The Hadoop community recently promoted YARN -- the next-gen Hadoop data processing framework -- to the status of "sub-project" of the Apache Hadoop Top Level Project. The promotion puts YARN on the same level as Hadoop Common, the Hadoop Distributed File System, and MapReduce. It had been part of the MapReduce project; the promotion means it'll now get the spotlight and developer attention its proponents believe it deserves.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 15, 20120 comments
This week a California court ordered both Google and Oracle to disclose the identities of any bloggers, commentators or journalists who were paid to write about the companies' courtroom Java battle.
"The Court is concerned that the parties and/or counsel herein may have retained or paid print or internet authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have and/or may publish comments on the issues in this case," wrote Judge William Alsup in a Tuesday filing.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 8, 20120 comments
Looks like we won't be seeing the Java-native module system known as Project Jigsaw in the upcoming Java 8 release. In a blog posted this week, the chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, proposed to defer the project to the Java 9 release. Java 8 is currently on track for a September 2013 ship date. Java 9 is currently expected in 2015.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 19, 20120 comments
Rod Johnson, who wrote the first version of the open-source, Java-based Spring framework, and later co-founded SpringSource, has left his position as SVP and GM of VMware's SpringSource product division. Johnson joined the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization company when it acquired SpringSource in 2009, where he then served as CEO.
In the blog post announcing his departure, Johnson gave no specific reasons for leaving the company, but described that past decade as "a wild and engrossing ride that I could never have imagined when I wrote the first lines of BeanFactory code in my study in London in 2001."
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 10, 20121 comments
The fifth annual Hadoop Summit brought an estimated 2,100 attendees to the Convention Center in downtown San Jose, Calif., last week. The two-day, big-data event was hosted by Yahoo, Hadoop's first large-scale user, and Hortonworks, a leading commercial support-and-services provider.
Among the announcements coming out of this year's summit were updates from the three leading commercial Hadoop distributors. Hortonworks unveiled the first general release of its Apache Hadoop software distro, Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.0, a day before the start of the show. The company bills the open source data management platform as "the next generation enterprise data architecture." Built on Apache Hadoop 1.0, this release includes a bundle of new provisioning, management, and monitoring capabilities built into the core platform. It also comes with an integration of the Talend Open Studio for Big Data tool.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 18, 20120 comments
JNBridge, maker of tools that connect Java and .NET Framework-based components and apps, released a free interoperability kit for developers looking for new ways of connecting disparate technologies on Monday. This second JNBridge Lab demonstrates how to build and use .NET-based MapReducers with Apache Hadoop, the popular Java-based, open-source platform for data-intensive distributed computing.
The company began offering these kits in March. The first JNBridge Lab was an SSH Adapter for BizTalk Server designed to enable the secure access and manipulation of files over the network. This new Lab aims to provide a faster and better way to create heterogeneous Hadoop apps than other current alternatives, the company claims. All of the Labs come with pointers to documentation and links to source code.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 21, 20120 comments
Brian Noyes didn't set out to become a software architect. He started writing code "to stimulate his brain," while he was flying F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft for the U.S. Navy. As his software expertise developed, he found himself "going down a technical track" managing onboard mission computer software in the aircraft, and later, systems and ground support software for mission planning and controlling satellites.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 11, 20120 comments
When the CSLA .NET framework made its first appearance in a book written by its creator, Rockford Lhotka, back in 1998, it was little more than a hunk of sample code -- at least that's how he saw it. But readers of that extremely popular book, VB6 Business Objects, saw it as something more.
"That first implementation was not really a framework per se," Lhotka recalls. "But after I published the book, I would get these e-mails from people who would say, 'Hey, I bought your book and I was using your framework and I wish it did this,' or, 'Your framework has a bug.' Initially I would respond that I don't have a framework. Over time I gave in and decided, hey, maybe I do have a framework."
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 7, 20121 comments
While there's lots of talk (a lot of talk) about big data these days, according to Andrew Brust, Microsoft Regional Director and MVP, there currently is no good, authoritative definition of big data.
"It's still working itself out," Brust says. "Like any product in a good hype cycle, the malleability of the term is being used by people to suit their agendas."
"That's okay," he continues, "There's a definition evolving."
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 10, 20121 comments