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.
Neither Sun nor Oracle wanted to see a parallel implementation of Java, so they were never going to give the ASF the TCK
And yet it was the JCP Executive Committee's (EC) recent approval of the latest Java SE 7 spec that finally became too much for the ASF membership to bear. "Oracle provided the EC with a Java SE 7 specification request and license that are self-contradictory, severely restrict distribution of independent implementations of the spec, and most importantly, prohibit the distribution of independent open source implementations of the spec," read a Dec. 9 post on the ASF's blog. "Oracle has refused to answer any reasonable and responsible questions from the EC regarding these problems."
The loss of the ASF is going to hurt, and Oracle knows it. Big O asked the ASF to reconsider its decision in another blog post: " Last month Oracle renominated Apache to the Java Executive Committee because we valued their active participation and perspective on Java..." Henrik Ståhl's Dec. 9 post read in part. "...We encourage Apache to reconsider its position and remain a part of the process to move Java forward. ASF and many open source projects within it are an important part of the overall Java ecosystem."
Oracle is right to want the ASF back in the JCP, says RedMonk analyst Michael Coté.
"The Apache Software Foundation has done a tremendous amount over the years to make the Java world a better place," Coté said. "The Web server (which is not Java), sure, but the vast array of projects that implement standards and the other libraries have brought millions, of not more, in revenue to the Java world: Struts, Tomcat, and so forth. And now, many of the important and interesting projects in the Java world are housed at the ASF -- Hadoop and Casandra to name two Big Data examples. Java developers and companies owe a lot to the ASF."
"If the ASF, its members, and the projects withdraw from participating in the official Java process," he added, "it'll push Java innovation further from the control of the standards bodies and its patrons. If more people take their toys and leave, as it were, the sanctioned Java world will have less fun toys to play with. I don't think that threatens Oracle, IBMs, SAP or any other member of the official Java world very much in the here and now. But, it does mean that some key innovators (not all) will seek new places to evolve Java. That could mean less control, ironically, for people like Oracle and more hassle when they want to catch-up with and incorporate those innovations if their customers start demanding them."
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, sees the loss of the ASF as bad news for the Java community, but also views Oracle's actions in general as positive for Java.
"There's no doubt in my mind that Apache has contributed enormously to the success of Java," Milinkovich said. "Geir Magnusson in particular, and others at Apache put a lot of effort into making the JCP a lot more open and a plausible process for open source. This is a sad event for the Java community."
"The good news," he added, "is that we now have a resolution to the dispute, and Oracle has made it clear that they are planning on investing in the Java platform and moving Java forward. I very much regret that Apache is unhappy with the way this went, though I don't disagree with their position. I might have had the same reaction myself were I in their shoes. But I am happy that Java is moving forward again. We have been stalled as a platform for far too long."
IDC analyst Al Hilwa sees old TCK dispute as the wrong reason to leave the JCP, especially now that IBM has turned away from Harmony, and he worries about how the infighting is going to affect the JCP.
"There is little support for Harmony," he says, "but Apache is a respected open source organization whose expertise would be helpful to the JCP -- assuming that the JCP functions effectively and smoothly and moves Java forward in a rapid fashion. If the JCP becomes a political body for the various players to grand-stand, then I am not sure it is performing a useful purpose. Java is in a competitive market of alternative languages and environments, and it must evolve and do so rapidly to continue to remain relevant."
Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments
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.
We did a SuperCast with Lisa Crispin this year, and her presentation was very well received. Both XP guru Ron Jeffries and Uncle Bob Martin of Object Mentor have endorsed this excellent and much needed book.
- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, by Jez Humble and David Farley (Addison-Wesley Professional, August 6, 2010).
This timely book lays out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of new functionality to users. It covers such techniques as automated management, data migration, and the use of virtualization. This is a great book for anyone on a delivery team.
- Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook, by Michael Lopp (O'Reilly Media, July 27, 2010).
If you haven't heard of Lopp, it's probably because of his nom de blog. He's the "Rands" of Rands in Repose. The book is largely a collection of his best blog posts. Readers get a narrative covering a typical tech-job life span, from job interview to the move to greener pastures. (You might also check out Lopp's other book, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager.)
- 100 SOA Questions: Asked and Answered, by Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani (Prentice Hall, November 22, 2010).
