As I mentioned earlier in the week, I was able to meet up with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, as he was prepping for the fifth annual EclipseCon, which runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif.
I snagged a few minutes with Milinkovich on Friday to talk about the event, but our discussion wandered to the annual Eclipse Release Train. It's not due until June, but Milinkovich is already excited about the sixth annual synchronized launch of multiple Eclipse projects.
"Eclipse is an open source community, and we take what people contribute, so a big part of the release train is serendipity," Milinkovich said. "But this is shaping up to be a perfect storm of glad tidings for Java developers from Eclipse."
This year's release train, dubbed Indigo, is shaping up to an interesting and potentially important release for Java jocks, largely because of three projects: the WindowBuilder Java GUI designer, newly contributed by Google; the latest developments from the eGit team, which is providing support for the popular Git version control system; and improved integration of Apache Maven project build manager.
Milinkovich is also hoping for new editing features for Java 7's new language extensions in Indigo. "That one is pretty aggressive," he said. "So we're crossing our fingers and toes."
He's also expecting to include a project, dubbed Runtime Packaging (RTP), which aims to build a single, downloadable, installable Eclipse package that pulls together the various bits and pieces of the Eclipse Runtime technology stack -- things like Equinox, Virgo, Jetty and Gemini. Milinkovich mentioned versions of this package for Linus and the Amazon cloud.
"You'll be able to consume the Eclipse Runtime stack with a lot more ease," Milinkovich said.
The current list of Indigo projects is posted here. It's a whopper.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 23, 20110 comments
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was in the Bay Area last week ahead of this week's EclipseCon Conference to attend the first ever Orion Planning Summit. The event brought together a range of interested parties and companies who gathered in Palo Alto, Calif. last Thursday and Friday to establish the scope and roadmap of Eclipse's nascent Orion project.
Introduced in January, the Orion Project seeks to define a platform for building and integrating Web development tools. The project summary describes it as a "browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the Web, in the Web."
"For a major part of the development world, this idea of being able to develop in the Web for the Web is the future," Milinkovich told me. "There's a lot interest in seeing if an open community can repeat the success Eclipse had in this new area."
"In the Web, for the Web" is more than just a buzz-phrase, Milinkovich insisted.
"It means zero-footprint deployment, run-in-the-browser support for the major browsers on the client side, a highly scalable hosting platform for development in the long term, and in the very long term the ability to enable to some quite cool code, team, and project analytics," he said.
It's definitely early days for the Orion Project. The original code contribution -- a modest one from IBM -- just showed up in late December, and the project is still in the pre-proposal stage. But Milinkovich hopes that getting people involved in the project early will lead to a more diverse community of developers.
"If you go back ten years ago, when Eclipse was first launched, the code base that was put into open source by IBM was pretty complete," he said. "It has been a challenge ever since to build a diverse development team around the core Eclipse platform. We have a lot of diversity across the Eclipse Community, but within the platform itself, it's still largely the team from IBM. With Orion, we're consciously trying to start off with just enough code to be interesting, with the goal of getting people to jump in and start participating, making contributions, and creating a much more diverse development team right from the very beginning."
This week's launch of OrionHub should help.
Gartner analyst Mark Driver sees a lot of potential in this "ground up" approach to developing the Orion community. In his January 19 blog post, he wrote that it could create "a potentially stronger community commitment and uptake than we saw with Eclipse."
If the turnout for the summit is any indication, the project is off to a good start. The event was hosted by SAP, and people from large and small companies well-known in the Web development communities showed up, including RIM, Mozilla, Nokia, Microsoft, PhoneGap and github, among others.
The early release of Orion is currently available for download here.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20111 comments
The fifth annual EclipseCon Conference, which starts today and runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., promises to be a humdinger.
The marquee keynote at this year's event is the much anticipated David Gondek talk, "What Is Watson?" Watson, for those who don't have all the time in the world to watch TV (or read newspapers), was the system that beat two Jeopardy champs. Gondek is a research scientist on the DeepQA/Watson Project, and he promises to provide "a tour of the technologies that power Watson."
Mark Reinhold and John Duimovich's keynote, "The Java Renaissance," promises to be interesting. Reinhold is chief architect of the Java Platform group at Oracle, and Duimovich is Java CTO and distinguished engineer at IBM. Big Blue and Big O joined forces in October to make the OpenJDK project the premiere location for open source Java development from the two companies, so it's a fitting duo. I'm wondering if anyone will take offense at the notion of a Java "renaissance," which means "rebirth."
There's also an OpenJDK panel following the keynote. The panel includes Reinhold and Duimovich, plus Milinkovich and Oracle's Adam Messinger.
Cloudera software engineer Todd Lipcon is offering an intro to Apache Hadoop. Tons of interest these days in this Java-based open-source framework for data-intensive distributed computing, so I'd expect a big crowd. A committer on the project, Lipcon promises an introduction to Hadoop that covers the motivation for the system, the Hadoop ecosystem, the overall architecture, and the programming paradigms used to express scalable and flexible computation on large datasets.
