Red Hat launched JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 last week, which gave me an excuse to chat with Pierre Fricke. The director of the company's JBoss division's product line is always a great, nuts-and-bolts interview.
"If I had to summarize this announcement in one line, I'd say, 'Turn the data you have into the information you need,'" Fricke said, beating me to my opening question. (I guess the marketing guys eventually get to everybody.)
The big news in this release is a superset of the SOA platform: the JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform (5.1). This an open source data virtualization and integration platform that includes some tools for creating data services out of multiple data stores with different formats. It also allows you to present information to applications and business processes in an easy-to-use service.
"Data integration and utilization of data has sort of been an orphan in the SOA discussion over the last decade," Fricke said. "But it's become a real hot topic in the last year or two. This basically brings this whole notion of data virtualization and integration into the data services platform."
Virtually all organizations have many data sets in many different formats. An org could have information on one customer, for example, in the CRM app data stores, in financial data bases, and customer support flat files. So it become difficult to establish a whole view of that customer, and if you hard code to all those data sources, management down the road is a bit of a nightmare.
Enter the Data Services Platform, which is an extension of what is effectively Red Hat's next-gen ESB.
"This is how we've solved this problem," Fricke says. "The Data Services Platform comes with tools in JBoss Developer Studio that enable you to create a virtualized view of the data you need in the specific application, or business processes, or set of applications. And you're drawing from your existing data sources, so you can leave the data in place; you don't have to make replicated copies and create data marts and all that kind of stuff, which is very expensive. You just leave the data in place and do rewrite transactionally, maintaining the integrity of the data and everything -- through the Data Services Platform -- leveraging that data in an SOA, business processes, and applications through the data virtualization engine."
The 5.1 version of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform itself comes with an Apache CXF Web services stack; the latest version of the JBoss Developer Studio IDE (4.0), which includes updated SOA tooling for ESB and data virtualization; a technology preview of WS-BPEL; a technology preview of Apache Camel Gateway; and updated certifications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows 2008, IBM, and JDK, among others.
The two technology previews are interesting. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) is a standard executable language from OASIS that's used for specifying interactions with Web services, both executable and abstract processes.
Apache Camel is a popular enterprise integration pattern framework. The open source framework is based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. (A must read.)
"BPEL is a standards-based service-orchestration engine and set of editor tools that help to automate a process flow," Fricke says. "The Camel Gateway brings Apache Camel to our enterprise customers. It's a very popular integration framework that makes integration development easy by providing patterns and adapters to start from. Both of these technology previews extend the ESB. "We're providing an early view of the code, which people can take a look at, use in development, to attract early adopters to give us feedback."
The Apache CXF Web services stack is also kind of a big deal in this release, Fricke pointed out. The stack has attracted a popular community and enjoys broad support. Red Hat has joined that community, too.
"You could say that our whole Web services story has become very simple," Fricke added. "It's simple to leverage Web services within the ESB. Anyone that struggles with leveraging the data they have, and faces a bunch of custom work to make the data fit their application, this is the tool for them."
Posted by John K. Waters on March 15, 20110 comments
Application security expert and Cigital CTO Dr. Gary McGraw is off to Europe this week to spread the gospel of the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). McGraw will be on the continent for a week, mostly in Germany and Switzerland.
McGraw is scheduled to speak to company developers during SAP's Quality Day today, in Mannheim, Germany. On March 16, he's off to Geneva to talk with the IT pros at CERN, and then to talk about how to start and evolve software security initiatives at the Cigital Europe Roundtable discussion. He'll also spend some time at Siemens, which is apparently taking a hard look at its security posture since Stuxnet, the first known malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, struck last summer.
McGraw has written a bunch of must-read books on application security, including the classic (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) Software Security: Building Security In. He's also created the BSIMM with Sammy Migues, director of the Knowledge Management group at Cigital, and Dr. Brian Chess, chief scientist at HP's Fortify Software division. (HP acquired Fortify last year.)
I caught McGraw between planes last week to ask him about his trip and what we might expect in the next BSIMM release. (Think hard before you give your cell phone number.)