This one is mainly for the business types in your life, but it might answer a question or two lingering in your mind about Service Oriented Architectures. Written by two IBMers, this book couldn't be more straightforward. It does exactly what it promises, taking on top-of-mind SOA questions such as: "Does SOA require service modeling?", "What are the building blocks of an SOA infrastructure?", and "What is the future trajectory of SOA?"
- Building the Perfect PC, by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson (O'Reilly Media, November 24, 2010).
Here's a gift for the Make magazine fans on your list. It might seem to be a book for quasi-technical geek wannabes, but this is a valuable how-to written by hardware experts. Include the URL to Mr. Thompson's Web page on the card.
I also want to recommend some oldies, but still goodies:
- Programming Clojure, by Stuart Halloway (Pragmatic Bookshelf, May 21, 2009).
- Eclipse Plug-ins, by Eric Clayberg, (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2008).
- Release It: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software, by Michael Nygard (Pragmatic Bookshelf, March 30, 2007).
- Software Security: Building Security In, by Gary McGraw (Addison-Wesley Professional, February 2, 2006).
And finally, a shameless, self-serving plug for my new book: The Everything Guide to Social Media (Adams Media, November 18, 2010). I'll let an Amazon reader speak for me on this one:
"If you're still unclear about the difference between Facebook and Twitter, this is the book for you. Well written, it provides a clear overview of the various social media tools available today. I'd especially recommend this for parents who are struggling to keep up with all the modes of communication and engagement being used by their kids online and for any professional or small business owner who needs to keep up with the changing landscape & harness social media tools for their own benefit."
Happy holidays!
Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20100 comments
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.
Bloomberg.com reported on Monday that the Swiss company filed the suit on Dec. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, asking Oracle America for "at least" $120 million in restitution.
Myriad charges that Big O is failing to license its Java tech fairly to its industry partners -- Myriad, in particular -- and alleges that Oracle made them pay on "unfair, unreasonable and discriminatory royalty-based terms."
There's kind of a David-and-Goliath vibe to this dustup. Myriad, which uses a lot of Java in its mobile applications, reported about $105.3 million in revenue last year, while Oracle reported $26.8 billion in sales last fiscal year.
But Florian Mueller, the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who laid out the situation well in his Dec. 14 FOSS Patents blog, looked over the compaint and concluded that there is "clearly connected to the ongoing patent litigation between Oracle and Google and the wider conflict concerning Oracle's Java licensing policies in connection with mobile platforms."
"What we are seeing here," Mueller wrote, "is a phalanx formed against Oracle by Google, Apache and Myriad." The Myriad Group , it seems, is being advised by the law firm that is defending Google against Oracle.
It has also been reported that Scott Weingaertner, one of the attorneys representing Myriad in the lawsuit, is also representing Google in the patent infringement suit filed by Oracle against the search engine giant in August. Oracle alleges that Google infringed on seven Java Platform patents in its Android mobile operating system.
Of course, Oracle isn't the kind of company to stand there and get bitch-slapped. On the same day Myriad filed its suit, Oracle filed a complaint against Myriad in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the Swiss company failed to comply with its royalty obligations and that it is making unauthorized use of the Java trademark and logo.
I chatted with a couple of local industry watchers about the dueling lawsuits. Forrester analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond pointed out that Myriad is part of the Android community and a member of the Open Handset Alliance.
"I'm not surprised to see Oracle squeezing its Java ME licensees to the point where they cry uncle," Hammond told me in an e-mail. "I'm sure they will look to extract as much revenue as possible to recoup their investments in the acquisition."
Forrester analyst John R. Rymer noted that Myriad makes a version of Dalvik, the VM in the Android OS. The company recently unveiled Dalvik Turbo, a JVM designed to beat the execution speed of Google's version. Dalvik does not comply with the mainstream JVM.
"The lawsuit in essence accuses Google of hiring former Sun engineers and copying patented Sun technologies to build their own version of the technology without paying Oracle license fees," Rymer told me in an earlier interview. "I don't think the paying of license fees is under dispute; Google doesn't pay Oracle Java licensing fees. At issue is whether or not engineers working at Google and on Dalvik [the Android VM] could implement their own versions of class loaders and other critical Java IP without having to pay Oracle for the privilege."
