Oracle kicked off its celebration of Java's 25th anniversary, which arrived officially on Saturday, with ... you guessed it: online content. It's disappointing not to be able to celebrate the language and platform that is, let's face it, running world IRL. But Big Red mounted an able effort on its "Moved-by-Java" site with inspiring personal stories from its Java team and the larger Java community, many of which are genuinely inspiring. If you haven't already, be sure to check it out.
I was a bit ahead of the festivities last month when I talked with Rich Sharples, senior director of product management at Red Hat, about how Java had faired over the years compared with other technologies debuting in 1995. Feel free to check that out, too.
I don't have an equivalent lineup of stories and conversation to share, but I do have the answers to three questions the folks at online course provider Pluralsight put to their Java course authors -- and then shared with me.
What impact has Java had on the world and/or society?
Jim Wilson (https://twitter.com/hedgehogjim) in Warner, NH: "Java helped clear the way for creating bigger and more sophisticated systems more efficiently. Java and the accompanying JVM (Java Virtual Machine) empowered developers to focus on the business problem being solved rather than being bogged down in managing many of the underlying technical details required by previous programming languages."
Sander Mak (https://twitter.com/Sander_Mak) in The Netherlands: "Java is more than a technology: it also brought together a vibrant community of Java developers who share knowledge, build open-source tools, and move the world of software development forward. After 25 years, this community is still unique in its size and impact."
Kevin Jones (https://twitter.com/kevinrjones) in Bristol, UK: "Prior to 1995, [if you were] a developer on Windows, the predominant platform then and now, you had to be a C or a C++ programmer; similarly on Unix if you were writing server code. Then along came the web and this dinky language that many serious developers dismissed out of hand, letting us write these little toys called Applets with this promise of "Write Once, Run Anywhere." Looking back it's almost impossible to think of how we got from there to here. Java has become the dominant language in the enterprise with billions of lines of code running millions of server applications in tens of thousands of companies. Weirdly it's also gone back to its roots and runs on billions of devices. It's survived Sun's collapse and the takeover by Oracle; it's survived an early split with Microsoft and the incursion of .Net and is still the predominant language in the software world."
Jose Paumard (https://twitter.com/JosePaumard) in Paris, France: "The impact of Java on the software development community is tremendous. The 12M developers worldwide make it one of the most prolific languages along with C. And Java applications are everywhere, from the SIM cards that equip every single mobile phone on the planet to the largest applications running on the cloud. Besides that, along with Linux, Java was of the most prominent technology to promote Open source development, now adopted by everybody."
What impact has Java had on your career?
Wilson: "Java has been a major driver in my career for well over a decade. I began working in Java professionally back in 2008 as part of developing applications for the beta release of the Android platform. That early experience along with my relationship with Pluralsight have been major factors in the success I've been fortunate to experience as both a consultant and as an educator.
Mak: "I've been fortunate to work with a wide variety of organizations, ranging from governments, to banks, to Picnic, the online groceries start-up I'm currently at. They all use Java for their backend systems. Why? It offers the perfect balance between stability, performance, and continuous evolution. Working with such a versatile technology throughout my career allowed me to become an expert, while helping companies across many domains.
Jones: "Java has let me retire from full-time work early. I started doing Java development not long after it appeared as a language. That led to me teaching the language all over Europe and North America. I also spoke at numerous conferences including Java One where I met people from various publishing companies back when paper magazines were a thing. I wrote articles and columns on Java and segued that expertise into writing on-line courses for Pluralsight. I'm pretty sure that without Java I'd still be sitting at a desk somewhere working for somebody else getting very bored, rather than sitting at home working when I want and still interested in building new things."
Paumard: "For the past 25 years, Java shaped my professional life. I gave my first Java course at the university in 1998 and I am still doing that. Java made me travel the world from conferences to conferences, where I talk several times a year. I became a Java Champion in 2016 and have more than a hundred of hours of online courses. I worked for countless companies helping them to better write and organize their Java applications."
What is your prediction for the future of Java over the next 5 years?
Wilson: "Java will continue to innovate and lead the way. Recent additions like microservice support and cloud-based services integration combined with a strong existing code base, rich APIs, and a well-established developer community will keep Java in the forefront of development for many years to come."
Mak: "In the coming years, Java will cement itself further as the platform for cloud applications. We can expect new features lowering Java's footprint and improving its already impressive performance even further. The pace of improvement for the Java programming language will keep increasing, ensuring Java's relevance for many years to come."
