'Big Data' Definition Evolving with Technology

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."

Posted by John K. Waters on April 10, 20121 comments

Developers: Gesture and Audio Input Are in Your Future

It may not happen tomorrow, but sooner or later you're going to find yourself writing multitouch, gesture- and audio-input-based applications, Tim Huckaby declared during his day two keynote at the Las Vegas edition of the Visual Studio Live! 2012 developer conference series.

"I'm old enough that I remember when using a mouse was an unnatural act!" Huckaby told a packed auditorium at the Mirage hotel on Wednesday. "Now it's second nature. I'd argue that some of this voice- and gesture-capable stuff will be just as natural in a few short years."

Huckaby's keynote focused on human interactions with computers in non-traditional "natural-type" ways -- sometimes referred to as the Natural User Interface, or NUI -- and how it will impact the lives of .NET developers. More

Posted by John K. Waters on March 29, 20120 comments

New AppDev Alliance Launches: The App Economy's 'Connective Tissue'

Last month, the CEO network at Technet.org published a study, titled "Where the Jobs Are: The App Economy," that puts the number of jobs generated in the U.S. by the so-called app economy in the last four years somewhere near the half million mark. The organization, which bills itself as a bipartisan political network of senior executives focused on promoting the growth of "technology-led innovation," concluded the following: "The incredibly rapid rise of smartphones, tablets and social media, and the applications -- 'apps' -- that run on them, is perhaps the biggest economic and technological phenomenon today."

Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20120 comments

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