New IOUG MySQL Council; Dueling Conferences

Here's a MySQL announcement that surprisingly didn't make the news last week: The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) has just formed a new advisory group made up of MySQL community leaders and subject matter experts.

The membership roster of the new MySQL Council includes some prominent names in MySQL Land. Here's the list:

- Sarah Novotny, Blue Gecko
- Sheeri Cabral, PalominoDB
- Bradley Kuszmaul, Tokutek
- Giuseppe Maxia, Continuent
- Rob Wultsch, GoDaddy.com
- Matt Yonkovit, Percona

Posted by John K. Waters on January 18, 20111 comments

Oracle Not Winning Any Popularity Contests, but Might Still be Good for Java

It's been a dramatic couple of weeks in Java Land. The headline grabber was the departure from the JCP of the Apache Software Foundation. Losing the ASF was a blow, to be sure, but I'm not so sure it's fair to paint Oracle as the bad guy in what is a long-standing dispute that goes back to Sun Microsystems' stewardship of Java.

The ASF has been objecting to the decision -- first Sun's, then Oracle's -- not to provide the ASF with a test compatibility kit (TCK) license for its own Java SE implementation, Project Harmony, since 2006. Without the TCK, Harmony can't be tested and certified against the Java standard. This decision, in the ASF's words, "imposes additional terms and conditions that are not compatible with open source or Free software licenses." The agreement under which Oracle and the ASF participate in the JCP entitles the ASF to a license for the TCK that will allow the organization to test and distribute a release of the Apache Harmony project under the Apache License, the ASF has argued.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments

Books for Geeks

The book as we know it is probably going the way of photo film and vinyl LPs: it won't disappear altogether, but evolve into an increasingly rarer curiosity treasured by aficionados. But whether it's an eText or dead-tree-tech, books still make great holiday gifts for the geeks in your life. Here, in no particular order, are a few that came across my desk this year that might be worthy of a place under your tree:

• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley Professional, January 9, 2009.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments

And the Lawsuits are Flying -- Again

Most of the time, reporting on doing ons in the Valley of Silicon is an inspiring gig filled with world-changing technological innovations and amazing success stories -- 26-year-old-billionaires, for example, making it to the cover of Time magazine. And sometimes it's like covering a bunch of fifth graders playing King if the Hill.

It's getting hard to keep up with who's suing whom around her. This week, it's Swiss mobile software maker Myriad Group suing Oracle for allegedly charging excessive licensing fees for Java.

Posted by John K. Waters on December 17, 20101 comments

Enterprise 2.0 by Any Other Name ...

The West Coast edition of the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference earlier this month generated some noteworthy debate about the evolution and efficacy of social software in enterprise environments -- debate corporate coders would be wise to track.

Start with the opposing views of Martijn Linssen in his blog post, "Enterprise 2.0: the Prodigal Parent," and Andrew McAffee's post, "'Social Business' is Past Retirement Age." ZDNet's Dennis Howlett weighs in on that discussion on his "Irregular Enterprise" blog. So does Bob Warfield's, who analyses on his "Enterprise Irregulars" blog. All worth reading.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 26, 20100 comments

Enterprise 2.0 Rife with 'Social Business' Annos

Vendor announcements were flying fast and furious at the recent second edition of the Northern California Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

The conference, which "explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives," drew an estimated 1,400 attendees to the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Boston edition has been running for 6 years.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 18, 20101 comments

Fighting Firesheep with Firesheep

When software developers Ian Gallagher and Eric Butler unleashed "Firesheep," an add-on they developed for the Firefox Web browser that allows users on unsecured Wi-Fi networks to identify and capture the social networking sessions of others on that network, Butler declared on his blog that their intention was to throw a spotlight on the lack of effective security among popular social media Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Posted by John K. Waters on November 17, 20100 comments

Scary Times in Java Land?: The Apple Mess, Impact on Eclipse, JCP's Future, More

Halloween may have passed, but some of last week's Java news is still casting a creepy pall on the Java landscape. Last week I reported on Apple's decision to deprecate Java on Mac OS X and Doug Lea's departure from the JCP's Executive Committee, but as my conversations with analyst and industry watchers continued, and I thought the additional insights were worth sharing.

Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond, for example, reminded me that the rules for the upcoming Mac App Store reject deprecated or "optionally installed technologies."

"What we're seeing here is the emergence of the application store as the new strategic control point for platforms," Hammond said. "From my perspective, Apple's decision is an extension of its low-intensity warfare against the Java platform, the Flash platform, and everything else that allows people to do cross-platform work in their ecosystem."

Which made me wonder if maybe a zombifying virus had gotten loose in Cupertino and caused Apple management to go crazy. The numbers vary from analyst firm to analyst firm, but the basic picture of the developer world going forward includes a steadily expanding community of Java jocks for around a decade before we even see a plateau. And I know a bunch of developers who consider the Mac to be a great machine to code on. How can Apple just dismiss so many Java-loving codederos?

"Here's your choice as a developer," he said. "You can write in Java as you've always done and have it ported to the Mac through third-party efforts, or you can write in Objective C and go directly to the consumer and make more money. Which would you chose?"

Ovum Senior Analyst Tony Baer's assessment was no more comforting. "It's all about making the Mac more iOS like," Baer said. "Jobs may talk up an HTML5 storm, but what he's really saying is: 'Develop natively for the Apple platform.' Java is not part that plan.' More

Posted by John K. Waters on November 1, 20108 comments

QCon -- It's Not Just for Architects!

QCon, my very favorite tech conference, is right around the corner and I'm already wishing I had the powers of The X-Men's Multiple Man, so that I could get to more sessions! (I actually wish that a lot.)

I've been to quite a few trade shows and user conferences in my 15-plus years on the tech beat. I don't mean to sound pollyanna, but most of them have been pretty good events. But in terms of the quality and scope of its content, QCon stands out. Conference organizers characterize it as a "practitioner-driven event." I think of it as the Cornucopia Conference.

Posted by John K. Waters on October 26, 20100 comments