Jones "Some things are not going to change, Java will still be ubiquitous in the enterprise and still running on most of the world's phones. Some change we're already seeing, Java has always evolved, but very slowly, but now the release cadence has gone up and this is great, it means that new features are coming into the language at a much higher rate, and the language gets to be modernized. Java as a language is being challenged from within the ecosystem by languages such as Kotlin and externally by languages such as C# and Go, this is a good thing as it, again, forces the language to evolve. I can see the language becoming more functional and less verbose, we already see this with the use of the 'var' keyword. If you could take a Java developer from 25 years ago and put her in 2025 she'd be amazed at the way code is being written, the language continues to evolve to a state where that developer would find it completely alien."
Paumard: "Java will continue on its current path for the next 5 years. Several major projects are under very active development and since their development is Open source, we can see, week after week the progress of them. The Loom project will bring new paradigms in concurrent programming, leading to critical performance improvements for web servers for instance. The Valhalla project will provide better ways to control how data is laid out in memory, bringing new performances for intensive data processing applications. But for me the most important of them is the Amber project, that will bring new ways of writing code and will have the same kind of impact on the way Java code is organized as the introduction of lambda expressions in 2014. Java 14, published earlier in March saw the first release of preview features from Amber and it was a great success."
Posted by John K. Waters on May 29, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation is moving its headquarters to Belgium, the organization has just revealed. One of the world's leading open-source software foundations, steward of the Eclipse IDE, enterprise Java, and the Eclipse MicroProfile, and the heart of a global ecosystem of developers, companies, and public sector entities, is pulling up stakes and heading for Brussels.
Well, figuratively speaking.
This "move" is more about establishing an official identity in a region poised to embrace open source in a big way than physically relocating. The Foundation offices in Ottawa, Canada, will still be there when the new legal entity in Europe is established later this summer; it should be finalized by July 2020. The Foundation will then be legally "domiciled" in Belgium as an AISBL (Association internationale sans but lucratif), which is the international version of the country's two forms of non-profits.
I asked the Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, who has led the organization since its founding just over 16 years ago (mostly from those offices in Canada) why the EF is doing this.
"From one perspective, we're just doubling down on the status quo," he told me. "Two-thirds of our committers are based in European countries, and we're already the largest open-source organization in Europe. But from another perspective, we're getting ahead of a kind of awakening in Europe about the true value of open source. Last year, we started to see the light bulb going off in the form of more and more publications and various governmental and industry organizations emerging with a focus on open source. Open source has gone from something that was tactical or perhaps interesting to something that's strategic and central to their thinking. It was pretty clear that if we didn't do this, someone else would."
"Don't get me wrong," he added. "There are open-source organizations in Europe, but they largely stick to single projects—the Open Document Foundation, for example. And none of them have the scope of the Eclipse Foundation, which hosts hundreds of projects."
The Eclipse Foundation is already the largest open-source organization in Europe, with nearly 1,000 committers and a staff of about 10 mostly development staff spit between France and Germany. This move builds on that large international membership base and will almost certainly accelerate its growth. As the Foundation put it in a press release, "The Eclipse Foundation's new home will enhance all its global members' abilities to participate in European projects via open technologies. This will provide new opportunities for all, in a competitive global level playing field, to bring new solutions to the global market."
"This is a move motivated by a business opportunity, an opening to establish a truly global institution for open source," Milinkovich said.
When all this virtual rearranging is completed, the Eclipse Foundation will have headquarters in Belgium, Canada, and the US, though its official home will be in Europe. Consider that trifurcation in the context of the Foundation's mission to prove to the enterprise that the world of open-source solutions can be trusted and relied on—a mission that spawned the annual simultaneous release of multiple Eclipse Foundation projects known as the Release Train—and the move makes even more sense. The industries that use the solutions developed and maintained by Eclipse committers (and those the Foundation wants to use them) are governed by the local laws. Europe-based companies are often more comfortable with Belgian law, Milinkovich pointed out.
"We're essentially creating a home that's more appealing to European industry," he said. "The number one reason we ended up in Belgium is that the country's legal structure is absolutely fit to purpose for an international organization like ours. But also, it's considered sort of the neutral country within Europe."