"We haven't really announced BSIMM3 yet, but there are two things of note coming," he said. "First, some large firms that have lots of business units internally asked us to do multiple BSIMM measurements and then come up with a roll-up score. That's a way for the CIO or central services to compare apples to apples when business units diverse. Second, we've done ten re-measurements of firms that have been involved in the BSIMM for a couple of years. The results are incredibly cool, but you'll have to wait for the summer to hear about them."
The BSIMM (pronounced "bee-simm") is the first maturity model for security initiatives created entirely from real-world data -- which is just the right approach for C-level execs.
"You have to speak to enterprises in the language they understand," observes Gartner Fellow Joseph Feiman. "Processes and methodologies are things that CIOs and department managers know. The BSIMM provides this maturity model, which would be accepted by those not on the security team. It's a very good idea, and an important first step."
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 maturity model in software engineering.
The BSIMM is based on in-depth interviews with thirty well-known companies considered to have implemented the most successful software security initiatives in the world. They include among others, Microsoft, Adobe, Bank of America and Google. The organizations span seven verticals: financial services, independent software vendors, technology firms, healthcare, insurance, energy and media. The BSIMM researchers collected a range of data on each organization's software security activities, including things like strategy and metrics, standards and requirements, security testing, code review and training.
"Our goal was to build an empirical model for software security based on real, observed practices," McGraw told me when the BSIMM was first published in 2009. "We believe that the time has come to put away the bug-parade boogey man, the top-twenty-five tea leaves, the black-box Web-app goat sacrifice, and the occult reading of pen-testing entrails. This is an entirely data-driven model. If we didn't observe an activity, it didn't get into the model."
BTW: You can see Gary playing kick-ass jazz fiddle at a BSIMM mixer during the recent RSA Conference here. (I'm also a fan of his columns on informIT.)
Posted by John K. Waters on March 14, 20110 comments
The JRuby community announced this week the release of the JRuby 1.6.0 RC3 -- and promised that this third release candidate would be the last.
"We are going to seriously try and make this our last RC before going final," the company wrote in the JRuby blog announcing the release. "Unless we find something devastatingly bad we will release 1.6.0 and then try and spin smaller point builds every 2-3 weeks to address reported problems."
This release candidate of the 100 percent Java implementation of the Ruby programming language is mostly about an unexpected inflow bug reports, Thomas Enebo and Nick Sieger told me this morning.
"One of the major themes of JRuby 1.6 is adding solid Ruby 1.9 support," Enebo said. "In JRuby you can run in either Ruby 1.8 mode or Ruby 1.9 mode. We got a surprising number of bug reports on our 1.9 support, so we decided to sort of re-circled the wagons and address those reports and make 1.9 support really solid."
Enebo and Sieger, of course, are two of the core JRuby contributors; the other one is Charles Nutter. They all work at Engine Yard, the primary commercial supporter of JRuby, which snatched them up in back in July 2009. Their move to Engine Yard "means we've got a dedicated Ruby and Rails company backing our project," Nutter wrote in his blog said at the time.
"Another surprise for us was how many people are testing 1.9 features," Sieger said. "Since there's no formal specification of the Ruby language, I think it takes lots of developers trying it out on their own."
JRuby 1.6 also makes Windows a primary supported platform with the addition of a continuous integration platform.
"We're now dog-fooding on Windows several days a week," Enebo said, "and we think that it's a decent OS for JRuby use now -- even to the point where we've begun implementing Windows-specific libraries."
This JRuby release is the biggest one to date, Sieger said, and this release candidate involved more than 2,000 commits and resolves 265 issues.
"Committers are definitely the life blood of the project," Enebo said.
The list of what the JRuby teams calls "notable changes" since RC2 include:
•New readable backtrace format
•Easier to embed in OSGi environment
•Fixed regression which slowed down jar-based requires
•Add native JFFI bits for x86_64 SunOS (Solaris)
•More platforms with pre-built C extension support
•New jruby-core and jruby-stdlib maven artifacts
•More 1.9 compatibility fixes
Enebo and Sieger said they expect the final release of JRuby 1.6 next Tuesday (March 14). Only three problems that might have kept the release from going final have been reported since RC3 was released, they said, and they plan to put out point releases every two to three weeks for the foreseeable future.
