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.
The news from inside wasn't quite as sizzling from an enterprise developer perspective, but Research in Motion (RIM) execs offered attendees a range of toasty announcements, including new tools and platforms for building applications for their popular smartphones.
They also added "SuperApp" to our vocabulary, which RIM declared is a new class of mobile applications that offers "a seamless, integrated, contextualized, and efficient experience." Will it last? I say, no.
The headline-grabbing news, of course, was the unveiling of the company's first entry into the tablet PC market. With its 7-inch touch-screen and 9.7 mm depth, the BlackBerry PlayBook is smaller than Apple's iPad, but loaded for bear -- or rather, for business (rear- and front-facing HD cameras, 1080p HD video, HDMI and USB connectors, Bluetooth paring with your BlackBerry smartphone, enterprise server compatibility and freakin' Flash support).
RIM's prez and co-chief exec Michael Lazaridis showed off the device like a proud papa. "The first time you hold it, it just feels right, and you'll want to take it wherever you go," he told a packed auditorium.
Look, but don't touch.
RIM gets marketing points for avoiding the rumored and hideous "BlackBook" moniker. And the slogan "BlackBerry amplified" nicely preserves the business context of the device, and conveys rather accurately what you're getting with it.
Attendees were offered "hands-on time" with the devices, and many of us --lots and lots of us, in fact -- stood in a long, snaking, wrap-around line on the top floor of the conference center only to end up staring at a cluster of PlayBooks displayed under glass. We could look, but not touch. (I flashed back to my senior prom.) But what I saw, I liked.
Enterprise developers might want to pay attention to this little tablet. There are signs that the PlayBook might be the one to make the leap from consumer curiosity to serious business tool. Cisco Systems likes it. Steve Slattery, VP and GM of the company's Unified Communications group, said that he expects it to do well in the enterprise. And IDC analyst Al Hilwa told me that he sees the tablet as a competitive business offering, because it "leverages the Adobe Flash eco-system for an instant portfolio of rich Web sites and applications" that "makes a credible entry into corporate boardrooms with Blackberry's formidable enterprise assets."
Posted by John K. Waters on September 30, 20100 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."
"In the 21st century, the technology we use is called virtualization," he added. "Multi-tenancy is 15 years old."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had cracked wise earlier about Oracle's new Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which Ellison unveiled at the show, calling it a "a cloud in a box."
"I have to chuckle a little at the phrase 'cloud in a box,'" Ellison said, "because the CEO of Salesforce.com said 'Larry doesn't get it, cloud doesn't just run on a box.' What does he think Salesforce.com runs on if not on a box? Salesforce.com runs on 1,500 Dell servers, which are boxes!"
The new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is Oracle's integrated hardware and software system designed to run Java and other applications with "extreme performance." It merges several components within a single chassis the size of a refrigerator, and it's designed to be used as the foundation for a cloud application infrastructure. Ellison declared that it would outperform anything his competitors have to offer.
Oracle's own-the-hardware-and-the-software strategy is reminiscent of the practices of Ellison's friend, Steve Jobs, and the exec was quick to give credit where credit was due. "[Jobs has] believed for a long time that if you engineer the hardware and software together, the overall user experience is better than if you just do a part of the solution," he said.
Ellison also delivered an elbow to SAP: "We think it's a mistake for SAP to have its on-premise and SaaS applications be a completely different code base," he said. "We think people will like to do their development on SaaS and migrate to on-premise or maybe take a hybrid approach with SaaS in a particular region and others hosted on our systems."
Ellison also promised a big rollout of Oracle's Fusion Apps, but offered no release specifics. He claimed that it would be the first system to run ERP applications on industry standard Java middleware, and he said that Fusion apps will be installable on-premise or as software as a service (SaaS).
He also told the crowd that Oracle is now building business intelligence (BI) into its applications -- which gave him a chance to thwack Big Blue: "IBM says business intelligence is one of its fastest-growing businesses," Ellison observed, "but we don't think of it as something separate. We think business intelligence should be everywhere."