Not all of this ephemeral shuffling is going to be virtual. The Foundation is establishing a new GitLab-based forge hosted on servers in Europe. Currently, the Foundation offers projects a choice between its own original forge, which is based on Git, Bugzilla, and Garrett, and GitHub.
A team at IBM developed the original Eclipse Java-based IDE in the late 1990s. That IDE was the EF's first killer app. "The Eclipse Foundation is vital to millions of developers worldwide, as are Eclipse projects to companies in many industries," said Todd Moore, vice president of Open Technology and Advocacy at IBM, in a statement. "The Eclipse Foundation is taking steps to expand its global presence and reach. IBM welcomes the initiative and is providing support."
More information on the Foundation's plans and how interested parties can get involved can be found on the Eclipse Foundation website.
Posted by John K. Waters on May 13, 20200 comments
Red Hat has been making a lot of news over the past two weeks, with product and services announcements fairly gushing from the Red Hat Summit online event last week, as well as IBM's online Think event, which is wrapping up today.
Red Hat kept its identity as an open source powerhouse more or less intact after IBM closed the deal to acquire it last year, but Big Blue is definitely leveraging the fruits of that acquisition. Red Hat's OpenShift hybrid cloud application Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), in particular, was in the spotlight at the both events.
A week earlier, I had an opportunity to talk with Brian Gracely, senior director of product strategy in IBM's Red Hat OpenShift group. Gracely lives "at the intersection of new technologies and new business models" (cool image). More from his LinkedIn profile: "Take complex new technologies, figure out the future business opportunities, connect the dots across the industry, simplify it and explain it to people in suits or t-shirts. That's what I do."
Clearly, this was the right guy to help me understand Red Hat's quirky OpenShift feature release strategy. OpenShift is built on the open source Kubernetes project, which has a new release approximately every three months, give or take a day. Within those Kubernetes releases, however, are features and capabilities classified as alpha, beta and GA (generally available).
Red Hat's OpenShift is upgraded on a four-to-six-month release cadence, which puts them about three months behind the open source project releases. "Three months later, we've done the integration testing, scale testing, fixed some bugs and updated our documentation for better training," Gracely told me. "It's a cadence that works for us and our customers."
However, in any given Kubernetes release, there might be -- let's say for the sake of this explanation -- half-a-dozen GA features, maybe 10 or 12 beta features, and 15 or 20 alpha features. Gracely explained, "What we find with customers is that the majority of them want GA stuff only, because those features are going into production and stability is a top concern. But there's also a subset of customers -- sometimes they're in a unique industry; sometimes they have a unique use case -- who want access to those alpha and beta features immediately."
To accommodate the needs of those customers, Red Hat created "channels" through which its customers could have easy access to those features classified as not ready for prime time. "It lets our technology partners have early access to the software," Gracely said. "It lets systems integrators who have to do some follow-on work have access to the software. And it gives customers, who say, 'I need to start testing this new stuff as early you can get it to me' the access they need. It's kind of new a way of distributing Infrastructure Center of software."
Red Hat has refined its understanding of Kubernetes over the years, Gracely said, and compensated for the early limitations of the platform when it came to extensibility and modularity. "Back in 2015, Kubernetes was just kind of a giant hunk of software," he said. "So, as stuff was added to it, it just became a bigger hunk of software, kind of a ball of mud."
Two years into the project, Red Hat made the platform extensible to accommodate new and useful features that needed the platform, but were not part of the Kubernetes core. Originally called third-party resources, they're now known as custom resource definitions (CRDs). "The CRD provides a standard way to extend Kubernetes without breaking the core stuff," Gracely said. "If you have new things to add, here's how you add them in a structured way."
The CRD was developed a year-and-a-half ago. As current examples, Gracely pointed to the service mesh project and serverless -- tech that lives on top of Kubernetes, but remains apart for the core project. But the CRD didn't remain static; it evolved, Gracely said, into "operator patterns."
"Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that make use of custom resources to manage applications and their components," the org's Web site states. "The Operator pattern aims to capture the key goal of a human operator who is managing a service or set of services. Human operators who look after specific applications and services have deep knowledge of how the system ought to behave, how to deploy it, and how to react if there are problems."
"And so, while we have main versions of Kubernetes that come out, we now have the ability to say, 'Oh, I have an operator extension for something new that doesn't have to be bound to a specific release,'" Gracely said. "And what that means is, 'I don't have to wait for multiple releases in order to get access to something new.' It's another way of adding flexibility to Kubernetes, while staying true to the projects, making sure your APIs are compatible, and not slowing down your ability to ship new software or a new feature.
