systems (pardon the pun) -- said that "Freescale has the expertise and insight necessary to help Java evolve and thrive in the IoT era."
Engine Yard Supports Java
Engine Yard, a provider of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Ruby on Rails, announced new support for Java at the show. The San Francisco-based company founded on the Merb open source framework for Ruby development offers its customers the option of deploying their applications in Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and now Java. The company also revealed that Oracle will become one of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. The company cited recent findings published in the August 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. report entitled "Who Are The Enterprise Cloud Developers?" to support its decision to add Java to its list of supported languages. Forrester researchers concluded that Java is the most popular programming language for corporate app development and for cloud app developers.
CloudBees Provides for the 'Cloud-Extended Enterprise'
Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company CloudBees unveiled a new set of capabilities at this year's show that will support its "cloud-extended enterprise" strategy. As industry buzz phrases go, this one isn't bad. It well characterizes the notion of taking "full advantage of the public cloud to accelerate application development and delivery, while continuing to make use of existing on-premise IT assets in a secure manner." The list of enhancements included a new ability of CloudBees-hosted Jenkins users to connect via a VPN to on-premise development resources (source code repositories, test databases, and other dev artifacts). Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) support for enterprises ID and access management. And a new data migration and sync service called WEAVE@cloud, which has been extended to further simplify the RUN@cloud deployment PaaS.
Tomitribe Supports TomEE
A Santa Monica-based company you might not have heard of, Tomitribe, launched a set of enterprise services for the Apache Foundation's TomEE application server at the show. TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is a lightweight and "nimble" version of Apache Tomcat aimed at the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Web Profile, a subset of Java EE APIs focused on web app development. The Tomitribe website describes the company as "a dedicated Apache TomEE support company." The company was founded in 2013 by TomEE co-creator David Blevins. "Our goal is to help developers build on what they already know and shine on new projects using Apache TomEE," said Tomitribe VP of sales and marketing Theresa Nguyen, in a statement.
Universal SDK Uses 'Build Cloud'
IntraMeta Corp. unveiled "nuvos," a one-and-done universal software development kit (SDK) at the show, along with its associated subscription-based cloud build and test service. The "build cloud" makes it possible to write an app in Java using your favorite development environment with no additional SDKs. The nuvos cloud builds and tests the app for multiple platforms, and you upload a fully native app to popular app stores. The company says nuvos users can leverage pre-integrated connectors to such services as Facebook, Twitter, and Twillio. And they can create their own adapters to existing web services, such as enterprise applications. The promised result of this build-cloud strategy is a system that allows devs to publish to native mobile, native desktop, smart devices, or HTML5 from one codebase.
Terracotta Announces JCache Java Spec
JSRs don't usually spend much time on the front page, but news that JSR-107 has made it through the public review stage should have. This is the spec request for Java Temporary Caching API (JCache), which specifies the semantics for the temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects. Apparently, the JSR languished for years until Terracotta and Oracle began funding it recently. Terracotta is probably best-known for its commercial development of Ehcache, a widely deployed open-source Java caching solution. Terracotta also announced that BigMemory, its flagship in-memory platform will be fully compliant with the spec early next year.
JFrog Snags a Duke's Choice
JFrog earned a second Duke's Choice Award at this year's show for its Bintray social platform for storage and distribution of software libraries. The San Francisco-based maker of the cloud-based Artifactory binary repository manager may be the only software company to snag a Duke's Choice twice. (JFrog won in 2011 for Artifactory.) The company's Bintray is a cool system designed to allow developers to publish, download, store, promote, and share open source software packages. It's billed as a fully self-service platform, which gives developers full control over their published software and how it's distributed. It currently hosts nearly 70,000 software packages, the company said. JFrog Bintray was also named Community Choice winner, an honor bestowed by developer community votes.