Posted by John K. Waters on September 24, 20103 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.
Dutch coder Geertjanoffered his "JavaOne 2010 Reflections" in a blog post focused on NetBeans. Nice coverage from a guy who works with the IDE, apparently, on a regular basis. He also thought it was a great JavaOne (Okay, now I'm feeling like a curmudgeon).
The Canoo Engineering's Rich Internet Applications Blog is also worth checking out. Lots of coverage by "Bruno."
David Thielen's Huffington Post blog, "JavaOne: Confessions of a Booth Babe," wasn't cranky, I guess, though not really as funny as the title implies. It does offer some nice observations about the show from the founder and CTO of Windward Studios, who worked a booth on the exhibit floor.
I have to add that, though I'm not happy about the juxtaposition of the two conferences, I did find the quality of JavaOne's content overall to be as useful as ever. Maybe what we should do is start now encouraging (or harassing, whichever works for you) Mr. Ellison and company to set aside a separate week for JavaOne 2011. Come on, guys, we know you can afford it. Show that you're really behind this technology -- and this community -- by giving them the space and spotlight they deserve!
What were your thoughts on this year's JavaOne? Did it live up to your expectations? Share your take with John/other readers by posting in the comments!
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."
There was some rah-rah in his presentation, but to his credit, Kurian offered attendees a fairly concrete roadmap. In fact, Kurian seemed to be on a mission to dispel the uncertainty that has fogged the Java landscape since Big O acquired Sun Microsystems earlier this year.
If the JCP approves it, Java SE 7 will be available in the Summer of 2011, and Java SE 8 should be available about a year later. Both will be based on OpenJDK, and they will serve as the basis for the Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 and JDK 8.
Oracle is proposing several features for these dev kits. In JKD 7, the company wants to see InvokeDynamic byte code and supporting features for dynamic languages; Fork/Join Framework and related concurrency and collections API enhancements; Small Language Enhancements (most of Project Coin); Session Description Protocol (SDP) and Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP) support; new I/O APIs, including a flexible filesystem API, and asynchronous I/O; support for updated standards, including Unicode, localization, security, cryptography, XML and JDBC; and JVM performance improvements.
For JDK 8, the company is proposing such features as Lambda expressions ("closures"); Small Language Enhancements (rest of Project Coin); a Java-native module system (Project Jigsaw); and JVM start-up time and ergonomics improvements.
Under Oracle, Java EE "will continue to evolve," with an emphasis on making application servers more modular and programming more efficient with improvements such as dependency injection and reduced configuration requirements.
Oracle is also planning a tight integration of JavaFX and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in two stages: the first in summer 2011; the next a year later.
"The programming model is to combine the power of Java with the ease of JavaFX," Kurian said. "Another aim is to eliminate anything that would prevent native interoperability between Java, JavaScript and HTML5."
The next release of JavaFX (Q3 of 2011) will introduce a new set of Java APIs designed to open JavaFX capabilities to all Java developers. The new Java APIs will, Oracle says, allow the use of such Java features as generics, annotations and multi-threading. They will make life easier for Web developers who want to use JavaFX with other dynamic scriptors (JRuby, Groovy and JavaScript).
Sun's Hotspot JVM will be integrated with the BEA JRockit JVM, the company says. The combined JVM will also be based on OpenJDK, and JRockit Mission Control will be available for the Hotspot JVM.
2011 will also see two new releases of the Glassfish open-source application server with several new features from WebLogic.
And to the surprise of many (including me), Oracle is planning for two new NetBeans releases in 2011.
"We are committed to making Java the world’s best programming language, the world’s most popular deployment platform with great graphics and other features embedded in Java," Kurian said.
Rah.
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.
John Rizzo of San Rafel, California wrote: "At JavaOne. Even though we have been pushed to a side show Oracle is still spending more on JavaOne then Sun has in a long time." But Palo Alto, California-based attendee Dion Almaer wrote: "JavaOne at the Hilton, not Moscone, is painful. At least it exists, but I will go Devoxx instead :)"
Organizers of the main event, Oracle OpenWorld, are claiming the largest turnout ever, with 41,000 attendees. The annual Oracle show is taking up all three wings of the Moscone Convention Center, not to mention Howard street between Moscone North and South.