OpenShift 4.4 was scheduled for general availability this week.
Posted by John K. Waters on May 7, 20200 comments
Now that you're working from home and not spending all that time on a daily commute or regular showers, instead of binge-watching back episodes of Rick and Morty, you might want to use that time to up-level your skillset with some online education -- much of which is suddenly very affordable.
Many of the top online technology education providers are offering deals during the lockdown. Pluralsight, for example, has a "Free April" offering that includes free, unlimited access to the Pluralsight Skills platform for the entire month. The company is allowing anyone to access Pluralsight's entire library of more than 7,000 courses during the month.
The Udacity "Quarantine Special" gives enrollees 30 days of free access to many of the classes in the company's catalog, including its newly announced Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree Program, which was developed with Intel and uses the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to provide this training. (More on that course in this Pure AI article.)
Udemy's April deals include 90 percent discounts on a number of courses. Introduction To Python Programming is one of a number of free courses currently being offered by the online education provider.
Coursera has a seven-day free trial, and edX has posted a list of coupon promotions and discounts on its Web site.
Clearly, many of you don't need my advice on this subject. (OK, most of you.) Earlier this month, Udemy reported a spike in enrollments in its online courses, including a 62 percent popularity jump during a 30-day period for its Complete Guide to TensorFlow for Deep Learning with Python course, and a 45 percent spike in interest in its ChatBots: Messenger ChatBot - DialogFlow and nodejs course.
Pluralsight's April deal is also drawing quite a crowd. The company is reporting more than 898,000 new sign-ups and over 142,000 skill assessments completed as of Monday. I had a chance to talk with Gilbert Lee, head of content at Pluralsight, about how the online learning business is going during the lockdown. He said the company's most popular offerings are application development courses, which was true before the lockdown.
"What I think we're seeing now is some urgency around the idea that the world is changing because of the pandemic," Lee told me. "We're all talking about this new reality and what that might mean for all of us going forward. But no one really knows what it will mean, and that creates insecurity. We're seeing all these folks who want to make sure they're skilled up and deep in competitive technology areas -- say, an application developer studying machine learning and AI, which wasn't such a big deal in their jobs before, but has become increasingly important."
There's an irony here, in that the tech sector is proving to be stronger than many other industries during the lockdown. The businesses that have remained open need technology more than ever. (Can I get a "zoom" from somebody!)
"That's right," Lee said, "but not only are the professionals going deeper, but we're seeing a surge of people getting into tech, looking to begin developing new careers."
The company has also put together a deal for Pluralsight One that is less unwieldy for accessing thousands of courses. Plurasight One is a separate program focused on bridging the technology skills gap for nonprofits and educators.
"Throughout the lockdown we will be pursuing our core mission, which is to democratize technology skills," he added. "We're building goodwill and we're providing a tangible benefit and a service we are super proud of."
Posted by John K. Waters on April 23, 20200 comments
Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: increased demand for COBOL programmers. The need seems to be particularly acute among states whose unemployment systems were originally written in the decades-old language -- systems suddenly tasked with processing a record number of unemployment claims. Estimates vary, but it's safe to say that there are a couple hundred billion lines of COBOL code currently in use. And it seems to be gumming up the works.
This news should provoke a bit of déjà vu in more than a few IT industry watchers. Remember Y2K? People were calling it the COBOL Programmers' Re-employment Act, as companies worldwide begged and bribed a virtually retired community to help them make changes to this language nobody seemed to understand anymore.
Meredith Stowell, VP of the IBM Z Ecosystem, wrote about the sudden demand for scarce COBOL expertise in a blog post, in which she also outlined three new initiatives members of the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project have devised to address the immediate need.
The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort managed by the Linux Foundation to encourage the use of Linux-based operating systems and open source software on mainframe computers. The five-year-old project's members, including IBM, Broadcom, Phoenix Software, Rocket Software, SUSE, Vicom Infinity, and Zoss, developed the initiatives "in response to this urgent need from our public sector officials." They include:
Calling all COBOL Programmers Forum: a new talent portal where employers can connect with available and experienced COBOL programmers. This new initiative provides an immediate way to help connect professionals where needs arise – with skilled talent ready to get to work. This is open to those looking for employment, retired skilled veterans, students who have successfully completed COBOL courses, or professionals wanting to volunteer.