Hammond and Rymer are working on an in-depth analysis of recent events. I'll give you a heads up when it's published. Meanwhile, check out Mueller's blog; it's one of the best summaries of the situation, and he's keeping it updated.
Posted by John K. Waters on December 17, 20101 comments
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.
I, too, noticed that, among the headlining keynoters -- IBM, Jive, Adobe -- the term "Enterprise 2.0" was all but replaced by "Business Social," or some variation. But I'm not as sure as these guys seem to be about where we are and where we're headed with the enterprise application of social media.
I spoke with Suzanne Livingston, senior product manager for IBM's Social Software group, before the show about this subject. Depending on how you define "social software," you could say that IBM has been in this market since it launched Lotus Connections back in 2007.
"We've seen a lot of customer demand for these types of tools," she said. "That's why we're investing in this technology. That's why we pulled our tools together into a platform early on. I think it's clear that the market is growing and customer demand is growing, but also, we're seeing a whole new series of use cases emerge for how to integrate social into the business work we do day to day."
My favorite example here is IBM's decision to combine social software with the Rational Team Concert environment. The idea was to give developers "instant" access to the experts they need to get issues resolved faster and to receive feedback from communities to help ensure that projects meet their intended goals.
"This is about building a network, but it's also about working more effectively with people, leveraging their expertise and the social data they have shared, so in essence, this is social collaboration," she said.
Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Socialtext, claims that his company was the first to deliver social software to businesses way back in 2002. The company's first product was a wiki, which has been built out over time into a platform that includes wikis, blogs, social networking, a widget dashboard, activity streams and microblogging (Twitter for the enterprise.)
"In the early days, Enterprise 2.0 was about bottom-up adoption," Mayfield told me. "People would use hosted services or open source within their work group or department. Today, Enterprise 2.0, or enterprise social software, or whatever you want to call it, is a mainstream category. You've got your niche players, and your stand-alone solutions, like Socialtext and Jive. But you've also got large, established vendors coming into this category -- IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, what have you -- and that's an important type of validation."
Call it Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, or Social Collaboration, this is not a trend any of us can afford to dismiss, even if the ROI hasn't shown up just jet. Maybe it'll just be a cost of doing business. Forget the current hype-level and remember that 500-plus million Facebook users and a gazillion tweeters are already changing the way social media-savvy workers and customers expect to interact with the enterprise.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 26, 20100 comments
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.
During his conference keynote opener, conference director Wylie called Enterprise 2.0 observed that "just a couple of years ago, as a market, we were all fighting for legitimacy amid the broader enterprise applications market, and today you all are leading what many believe to be the next truly transformative shift in business, the shift to more people oriented social and collaborative applications."
Okay, he's the conference director, so he can be forgiven this bit of hyperbole. And he also had some actual news: The conference organizers are launching a new website next year, called The Brain Yard, a site focused on the E2.0 community that he promised will be "chock full" of industry news, analysis, opinions, and case studies on the enterprise collaboration and social software industry. Should be interesting.
IBM announced a new release of its Lotus Connections enterprise collaboration platform, as well as an enterprise social software support service. (Say that three times fast!) Version 3.0 adds a new set of "social analytics" to mine the growing piles of social data growing today within the enterprise.
Socialtext unveiled version 4.5 of its namesake enterprise social software at the show. Socialtext 4.5 is designed to make it simple for employees to share relevant knowledge across departmental boundaries, and to sort, curate, and discover that information later with the context in which it was generated. A feature added to the product last summer, Socialtext Connect, lets companies integrate social software with their traditional systems of record, such as ERP or CRM. Socialtext 4.5 also adds Socialtext Explore, which lets employees access microblogging messages, pages, posts, pictures, and files they share with each other at work.
Some other noteworthy vendor announcements:
- Moxie Software announced the Winter 2010 release of its social enterprise software, Spaces by Moxie. This release puts the company's knowledgebase at center of the platform, "bridging the gap between Social CRM and enterprise 2.0" with capabilities for capturing and sharing knowledge among employees, trusted partners, and customers.
- NewsGator unveiled News Stream for Social Sites 2010 and Idea Stream for Social Sites 2010, modules designed to leverage the company's RSS and management technologies to boost information sharing for Microsoft SharePoint 2010. According to the company, Social Sites is the only social computing suite to fully integrate with SharePoint.
