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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 6, 20130 comments
NewSQL database startup NuoDB this week released an update of its nascent distributed relational database. Code-named "Starlings," version 1.2 of the database includes support for new drivers, frameworks and SQL functions.
NewSQL is the scalable, high-performance SQL databases that is going head-to-head with NoSQL. It offers full support for SQL queries and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) transactions, built on a key-value storage manager that persists data to the file system.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 7, 20130 comments