COBOL Technical Forum - a new temporary resource being actively monitored by experienced COBOL programmers providing free advice and expertise during the crisis. This tool will allow all levels of programmers to manage issues, learn new techniques and expedite solutions needed as programmers alter this critical code.
Open Source COBOL Training – a brand new open source course designed to teach COBOL to beginners and refresh experienced professionals. IBM worked with clients and an institute of higher education to develop an in-depth COBOL Programming with VSCode course that will be available next week on the public domain at no charge to anyone. This curriculum will be made into a self-service video course with hands-on labs and tutorials available via Coursera and other learning platforms next month. The course will be available on IBM's own training platform free of charge.
Hundreds of engineers had made themselves available through the new COBOL talent platform, the Project reported, both for hire and as volunteers. They'll have their hands full: The federal labor department reported 16.8 million unemployment claims were filed between March 15 and April 4.
"This call for skills is a great example of how communities, and in particular open source communities, pulling together can quickly and efficiently address critical needs in times of crisis," said Alan Clark, Open Mainframe Governing Board Member and SUSE CTO.
IBM should get some extra credit for maintaining its own programs to help fill the shallow pool of COBOL coders. "IBM has a long history of investing in mainframe skills," Stowell wrote. "In addition to contributing to the Open Mainframe Project Community Forum and providing expanded open-source training, there are a number of initiatives that IBM has been participating in to address the continuous need for COBOL skills by our community."
Those programs include:
- IBM Z Academic Initiative: Through the IBM Z Academic Initiative program, IBM actively partners with over 120 schools across the United States located in the vicinity of our clients to integrate critical Enterprise Computing content into curriculum. These courses often include an introduction to COBOL. Over 45 of these schools have specific courses dedicated to COBOL programming and more are added each year. For example, Bergen Community College in New Jersey includes mainframe content in their curriculum in addition to having a vibrant, active mainframe student club.
- Master the Mainframe: COBOL is also introduced through our Master the Mainframe program which reached 4,286 students from over 600 schools across the US last year. No charge, COBOL e-learning courses are also available to academic students globally, year-round.
- Mainframe Application Developer Standard: To help broaden the skill base, IBM has recently developed a Mainframe Application Developer standard in cooperation with a number of clients. This standard is registered as an apprenticeship with the Department of Labor and COBOL training is incorporated into that standard to meet the demands of the marketplace.
- A robust ecosystem of partners: COBOL training is offered globally through our ecosystem of partners. For example, Inter-skill offers a significant number of e-learning courses and approximately 1,000 digital badges have been issued for COBOL.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 16, 20200 comments
Java's silver anniversary is right around the corner; in May, the venerable language undergirding acres of the enterprise and still supported by a community of more than seven million developers turns 25. But Java wasn't the only technology hitting the mainstream in 1995. The folks at Red Hat sent me a list of ground-breaking technology platforms, which, "taken as a whole, are the ancestral equivalent of the way we work, play, and live today." The idea was "to put Java and its birth-year brethren in context."
Cool idea.
Windows 95 was the most obvious item on the list, and if you thought about it for a minute, you'd probably recall that Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in 1995. But did you know that the DVD was invented in 1995 and released in late 1996? That the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol was developed in 1994? That the first PlayStation was released in Japan in December 1994 and the rest of the world in 1995? Or that Amazon.com was founded in 1994? Or that JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich the same year James Gosling created Java?
"It's an interesting exercise," Rich Sharples, senior director of product management at Red Hat, told me. "Those are some cool technologies, but I think there's a big difference with some of them, in that consumer tech is rapidly forgotten as soon as there's a better alternative, like DVDs. But programming languages are not like that. They don't get deprecated very quickly, if ever. When people use them to build business critical systems, they can't just stop using them. They have to evolve and be maintained virtually forever."
The COVID-19-driven spike in unemployment claims has driven IBM to reach out to COBOL programmers to help scale those systems, Sharples pointed out. COBOL has been around since 1959. "Imagine if those systems had been built with microservices and four or five different languages," he said. "They probably wouldn't have survived 2 years, let alone 30."