- Oxygen Cloud, a company that combines cloud storage and collaboration "to transform the way business users work," showed off Oxygen Stream, a new application designed to allow users to follow, communicate, and engage in collaborative projects through a unified activity stream.
- Rhomobile introduced what it describes as a new category of software: MEAP 2.0, which is "a comprehensive, multi-pronged solution enabling enterprises of all sizes to utilize the power and productivity of web technologies and the cloud to develop, distribute, deploy and manage native smartphone applications and data to their mobile workforce."
- Sococo announced the commercial availability of its first service, Team Space, an always-on group communication service for distributed teams. Team Space is designed to provide an "intuitive spatial layout" that allows people to see office interactions as they occur and initiate ad hoc meetings. (One of the cooler products at the show.)
- TicTacDo launched a business edition of its TicTacDo social productivity service. On top of a collaboration and task management platform, this edition provides a "know-how" system, based on ready-to-use checklists and experts.
- Traction Software introduced a new action-tracking feature that's integrated with the Traction TeamPage. "One click adds an action tag to any page, comment, status post or paragraph with automatic rollup by person, date, milestone or project, putting project management in the natural flow of work," the company says.
- Yammer, a provider of enterprise social networking solutions, showcased its newest applications: Polls, Events and Questions. The apps are designed to enhance the actionable structure of Yammer messages.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 18, 20101 comments
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.
"This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death," Butler wrote, "yet very popular Web sites continue to fail at protecting their users." He went on to scold Facebook and Twitter in particular for failing to fix the problem, adding, "Web sites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services. They've been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it's time for everyone to demand a more secure Web…."
But you know this already. The add-on was reportedly downloaded more than 500,000 times between its mid-October release and early November, and "Firesheep" was among the Top Tweets on Twitter for weeks.
Firesheep is dead simple to use. No skills needed. You just download it from the Web, install it on Firefox, click on a button, and viola, you can collect any session cookies floating around the Wi-Fi network to which you're currently connected. Session hijacking has never been easier.
Julien Sobrier decided it was too easy. The senior security researcher at Zscaler, a Sunnyvale, Calif.–based provider of cloud security solutions, and his crew created their own Firefox add-on to defend against Firesheep. Dubbed BlackSheep, the Zscaler add-on is actually based on the Firesheep source code.
"To understand how it works, you have to first consider how Firesheep works," Sobrier told me. "Firesheep listens for HTTP connections to popular websites and looks for specific cookie values which will identify a user. When it detects a connection to, let's say, Facebook, it connects back to the same website with the same cookie values to retrieve information about the user. What BlackSheep does is to regularly generate fake traffic to this website with fake cookie values. Just like Firesheep, it listens to HTTP connections and notices if anyone else is going to the same site with the same fake values. And then it gives a warning and the IP address of whoever is using Firesheep."
BlackSheep is an elegant parry to Firesheep's thrust, and it's another freebie.
"This is what we do," Sobrier said. "We try to help people to protect themselves and help them to be aware of the security threats that are out there. Not just our own users, but everybody. Firesheep gave us another opportunity to do this."
Zscaler unveiled BlackSheep on a blog through which the company keeps readers informed about new and ongoing security threats. Definitely worth reading. Here's the blog post on BlackSheep. This is also the download site.
To give them the credit due, Butler and Gallagher's dramatic demonstration not only put the security inadequacies of popular social media sites in the spotlight, but underscored the growing appeal of these sites to malicious hackers.
And now to download BlackSheep so I can post my freakin' Facebook status from Starbucks!
Posted by John K. Waters on November 17, 20100 comments
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.'
Baer sees Doug Lea's departure from the JCP's Executive Committee as "the natural attrition that comes in the wake of any acquisition." You know, like when the seething mass of sentient jelly from outer space devours you and then sloughs off the bones.
"But there are other things at play here, too," he said. "It's clear that Oracle is taking a more active commercial role in managing the Java platform. You can see it in the Google litigation. And they've persuaded IBM to join rather than fight, and so there will be various as-yet-to-be-specified 'reforms' to the process. But Oracle will make the JCP more corporate."