"We could really go GA right now," Enebo said, "but we're giving it a couple more days."
Posted by John K. Waters on March 11, 20110 comments
I try not to let my fanboy tendencies leak into my coverage of tools and tech, but I have to admit to a fondness for JetBrains, the Prague-based maker of the venerable code-centric Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, one of the relatively few such tools to survive the Eclipse Juggernaut. (I've referred to the advent of Eclipse that way so often I thought it was time I capitalized the moniker.)
It's hard not to root for the scrappy survivor, and the company was scrappier than ever last month when Oracle announced that it would be dropping support for Ruby on Rails in the NetBeans IDE. The company tweeted: "We welcome all NetBeans users to start evaluating RubyMine as your new Ruby/Rails IDE! Expect some great news very soon on our pricing page!"
See? Scrappy.
JetBrains was probably the first dev tool maker to support Rails 3.0, which it did via its RubyMine IDE. Like IntelliJ, RubyMine is known for its intelligent refactoring and code analysis capabilities. When I talked with the company late last year, the product's lead developer, Dennis Ushakov, said, "We are doing our best to keep RubyMine on the cutting edge, which is a must with a technology as dynamic as Ruby on Rails."
In addition to IntelliJ IDEA and the RubyMine IDE for Ruby on Rails, the company makes a Python tool (PyCharm); a PHP tool (PhpStorm); and a tool for JavaScript, HTML and CSS (WebStorm).
We reported last week on the company's release of version 10.5 of the IntelliJ IDEA tool, but I wanted to make sure we also mentioned the February 14 release of PhpStorm 2.0.
PhpStorm was one of the first smart IDEs for PHP development. It gave users of the popular dynamic language some features they hadn't seen before in a tool designed just for them, including automated refactoring, deep code analysis, on-the-fly error checking, and quick-fixes. Version 2.0 of the IDE focuses on more intelligence, better code quality assurance, and support for the latest PHP trends. It adds support for PHP 5.3 namespaces and closures, ECMAScript 5, and LESS and SASS extensions for CSS.
It also aims to improve the environment itself, as the company says, "making debugging easier with a zero-configuration debugger, extending its code analysis capabilities to provide more code inspections and quick-fixes, reworking the UI, and simplifying working with issue trackers and version control systems right out of the IDE."
The company unveiled its newest tools during a celebration of new offices in Munich, Germany. Snapshots and status updates are available on the company's Facebook page.
More info about PhpStorm and a 30-day evaluation version are available on the company Web site. But also check out the "WebStorm & PhpStorm Blog" for tips and news about these tools.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 28, 20111 comments
Whenever I talk with a company on a mission, my Spidey Sense starts tingling (or maybe that's just my iPhone on vibrate). But here's the thing about Talend's quest to "democratize the ESB market:" It may be a marketing slogan, but it's one that clarifies, and that's depressingly rare.
"What we mean by democratization," said Pat Walsh, VP of marketing in Talend's new Application Integration Division, "is not only the attractive economics that open source products provide to our customers, but it's also about accessibility to users. Oftentimes these types of products can be complex and difficult to use, and we -- along with the open source community -- are making them easier to use."
The Los Altos, Calif.-based company has earned a reputation as a provider of affordable data management products for the little guy, thanks largely to its open source approach. This week the company added to that reputation with the launch of a production-ready version of the open source Apache Camel project. The new Talend Integration Factory uses Camel patterns to make message-based system integration easier to implement and more scalable.
Apache Camel is the open source, Java-based integration framework based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. (A must read.)
"Camel takes the concept and provides a vocabulary for application integration developers," Walsh told me, "so that they can take what are fairly complex implementations of integration and have a common language and set of templates that allow them to be more productive as they use tools and build out their integration solutions and projects. We've incorporated that into the Talend Integration Factory."
This is the second in a set of product releases stemming from the company's acquisition last year of Sopera, a spin-off from Deutsche Post that developed software and solutions for the SOA/ESB market, also from open source. The first was the Talend Service Factory, a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF, launched in December 2010.