The DukePad
The JavaOne technical keynote featured a two-inch thick tablet device based on the credit-card-size, single-board Raspberry Pi computer running Java SE Embedded 8. The interface is powered by JavaFX on top of Oracle's Raspbian (a Debian remix custom built for the device), and apps built for the device are exposed as JavaFX OSGi modules. It's not an actual product yet, but rather a set of free plans. It's not ready for prime time, but Oracle says it's working on pre-made kits. The device isn't exactly pretty, but it is a cool innovation to put in the hands of do-it-yourselfers.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 2, 20130 comments
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison didn't make it to his own keynote at this year's OpenWorld conference. (He was seen hanging out by the San Francisco Bay watching some boats.) But his redoubtable EVP of product development, Thomas Kurian, pitched in to announce a major expansion of the company's cloud services that will include Oracle Database as a Service (DaaS), Oracle Java as a Service and Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Oracle unveiled its first public cloud at last year's conference. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering is an enterprise cloud service designed to run Oracle apps, middleware and database products in a self-service, subscription-based, elastically scalable system. Currently, 21.5 million users of that PaaS complete 19 billion transactions a day across more than 10,000 companies in 180 companies in 34 languages, Kurian said. Oracle also announced a new enterprise social platform last year, which Kurian said is currently used by 900. The company is building on those systems with its new suite of cloud platform services, he said.
"This suite of platform services gives you great agility," he said. "It allows you to have a platform to extend your applications, and you also have a platform that can change the way you use and consume IT resources."
Kurian described the new Oracle DaaS this way: "It's taking the world's best database and making it available in the cloud." Now available as a preview, the DaaS is a dedicated instance of the Oracle DB running on a pre-configured Oracle VM image. The customer will have full administrative control of the database, and the system provides support for any database application, language, and connection method.
Oracle's new Java-as-a-Service offering, also in preview, is a dedicated WebLogic cluster or clusters running on an Oracle VM image. It's designed to provide an environment for developing and deploying Java applications, and the company says it supports any Java app. Oracle provides what it calls "flexible administrative control" of the app server, but also provides automated and simplified patching, backup and recovery, cloning and other lifecycle operations.
Oracle's IaaS is a general purpose compute and storage services designed to support any application and to give users greater flexibility and administrative control. It's an elastic compute service that is compatible with OpenStack Nova and provides virtual CPUs "to which Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder assemblies and Oracle VM templates may be deployed," the company said. It provides elastic block storage in the form of direct attached, network attached, or DBMS-backed storage that is fully persistent and portable between Oracle Cloud services. It also supports object storage for a range of the company's cloud services, and it's compatible with OpenStack Swift to support Java and REST APIs.
"One great thing about our cloud," Kurian said, "[is that] there's nothing proprietary about it," Kurian said. "If you want to extend our applications, you can do it 100 percent in Java. If you don't like Java, you can do it in Ruby. We don't require you to use our programming language or a language that only runs in the Oracle cloud to extent your applications."
Kurian said his company would soon be offering other cloud services, including a Business Intelligence Cloud designed to allow users to analyze data in the Oracle Database Cloud, a Documents Cloud that supports file sharing and collaboration, a Mobile Cloud for building mobile apps, and a Cloud Marketplace "where partners can publish applications and customers can find new solutions."
"It's not that we have more stuff than anybody else," Kurian said. "It's that our stuff is amazingly capable."
Lots of people attending the keynote were not happy about Ellison's absence, and the audience dwindled throughout Kurian's presentation. One attendee who asked not to be identified summed up the negative sentiment: "We spent a lot of money to be here; the least [Ellison] could do is show up." Some news organizations reported the CEO's absence as a "PR disaster." One called the keynote a "snubnote;" another called OpenWorld "SnubWorld."
For those who spend $2,600+ per attendee, not counting travel and hotel expenses, to attend the conference, these are fair criticisms… to a point. With all due respect to the man, Ellison isn't Steve Jobs, so what did attendees really miss? The timing sucked, but Oracle Team USA was thrashing it out with New Zealand that day -- and then they went on to stage one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to win the America's Cup and, as Forbes reporter Daniel Fisher put it, "change sailing forever."