In fact, Baer suggests that the JCP may become essentially irrelevant to the evolution of Java.
"The core issue is that Java itself has been something of a mongrel," he said, " not quite open source, not quite proprietary, in spite of the open source dalliances of the [former Sun Microsystems CEO] Jonathan Schwartz years. Sun's position was adequate when Microsoft was perceived as the evil empire, but rapidly grew irrelevant as other centers of power (what former Burton analyst Richard Monson-Haefel called the "Rebel Frameworks") emerged over the past six/seven years in response to impatience with Sun's more-equal-than-others approach and the rigidity of the JCP process. As innovation began happening elsewhere, the JCP grew less relevant. It's interesting that their focus has shifted from Java EE (bypassed by Spring) to Java SE, while Java ME has largely been stalled on arrival."
Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich confessed to being bewildered (if not bewitched) by the Apple decision to deprecate Java on the Mac OS X, but he had no doubt about the future of the JCP.
"Look, the JCP is here to say," he said. "Doug [Lea] wasn't wrong to leave, but his reasons for leaving were based on faulty assumptions. I think Doug and many others are conflating an effective standards organization with a vendor-neutral standards organization. The JCP was never vendor neutral. The only thing that's changed since Oracle took over is that they've made it a little bit clearer that they're in charge. Anyone who thought Sun wasn't in charge was laboring under a delusion. Nothing has changed fundamentally at the JCP, and it now has an opportunity to return to being effective, where it certainly has not been for the past three years."
He also reminded me that both the fate the JCP and Apple's decision to deprecate Java will affect more than just Java jocks.
"The number one IDE for PHP developers is Eclipse," he said. "Android developers use Eclipse as their default set of Android tools. The tools you get from Adobe for building Flash applications are built on Eclipse. And despite the back and forth between Apple and Adobe around Flash on the Mac and various Apple devices, there are an enormous number of graphic designers out there who use the Mac with Flash as their development platform. So this stuff has implications that ripple beyond just the Java development tools market."
In other words, lots of people are going to be haunted by this decision.
Milinkovich has more to say in his latest posting to the "Life at Eclipse" blog, "Take a Deep Breath, Then Vote for Eclipse: Our View on the JCP."
Milinkovich's colleague, Ian Skerrett, offers a more be-fanged reaction to recent developments in the Java space in his blog post: "Dear Oracle, Get a Clue." Skerrett is the usually soft-spoken Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, but I think the moon was full when he penned this missive, because he takes a bite out of Oracle here. But don't be put off by his growling. He makes a good point.
And be sure to catch Baer's excellent blog post on the Oracle-IBM partnership on OpenJDK on the OnStrategies Perspectives page.
Posted by John K. Waters on November 1, 20108 comments
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.
This isn't just a single-technology show; the program includes two tutorial days and three conference days, with 15 tracks covering Java, NoSQL, JRuby, Node.js, hypermedia, Ruby on Rails, SOA, Agile, Clojure, security, inter-disciplinary design, JavaScript, parallel programming, REST and cloud computing.
This is the fourth year for the San Francisco event; there have also been four QCon's in London, two in Beijing, two in Tokyo, and one in Sao Palo, Brazil. The conference is a joint venture of the InfoQ online enterprise software community (whence it gets its name) and Trifork, a provider of financial and public-sector IT solutions in Denmark. Conference organizers expect about 550 attendees this year.
I chatted last week about this year's conference with Floyd Marinescu, CEO of C4Media, which organizes the QCon events.
"This conference is a combination of things that make you think and things that you can apply," he said. "That makes us different from many development conferences, which seem to be mostly about the latest APIs. We're trying to encourage more software generalists, and that requires historical perspective, so our keynotes are always a combination of old guys with beards and fair-faced young technologists."
Among the 80 speakers booked for this year's QCon is a rock-star lineup of old-timers and young turks, including: Dan Ingalls, the principal architect of five generations of the Smalltalk environment; Twitter engineer Nick Kallen, author of Arel, NamedScope, Cache Money, and Screw.Unit, and co-author of FlockDb, Twitter's distributed graph database; Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks and (his words) "Loud-Mouth on Object Design;" Patrick Copeland, Google's director of engineering; Michael Nygard, author of Release It: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software; Randy Shoup, distinguished architect in the eBay Marketplace Architecture group; Stuart Halloway, author of Programming Clojure and Rails for Java Developers; and Dan North, who coaches teams in Agile and lean methods, and originator of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).
