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.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 16, 20115 comments
My inbox is positively billowing with press releases, product announcements and marketing department communiqués about the cloud. A quick keyword search of last week's pile alone turned up 400 electronic missives containing "cloud" and 175 of which contained "cloud application."
Navigating this e-mail thunderhead put me in mind of a conversation I had with David Intersimone earlier this year. Intersimone is vice president of developer relations and chief evangelist for tool maker Embarcadero Technologies. Better known as David I, he worked for more than two decades at Borland, the company that invented the IDE, then CodeGear, the company that emerged from Borland's decision to shed its tools business. I caught up with my favorite programming guru during his latest trip down under to visit the Australia Delphi Users Group (and to get in a bit of scuba diving in).
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 12, 20111 comments
Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) startup CumuLogic has released a public beta of its flagship offering with the same name that offers application infrastructure software for enterprises, cloud provider and ISVs building and managing Java PaaS in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The CumuLogic solution is essentially a platform for developing and deploying Java applications in any type of cloud environment.
The CumuLogic PaaS software is designed to provide support for multiple clouds, which makes it possible to support clouds from different vendors at the same time. It currently supports EC2, Cloud.com, Eucalyptus and VMware. The company also expects to add OpenStack to that list soon.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 10, 20110 comments
Java has the potential to emerge as a dominant language supporting platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and will continue to provide the underlying enterprise runtime for a new generation of dynamic languages -- if history doesn't repeat itself.
So says Red Hat's Mark Little, senior director of engineering in the company's JBoss group. Little has been active in the Java Community Process (JCP) for about six years, the last four of which he's served on the Executive Committee (EC). He's also a visiting professor in the computer science department at Newcastle University in the U.K.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 8, 20111 comments
If you've been watching the Java SE 7 release news, you know about the bug reported by the Apache Lucene community last week. The long-awaited release of a new version of standard Java apparently contains hotspot compiler optimizations that miscompile some loops, which can cause the JVMs in some Apache projects to crash and even result in incorrectly calculated results leading to bugs in some applications.
"It is strongly recommended not to use any hotspot optimization switches in any Java version without extensive testing!" Apache Lucene's warning (here, scroll down to "news" section) concluded.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on August 2, 20110 comments
EnterpriseDB, the commercial distributor and supporter of the open source PostgreSQL object-relational database system, has launched the latest version of its Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The new version (9.0) comes with new support for the HP-UX operating environment and better compatibility with Oracle, among other enhancements.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on July 15, 20110 comments
Adobe recently unveiled an update to its Flash Builder and Flex tools designed to enable developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry's PlayBook tablet. (Support for Android devices was released in April 2011.) As the company put it, Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 give developers "a single platform for building highly expressive mobile applications that can be distributed via the Android Market, Apple App Store, and BlackBerry App World."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 30, 20112 comments
As I reported on Wednesday, the Eclipse Foundation launched its sixth annual Release Train this week. I spoke with the Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, as I have for each release, and we got to talking about this thing that started out as an experiment back in 2006.
The Foundation's first Release Train, code-named "Calisto," comprised 10 projects. It was then the largest ever simultaneous release of multiple open-source projects, and during the run-up no one was absolutely certain the then two-year-old Foundation was going to pull it off. "Herding cats" was a phrase that came to mind at the thought of coordinating so many OSS releases. But they did pull it off, and its success proved to be a significant milestone in the evolution of this community.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 24, 20110 comments
Since 1985, Japan has recognized innovators in science and technology from around the world with its annual Japan Prize. But the ferocious, earthquake-spawned tsunami that struck the island nation in March and the subsequent nuclear crisis put this year's award ceremonies on hold.
That is, until Vint Cerf stepped in.
Google's chief Internet evangelist, co-progenitor of the Internet and the Silicon Valley's dapper-est technologist brought the event to his company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters last month. The Japan Foundation's chairman, Prof. Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, traveled to California to present this year's award in person to Dr. Ken Thompson, a distinguished engineer at Google who co-created the Unix operating system with Dr. Dennis Ritchie, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Emeritus at Bell Labs. Dr. Thompson received his award during a simple ceremony at the Googleplex; a separate event was scheduled for Dr. Ritchie in New Jersey.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on June 20, 20110 comments