A number of insightful industry watchers got back to me right after the holidays with their thoughts on the challenges facing developers in 2013. (Most of them didn't even seem that hung over.) It was just too much wisdom to cram into two blog posts, so we're going with a Part III.
John R. Rymer, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., covers application development and delivery (and writes a killer blog). He agreed with his colleagues that mobile will continue to vex developers, as will the need to learn and employ multiple languages. However, he was surprised (as was I) that the arrival of Windows 8 didn't top more lists.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on February 6, 20130 comments
Earlier this month Mozilla announced the first developer preview phones specifically designed for its Firefox OS.
The phones -- two of them -- are being developed by a Spanish startup called GeeksPhone in partnership with Spanish telecom Telefónica. Mozilla says the phones will be available sometime in February.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 31, 20130 comments
An Oracle executive has promised to "fix" problems with Java that have left Web sites running the Java plugin vulnerable to malicious hackers and resulted in some high-profile security breaches. Speaking with Java User Group (JUG) leaders during a conference call last week, Oracle's senior product security manager, Milton Smith, said that his company cares about Java security, and has been working on the problem and will continue to do so.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 30, 20132 comments
More on this topic:
Client-side Java has a big, bright bull's eye painted on it, and black hats just can't seem to resist shooting at it. Oracle was relatively quick to response to news of the latest critical vulnerability in Java 7 (revealed last Thursday; fixed by Sunday), but many security mavens have been unwilling to tell users that it's safe to enable Java in their browsers again. It didn't help that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has issued a warning to Average Joe computer users to disable Java.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 16, 20134 comments
By this time last year, the term "polyglot programmer" had entered the IT lexicon, and there was plenty of talk about the strategic advantage of learning to use a wider variety of programming languages, frameworks, databases, interface technologies and other development tools. Last year's strategic advantage may be evolving into this year's survival strategy.
"I would argue that developers need to be fluent in multiple languages now," said Forrester analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond. "I see that in my data: I've talked about the multilingual developer who programs in no single language more than 50 percent of the time, and that's definitely on the rise. I don't see how you get away with just being a C++ developer or a C# developer or a Java developer anymore."
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 11, 20130 comments
In 2013, life for developers is going to get interesting, say industry watchers -- which sounds great until you remember that old (purportedly) Chinese curse. Living in "interesting times" is likely to prove challenging to hard-working codederos.
Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst for Interarbor Solutions (and a must-read blogger) sees 2013 as the time for developers to make strategic bets on both mobile and cloud, but he also advises caution.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 7, 20131 comments
I should probably send Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note. Ever since he told reporters that the biggest mistake his company had made so far was "betting too much on HTML 5 rather than native" in its mobile software development strategy, I've heard from a lot of interesting and creative HTML 5 users with, as you might guess, a slightly different view of the latest incarnation of the venerable markup language. Last week I sat down with two developers who took Mr. Zuckerberg's comment as a challenge.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 20, 20122 comments
Kotlin, the JVM-targeted programming language developed by software development toolmaker JetBrains, passed its fourth milestone this week. The big upgrades in Kotlin M4 (besides the 128 "closed issues") are its improved compatibility with JDK 7 and the introduction of KAnnotator, a tool for automatically annotating developer libraries.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 12, 20121 comments
Last week's announcement that VMware is spinning off a new organization called the Pivotal Initiative under parent company EMC to manage its application development and deployment products, including SpringSource, Gemfire, and Cloud Foundry, is probably a good thing for developers. Among other things, says 451 Research analyst Matt Aslett, it will better enable both VMware and EMC to tap into the developer-led adoption of cloud and big data technologies.
More
Posted by John K. Waters on December 10, 20120 comments