Enterprise interest in Big Data and associated analytics software has sparked intense interest in Apache Hadoop, the open source framework for running applications on large data clusters built on commodity hardware, and something of a flood of tools for developers working with it. But as an applications market emerges in this space, the next Big Thing for Big Data is likely to be app-oriented middleware.
That's an insight Tony Baer, principal analyst at Ovum, shared with me when I talked with him recently about Continuuity's recent Reactor 2.0 release, which the Java toolmaker billed as the first scale-out application server for Apache Hadoop.
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Posted by John K. Waters on December 4, 20130 comments
The annual Dreamforce conference finally reached street-blocking proportions this year, with a reported 120,000 attendees registering for Salesforce.com's biggest event, winding down this week at San Francisco's Moscone Center. (I remember when it barely took up an auditorium and a hotel hallway.) Attendance-wise, the 2013 edition of the event crushed this year's Oracle OpenWorld, which drew an estimated 60,000 to the same venue in September -- if those numbers are accurate. City officials are dubious, because the conference center can only hold about 60K. And yet, the Salesforce event sprawled beyond Moscone into nearby hotels, including the Palace on Market Street and the Intercontinental at Fifth and Howard. And a bunch of people attended online.
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 21, 20130 comments
Oracle wants to make it easier for Java developers to leverage the combined power of CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and digital signal processors (DSPs) -- so-called heterogeneous computing -- and the database giant has thrown in with other organizations in an industry consortium to do it.
Oracle was among several industry leaders to announce plans to join the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation (HSAF) at this year's 2013 AMD Developer Summit. The not-for-profit consortium of system-on-a-chip vendors, OEMs, academics, ISVs and others is developing royalty-free specifications for system architectures that combine different kinds of processors. The foundation's goal is to make it easier to write code for these multi-breed systems, and to grow a heterogeneous compute ecosystem based on an industry standard.
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 20, 20130 comments
How do enterprise developers extend their corporate apps to the ever expanding universe of mobile devices with the least amount of pain? Visual dev tool maker Sencha made the argument this week for the less-coding-is-more approach provided by Sencha Architect, the latest version of which the company just released.
Sencha Architect is a visual app builder designed to allow developers to create applications using the Redwood City, Calif.-company's enterprise-class frameworks: Sencha Touch, which is an HTML5 framework for building mobile applications, and Ext JS, which is a JavaScript framework for business-grade Web app development.
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Posted by John K. Waters on November 14, 20130 comments
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.
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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.
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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