Be honest: Where would you have been?
Posted by John K. Waters on September 26, 20130 comments
I've been saying in this blog for a while now that it's a great time to be a developer, but it's nice to hear that notion echoed from someone like IBM distinguished engineer John Duimovich.
Duimovich, who serves as Big Blue's Java CTO, spoke on Sunday in San Francisco at the annual JavaOne kickoff keynote. IBM is focusing on the developer this year, Duimovich told attendees, by sending 28 "engineers of all ranks" to present 28 talks, and limiting the marketing team to...one. (He had the guy wave from the audience.)
"Our developers are taking over the show for the week," Duimovich said.
Duimovich, who has trod the keynote stage at JavaOne for several years in a row and is IBM's go-to guy on Java, has some specific ideas about why the developer's star is rising. The title of his talk offers a clue: "Java Flies in Blue Skies and Open Clouds."
"This is a great time to be a developer," he said. "You've got languages, frameworks, tools, new things like social coding. These are all things developers need to develop great applications." But even more important, they have the cloud and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which gives developers a way to take their good ideas, pack them up, test them, and deploy them worldwide, sometimes within a day. "This is how cloud is changing the landscape for developers," he added.
He also argued that Java is at the center of this developer ascension, because devs are choosing Java over other languages to deploy to the cloud. They're also choosing JavaScript, he said, which is why there's so much talk about "polyglot" developers. But it's clear to Duimovich that cloud developers are going to be using Java.
After a brief struggle with his slideware, Duimovich offered attendees the results of a Forrsights Developer Survey of enterprise software developers in Q1 2013 to support his claim. Survey respondents answered the question, "How do you allocate the time you spend writing code across the following programming languages?" Java lead among those deploying to the cloud, but with only 17 percent. HTML/CSS/JavaScript came in at 16 percent; C# and C++ at 11 percent; and Visual Basic .NET at 5 percent.
IBM will continue to invest more in Java, he said, as well as JavaScript -- in fact in a range of open technologies, from OpenJDK to OSGi, because they make developers successful. ("Often on our hardware," he admitted, "but successful.)
"These are things that we invest in to make a better stack for developers," he said.
Duimovich offered a big list of open technologies in which IBM currently invests, including two new cloud-based technologies: OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, new ecosystems around the open cloud, which is the next "really big thing that's going to happen for developers."
OpenStack is made up of several interrelated projects focused on delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution. As the community Web site describes it, the project aims to deliver "solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich." More than 180 companies participate in the OpenStack project, including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Intel and Microsoft.
Cloud Foundry is one of the first open PaaS offerings. Earlier this month, IBM announced that it would be contributing its WebSphere Liberty Buildpacks to the platform. Buildpacks, which lie at the core of Cloud Foundry, are the build-time adapters originally introduced by Heroku via Cedar, a general-purpose stack with no native language support. The IBM version started from a fork of the Cloud Foundry Java Buildpack code.
The IBM WebSphere Liberty Buildpack is a lightweight container for Java apps, available now for download. Although it's essentially a servlet container, Duimovich argues that it's more like a Java EE Web Profile. It's integrated with Eclipse tools and it's freely available to developers.
Duimovich also talked about "systems of engagement," a new type of app he described as user-centric and specifically targeted to support user workflow. These apps, which are typically mobile, bridge systems of record, social networks, and big data. And it's the cloud that makes them possible, he said.
IBM began experimenting with systems of engagement in June with BlueMix, an open cloud PaaS based on Cloud Foundry.
And it wouldn't be an IBM presentation without some hardware specs, which Duimovich had in abundance. But it wouldn't be the WatersWorks blog if I wrote about hardware.
Duimovich wrapped his presentation with a challenge to the assembled Java jocks.