Although none of the top Oracle execs will be speaking directly to JavaOne attendees -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and co-president Safra Catz spoke Sunday night at Moscone, and new co-president Mark Hurd is scheduled to speak later this week -- Oracle EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian will be speaking at JavaOne later this afternoon (Monday). His topic: "Java Strategy and Directions." He's scheduled to "share Oracle's vision for strengthened investment and innovation in Java and describe how Java will continue to grow as the most powerful, scalable, secure, and open platform for the global developer community."
And the content planned for this year's JavaOne… I mean JavaOne/Oracle Develop… looks good. Lots of sessions on Java Enterprise Edition, the MySQL database, the GlassFish Server and other Java tech. And inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil will be giving a special JavaOne keynote on Thursday morning.
IDC analyst Al Hilwa, who's in San Francisco this week for the event, offered me some perspective on the combined conferences: " I think Oracle's strategy will evolve over time," he told me. "While it's not convenient to be in a separate location, there's just so much you can do at the Moscone. OOW was already the biggest thing happening here and way overstretched even before JavaOne, so it's clearly not an ideal situation. Oracle has to figure out how important for them it is to have these things at the same time. In my opinion, the developer audience deserves their own JavaOne developer events, however, it is clearly a tradeoff, because the atmosphere and energy generated by the scale of OOW is almost unique in the industry."
I get that the choice to hold JavaOne at the Hilton is probably about logistics. Both events are biguns and they can't occupy the same space without ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. But it still sucks a little.
More later. Stay tuned.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 20, 20100 comments
It was a busy week in the City by the Bay, with concurrent conferences filling up a couple of wings of the Moscone Center. While the venerable Intel Developer Forum (IDF), the giant chipmaker’s periodic conference for hardware and software developers, took over Moscone West, a bouncing baby tech show, the AppNation Conference, occupied Moscone North.
The inaugural, two-day AppNation event was billed as the first conference focused on the "app economy." The show featured a fairly impressive lineup of speakers and exhibitors for a newbie. The roster included Google, Fox, Zynga, Microsoft, The North Face, AT&T, GetJar, Mediabrands, Major League Baseball, General Electric, The Wall Street Journal, AKQA, Smule, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Symbian, PepsiCo, JP Morgan Chase, Ogilvy, Lima Sky (pause for big breath), and dozens of others.
In his opening remarks, Drew Ianni, chairman and founder of the event (and former chairman of a digital marketing conference called Ad:Tech), shared some AppNation research, which predicts that a million mobile apps will be available for download by 2012.
"It's this ecosystem and economy that's sort of sprung out of nowhere," Ianni said. "It's a huge potential market. It's also a revolution."
San Francisco's Mayor, Gavin Newsom, was on hand to welcome an estimated 1,200-plus attendees to the event. Among other things, the Mayor announced that he would be issuing a challenge to developers to make the official Gavin Newsom app for his campaign for Lieutenant Governor.
Some interesting stats came out of this show, as Jonathan Carson, CEO of the Nielsen Company's Telecom Practice (yup, the TV ratings guys), rolled out the results of an ongoing mobile computing study, dubbed "The Mobile Apps Playbook." The results reported at the show are based on an August survey of more than 4,000 mobile subscribers who reported downloading an app in the previous 30 days.
According to the study, 91 percent of respondents said they would be willing to pay for a game; 86 percent said they would be willing to pay for an "entertainment" app; 84 percent would pay for map or navigation apps; 82 percent would cough up for productivity apps; 77 percent for "food" apps (whatever those are); and 76 percent would pay for news apps.
"A year and a half ago, the conversation was mostly about iPhone apps and Facebook apps," Ianni said. "But businesses were being transformed by apps. They're turning into the new touch points for brands. And it's a new media distribution channel."