A list of product features is available on the company's website, but a few are worth underscoring:
- This release comes pre-configured in a single installable package, ready to deploy in such environments as OSGi, Apache Tomcat, JEE servers and standalone JVM.
- Its component-based architecture supports a broad set of protocols (http, https, ftp, xmpp rss, and more), data formats (EDI, JSON, CSV, HL7), and languages (JS, Python, Scala).
- And my favorite: It comes with documented examples "based on real-world experience implementing integration solutions."
The Talend Integration Factory is available now. The Community Edition is available under the Apache Public License v2 can be downloaded for freesies here. It's also integrated with Talend’s Data Integration products.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 16, 20110 comments
On Tuesday, a bit more than a year after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, and with it the stewardship of Java, the database giant invited the public to a webcast that promised to provide a "state of the union address" on Java under Oracle's watch. But the company's fireside chat failed to address the hottest topics sparked during its first 12 months in that role.
During the webcast, dubbed "Java and Oracle, One Year Later," Justine Kestelyn, director of the Oracle Technology Network, tossed softball questions to Ajay Patel, vice president of product development for Oracle's application grid products group.
Patel emphasized that Oracle's goal is to drive Java adoption, make the platform more competitive, make it more relevant and make it more modular. "Things got stalled over the past couple of years," he said. They "came to a grinding halt… The community has been waiting to move the platform forward." The OpenJDK is the perfect way to do that, he insisted
Patel also talked about the decision to appoint Bruno F. Souza, former president of Brazilian Java user group, SouJava, to the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process. User groups are the "heart and soul" of the Java community, Patel declared, adding, "This is a community drive effort, not just an Oracle driven effort."
"The Java community has many hearts and souls, of course," observed Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk. "But if you were to pick one [type of] community, it'd be hard to go wrong with user groups. Java user groups may not be as powerful as they used to, at least in the U.S., but they're still a significant part of the community. The proof? User groups are pretty much volunteer-led. For some there are incentives to get involved -- free stuff, networking, fame, etc. -- but you can look at the participation as driven mostly by the user group members passion."
But there was no mention of the reason for the vacancy Souza is filling: namely, the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) decision to quit the JCP EC in December. The non-profit organization behind more than 100 open-source projects had been threatening to leave the organization for some time. When the JCP executive committee voted to approve Java SE 7, which the ASF opposed, the group walked.
Nor was there any discussion of the dispute that lead to the ASF's decision: Oracle's refusal to provide the ASF with a test compatibility kit (TCK) license for its own Java SE implementation, Project Harmony. Without the TCK, Harmony cannot be tested and certified against the Java standard.
Of the Web cast, Mark Driver, research director at the Gartner Group, said: "This was essentially a little cheerleading session...We learned nothing we didn't already know, and they managed to avoid talking about the elephants standing right next to them."
Driver found Patel's comment that Oracle will "drive the pace of innovation" in the Java community telling: "You can't do that and have an open community," he said. "I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. When you have a stalemate, nothing gets done. At some point, if you can't come to a compromise, someone has got to lose. But you can't then maintain that it's just as open as it was before. It's just not."
"To the traditional enterprise audience, that message is going to be just fine," Driver added. "There are an awful lot of customers out there, worldwide, who have invested billions of dollars in Java technology. All they really care about is running their businesses. And that's the traditional Oracle customer. That's who they listen to, and what their business is built on."
To an audience question about how Oracle is planning to fill the other open seats on the JCP, Patel said that the company was interested in adding "an end-user perspective." He said that Oracle had talked to large banks and telcos about joining the JCP EC. "We want to find someone who represents a user..." he said. "We want to mix it up a little bit..." and "bring the customers in."
"That makes perfect sense if you want to promote the use of established 'users,'" said Coté. "Big enterprises certainly use Java and depend on many existing applications (off the shelf and custom) that are built on Java. I'd suggest that Oracle probably knows how much revenue is generated by such big customers and, thus, how important they are to the financial side of the Java world. It's actually a good idea to give big spending users like that a seat at the table."
But the community also needs the important innovations from members with "shallow pockets," Coté added.
