The Eclipse Foundation will soon allow the hosting of its projects on social coding sites, such as GitHub and Bitbucket. The idea, says the Foundation's executive director Mike Milinkovich, is to attract new, maturing projects to Eclipse.
"We expect that this will pique the interest of projects that, perhaps, started on GitHub, but have gotten to the point where they're interested in vendor-neutral governance, having infrastructures for following meritocratic processes, and proper intellectual property management," he told ADTmag. "That's not just what GitHub does. I think we're a perfect complement to using GitHub as a repository for your development."
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 25, 20130 comments
Developer tool and platform vendors are kicking the summer off with a slew of product and partnership announcements. In particular, we've been hearing a lot from providers of tools for publishing, promoting and overseeing application programming interfaces (APIs). Here are some API management product notes that wouldn't fit into the main news feed we thought you shouldn't miss:
- Apigee unveiled a new feature for its API platform that should appeal to devs building API-powered apps: push notifications. According to the company, its backend-as-a-service (BaaS) capabilities can now be used to deliver relevant and context-aware notifications directly to customers. "Sharing information directly with a carefully targeted audience has proven to be the most effective way to connect with customers," said Ed Anuff, Apigee's head of product strategy, in a statement. He added that the new feature enables highly focused, context-aware push campaigns. The free, self-service Apigee platform is available as software-as-a-service or on-premises. More information about the new push notifications feature is available here.
- SOA Software has added support for Windows Azure to its API Management solution. The newly released API Management solution for Microsoft is designed to help developers "plan, build, run, and share your APIs on Windows Azure," the company says, both in on-premise environments and hybrids. The API management software integrates natively with the Windows Azure Service Bus, BizTalk Server, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). "SOA Software's approach to API management is to emphasize management across the full lifecycle," the company said in an email. "In our experience, working with large corporations, the best practice is to involve stakeholders and processes fully through the plan/build/run/share phases of an API's life." For more information, visit the API Platform page.
- Enterprise middleware maker WSO2 has released API Manager 1.4, which the company says is the first API manager that can run on a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. The company also claims that it's the first such product to enable federated access to APIs across multiple entities, "enabling new models for organizations to collaborate and monetize APIs." Launched last year, this birth-to-death API governance and analysis tool/platform is the company's bid to "democratize API management" with an affordable piece of software for controlling and managing the API lifecycle.
Posted by John K. Waters on June 14, 20130 comments
Oracle reversed course this week on its earlier decision to cut the popular Time Zone Updater (TZUpdater) tool from the latest version of the Java Development Kit (JDK 7) -- or was that just a slip of the knife? The tool, which allows developers to update the time zone in any version of the JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) without having to update the JDK/JRE itself, was removed from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Web site "as part of maintenance tied to the end of public updates for Oracle JDK 6," wrote Henrik Stahl, senior director of product management in the Java platform group, on the Oracle blog.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 12, 20130 comments
IBM wants to give customers using its System z mainframes the ability to extend their important business applications to the Web, the cloud and mobile environments, the company says. Toward that end, the company has updated its Enterprise COBOL for z/OS compiler to support XML Server and Java 7.
IBM's z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for Big Blue's System z mainframes; Enterprise COBOL for z/OS is the compiler that allows line-of-business COBOL applications to execute on z/OS systems. COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), of course, is one of the oldest high-level programming languages.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 21, 20130 comments
Google announced the release of version 1.1 of its Go programming language two days before its annual I/O conference, which gets underway on Wednesday. The first major update of the open source language since the search engine giant released version 1 just about a year ago focuses on performance-related improvements, including optimization of the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation and parts of the standard library
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 14, 20130 comments
Listening to Mitra Azizirad, GM of Microsoft's Developer Tools Marketing & Sales group, talk about Redmond's plans for its venerable Visual Studio IDE and her long career with the company, I was reminded again why I feel so lucky to be on the tech beat: Almost every day I get to talk with smart people who love what they do.
Azizirad was in San Francisco last week with "Soma" Somasegar, VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, speaking with a group of reporters informally about MS developer tools. (More on that conversation in Visual Studio Magazine.) She started at Microsoft as an architectural engineer based in Washington D.C. back in 1992, which gives her a decades-long perspective on the evolution of the role of the developer in the enterprise.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 10, 20130 comments
JNBridge, maker of tools that connect Java- and .NET-based components and apps, this week released another of its free "labs," a.k.a. interoperability kits for developers looking for new ways of connecting disparate technologies. The latest lab provides a way to build a Microsoft Excel add-in for Hadoop HBase.
HBase is the Java-based, open source, distributed database for Big Data used by Apache Hadoop, the popular open-source platform for data-intensive distributed computing. HBase apps must use Java APIs, which makes it tough to provide cross-platform business intelligence on the desktop. The new JNBridge Lab provides a simple Excel front end to HBase MapReduce that allows developers to view HBase tables and execute MapReduce projects. Google's MapReduce is a programming model for processing and generating large data sets. It supports parallel computations over large data sets on unreliable computer clusters.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 8, 20130 comments
Java is starting to look like a chubby guy in tight Dockers who can't sit down without splitting a seam (and yes, I analogize from experience). A week after Oracle released Java 7, Update 21, which included 42 vulnerability patches, news of a reflection API vulnerability in the newly shipped Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has emerged, as reported by veteran Java bug hunter Adam Gowdiak.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 24, 20132 comments
Two of the biggest players in the OpenStack community and a top Hadoop provider announced plans yesterday to join forces to advance the "Hadoop on OpenStack" project known as Savanna. OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis Inc., the company that started Project Savanna, will be working with Hortonworks Inc., the top commercial distributor of Apache Hadoop, and Red Hat Inc., the current leading OpenStack contributor, the three companies said today.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 17, 20130 comments