Chair Says Java Community Process 'Definitely Unstuck'

During the Tuesday morning keynote at last week's JavaOne conference, Rob Benson, director of runtime systems at Twitter, took the stage to announce that his company would be joining both the OpenJDK community and the Java Community Process (JCP). Twitter wants to work with members of the JCP and the OpenJDK Community, Benson said, to help evolve the Java platform.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 12, 20110 comments

Oracle Embraces JavaFX, Plans To Open Source It

JavaFX was something of a darling of JavaOne this week. Oracle not only came through on its promised update of the Java user interface (UI) platform, it delivered additional features, such as a new HTML editor and the new WYSIWYG GUI design tool, Scene Builder, with this release. And JavaFX Script (which still exists as the open source Visage) has been replaced by Java APIs, so Java jocks can use their favorite IDEs to develop, compile and debug JavaFX 2.0 applications.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 6, 20113 comments

User Group President Looking Out for Oracle Developers

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.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 5, 20110 comments

Oracle Embraces NoSQL with its Big Data Appliance

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."

Posted by John K. Waters on October 3, 20110 comments

BSIMM3 Continues To Add Real-World Data to Security Maturity Model

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.

Posted by John K. Waters on September 30, 20110 comments

Dart: Google Won't Comment, Analysts Weigh in on Possible JavaScript Replacement

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.

Posted by John K. Waters on September 15, 20110 comments

Former Apache Exec's New Gig: Function(x)

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."

Posted by John K. Waters on September 9, 20110 comments

The PaaS Wars Heat Up at Dreamforce

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.

Posted by John K. Waters on September 2, 20110 comments

eXo's On-Ramp to VMware Cloud Foundry

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.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 25, 20110 comments