One big difference between Java and COBOL, of course, is Java's large and active community, which continues to contribute to the evolution of the language and platform. "Java has a bigger ecosystem now than it has at any time in its history," Sharples said. "There are lots of players, old and new, with an interest in Java, including Microsoft. So, there's still plenty of innovation going on in the Java world. People are still building cool stuff with Java."
Red Hat is among those still building the cool stuff. For example, last April the company launched Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java framework. The Raleigh, NC-based open-source solutions provider and long-time Java community leader also stepped in last year to assume the stewardship of OpenJDK projects no longer supported, long-term, by Oracle.
"Languages do tend to have a long shelf life, and Java is no exception," Sharples said, "In fact the two languages that top the popularity charts along with Java are Python, which is going through a renaissance with AI and ML, and JavaScript, the duct tape of the web—both of which are older languages. And C++ is always in there, too."
"I said this on the 10th anniversary," Sharples added, "the last Java developer has not been born yet. My 18-year-old daughter is at home from university, where she's been studying AI and machine learning. But in her basic computer science classes the language she's learning is Java."
Posted by John K. Waters on April 15, 20200 comments
Calling all coders! The world needs you now to save us from COVID-19! Or to put it in less panicky, running-out-of-TP, could-we-eat-the-cat-if-we-had-to terms, we could all use a dose of your smarts and skill to help with this immediate, life-or-death challenge.
Yes, I'm talking about the third annual Call for Code Global Challenge, which is something of a clarion call to software developers around the world -- from crusty engineers to baby-faced programmers and everyone in between -- to pool their talents to address some of society's biggest challenges. Climate change has been a focus of The Challenge in the past, but in March of this year, the organizers announced that they would be expanding that focus to include both climate change and COVID-19.
"We realized we can and should do more through the amazing ecosystem and infrastructure we've created through Call for Code," said Willie Tejada, chief developer advocate in IBM's developer ecosystem group, in a blog post. The change received "overwhelming support and some exciting early ideas," Tejada said. "In a single day, we received over 1,000 registrations from developers. First responders, at-risk individuals, and coders are reaching out to us to share their experiences and brainstorm solutions. Together with Creator David Clark Cause and in partnership with United Nations Human Rights and the Linux Foundation, we're asking developers, data scientists, and problem solvers to answer The Call."
Developers and non-coder problem solvers (anybody with a good idea) have until April 27 to submit their open source solutions for early deployment, the organizers said.
Dennis Bly, global offering manager for academic developers at IBM, who leads Big Blue's global university engagement for Call for Code, talked about this year's Challenge in an e-mail conversation with ADTmag.
"The initiative aims are to create open-source-powered technology solutions at scale across IBM Cloud services," Bly said, "and it's one of the largest developer challenges in the world."
In 2019, more than 180,000 participants from 165 countries created more than 5,000 applications focused on natural disaster preparedness and relief, Bly said.
"After we expanded the focus of this year's competition to include COVID-19, the response has been tremendous," he said. "In just under a month, we already have 45,000 participants from 146 countries and growing, who are actively working on solutions to help address the COVID-19 response and climate change."
The 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge invites participants to take on climate change by building applications on open source software, including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain and data from The Weather Company. The goal is to employ technology in new ways that can make an immediate and lasting humanitarian impact in communities around the world, he explained.
The organizers provide starter kits that give developers quick-start guides to create applications tied to easy-to-understand use cases in just minutes. (By the way: The intro video is hosted by Lady Gaga.)
Last year's Call for Code Global Challenge winner, Barcelona-based startup Prometeo, created an AI-based cognitive health monitoring platform -- a wearable device that measures carbon monoxide, smoke concentration, humidity and temperature to monitor firefighter safety in real-time. That dev team included three developers, but the company founded by a veteran firefighter and an emergency medical nurse, so the special expertise was there.
The company won the $200,000 grand prize, as well as the People's Choice award (in October), where thousands of voters chose Prometeo as their favorite solution.
IBM helped Prometeo to build and deploy a solution to elevate firefighter decision making in the face of natural disasters.
"Another way we've seen Call For Code make a positive difference is by connecting developers who have similar ideas but different ways of going about them," Bly said. For example, our first Call for Code winner, Project Owl, created a solution that helps create a wireless network in areas affected by natural disasters to bring connectivity to the people impacted. We were able to connect the members of that team with the winner of our Call for Code Puerto Rico hackathon, a solution called DroneAid that uses drones to check in on and provide assistance to those stranded in the wake of a disaster."
