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.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 25, 20100 comments
The big news this week for developers was the revelation that the new keeper of the Java flame, Oracle, is getting into bed with IBM on the OpenJDK project. The blogosphere was buzzing with the news, but a few posts stood out, reminding me to make sure I follow these guys.
Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Systems and Linux in IBM's Software Group, posted a widely quoted commentary on the partnership on his blog. This is where the news broke that IBM would be "shifting its development effort from the Apache Project Harmony to OpenJDK." Sutor is an IBMer, but his blog is thoughtful and worth reading. He also maintains a great list of other bloggers under "People and Places."
Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, also blogged about the announcement. Reinhold handled Oracle's side of the story, but also offered his own predictions and expectations about who'll be doing what. Reinhold's blog is worth following for the news he provides, but also for the feedback he gets. Good conversations that include some questions and comments from the likes of another favorite blogger, Simon Phipps, and a bunch of first-string Java jocks More
Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20100 comments
Google treated a group of reporters to lunch last Friday in its San Francisco offices (sushi and pizza -- yum!), and we got to meet some happy users of the App Engine and chat with the Google team behind it.
Google's App Engine is a suite of the tools and services for building and scaling Web apps on the company's infrastructure. Applications developed using the App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) can be uploaded and hosted by Google, and those apps can then utilize Google's bandwidth and computing power. That's a big selling point, Google argues, given Big G's vast, road-tested infrastructure, which is also hosting its own apps.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 15, 20101 comments
Microsoft has been lobbing water balloons at Google's Android mobile operating system for months now, but on Friday the Redmond software maker tossed a Molotov cocktail in the form of a lawsuit alleging infringement of nine of its patents by Motorola's Android-based smartphones. Microsoft filed in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
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Posted by John K. Waters on October 4, 20105 comments
It was another hot Indian summer in the City by the Bay this week as codederos with a mobile-biz bent swarmed into San Francisco for the annual BlackBerry DevCon. And when I say "hot," I mean scorching sidewalks strewn with melted attendees caught between the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, where the sessions, labs and breakout sessions were held, and Moscone West, where the General Session and keynotes were presented. Not as bad as last week's Oracle OpenWorld-to-JavaOne slog, but with temps heading for triple digits, it was a bit tougher on those of us who are well-insulated and pigment-challenged.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 30, 20100 comments
I wasn't the only one complaining about the first JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship this week. I'll admit that my criticism of Big O's decision to hold the J1 portion of its hybrid, San Francisco-devouring, Tandem Conference Monster was probably exacerbated by my lack of cardiovascular fitness and what evolved into the hell of hauling my chubby self back and forth between Moscone and the Hilton. (I swear, I'm joining a gym tomorrow!) But other, fitter bloggers were just as cranky about this year's show.
John's boots weren't made for walkin'...
The Eclipse Foundation's Ian Skerrett was with me. In his post, "The New JavaOne; The New Java Community," Ian offers some cogent observations about J1 under Oracle. The Hilton, he says, was "the worst location for a conference I have ever experienced" (Yes!) He goes on to give Kurian credit (as just about everyone has) for a good keynote. Interesting conclusions. Also check out his "My JavaOne Wish List" post.
Sam Dean worries on the Ostatic blog post, "Oracle Still Shows Few Signs of Open Java Goals," that, "Many of [Oracle's EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian's] points made clear that Oracle will encourage lots of development around Java, but not many of them made clear that Oracle will retain the level of openness that Sun Microsystems always had toward Java." (Editor's note: Go here and here for more on what Kurian said at the show.)
Adam Bien gives a nice little post-mortem of his travels at the event in his blog "JavaOne 10 Afterglow." He actually concludes that "Considering the circumstances JavaOne was even great this year…" (Hmm… Not nearly as grumpy as me.) But keep scrolling down to get even more conference notes.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 20103 comments
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison closed out the first combo Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne event in San Francisco on Wednesday, and I have to say, it was a vintage performance. He slammed his competitors, as usual, with digs aimed at SAP, IBM, and EMC. But he seemed to relish dissing his chief CRM rival, Salesforce.com, the most, describing the company's multi-tenancy architecture as "a horrible idea" that "commingles everyone's customer list in a single database."
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 20103 comments
Oracle's EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian took the stage last night at the JavaOne branch of the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco to talk about his company's plans for Java.
"I've been at JavaOne since 1997," Kurian said, "but this year is very special for us, because it's the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving."
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 21, 20100 comments
At last year's Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle co-president Charles Phillips promised that the annual JavaOne conference, a touchstone event for Java jocks around the world, would continue as a stand-alone conference, though it would be co-located with OpenWorld. A year later, here we are at the annual Oracle show, and I'd have to say that Big O's idea of "co-located" differs a bit from mine.
Renamed JavaOne/Oracle Develop, the event is underway this week in San Francisco, but instead of its traditional Moscone Center home, the show has been shifted to the Hilton San Francisco off of Union Square half a mile away.
I think Robert Mullins described the event and its implications aptly in his blog: "Holding a separate event at a different venue makes it seem like Oracle is seating JavaOne at the equivalent of the kids' table and could feed the concern of skeptics who wondered how well Oracle would support open source software that would be competition for its more profitable licensed software."
The Twitterstream was burbling with mixed reviews of Day One of the new JavaOne event.
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Posted by John K. Waters on September 20, 20100 comments