Spring Hadoop Fits Neatly Under the Spring Data Umbrella 

VMware's recent announcement of an integration of its Spring Framework with Apache Hadoop is aimed at making life easier for enterprise Java developers who want to use the popular open-source platform for data-intensive distributed computing. The new Spring Hadoop is a lightweight framework that combines the capabilities of the Spring framework with Hadoop's ability to allow developers to build applications that scale from one server to thousands and deliver high availability through the software, rather than hardware.

Posted by John K. Waters on March 13, 20120 comments

MIME's Co-Creator Reflects on Past, Discusses a Cloud Future

The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) specification that defines the way multimedia objects are labeled, compounded and encoded for transport over the Internet turns 20 this month. Ned Freed and Nathaniel Borenstein were the two primary authors of the spec. Borenstein, who worked at New Jersey-based Bellcore at the time, sent out the first real MIME message on March 11, 1992. That message included an audio clip of the Telephone Chords, an all-Bellcore barbershop quartet featuring John Lamb, David Braun, Michael Littman and Borenstein, singing about MIME to the tune of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Posted by John K. Waters on March 9, 20120 comments

New Cloud Products Rise at CloudConnect Conference

The annual CloudConnect conference got under way this week in Santa Clara, Calif. There's a great speaker lineup, and lots of vendor news at this year's event. Among the more noteworthy vendor announcements was Nimbula's beta release of its Director 2.0 product. The company expects a general availability release in March.

Posted by John K. Waters on February 14, 20121 comments

Java Community Process To Merge Executive Committees

Back in October at JavaOne, representatives from the Java Community Process (JCP), the group that certifies Java specifications, talked about changes coming to the organization. First on the list was the "low-hanging fruit" of transparency, participation, agility and governance addressed in Java Specification Request (JSR) 348. Since then the community has been, in the words of JCP chair Patrick Curran, "revising the process through the process."

Posted by John K. Waters on February 7, 20120 comments

PHP Devs Want Mac Support; Zend Gives It to Them

If you were wondering whether Mac developers were also facing the pressure to become polyglot programmers so many industry watchers mentioned in their 2012 predictions (like this one and this one), consider the recent announcement from Zend Technologies. The creator and commercial maintainer of PHP announced the general availability of its Web app server, Zend Server 5.6, featuring new support for Macheads.

Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20120 comments

Wal-Mart Backs Node.js for Mobile Apps

The big news at last week's Node Summit was, arguably, Microsoft's full-tilt support of the server-side JavaScript development environment. But it might turn out to be the endorsement of giant retailer Wal-Mart that marks the tipping point in its evolution. Wal-Mart's vice president for mobile engineering, Ben Galbraith, and its VP of mobile architecture, Dion Almaer, told conference attendees how the company is using this relatively new (three-years-old) technology in its mobile applications.

Posted by John K. Waters on January 30, 20120 comments

2012 Dev Predictions: Hello DevOps and Cloud, Goodbye Single-Language Programmers

Scanning the 2012 horizon with Martin Schneider, research manager at 451 Research, it's hard not to feel excited about the coming year. Schneider, who covers core business applications, app platforms, and next-gen data systems for the enterprise IT analyst firm, expects to see an acceleration of a number of trends that have been gaining momentum over the past few years. Chief among them: the rise of DevOps.

Posted by John K. Waters on January 17, 20123 comments

2012 Agile Predictions From an Enterprise Architecture Insider: HTML 5 Matures, REST Finds Its Place, More

Two weeks into 2012 and I'm already getting a sense of what the new year holds in store for enterprise software developers. I don't have a crystal ball, of course, but I've been talking with industry watchers who do -- at least I think that's how they do it. Or is it careful observation of industry trends and rigorous data analysis? How about Tarot cards?

I've been checking in with Jason Bloomberg to get the skinny on SOA and enterprise architecture almost since he and Ron Schmelzer founded ZapThink back in 2000, and more recently on architectural approaches to cloud computing. ZapThink became a division of Dovèl Technologies late last summer, and Bloomberg became the division's president. Schmelzer, who often described himself to me as a serial entrepreneur, is busy with his new company, Bizelo.

Posted by John K. Waters on January 9, 20120 comments

2012 Dev Predictions From a Gartner Analyst: Rise of Ruby, PaaS vs. SaaS, More

There aren't many of us who will be looking back on 2011 with a wistful sigh. But if my conversations with industry watchers this week are any indication, enterprise software developers have a lot to look forward to in 2012 -- and a couple of things to prepare for.

Gartner analyst Eric Knipp shared a few of his firm's beyond-2012 predictions in an e-mail:

• By 2015, at least 20 percent of the Global 2000 organizations will use Ruby in opportunistic application development projects.
• By 2014, 75 percent of the Fortune 1000 will offer public Web APIs.
• Through 2020, attempts to displace browser JavaScript with proprietary client-side Web programming languages will fail.
• Through 2014, 60 percent of the value of PaaS functionality will be delivered and recognized as SaaS revenue.
• By 2015, aPaaS providers that do not offer differentiated SaaS will not be profitable.

Posted by John K. Waters on January 6, 20122 comments