Hmm… And it's still kind of about iPhone and Facebook. According to the Nielsen survey, smartphone app downloaders currently have an average of 27 apps on their phones -- that's up from 22 app reported in December 2009. Unsurprisingly, users of Apple's iPhones have the largest number of apps on their devices; Android uses came in second and BlackBerry users third. And Facebook is the most popular individual application on all three.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 17, 20100 comments
With the recent sturm und drang around Oracle's stewardship of Java, the upcoming Oracle-sponsored JavaOne conference, and Apple's decision to make some changes to its iOS Developer Program license, it seemed like a good time to mention the blogs of a couple of Java and Open Source vets that are not to be missed.
First, James Gosling, the Father of Java, is blogging again. His observations on Java and related technologies and issues in his On a New Road blog are especially welcome in uncertain times. He knows the tech and the players, he has a clear point of view, and he doesn't pull punches. Love his "Just Free It" Java T-shirt design in his Aug 27 blog.
One of the reasons I'm recommending this blog so highly is that Mr. Gosling's posts generated a lot of responses, so it's more than just a venerable Java jock holding court; it's a conversation.
Next, is the blog of Bruce Perens, original author of the "Open Source Definition" and a founder of the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Standard Base, and Software in the Public Interest. The insightful Perens jumped back into blogging after a fairly long absence with some useful posts on the Oracle lawsuit, the Mark Hurd firing and other issues.
I was disappointed to see that he's once again in in "head-down mode" developing "some paradigm-changing new software." Check out his recent posts, and help me nudge him back into the blogosphere (he's on Twitter at @BrucePerens).
If you're not reading Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog, you're missing a nuts-and-bolts gem. Bray is the co-inventor of XML, co-founder of Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems, former director of Web tech at Sun, and current Developer Advocate at Google. Often surly (loved his recent reference to JavaOne as an Oracle OpenWorld "appendage"), always on point, full of tech talk, occasional book and tech reviews, and useful links, this is a blog to subscribe to.
Bray is also a prolific and pithy tweeter; be sure to add @timbray to your fav list.
I had thought I might also recommend former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's aptly named "What I Couldn't Say" blog, which I found interesting and entertaining in the wake of the Oracle acquisition. But I hadn't checked it in a while and discovered that the Ponytailed One had stopped posting in March -- but that's also the reason for his absence from the blogosphere. Schwartz blogged this week about his new company, Picture Of Health.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 10, 20102 comments
I don’t usually spend a lot of time on Apple announcements, because we're sort of enterprise-focused around here. But I can hardly ignore the Cool Cats in Cupertino today. The amount of email I received from companies commenting on Apple's decision to relax its restrictions on cross-platform compilers -- which, if I've got this right, maybe even allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone -- reminds me that, even in the enterprise, the compute platform is on the move.
In case you missed the announcement, Apple says it will no longer bar developers from using rival programming tools to build apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The statement read, in part:
…We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.
In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.
In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store….
When Apple released an update of its iPhone developer program license in April, plenty of developers were PO'd about its ban on private APIs and requirement that apps be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript, as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.
Needless to say, none of the messages crowding my inbox on this decision were negative. A note from Appcelerator, a Mountain View, CA-based maker of an open source application development platform called Titanium, was typical: "Appcelerator believes this move provides a strong endorsement for developer innovation, reinforces Apple’s long-term platform advantage, and benefits consumers as the ultimate arbiters of quality in the App Store."
You can almost hear the sigh of relief.
And Omar Hamoui, former CEO of AdMob and current VP of Google's product management group, posted what amounted to a cheer on the company blog: "This is great news for everyone in the mobile community, as we believe that a competitive environment is the best way to drive innovation and growth in mobile advertising…," wrote. Hamoui ought to be cheering. Google spent $750 million on its AdMob acquisition.
It's potentially big news for Adobe, which has been squabbling with Apple over Steve Jobs' adamantine antipathy for Flash. But the company was almost solemn in this tweet on the news: "We are encouraged to see Apple lift restrictions on its licensing terms, giving developers freedom to choose the tools they use."