"QCon is definitely an event that's trying to push the envelope," Marinescu said. "We want QCon to be a force that's helping our community to evolve, but with a sense of what it's evolving from."
Marinescu is especially proud of another new track, "Architectures you've always wondered about," which he helped to develop with Randy Shoup, and which looks at some of the most well-known and high-volume Web applications in the world, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga, Amazon S3, Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay, among others.
My one complaint about this show: They keep billing it as "designed for team leads, architects and project management." I get why they do it, but this is a show for codederos, too. One of this year's new tracks, "Dev and Ops: A Single Team," should be of particular interest to developers. The track "explores the challenges of bringing both Development and Operations together into a single team." (And no, it's not being held in a padded room.)
"There's definitely a part of the culture, especially in the U.S., who see 'architect' as a bad word," Marinescu said. "But I do think that's changing. And when we say 'architect,' we don't mean an ivory tower guy. We mean a guy who is both designing and coding, and maybe getting more involved in solutions architecture and putting the pieces together."
The fourth annual QCon San Francisco event runs from November 1-5. Videos of keynotes and presentations from previous events are available on the QCon and InfoQ sites for free.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 26, 20100 comments
Big announcements coming out of the annual Adobe MAX conference, underway this week in L.A. Lots of talk about the "multiscreen revolution," of course, and how to get your apps and your content to work across PCs, smart phones, tablets and TVs. Adobe is touting its Flash platform as well as HTML5 for Web sites, digital publishing, online video, gaming and even enterprise apps.
The list of announcements at this event is a long one. The company is extending its AIR runtime into this new cross-screen world. AIR 2.5 now supports smart phones and tablets built on Android, iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS, as well as desktop OSes. Samsung says that it's going to be the first television manufacturer to ship Adobe AIR in its SmartTV devices; RIM, Motorola, Acer, HTC, Samsung and others handset makers are planning to ship AIR on smart phones starting this year and in early 2011. The company is launching a new service, dubbed Adobe InMarket, which aims to allow developers to easily distribute and sell their applications on app stores across different device types from Acer, Intel and others.
There's also an upcoming digital publishing suite built on Adobe's Creative Suite and InDesign CS5, which the company is pitching to major magazine publishers as the digital publishing tool they need to move from dead-tree tech to the tablet.
But it's the unveiling of version 2.5 of Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite that should wiggle the antennae of enterprise developers. LiveCycle ES2.5 is designed to provide "a standard toolset and methodology for design, modeling and development of user-centric enterprise RIAs," the company says in its press release. This release adds process management, data capture and content services to mobile devices, enhances the framework for building enterprise RIAs, andd lets developers to embed real-time social components into their apps -- things like chat, voice, video, screen and application-sharing features.
What strikes me about this year's event is the confidence at Adobe that the enterprise truly understands the importance of the user experience (UX), both for its customers and its employees. It has sort of become a given.
"All of these releases springboard from a set of conversations that we've been having with our customers," Adobe's UX guy, Ben Watson, told me last week during a conference preview call. "Those conversations led us not only to uncover and productize repeatable solutions that are built on top of our enterprise platform, but to help our enterprise customers to bring user experience to the forefront of their application development and delivery mandate."
Somewhere in all the marketing-speak, Watson is making an important point: Adobe's enterprise customers are making the UX a priority, not just for their customers, but for their employees.
"We've seen an incredible explosion in the focus on the user experience," Watson said. "It seems that the social and general consumer Web sites have led people to be increasingly frustrated with complex and unnecessarily sophisticated interfaces that are plunked on top of enterprise systems. I think everybody is coming together and recognizing that sticking people with legacy enterprise software with a clumsy and awkward interface is counterproductive."
Watson argues that user-centric design -- the end-to-end focus on the user experience -- ultimately can unlock the ROI in the legacy systems by making them easier to use, but can also serve as a kind of insurance on new systems, making sure that they're more quickly adopted with less training, used by happier employees, and ultimately by more satisfied customers.
Adobe MAX 2010 runs through Wednesday, October 27.
Posted by John K. Waters on October 25, 20100 comments