Oracle reversed course this week on its earlier decision to cut the popular Time Zone Updater (TZUpdater) tool from the latest version of the Java Development Kit (JDK 7) -- or was that just a slip of the knife? The tool, which allows developers to update the time zone in any version of the JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) without having to update the JDK/JRE itself, was removed from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Web site "as part of maintenance tied to the end of public updates for Oracle JDK 6," wrote Henrik Stahl, senior director of product management in the Java platform group, on the Oracle blog.
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 12, 20130 comments
IBM wants to give customers using its System z mainframes the ability to extend their important business applications to the Web, the cloud and mobile environments, the company says. Toward that end, the company has updated its Enterprise COBOL for z/OS compiler to support XML Server and Java 7.
IBM's z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for Big Blue's System z mainframes; Enterprise COBOL for z/OS is the compiler that allows line-of-business COBOL applications to execute on z/OS systems. COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), of course, is one of the oldest high-level programming languages.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 21, 20130 comments
Google announced the release of version 1.1 of its Go programming language two days before its annual I/O conference, which gets underway on Wednesday. The first major update of the open source language since the search engine giant released version 1 just about a year ago focuses on performance-related improvements, including optimization of the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation and parts of the standard library
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 14, 20130 comments
Listening to Mitra Azizirad, GM of Microsoft's Developer Tools Marketing & Sales group, talk about Redmond's plans for its venerable Visual Studio IDE and her long career with the company, I was reminded again why I feel so lucky to be on the tech beat: Almost every day I get to talk with smart people who love what they do.
Azizirad was in San Francisco last week with "Soma" Somasegar, VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, speaking with a group of reporters informally about MS developer tools. (More on that conversation in Visual Studio Magazine.) She started at Microsoft as an architectural engineer based in Washington D.C. back in 1992, which gives her a decades-long perspective on the evolution of the role of the developer in the enterprise.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 10, 20130 comments
JNBridge, maker of tools that connect Java- and .NET-based components and apps, this week released another of its free "labs," a.k.a. interoperability kits for developers looking for new ways of connecting disparate technologies. The latest lab provides a way to build a Microsoft Excel add-in for Hadoop HBase.
HBase is the Java-based, open source, distributed database for Big Data used by Apache Hadoop, the popular open-source platform for data-intensive distributed computing. HBase apps must use Java APIs, which makes it tough to provide cross-platform business intelligence on the desktop. The new JNBridge Lab provides a simple Excel front end to HBase MapReduce that allows developers to view HBase tables and execute MapReduce projects. Google's MapReduce is a programming model for processing and generating large data sets. It supports parallel computations over large data sets on unreliable computer clusters.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 8, 20130 comments
Java is starting to look like a chubby guy in tight Dockers who can't sit down without splitting a seam (and yes, I analogize from experience). A week after Oracle released Java 7, Update 21, which included 42 vulnerability patches, news of a reflection API vulnerability in the newly shipped Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has emerged, as reported by veteran Java bug hunter Adam Gowdiak.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 24, 20132 comments
Two of the biggest players in the OpenStack community and a top Hadoop provider announced plans yesterday to join forces to advance the "Hadoop on OpenStack" project known as Savanna. OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis Inc., the company that started Project Savanna, will be working with Hortonworks Inc., the top commercial distributor of Apache Hadoop, and Red Hat Inc., the current leading OpenStack contributor, the three companies said today.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 17, 20130 comments
Collaboration and development tool maker Atlassian has created a set of page-creation templates, dubbed "Blueprints," designed to simplify the way users of its Confluence content and team collaboration platform create and share their work. Blueprints also provide instructional "placeholder" text and an automated structure for organizing content once it has been created.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 10, 20130 comments
Java-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider Jelastic Inc. has added the Apache TomEE application server to the list of software stacks supported on its platform. Jelastic is the first public PaaS to offer TomEE support.
TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is a version of Apache Tomcat aimed at the Java Enterprise Edition (JavaEE) Web Profile, a subset of Java EE APIs focused on Web app development. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) released TomEE as a Java EE 6 Web Profile certified stack last summer. Available under the Apache 2.0 license, it integrates a number of Java projects, including Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache MyFaces, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache CXF and Apache OpenJPA. Version 1.5.1 was released in December 2012.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 13, 20130 comments