"So called 'community' people like to complain about moneyed interests invading the community, as big banks and telcos aren't part of that community. But I think what they're really worried about is… money talking instead of useful, innovative ideas winning out, no matter how expensively dressed those ideas are. As long as board members' decisions make sure to (a.) keep existing Java applications stable and working, and, (b.) advance the platform with new innovations as fast as possible, they'll be doing a good job. That's how I'd rate any member, threadbare or sartorially sophisticated."
Patel also made no mention ofOracle's lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements when it comes to Android. But he did spend a lot of time talking about the Glassfish app server, which Oracle now sees as the reference implementation for Java EE. He said that the company had seen increased downloads of both Glassfish and the NetBeans IDE.
And apparently lots of people have been calling for a separate JavaOne conference. Patel said that it was "the number one conversation in the [Oracle] executive offices."
"People want one marque JavaOne event," he said, "like the one in SF."
"JavaOne used to be the event for Java developers," Coté said, "and a significant one for the development world in general. Folding it into Oracle OpenWorld sends the wrong signal (Oracle is more important than Java: it wasn't SunOne) and probably makes some Java people not want to attend. The Java world is much bigger than the Oracle world and it definitely deserves its own conference, if only in name."
Posted by John K. Waters on February 15, 20110 comments
The recently published report from Forrester Research on the future of Java under Oracle is getting a lot of attention, as well it should. (We covered it in "Future of Java 'Constrained by Oracle's Business Model,' Analysts Say." But another new Forrester report not in the spotlight shouldn't go unnoticed.
In "WebSphere 7 Reaffirms IBM's Java Platform Lead," Forrester analyst John R. Rymer (who co-authored the aforementioned paper) declares, "With the seventh generation of its WebSphere software, IBM redefines the state of the art in Java platforms."
A strong statement, but Rymer backs it up. He observes that WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 7 was "years in the making" as IBM worked out the kinks in the app server specs, and then integrated the app server into WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Commerce and other high-level platforms.
The result, he says, is a WebSphere 7 product family that provides developers with "new ways to optimize their application architectures; more development frameworks; automatic transactional reliability; simpler configuration and management; and improved stack integration for BPM, portal, and eCommerce projects."
Big Blue has set its core app server on a path to become a Java transaction monitor, Rymer notes, adding "WAS's reliability features now provide a foundation for highly reliable Java distributed systems, just as IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS) did for an earlier technology generation."
For development organizations that are struggling with scale, complexity and high performance in their Java applications, Rymer says, WebSphere 7 "may offer both relief and a simpler, easier-to-manage stack."
The report, which includes contributions from Forrester analysts Mike Gualtieri, Jeffrey S. Hammond, Mike Gilpin, and Alissa Anderson, is available here but it isn't free. Fortunately, Rymer offers a useful summary of his conclusions on his blog. And that's a freebie.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20110 comments
Cisco Systems says Java vulnerabilities are now exploited more often than holes in Adobe's Acrobat and Reader applications.
The networking giant's 2010 Annual Security Report states that in January 2010, Java exploits accounted for only 1.5 percent of Web malware blocked by the company's ScanSafe software. By November, that number had jumped to 7 percent, Cisco says. Meanwhile, PDF exploits were declining. In January, they totaled just over 6 percent of Web malware blocked by ScanSafe, and by November that number had dropped to just 2 percent.
Java, Adobe's Reader and Acrobat, and Flash were the most common attack targets during the first half of 2010, the report found.
Why do the black hats have a new favorite target? One possibility, Cisco suggests, is the increased availability of public Java exploit code and the decreased availability of public Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat exploits. Also, end users are beginning to favor alternative PDF readers, and those who still prefer Adobe's software are tending to disable JavaScript and Flash. Consequently, PDF exploits simply aren't succeeding as often.
"Online criminals pay close attention to the success and failure rates of their exploits," the report states. "As of late 2010, it became clear that they feel Java is a gold mine."
Flaws in Java have made it "a promising target for criminals," the report states. The Blackhole, Crimepack, and Eleonore exploit software packages, for example, make heavy use of Java. All three are available for sale.
