O'Reilly's annual Open Source Convention, better known as OSCON, is in full swing this week in Portland. Among the more joyful attendees at this year's event is James Watters, vice president of Product, Marketing and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. How do I know Watters is a happy camper? His latest blog post, in which, among other things, he enthuses about the dramatic uptick in conference sessions on microservices -- 30 this year, up from only one last year, which Pivotal presented.
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Posted on July 22, 20150 comments
Now that the Supreme Court has decided not to review Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., the long-running lawsuit returns to the Federal Circuit Court in San Francisco, where Google will have a chance to argue that its use of 37 Java APIs -- now considered copyrightable becuase of the Supreme Court's pass -- in its Android operating system falls under the doctrine of fair use.
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Posted on July 8, 20150 comments
Among the more interesting vendor announcements at last week's DockerCon was VMware's preview of two new products: AppCatalyst and Project Bonneville. Both are emblematic of VMware's relatively newly amped up effort to, as Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO of VMware's Cloud-Native Applications group, put it, "make the developer a first-class user of the datacenter through our cloud-native applications."
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Posted on July 6, 20150 comments
It took 18 months, 155 releases, and the efforts of hundreds of contributors to get here, but version 1.0 of GitHub's Atom text editor is now available. First released to open source in May 2014, Atom is a customizable, cross-platform text editor built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Node.js integration. It runs on the Electron framework, and it works on OS X, Windows or Linux.
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Posted on June 26, 20150 comments
I knocked on quite a few doors last month, looking for Java mavens to talk with about the language on its 20th birthday. Lots of people got back to me (I think they got tired of the banging), and I heard some great stories. But I was surprised that, to my first question -- "What has been the most significant change in the Java language and/or platform in the past 20 years?" -- no one answered, "Open sourcing Java." It's probably the way I phrased the question, but I remember Java jocks clamoring back in the day for Sun to release their beloved language under an open source license.
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Posted on June 9, 20150 comments
It's probably the most popular development tool you've only kinda-sorta heard of. Oracle's Application Express (APEX) rapid Web app development tool has been around for more than a decade in one form or another, and it enjoys enormous popularity within the Oracle community. The latest incarnation, APEX 5, was released last month. The company spent two years and seven months re-engineering the tool, and according to its creator, Michael Hichwa, vice president of Oracle's Software Development group, it was time well spent.
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Posted on May 11, 20150 comments