Red Hat developer Andrew Haley will assume the role of project lead for OpenJDK 6, the company announced last week, letting Red Hat "continue to help drive the future of Java and of OpenJDK."
Haley is a long-time Java technical lead and member of the OpenJDK governing board.
This announcement isn't headline-grabbing, but this "transition into a leadership role" underscores Red Hat's commitment to Java."We think that Java will continue to be a strong option for developers for a long time to come," Rob Cardwell, vice president of middleware strategy at Red Hat, told ADTmag. "What we're doing with OpenJDK 6 is continuing a trend we started years ago with IcedTea Project."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20131 comments
It's an odd way of setting a high standard, naming your flagship product after one of the last century's most notorious cinematic slackers, but the decision to call their new web application development framework "Ferris" (for Ferris Bueller) made perfect sense to its creators at Cloud Sherpas.
"We're making it easy for developers," explained Cloud Sherpas' Michael Cohn. "And Ferris Bueller was all about easy."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 6, 20130 comments
This year's RSA Conference was chock full of great content. One of my favorite sessions was the chief information security officer (CISO) panel, hosted by Cigital Inc. CTO and build-security-in guru Gary McGraw. Instead of a whip, McGraw wielded a Star Wars lightsaber (a vendor was handing them out on the exhibit floor) to keep four top security execs moving through a series of "driving" questions.
In answering a question about measuring risk, Gary Warzala, CISO at Visa, argued that, although it was certainly important to measure an organization's vulnerabilities and level of compliance, it was just as important to make sure that risk is owned throughout the enterprise.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 5, 20130 comments
The annual crypto-uber-geek, cyber-security trade show, better known as the RSA Conference, gets underway next week in San Francisco. I love this event. The content is broad and deep and sometimes downright scary. Even registering for the thing can be unsettling: never have I had to work so hard to create a password. And you need a personal access code to get on the wireless network at the show. So cool.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 22, 20130 comments
Forget the headline-grabbing revelations of new security flaws, the dogged dissing from Apple and the dire warnings from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Java is the world's most popular programming language. That's according to TIOBE Software's latest Programming Community Index.
TIOBE is a Netherlands-based provider of software quality assessment services based on the ISO/IEC 9126 standard. The company ranks the popularity of software languages based on "the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses, and third-party vendors." The purpose of the Index, the company says, is to provide coders with a kind of contextual yardstick with which to measure their own language skills against current demand.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 13, 20131 comments
A number of insightful industry watchers got back to me right after the holidays with their thoughts on the challenges facing developers in 2013. (Most of them didn't even seem that hung over.) It was just too much wisdom to cram into two blog posts, so we're going with a Part III.
John R. Rymer, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., covers application development and delivery (and writes a killer blog). He agreed with his colleagues that mobile will continue to vex developers, as will the need to learn and employ multiple languages. However, he was surprised (as was I) that the arrival of Windows 8 didn't top more lists.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 6, 20130 comments
Earlier this month Mozilla announced the first developer preview phones specifically designed for its Firefox OS.
The phones -- two of them -- are being developed by a Spanish startup called GeeksPhone in partnership with Spanish telecom Telefónica. Mozilla says the phones will be available sometime in February.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 31, 20130 comments
An Oracle executive has promised to "fix" problems with Java that have left Web sites running the Java plugin vulnerable to malicious hackers and resulted in some high-profile security breaches. Speaking with Java User Group (JUG) leaders during a conference call last week, Oracle's senior product security manager, Milton Smith, said that his company cares about Java security, and has been working on the problem and will continue to do so.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 30, 20132 comments
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Client-side Java has a big, bright bull's eye painted on it, and black hats just can't seem to resist shooting at it. Oracle was relatively quick to response to news of the latest critical vulnerability in Java 7 (revealed last Thursday; fixed by Sunday), but many security mavens have been unwilling to tell users that it's safe to enable Java in their browsers again. It didn't help that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has issued a warning to Average Joe computer users to disable Java.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 16, 20134 comments