Java toolmaker ZeroTurnaround has broadened its "attack campaign against redeploys, the natural enemy of Java developers," says its says CEO David Booth, with the release of JRebel 4.0, the latest version of a JVM plug-in designed to allow developers to make on-the-fly code changes in Java class files.
ZeroTurnaround claims that Java developers spend an average of 10.5 minutes of every coding hour redeploying their apps to see changes. The company bases that claim on its own recent survey of 1,000+ Java EE developers on turnaround time, tools, and application containers in the Java ecosystem. The company's raizon d'etre is to reduce that time, Booth said.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 9, 20110 comments
Miguel de Icaza took time out from his hectic starting-a-company schedule to chat with me this morning about his new Mono venture, Xamarin, which he and other Novell ex-pats are just getting off the ground. He announced the startup in his May 16 blog post, hot on the heels of news that Attachmate Corporation, which acquired Novell in April, had laid off virtually all members of the Mono team.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 20, 20114 comments
"Refactor mercilessly," say the Agilistas -- especially the XPers. Good advice, but the process of changing a program's internal structure to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without altering its external behavior can be challenging and messy.
Enter Headway Software, a Waterford, Ireland-based company on a mission to make refactoring easier and more effective. The company's newly released refactoring tool, Restructure101, is the fulfillment of a vision, the company's CEO, Chris Chedgey, told me in an e-mail, of "nothing less than the manipulation of software files and functions with the same ease that has been available to hardware engineers for decades."
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 19, 20110 comments
Google sure knows how to get the attention of software developers -- 5,000+ of whom nearly blew the roof off San Francisco's Moscone Center West during the opening keynote of the search giant's annual Google I/O Conference on Tuesday when they learned they would each be getting a free Samsung Galaxy tablet.
But getting their attention and winning their hearts and minds are two different things, and the latter is absolutely essential if the company really wants to become a platform player.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 12, 20111 comments
When I heard that Oracle would be proposing the Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation, a few things struck me: 1) Oracle is getting better at dancing back from stepped-on toes in lively open source communities; 2) This is the very move IBM made when it created the Eclipse Foundation; and, 3) What will this move mean for the Jenkins fork?
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 4, 20110 comments
If you haven't been following the evolution of the Jease open-source content management system (CMS), you should. The now two-year-old project was conceived to solve some of the problems developers face when building database-driven Web applications with Java.
Jease (an abbreviation of "Java with Ease") started out as a basic CMS framework with no "system" pretentions. Back in early 2010, project founder Maik Jablonski declared his simple aim to create a framework that makes it easy for Web devs to create custom content structures (FAQs, special Web site content sections). And he built the framework on top of three open source technologies: the db4o object-oriented database, the Apache Lucene information retrieval library, and the ZK Ajax Web application framework. Jease now also supports McObject's Perst OO embedded database.
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Posted on April 28, 20110 comments
Zend Technologies and Rightscale announced this week a jointly-developed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) architecture for PHP developers. The announcement was kind of overshadowed by the big VMware PaaS news, but this is a dynamic duo you should keep an eye on.
Zend, of course, is the Cupertino, Calif.-based creator and commercial maintainer of the PHP dynamic scripting language. Zend is run by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who are key contributors to PHP and the creators of the core PHP scripting engine. RightScale is a Santa Barbara-based provider of an automated, Web-based (and eponymous) cloud management platform.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 21, 20110 comments
VMware has launched an open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product, which my colleague Michael Domingo reported on last week. The Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization vendor is billing its new Cloud Foundry as the industry's first open PaaS offering, a "new generation of application platform, architected specifically for cloud computing environments." Cloud Foundry is available as a cloud service operated by VMware, but also as a downloadable VM called "Micro Cloud." It's still in beta, but the source code for the project is available now on http://cloudfoundry.org/.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 18, 20111 comments
What's the first big-enterprise name that pops into your head when you hear "Java community" these days? Oracle, of course, but also IBM, and lately Apple. How about Red Hat?
Red Hat doesn't always get recognized for its efforts to move Java forward. And frankly, they're kinda tired of going unnoticed.
"We often don't get the credit we're due when it comes to moving Java forward," Rich Sharples, director of product management in Red Hat's Application Platforms group, told me the other day. "Red Hat is a very active contributor to all things Java. We're the largest contributor to the OpenJDK, outside of Oracle itself. And for the last couple of releases -- Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 -- we played it pivotal role in making Java EE a much more accessible and product platform for developers."
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 14, 20110 comments