Now let me get this straight: Java is not only safe in the bosom of Oracle, but better off because the company is accelerating innovation, which stalled under Sun. And the OpenJDK is the best way to make that innovation happen. And Oracle and IBM, though still fierce competitors, are committed to working together to protect their substantial investment in Java, so don't worry about that. And Big O's inherent interest in profits -- it's a company, after all -- does not make it the enemy of open source.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 25, 20110 comments
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I was able to meet up with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, as he was prepping for the fifth annual EclipseCon, which runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif.
I snagged a few minutes with Milinkovich on Friday to talk about the event, but our discussion wandered to the annual Eclipse Release Train. It's not due until June, but Milinkovich is already excited about the sixth annual synchronized launch of multiple Eclipse projects.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 23, 20110 comments
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was in the Bay Area last week ahead of this week's EclipseCon Conference to attend the first ever Orion Planning Summit. The event brought together a range of interested parties and companies who gathered in Palo Alto, Calif. last Thursday and Friday to establish the scope and roadmap of Eclipse's nascent Orion project.
Introduced in January, the Orion Project seeks to define a platform for building and integrating Web development tools. The project summary describes it as a "browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the Web, in the Web."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20111 comments
The fifth annual EclipseCon Conference, which starts today and runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., promises to be a humdinger.
The marquee keynote at this year's event is the much anticipated David Gondek talk, "What Is Watson?" Watson, for those who don't have all the time in the world to watch TV (or read newspapers), was the system that beat two Jeopardy champs. Gondek is a research scientist on the DeepQA/Watson Project, and he promises to provide "a tour of the technologies that power Watson."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 21, 20111 comments
Unless you were coding under a rock this week, you probably heard that Java's progenitor James Gosling held forth at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas on the state of Java under Oracle. His comments were widely reported, including this one posted on TheServerSide.com:
"It's in [Oracle's] own self-interest to not be really aggressively stupid. But it's been clear that it's been something of a learning experience. It's been clear that they didn’t understand what they bought, what it meant to deal with communities and people and all the arguing and discussion and consensus building that’s involved in communities."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 18, 20110 comments
The ballots are in, and Oracle's development proposal for Java EE7 has been approved by the Executive Committee of the JCP. The vote was unanimous, with only one company (IBM) even commenting.
The sponsors of Java Specification Request (JSR) #342, the umbrella JSR under which Java EE 7 will be developed, literally cited the cloud as the "theme" for this release.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20111 comments
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.)
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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.
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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."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 11, 20110 comments