To describe the 2.0 release of the Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server as long-awaited would be the understatement of the decade -- which is literally how long Jenkins has been a 1.0 release. Really. Ten years.
"I don't know if it's the longest 1.0 release in history," CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey told me during a recent visit to Silicon Valley, "but it's got to be close."
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 12, 20160 comments
The list of Java evangelists exiting Oracle got a little longer this month when Reza Rahman announced that he would be leaving the company. But Rahman is not going quietly. In a personal blog post, he stated that he left because of his growing skepticism about Oracle's stewardship of enterprise Java, which he said was "independently shared by the ever vigilant Java EE community outside Oracle."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20160 comments
You know how I'm always banging on about how we need a technology-agnostic conference focused on the challenges facing the makers and maintainers of the purpose-designed software that drives organizations in virtually every industry in the world -- in other words, the readers of Application Development Trends? Well, it turns out, the organizers of the enormously popular Live! 360 conference agree with me. (Or maybe they just got tired of the noise.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 18, 20160 comments
There are few trickier tasks in business -- any business -- than changing a company's name. There are branding issues, legal complications, marketing considerations. Just ask the folks at Lightbend, formerly Typesafe, who have been going through the process for months, and today announced its new moniker.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 23, 20160 comments
I know, it's February, but I reached out to a lot of smart people last month for their thoughts on what lies ahead for enterprise developers in 2016 -- more than I could squeeze into parts 1 and 2. In addition to industry analysts, I connected with some of the thoughtful execs I spoke with last year.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 16, 20160 comments
News that Oracle Corp. plans to deprecate the Java browser plug-in in JDK 9 prompted a rousing chorus of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from the Internet last week. But the news came as no surprise. A growing number of browser vendors have either stopped supporting the plug-in or announced plans to do so. (Flash and Silverlight, too.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 20160 comments
We're only a month into 2016 and it's already shaping up to be another lively year for enterprise developers. Mobile, cloud, DevOps, IoT, microservices, the API economy, cognitive computing, virtual reality -- all are reshaping organizations in fundamental ways, and it looks like devs are going to have a large role to play in that change.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 29, 20160 comments
As we reported earlier, Java won TIOBE's annual popularity contest for 2015, and came in a close second among languages used on GitHub, even though everybody and his brother seemed to be predicting Java's decline last year. This is why covering this beat often makes my head hurt. How can Java be on its way out when it's more popular than ever?
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 27, 20160 comments
My annual, informal survey of industry watchers about challenges and opportunities for enterprise developers in the coming year led me this year to a group of Forrester analysts (Jeffrey S. Hammond, Kurt Bittner, John R. Rymer, Diego Lo Giudice, Jost Hoppermann, John M. Wargo, Randy Heffner and Michael Facemire) who made some predictions back in November in a must-read report, "Predictions 2016: Modern Development Goes Mainstream").
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 22, 20160 comments