"Java isn't done," he said. "Developers rule the world, but you've still got big challenges." Among those challenges: refining the cloud and virtualization; better management of "big everything," from big data to more threads and memory; the critical connection between software and security; and a continued focus on compatibility with a drive toward innovation.
As Duimovich pointed out, IBMers are leading several talks at this year's show. On Monday, IBM Fellow Rod Smith is speaking on cloud computing, and chief architect of IBM's Mobile First Platform group Greg Truty is speaking on the effect of mobile on enterprise developers. Keep an eye out for more.
And if you see Duimovich, tell him what you think of Java. He wants you to.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 23, 20130 comments
Think DevOps is still just a buzzword? The recently published results of a survey of 1,300 senior IT decision makers might change your mind.
Commissioned by CA Technologies and published in the white paper, "TechInsights Report: What Smart Businesses Know about DevOps," the survey suggests that IT execs are taking the DevOps movement quite seriously, investing resources in developing DevOps strategies and seeing "concrete business benefits" from their efforts.
Market researchers at Vanson Bourne concluded that the survey shows tha,t "IT leaders recognize they must change how their organizations work to accelerate time to market, improve software quality, speed application development and meet growing customer demand. It also confirms that two-thirds of IT leaders are deploying new technologies, updating processes and collaborating across IT domains to implement DevOps and achieve these goals."
Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported DevOps strategies already adopted in their organizations, and 27 percent said they plan to adopt such a strategy. Only 18 percent said they had no plans to adopt DevOps.
But they also found that one in six IT decision-makers are actually unfamiliar with the term "DevOps," even though they may be implementing key elements of it. And there appears to be wide disagreement among respondents on how a DevOps strategy should be implemented.
The term "DevOps" found its way into the popular tech lexicon in 2009 and has evolved into an enterprise discipline that addresses the disconnect between what is traditionally considered software development activity and what is traditionally considered technology operations activity. It aims to smooth out the interaction among Dev, Ops, and QA within an enterprise to improve efficiencies and increase productivity.
The survey results strongly suggest that, as the paper's authors declare, "DevOps is real" -- specifically, that it is yielding improved business in the form of increased revenue, faster time-to-market, improved competitive positioning, and enhanced customer experience. Between 17 percent and 23 percent of respondents reported these improvements.
The "spectrum of tools and technologies" respondents reported using in their DevOps implementations included: IT automation (52 percent), agile development (47 percent), collaborative teaming between development and operations (45 percent), and parallel development technologies such as service virtualization (42 percent).
The core driver of current DevOps adoption in the enterprise, the researchers believe, is the need to satisfy customer demands. Respondents reported a range of concerns underlying that driver, including: greater collaboration among IT teams (47 percent); a greater need for simultaneous deployment across different platforms (41 percent); the increasing use of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets (35 percent); an increasingly complex IT infrastructure that is part physical, part virtualized, and part cloud (28 percent); and the need to reduce IT costs (16 percent)
"DevOps is evolving from the theoretical into an essential strategic approach for all businesses," said Shridhar Mittal, general manager of CA Technologies' Application Delivery group, in a statement. The report "paints a clear picture" of what companies can expect to gain by embracing the new strategy and transforming their IT organization."
The market researchers surveyed 1300 IT executives in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector and telecommunications in 21 countries. The respondents held the titles of IT executive, management, project lead, or enterprise architect in companies with revenues of $100 million or more. The survey was conducted between May and July 2013.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 19, 20130 comments
More than 25,000 people have earned certification under the Open Group's TOGAF 9 program, the group reported recently, marking a milestone for what has become a standard framework and method for enterprise architecture (EA).
Andrew Josey, director of standards for The Open Group, announced the milestone in his blog. The number of certifications, he wrote, was evidence of "a huge surge in the popularity of open standards over the last few years." He also credited the recent economic downturn.
