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
Red Hat developer Andrew Haley will assume the role of project lead for OpenJDK 6, the company announced last week, letting Red Hat "continue to help drive the future of Java and of OpenJDK."
Haley is a long-time Java technical lead and member of the OpenJDK governing board.
This announcement isn't headline-grabbing, but this "transition into a leadership role" underscores Red Hat's commitment to Java."We think that Java will continue to be a strong option for developers for a long time to come," Rob Cardwell, vice president of middleware strategy at Red Hat, told ADTmag. "What we're doing with OpenJDK 6 is continuing a trend we started years ago with IcedTea Project."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20131 comments
It's an odd way of setting a high standard, naming your flagship product after one of the last century's most notorious cinematic slackers, but the decision to call their new web application development framework "Ferris" (for Ferris Bueller) made perfect sense to its creators at Cloud Sherpas.
"We're making it easy for developers," explained Cloud Sherpas' Michael Cohn. "And Ferris Bueller was all about easy."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 6, 20130 comments
This year's RSA Conference was chock full of great content. One of my favorite sessions was the chief information security officer (CISO) panel, hosted by Cigital Inc. CTO and build-security-in guru Gary McGraw. Instead of a whip, McGraw wielded a Star Wars lightsaber (a vendor was handing them out on the exhibit floor) to keep four top security execs moving through a series of "driving" questions.
In answering a question about measuring risk, Gary Warzala, CISO at Visa, argued that, although it was certainly important to measure an organization's vulnerabilities and level of compliance, it was just as important to make sure that risk is owned throughout the enterprise.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 5, 20130 comments