I spent Tuesday morning at the Hilton on JavaOne duty, but I made the long trip back to the Moscone Center after lunch to chat with some Oracle customers. My favorite of the day was Mike Riley, president of the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG). Riley is a big, affable guy with more than 20 years of experience in the field and what you might call a self-conscious passion for Oracle tools and the community that uses them.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 5, 20110 comments
The annual Oracle OpenWorld conference got underway this week, and I was among thousands of attendees swarming into San Francisco's Moscone Center to hear Larry Ellison's keynote opener on Sunday night, and then again this morning for the early a.m. presentations.
So far, it's been kind of a pitchfest on the keynote stage, with Oracle execs flogging existing product lines, announcing some new ones and pounding on its conference theme: "Hardware and Software: Engineered to Work together."
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 3, 20110 comments
The intrepid trio of app security mavens who decided back in 2009 that it was about time the world had a set of best practices for developing and growing an enterprise-wide software security program based on actual data has unveiled the third version of their innovative Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM).
A "maturity model" describes the capability of an organization's processes in a range of areas, from software engineering to personnel management. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a well-known example from software engineering. The BSIMM (pronounced "bee-simm") is the first maturity model for security initiatives created entirely from real-world data.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 30, 20110 comments
Google is keeping mum on its plans to unveil another new programming language at its upcoming GoTo Conference in Denmark next month, but the buzz is already starting to hurt my ears. The language is called "Dart" (formerly "Dash"), and the conference Web site describes it as "a new programming language for structured web programming." Google's PR rep, Lily Lin, gave me a polite brush off in an e-mail, referring me to the opening keynote presentation at GoTo, during which Google engineers Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha will host Dart's debut.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 15, 20110 comments
Geir Magnusson, Jr., the former Apache Software Foundation board member and representative on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, has left his position as CTO of Gilt.com to become CTO of new company launched by entertainment entrepreneur and "American Idol" backer Robert F.X. Sillerman. The company is called Function(x) (pronounced "function ecks," not "function of ecks," you math geeks), and its broadly stated mission is to "establish a new platform for investments in media and entertainment with a particular emphasis on digital and mobile technology."
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 9, 20110 comments
This year's Dreamforce event was ginormous. Salesforce.com took over all three wings of the Moscone Center in San Francisco for a week and even closed down a block of Howard Street to accommodate the wanderings of the 45,000 registered attendees. The entire exhibit area of one wing was set up for CEO Mark Benioff's keynote opener, and they still had overflow traffic going into another room to watch the keynote on monitors.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 2, 20110 comments
Developers deploying Java applications to VMware's new Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) have yet another way to get there. eXo, the French company best known for its GateIn-based enterprise Java portal, has added Cloud Foundry to the growing list of PaaS systems supported by its new Cloud IDE development tool.
The company is billing the eXo Cloud IDE as the industry's only cloud-based integrated development environment. It provides codederos with a multi-tenant, hosted dev space designed to enable the collaborative building of apps based on Java, Groovy, Spring, PHP, Ruby and HTML, among others. And the apps you build with it can be deployed directly to a PaaS environment.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 25, 20110 comments
The advanced primates over at Gorilla Logic have been working those opposable thumbs overtime recently. The results: FlexMonkey 5, a revamped version of the company's flagship open source automated testing tool for Adobe Flex and AIR. The company is calling this release "a major re-write" of the core open source tool that was driven by real-world feedback from the FlexMonkey community and Gorilla Logic's customers.
"We'd evolved the platform tremendously, and with [version] 4.19 we really hit our stride," Gorilla Logic's VP of engineering, Ed Schwarz, told me, "but we also got a lot of feedback about some aspects of it, and we realized that if we were going to take FlexMonkey to the next level, we had to do a bottom-to-top review and come out with a brand new version."
That version, code named "FlexMonkey Reloaded," had been in beta since the beginning of the year. It became the platform's main code base as of August 1.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 24, 20110 comments
There's a lot that's new in Oracle's recent release of the Java Platform Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7), but for Martin Odersky and much of the Scala community, this release is all about its updated concurrency infrastructure -- the new Fork/Join Framework in particular, which was actually part of the JSR-166 concurrent utilities that didn't make it into Java 5 or 6. "This will no doubt further improve the performance of Scala's higher-level parallelism construct," he said in a released statement, "including its parallel collections and actors."
I recently talked with Odersky while he was in Lausanne, Switzerland, where much of the development for his company, Typesafe, takes place. The months-old commercial startup behind the open source Scala project, which Odersky created, and the open source Akka event-driven middleware framework, maintains its official headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 16, 20115 comments