"…Since the financial crisis began," he wrote, "open standards have helped by providing a framework that allows Enterprise Architects to save their companies money, maintain and increase profitability and drive business efficiencies. And, on a professional level, certification has helped Enterprise Architects to differentiate themselves, delivering better job security and employment prospects through testing times."
TOGAF, which stands for The Open Group Architecture Framework, is designed to provide organizations with a structured process for governing their implementations of technology, primarily software. It's based on the U.S. Department of Defense Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management (TAFIM), and was developed by a diverse group of member companies, including PG&E, Oracle, Rolls Royce and Microsoft. The first version was released in 1995, and TOGAF 9 was introduced in 2009.
"This framework is a synthesis of stuff that has worked for a lot of people in a lot of different contexts," Leonard Fehskens, the Open Group's vice president of skills and capabilities, told ADTmag in an earlier interview.
The Open Group certifies individuals, service providers, tools, and training around TOGAF. In 2006 about 1,000 people were TOGAF-certified; that number had grown to nearly 9,000 by the start of 2009.
Currently in version 9.1, TOGAF comes with a set of supporting tools, called the TOGAF Resource Base, but at its heart it is a description of a step-by-step approach to the process called the Architecture Development Method (ADM).
The certifications come in two flavors: "TOGAF 9 Foundation," which demonstrates knowledge of the terminology, structure, and basic concepts of TOGAF 9, as well as an understanding of the core principles of EA and the TOGAF standard; and "TOGAF 9 Certified," which validates an ability to analyze and apply the Foundation competencies.
The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on open standards and "global interoperability within and between enterprises." The organization was formed from the merger of the Open Systems Foundation and XOpen in the mid-1990s. The group's initial focus was the development of Unix standards and certification of Unix implementations. Over time, as the members' concerns moved away from Unix as a strategy for multiplatform integration and into the realm of enterprise architecture, the group's activities and focus also shifted.
Posted on September 9, 20130 comments
Need more evidence that it's all about developers? This week Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based cloud company and initiator of the open source OpenStack project, reached out to "developers, hackers, devops people, and makers of the digital age" with a discount program aimed at codederos operating in a marketplace full of choices.
The Developer Discount program, unveiled on Tuesday, offers devs new to Rackspace a $50-per-month discount for the service at sign up. The deal lasts for six months, doesn't rollover month to month and applies to data centers in both the U.S. and the U.K. The deal doesn't apply to the company Cloud Sites Web site hosting service or the Managed Cloud hosting services.
The company made the announcement in a blog post by the company's newish open-source community advocate, Jesse Noller, a long-time Python Programmer (he's a core developer of the language and serves on the Python Software Foundation board).
"The Developer Discount program makes it easy for you to chase something you feel passionate about and simply need a place to build and deploy it," Noller wrote. "Regardless of what you make, or want to make, we celebrate and encourage your creativity. That's why Rackspace is dedicated to making developer lives easier. It's what keeps us passionate about supporting collaborative open source projects and communities."
Yes, there's a lot of marketing slobber in there, but there's no mistaking the dev deference. You can also see it in Noller's personal blog post announcing his move to Rackspace in April, a company he noted offers "fanatical support for developers." His and the company goal, he added, was to "Strive to make Rackspace the place where every developer wants to work; make Rackspace services the ones that every developer wants to use. Work to make Rackspace's Open Source projects the best of breed solutions in their areas (such as OpenStack)."
Rackspace is a recognized leader in the cloud hosting market, but it's facing stiff competition these days, from big players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and a growing list of smaller players, such as developer fav Digital Ocean. (Netcraft analyzes the "meteoric rise" of Digital Ocean on its Web site). And they'll need the hearts and minds of a lot of developers to keep their lead. That the company knows this is evident in the title of Noller's post: "Developer Love: Welcome to the Rackspace Cloud Developer Discount."
In a previous post I covered a panel of in-the-trenches start-up execs discussing the growing power of the developer. Great insights from some thoughtful people.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 6, 20130 comments