Together, the two teams have been running pilot programs in Puerto Rico throughout the past year to optimize how they work together to best serve the same communities, Bly said.
IBM also commissioned a global survey of developers, first respondents and activists to better understand their feelings around climate change with partner Morning Consult. Bly sent us the findings of the survey, which included:
- 77 percent of first responders and developers agree with the statement, "Climate change is the single most pressing issue facing my generation." (The number is 83 percent for activists alone.)
- 79 percent of first responders and developers agree that most people want to do something to help combat climate change, but don't know where to start. (The number is 84 percent for activists alone.)
- 78 percent of first responders and developers agree that climate change is something that can be reduced or combated with technology. (The number is 83 percent for activists alone.)
This year's Challenge includes a dedicated university edition.
"Since the competition launched, we have learned that the most promising innovations often come from unexpected sources," Bly explained. "The scope and urgency of the issues we're facing today demand diverse perspectives and expertise, and student participation is key to that. ... One of our partners, who we are honored to work with for the second year, is the Clinton Global Initiative University. Together we have launched a dedicated University Edition within Call for Code. Last year we reached over 10,000 students as a part of our work with CGIU and this year would like to surpass that number.
On April 22, IBM will host a kick-off event for the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge University Edition.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 9, 20200 comments
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Pinterest and other tech industry giants have joined forces with the World Health Organization (WHO) to organize a hackathon to promote the development of software solutions that address "challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic."
The Build for COVID19 Global Online Hackathon (#BuildforCOVID19) was announced on Tuesday and began taking project submissions today. Interested developers can register on the DevPost hackathon registry, and also a registration page created by the Hack Club. The deadline for submitting projects is Monday. The hackathon organizers will announce the top projects on April 3.
The first two weeks of a social-isolation campaign that's on the verge of locking down the population of the entire country -- not to mention the world -- might seem like an odd moment to gather the efforts of software developers for a traditionally sleep-sucking, cheek-by-jowl, code-cramming session, but the event's organizers see it as a valuable means of focusing expertise, creativity, and plain old brain power on some aspects of the world-shaking crisis through a platform that keeps everyone working from a safe distance.
"Given the isolation currently being experienced within communities right now, we want to create an online space where developers could ideate, experiment and build software solutions to help address this crisis," the companies said in a statement.
The hackathon organizers are encouraging developers to build projects focused key challenges, such as the need for accurate disease prevention information around the world in languages and formats that resonate locally, but also the regional needs for expertise, resources, supplies, and financial support from donors.
The organizers posted a list of seven themes to help spark ideas among hackathon participants, including:
- Health: Address and scale a range of health initiatives, including preventative/hygiene behaviors (especially for at-risk countries and populations), supporting frontline health workers, scaling telemedicine, contact tracing/containment strategies, treatment and diagnosis development.
- Vulnerable Populations: The set of problems facing the elderly and the immuno-compromised, such as access to meals and groceries, and supporting those who are losing jobs and income.
- Businesses: The set of problems that businesses are facing to stay afloat, collaborate effectively, and move parts of their business online.
- Community: Promoting connection to friends, family, and neighbors to combat social isolation and the digitizing of public services for local governments.
- Education: Alternative learning environments and tools for students, teachers, and entire school systems.
- Entertainment: Alternatives to traditional forms of entertainment that can keep the talent and audiences safe and healthy.
- Other: The above themes are just suggestions. Feel empowered to get creative!
The WHO, scientists from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and experts from other industries will provide guidance on which projects are likely to prove most useful, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a blog post. "[A]nd our engineers will be joined by teams from Microsoft, Slack, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, WeChat, Giphy, Slow Ventures, and more to build tools to help tackle some of the health, economic and community challenges coming from the outbreak," Zuckerberg said.
These companies will be sharing resources to support participants throughout the submission period, Zuckerberg said. And the organizers want participants to use technologies of their choosing.
Whipping up a hackathon to deal with some of the problems caused by the pandemic is not an unprecedented strategy, Zuckerberg pointed out. "Hackathons have always been an important part of how we come up with new ideas and projects at Facebook," he said, "features like Blood Donations and Crisis Response were first built during hackathons and are now used by millions of people worldwide. I'm hopeful that some useful prototypes and ideas will come out of this one as well."
