They're not in the headlines much these days, but mainframes are still an enterprise mainstay. And yet, says Gartner analyst Jonah Kowall, managing the software that runs on big iron continues to present one of IT's trickier management challenges.
"As applications mature in order to be delivered on mobile, tablet, and new interfaces, many businesses still rely on tried and true mainframe processing for those transactions," Kowall said in a statement.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 10, 20120 comments
During the first Oracle-sponsored JavaOne conference in 2010, representatives from the Java Community Process (JCP), the group that certifies Java specifications, told attendees that changes were coming to the organization. That first year, JCP chair Patrick Curran said, would be about transparency, participation, agility and governance, all addressed in Java Specification Request (JSR) 348 ("Towards a new version of the Java Community Process"). A year later, Curran and company announced plans to merge the two JCP Executive Committees (ECs) -- the SE/EE EC and the ME EC -- under JSR 355 ("JCP Executive Committee Merge"). That plan was approved in September.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 5, 20120 comments
The annual JavaOne conference started early this year, staging its strategy, partner, and technical keynotes together on Sunday evening at the Mason Auditorium on San Francisco's Nob Hill. (The conference proper is being held at the nearby Hilton Hotel in Union Square through Thursday). The speakers offered a crowded auditorium updates and announcements on a range of Java technologies, from JavaFX to new Java ME-based offerings for embedded systems.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 1, 20120 comments
The annual JavaOne conference gets underway next week in San Francisco with a new keynote venue, seven technical tracks comprising more than 500 sessions and speakers, and a new conference-within-the-conference focused on embedded Java. The nearly week-long event (Sept. 30 - Oct. 4) is being held (mostly) at the Hilton Hotel in Union Square.
One big change at this year's conference: the strategy, partner and technical keynotes are scheduled for Sunday evening (9/30), starting at 4 p.m. And they're being presented at the Mason Auditorium on Nob Hill. Last year they were delivered on Monday morning at the Hilton Ballroom. This is a bigger venue, an Oracle spokesperson told ADTmag, which was needed "to accommodate the ever-growing number of attendees," and the earlier presentations leave more room in the week for technical sessions.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 26, 20120 comments
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicked off his company's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week with eardrum-testing music, high-end customer videos, onstage executive cameos, and a keynote in "social revolution" overdrive. "Business is social!" Benioff declared from a stage set in the center of the packed Moscone auditorium. "It's the fastest growing segment of our industry, with 150 million customer conversations a day!"
"This social revolution is unlike anything we've ever experienced," Benioff said. "Every aspect of our world is changing. That is why this is the most exciting thing that is happening in our industry." He added, "The social revolution is a trust revolution, and the new social front office is where the trust revolution lives."
Amid the full-court-press sales pitch were some significant product announcements. For developers, the big news at this event is probably Force.com Canvas, a set of tools and JavaScript APIs designed to allow them to expose their apps as Canvas apps. More
Posted by John K. Waters on September 20, 20120 comments
It's hard to believe they wrapped up the 9th annual VMworld conference in San Francisco last week. It seems like only yesterday I sat down with Diane Greene, VMware's co-founder, at a LinuxWorld conference to talk about a then largely misunderstood technology that she, her husband, Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum, two graduate students (Edouard Gugnion and Scott Devine) and a friend from Berkeley (Edward Wang) had unearthed from the mainframe midden and re-imagined for x86.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 4, 20120 comments
It would be hard to exaggerate the collective apprehension that seized the Java community when Oracle announced its plans to acquire Sun Microsystems back in 2009, and with it, the stewardship of Java. That acquisition was completed in January 2010, and Java jocks everywhere held their breath.
And then nothing really bad happened.
In fact, if you ask IDC analyst Al Hilwa, Java has fared relatively well in the occasionally clumsy grasp of the database giant in Redwood Shores. In a published report, "Java: Two and a Half Years After the Acquisition," Hilwa argues that the acquisition has been mostly good for Java.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 21, 20120 comments
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