Azul Survey Finds 88% of Enterprises Weighing Alternatives to Oracle Java as Licensing Costs and Rules Shift

Posted on February 3, 20260 comments

What the $38B OpenAI–AWS Deal Means for Developers

Last week, OpenAI quietly signed a $38 billion, seven-year compute deal with Amazon Web Services. The partnership, one of the largest cloud infrastructure deals ever reported, is not about new models or product launches—it’s about the infrastructure that will power those models.

For developers, DevOps teams, and application architects, this signals a major inflection point in how AI services will be built, deployed, and scaled over the next decade.

Posted on November 10, 20250 comments

The Worm That Ate JavaScript: Inside the Shai-Hulud Supply Chain Attack

The notification arrived on September 14, 2025, at 17:58 UTC. Somewhere in the sprawling npm registry—home to 2.5 million JavaScript packages that power everything from banking apps to smart refrigerators—something had gone terribly wrong. A package had been compromised. Then another. Then twenty more.

By the time security researchers at Aikido, Socket.dev, and StepSecurity pieced together what was happening, more than 180 packages had been infected with malware that did something no one had quite seen before: it reproduced itself, worm-like, spreading through the very infrastructure developers use to share code.

Posted on October 1, 20250 comments

Java 25: Oracle’s Big-Tent Release—and a Clearer Roadmap for What’s Next

Oracle’s Java team sat down with me last week for a fast-moving briefing on Java 25 and the broader direction of the platform. The headline: JDK 25 is an LTS release, the second on Oracle’s new two-year LTS cadence (after 21), and it lands with meaningful language cleanup, startup/perf work, forward-looking security, and a steady drumbeat toward AI-era workloads.

Below are the highlights that stood out.

Java’s momentum (by the numbers and the vibe)
Oracle cited a 2025 VDC study claiming 73 billion active JVMs and reiterated Java’s position as the "#1 enterprise language." That’s marketing, sure—but the roadmap that follows backs up the claim: frequent releases, visible progress on long-running projects, and pragmatic integration paths for AI and post-quantum crypto.

Posted on September 16, 20250 comments

JFrog Wants to Fix the Messy Business of AI-Generated Code

Software repositories aren't exactly the sexiest part of the tech stack. They're the digital warehouses where developers store, version, and distribute the building blocks of applications—think of them as the unglamorous but essential logistics network that keeps modern software development running.

But as artificial intelligence reshapes how code gets written, companies like JFrog are betting that these repositories need a fundamental rethink. The Israeli DevOps company this week unveiled JFrog Fly, a new platform designed specifically for what it calls "agentic workflows"—development processes where AI tools don't just suggest code snippets but actively participate in building, testing, and deploying software.

Posted on September 10, 20250 comments

The Government Just Rewrote the Rules of Software Updates—And It's About Time

It's a scenario familiar to virtually every IT administrator: A critical security vulnerability drops on a Tuesday afternoon. Patch it immediately and risk crashing the entire network, or wait to test it properly and leave the door wide open for the bad guys. It's a digital Sophie's choice from which the folks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) might be sparing you.

I know... I know... Another post about NIST? The thing is, they've just announced an update to their cybersecurity bible that addresses that Sophie's choice with a new cybersecurity framework focused on the challenging choice between patching quickly and breaking everything.

Posted on August 27, 20250 comments

NIST's New AI Security Controls: What Developers Need to Know

If you're building AI systems, NIST has just released a roadmap that will significantly impact how you architect, deploy, and maintain your models. The agency released a concept paper this week outlining Control Overlays for Securing AI Systems (COSAIS), essentially taking the federal government's existing cybersecurity playbook (SP 800-53) and adapting it for the unique challenges of AI development.

Posted on August 18, 20250 comments

A GPT-5 Reality Check: When AI Progress Meets Human Attachment

OpenAI dropped GPT-5 last week with the usual fanfare, and I've been diving into what it actually delivers versus what the marketing promises. Spoiler alert: it's complicated, and not always in the ways you'd expect.

What Actually Changed
GPT-5 is a solid incremental upgrade—emphasis on incremental. The numbers are real: 94.6% on math competitions, 74.9% on coding benchmarks, and significantly fewer hallucinations. These aren't revolutionary leaps, but they matter for anyone using these tools for real work.

Posted on August 13, 20250 comments

Java Developers Can Finally Build AI Apps Without Losing Their Minds

For decades, Java has been the enterprise world's go-to programming language—the reliable, if somewhat verbose, workhorse powering everything from banking systems to e-commerce platforms. But when the AI revolution hit, Java developers found themselves on the sidelines, watching Python programmers build chatbots and image generators with seemingly magical ease.

Now that's changing, thanks to an unlikely duo: Quarkus and LangChain4j.

Posted on August 5, 20250 comments