Paola Pisano, Minister of Technological Innovation and Digitalization in Italy, one of the hardest hit countries, endorsed the hackathon in a video tweet, and encouraged developers to get involved: "#COVID19 Global Hackathon is a great opportunity for designers, developers to build solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic. I'm encouraging innovators around the world to join #BuildforCOVID19."
#BuildForCOVID19 is open to anyone who wants to participate, and I encourage ADTmag readers who have the bandwidth to participate to sign up. You can find more details here.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 26, 20200 comments
Oracle announced the general availability of Java 14 (Oracle JDK 14) this week, and though this is not a long-term support release, it comes with some highly anticipated new features -- plus, it arrives just two months before the 25th anniversary of the Java programming language, which was released by Sun Microsystems on May 23, 1995.
This seemed like a good time to check in with the Java gang at Oracle (from a safe distance, via video conferencing). Georges Saab, vice president of software development in Oracle's Java Platform Group, sees the same "candy-to-medicine ratio" in this release as we saw in Java 8, which, as he predicted, was very popular. The "candy" in Java 14 comes in the form of incremental features from some longer-term projects, such as Panama and Valhalla.
"Those are fairly ambitious projects that we started around the time we were working on delivering Java 9," he said. "We knew they going to take while to bear fruit, so we're really pleased to see some of these things coming in—things like Pattern Matching, Records, and the Foreign-Memory Access API. All of those things have come from those larger projects. This is the start of something we'll see play out over the next few releases. From that perspective, this is quite an exciting release."
As I reported earlier, the list of JEPs addressed in this release is a long one. Pattern Matching (JEP 305), which allows common logic in a program to be expressed more concisely and safely, and Records (JEP 359), which provide a compact syntax for declaring classes that are transparent holders for shallowly immutable data, are both previewed in Java 14. Saab explained how Oracle is defining a feature "preview."
"People ask about this," he said. "Is it an alpha? Is it a beta? But it's actually a completely defined, production quality feature that hasn't had a chance to get the kind of broad feedback we really need on something that's going to be in the Java platform for the next few decades. We want to make sure we're getting it right, so we put it in as a preview feature, which developers have to actually enable, so they won't accidentally write some code that depends on that feature and not be aware it."
Saab also said he continues to get mostly positive feedback on the faster release cadence.
"People who made the investment to move from eight to something after nine, are in a really good place now," he said. "They can choose to keep a production workload running on Java 11 while they're trying out the newer releases. They've told us it was a bit of an effort to get to 11, but now, they're finding it really easy to move forward with the smaller, six-month releases."
When I pushed him or favorite new features, Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro, Oracle's senior director of product management in charge of Java SE, and a Sun Microsystems veteran, didn't hesitate.
"It's Records," he said. "It's just so easy to show the benefits on that one. I remember when I was learning Java, it took me a while to get used to having to write boiler-plate code. For every class, you had to implement toString(), equals(), and hashCode(). Now, if you're using records, you don't have to do that. Records provides a compact syntax for declaring classes which are plain immutable data carriers."
Manish Gupta, Oracle's VP of global marketing for Java and the GraalVM, pointed out (as the marketing guy should) that Oracle's contribution to this release surpassed all other contributors combined.
"There is a strong ecosystem that's participating in the OpenJDK for all of the releases," Gupta allowed, "and the development is done in a transparent and open manner. But the level of investment and the engineering resources Oracle continues to put behind this platform far exceeds the investment from Red Hat, IBM, and others, though they make a lot more noise about their contributions."
Gupta also weighed in on the status of Oracle's Java SE subscription service, which Big Red launched in June 2018. "Although there was a lot of initial anxiety in the market, and we couldn't predict what the uptake would be, I'm happy to report that we have, with many of our customers, crossed the one-year line," he said. "Our last quarter was the first to see subscription renewals, and we came close to a 90% renewal rate. It's a validation of the model, which was a significant change. Thousands of customers are seeing value in it."
I pointed to my interview with Gartner analyst Anne Thomas earlier this year, in which she suggested that the advent of Oracle's subscription model hit the budgets of many organizations hard.
"Options still exist for people," he said. "But if you're an enterprise, you're probably going to be paying for support somewhere. The question is, do you want the support of the company that is driving much of the innovation in the Java space, or others. We're not trying to lock you in, but we want to make sure you recognize the value you get from Oracle."
Posted by John K. Waters on March 19, 20200 comments