Apple's decision is particularly good news for the AdMob crowd (no pun intended), but it's also good news for burgeoning population of developers building mobile apps for consumers -- a market that history shows us is a harbinger of things to come for the enterprise. And let's face it: with rumors swirling around that the FTC might be looking at Apple for anti-competitive practices that restrict rivals in the mobile-ad market in the wake of its acquisition of Quattro Wireless, it might have been Cupertino's only move.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 9, 20100 comments
The attendance stats coming out of the seventh annual VMworld conference, which wrapped up Thursday in San Francisco, are stunning: more than 17,000 conference goers attended more than 15,000 labs and consumed 102,000 sodas and 27,000 pastries (my contribution to this last one was more restrained this year, thanks for asking). And unseasonable temps in the high 90s!
But the numbers I began to wonder about after VMware unveiled its grand vision for a "new infrastructure" and "IT-as-a-Service" aren't as easy to pin down. (Get the details on these technologies from our sister pub, Virtualization Review. Excellent coverage of this year's conference by Bruce Hoard, Rick Vanover and others.)
Derrick Harris, senior curator in the Infrastructure group at industry analyst firm GigaOM Pro, actually posed the question on my mind in the title of a recently published strategy research paper: "VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?
You'll probably know GigaOM as the biz blog network launched in 2006 by Om Malik. Launched last year, GigaOM Pro provides "real-time expert industry analysis on emerging technology markets." It's essentially a network of savvy IT industry watchers.
I talked with Harris a week before the show, and he described a VMware already embarking on an all-inclusive cloud-computing strategy.
"In the cloud, you have the infrastructure level, the platform level and the software level, and VMware is trying to play in all those areas," he said. "Its solution set covers nearly every layer of the cloud stack, and its server, storage and networking partners fill in the rest, so against any single vendor, VMware continues to be the hands-down favorite for market leader. Which is not to say won't find anyone in its rear-view mirror."
VMware execs took the stage during the conference to describe a new everything-in-the-cloud stack that features an infrastructure layer comprising vSphere, vCenter, vCloud Director and vShield. Above that: a new cloud application platform layer; above that, a new end-user-access-from-any-device-anywhere layer. VMware CEO Paul Maritz declared that the role of the operating system layer in this environment is changing. "The traditional OS won't disappear," he said, "but it's one component that needs to fit into this world."
The big news for developers here is the cloud application platform, called vFabric. Based on the Spring Java development framework, vFabric includes the Apache Tomcat-based app server tc Server, GemFire data management software, the Enterprise Ready Server web server, the newly acquired Hyperic app performance management solution, and the RabbitMQ messaging software.
"VMware wants a situation where the developer writes to a framework -- in this case, the Spring framework -- and the lower level stuff is handled by another group of people and is automated as much as possible," Harris said. "This should be great for developers who have been trying to write applications for a virtualized environment; it frees them from concerns about the operating system, or the database, or other pieces of the stack."
I also talked with Timothy Stephan, VMware's knowledgeable senior director of product marketing, at the show about the IT-as-a-service model VMware was touting.
"In the late 1800s, organizations had a Chief Electricity Officer, who was charged with making sure that the rate and sources of electricity were standardized," he said. "I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say that the CIO is that outdated, but you see how things evolve. This is a utility model we're talking about, and a growing number of our customers are thinking about computing in this way."
I checked in with GigaOM Pro's Harris via e-mail after the show to get his take on the announcements: "In terms of [VMware's] cloud computing strategy around vCloud and its vFabric platform solution, nothing much has changed," he said. "However, Maritz's focus on IT as a service did surprise me a bit, as did the related acquisitions of Integrien and TriCipher [security]. Expanding beyond applications and infrastructure by delivering additional IT processes as services shows that VMware gets the bigger picture. Of course, it also puts VMware in greater competition against management vendors, which could have some interesting implications."
Posted by John K. Waters on September 4, 20100 comments