How are shifting consumer behaviors, new digital channels, application standards, and open source trends influencing current approaches to customer-facing software development? That's a big, scary question, but the panel of experts assembled to answer that question during Actuate's iHub F-Type launch in San Jose recently weren't intimidated in the least.
In fact, customer strategist Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar, took issue with the title of the panel -- "Building the Next Big App" -- arguing that the next big app could very well be small.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 28, 20140 comments
Actuate signed on with the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer back in 2004, just a few months after the organization was founded. The South San Francisco-based company proposed the industry's first open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project (BIRT), and a decade later, BIRT is one of the best known open-source initiatives for data-driven development.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 24, 20140 comments
Typesafe this month marked the five-year anniversary of Akka, its open-source run-time toolkit for concurrency and scalability on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Written in Scala and used to build highly scalable, fault-tolerant applications in both Scala and Java, Akka has gained serious traction since Swedish programmer Jonas Bonér pushed out the first public release (v.05) on July 12th, 2009. The company now includes some big names on its Akka user list, including Amazon, BBC, Cisco, Credit Suisse, eBay and more.
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Posted by John K. Waters on July 14, 20140 comments
The annual Google I/O developer conference, which wrapped up this week in San Francisco, packed its usual punch with a number of announcements and free stuff for attendees.
We saw the first example of Android Wear software for wearable devices, coming initially in LG's G Watch and Samsung's Gear Live, and later in Motorola's Moto 360. We saw Android TV, which Google will make available to new television sets from vendors like Sony and Sharp.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 27, 20140 comments
The Eclipse Foundation's annual Release Train will be in the spotlight later this week, but first a bit of that metaphorical illumination should fall on a new Foundation project. Announced on Monday, the newly organized Eclipse Science Working Group (SWG) is being described as "a global collaboration for scientific software." It aims to bring together groups from academia, industry and government to create open software that can be used in basic scientific research.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 24, 20140 comments
GitHub.com this week unveiled an update of the application it launched two years ago to support Windows developers who want to use the Linux-centric code-hosting platform and its namesake revision control system for their projects. The company is describing Windows for GitHub 2.0 as a major update, emphasizing a new streamlined interface designed to help users focus on their work.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 13, 20140 comments
The amount of both mainstream and tech press generated by Apple's annual World Wide Developer Conference, winding down in San Francisco today, always catches me by surprise. It shouldn't, I suppose, but everyone covers this show. I agree with the argument that Apple has earned the attention with its bleeding-edge, category-creating, market-overhauling innovations over the past couple of decades, but it's still true that somewhere around 90 percent of all PCs worldwide are running Windows. Maybe I should look at the coverage of the WWDC as further evidence of the receding relevance of the PC as a personal computing platform.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 6, 20140 comments
Would you be surprised to learn that 82.5 percent of Java developers responding to a recently conducted survey said they favor the JUnit testing framework? Or that 70 percent reported an affinity for the Jenkins CI Server? Or that 69 percent prefer Git for version control? Or that 48 percent of developers reported using the Eclipse IDE? Yeah, me neither. But those were just a few of the stats -- both expected and surprising -- assembled from the latest survey of in-the-trenches Java developers by RebelLabs, the research and content arm of Java toolmaker Zeroturnaround.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 28, 20140 comments
A federal appeals court sided with Oracle on Friday, ruling that the 37 Java APIs at the center of the now four-year-old Oracle v. Google patent infringement lawsuit are, in fact, protected under U.S. copyright law. The appeals court overturned the 2012 ruling of Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California, and referred the case back to that court, which will now take up the question of whether Google's use of those APIs in Android constitutes fair use.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 12, 20140 comments