On of Java's strengths -- its multiplatform interoperability -- is also a weakness. It makes it easier for scammers to distribute malware across several platforms and devices (including mobile gear) running Java. And because Java works in the background, users tend not to keep track of necessary security updates. It's easy enough for criminal hackers to configure malware to check for older versions of Java during exploits.
"Cybercriminals aim their campaigns at software programs, devices and operating systems where they can reach the widest net of potential victims," the report states. "...At this point, Java appears to be the greater threat."
I would love to hear from Java jocks on this report. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20111 comments
I wrapped up the working side of 2010 by catching up with one of my favorite software development gurus, David Intersimone, best known as "David I." He calls himself a "code junkie'; I'd call him a programmer's programmer. 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; and he's now Vice President of developer relations and Chief Evangelist at Embarcadero Technologies.
We talked about a lot of stuff, including how he manages to get a seal on his scuba mask over that Dumbledore beard of his. But we eventually hunkered down on a topic that has been occupying him lately: developing for the cloud.
"I think we've made it through all these overloaded terms like software-as-a-service and mashups," Intersimone told me. "Now we're at the point where we can say, we've got clients and we've got servers, and in between them there are protocols and APIs. That's the real world."
The cloud is more a less a manifestation of that real world, he said, and it's improving the lives of developers by allowing them to employ the standards and the architectures they use when building desktop client-server multitier applications with the added ability to deploy very rich clients "all over the place."
"It's so easy now to configure and provision an instance of a server, inside or outside the firewall," he said, "and then build all sorts of clients, including a simple HTML/JavaScript browser client, or a simple client built with Xcode and REST connectivity for the iPad or the iPhone, or with simple Java for Blackberry and Android, or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7."
Because developers can use the tools and tricks they've already mastered when developing for the cloud, they don't have to create something completely different to service all these platforms. It's a Linux or Windows executable, or it's a REST server, or a SOAP server.
"I'm a developer," he said. "I want to build applications. I don't want to force everything into being a browser container -- unless my app wants to have a browser container inside the application. If I can do that, I can get anywhere. I can build a browser client. Or I can deliver a nice executable that has an affinity for the way an iPhone works, an iPad works, or a Blackberry device works."
Intersimone has a nice example online that he points to during his travels. It's a Web site called "Fish Facts" He built a DataSnap server in Delphi that serves up native code, REST code, and PHP. (Intersimone is a certified, Open Water II SCUBA diver, which I guess explains the fish.)
"All you need to do is to give the connectivity library for REST and the JSON parsing view with the packets encrypting them, and you can build clients in anything," he said. "There's a REST library for anything and a JASON parser library for every kind of device that I know of. So you put all your logic elsewhere."
DataSnap, of course, is Embarcadero's software for RAD development of multi-tier database apps for the Win32 environment. Devs can use Delphi or C++ Builder to create Data Broker/Client applications with TCP/IP, DCOM, HTTP or SOAP transport protocols.
Intersimone's advice for developers in this increasingly cloudy world?
"Keep doing what you're doing, but keep an eye out for ways you can house your functionality in these reusable server objects, rather than rewriting them completely," he said. "Then look at the protocols of the Internet and start thinking about how you can build clients that can talk to all that infrastructure."
Also, pay attention to existing and emerging privacy policies -- especially in Europe. Privacy is going to be one of the big issues for developers going forward, he said. Keep in mind what you have to do to scale properly in the cloud. And don't believe anyone with a write-one-run-anywhere pitch.
"Today it's all about connectivity, about building native applications and sticking them on a server somewhere, and then connecting to them via whatever protocols you want from any device," he said.
Code Gear, the company that first took over Borland's IDE business, including JBuilder, Developer Studio and a reinvented version of the Turbo line, was acquired by Embarcadero in 2008, but most of the crew that formed that entity are still there, Intersimone said. Their offices have been moved from the venerable Borland campus in Scotts Valley -- one of the first Silicon Valley corporate office complexes to earn the "campus" label back in the day -- to a building across the highway.
David I's blog, "Sip from the Firehose," is a worthy addition to your online reading. I got a particular kick out of his charmingly goofy "A Developer's Night Before Christmas" holiday poem.
Posted by John K. Waters on January 21, 20110 comments