This year's event is also hosting the fifth annual OSGi Devcon event. The co-located conference runs March 21 through 24 is open to all EclipseCon attendees. This is widely considered to be the premier OSGi developers' event, and features four days of talks, tutorials, and presentations for OSGi beginner and experienced OSGi developers. Look for sessions on OSGi and the cloud, software complexity, open source, massive device deployment, new tools, and nuts-and-bolts how-tos.
Of course, there will be lots of vendor announcements at the event. Here are a few to watch for:
- Compuware is showcasing its new Workbench product. Workbench is an open environment for managing mainframe app development through an Eclipse GUI. It also provides a common framework and single-launch point to initiate Compuware’s mainframe products and other mainframe and distributed products.
- Genuitec is demoing “OneInstall,” which the company bills as a one-click, cross-platform installation technology designed to allow developers to deliver their apps to end-users, and manage updates on the user desktop. This is a direct competitor with InstallAnywhere and InstallShield, and worth a look.
- AccuRev. will be announcing updated integration of its software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution with Eclipse at the show. The Eclipse Plug-in for AccuRev is designed to provide out-of-the-box integration between AccuRev and the Eclipse IDE platform.
- I also got a cryptic email from Juniper Networks about news expected at the show about its Junos SDK and Junos Space SDK. The Junos SDK is designed to enables developers to "innovate on top of Junos and Juniper Networks platforms." The Junos Space SDK is aimed at developers building and deploying network-aware applications.
- Finally, a company called itemis , an independent IT-consulting company and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, has created an EclipseCon 2011 app. Peter Friese, Heiko Behrens, Ekke Gentz, and Christian Campo developed the app, which runs on any phone with a Web browser. It lets you browse the schedule, mark your favorites, create your own personalized conference schedule, see photos of the presenters, and refer to maps of the venue and Santa Clara. It's downloadable from the EclipseCon Web site.
Watch this site for more coverage of the show.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 21, 20111 comments
Unless you were coding under a rock this week, you probably heard that Java's progenitor James Gosling held forth at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas on the state of Java under Oracle. His comments were widely reported, including this one posted on TheServerSide.com:
"It's in [Oracle's] own self-interest to not be really aggressively stupid. But it's been clear that it's been something of a learning experience. It's been clear that they didn’t understand what they bought, what it meant to deal with communities and people and all the arguing and discussion and consensus building that’s involved in communities."
Receiving less press was a keynote by Steve Harris, Senior VP of Oracle's Application Server Development Group, and Adam Messinger, VP or the Oracle Fusion Middleware Group. The title of their talk was "Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteronopia?"
Notwithstanding the unexpected coolness factor of using the title of an episode of the "Aeon Flux" anime series, or the many trips to a dictionary it undoubtedly triggered, Harris and Messinger covered well-trod territory: We've made some mistakes…we're sticking to our roadmap…converging the JRockit and Hotspot JVMs is a priority…look at all we've done with JDK7… we're working on Lambda…Java EE needs to be tenant-aware and service-enabled to support the cloud…Java ME is still important…we love the Java community, etc.
But here's the thing: Harris and Messinger are in the belly of the beast, so to speak, managing an awful lot of Java activities at Big O, so shouldn't the press be paying closer attention to what they're saying?
Harris joined Oracle in 1997 to manage development of the Java virtual machine for the Oracle8i release. He's the guy who called Java "the crown jewel" of the Sun acquisition. Messinger manages Oracle Coherence, JRockit, WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. He lists his job on his LinkedIn profile as "Hacker."
"Oracle has a tradition of saying a few things and sticking by then, in contrast to Sun who was much more open," Messinger told conference attendees, according to TheServerSide. "We laid out the Java roadmap and are executing on it, and we hope that speaks to our commitment."
"Developers are restless, they want cloud functionality from their own IT department" Harris added. "With the cloud, the scope of problem has expanded to include the data center itself, with multiple tenants. To move forward, existing APIs in Java EE need to be updated to be tenant-aware, service-enabled, and EE needs to support various styles of deployment. The goal is to get all that done in Java EE 8."
Please note that I'm not implying that you shouldn't be following Gosling's activities. If you're not following his blog, NightHacks, you should be. But he's a big presence, literally and figuratively, and he shouldn't overshadow the current crew of Java stewards. Be sure to keep Harris and Messinger on your radar.
We certainly will.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 18, 20110 comments
The ballots are in, and Oracle's development proposal for Java EE7 has been approved by the Executive Committee of the JCP. The vote was unanimous, with only one company (IBM) even commenting.
The sponsors of Java Specification Request (JSR) #342, the umbrella JSR under which Java EE 7 will be developed, literally cited the cloud as the "theme" for this release.
"The Java EE platform is already well suited for cloud environments thanks to its container-based model and the abstraction of resource access it entails," the spec request reads in part. "In this release we aim to further enhance the suitability of the Java EE platform for cloud environments. As a result, Java EE 7 products will be able to more easily operate on private or public clouds and deliver their functionality as a service with support for features such as multi-tenancy and elasticity (horizontal scaling). Applications written for Java EE 7 will be better able to take advantage of the benefits of a cloud environment."
But Gartner analyst Mark Driver, who specializes in application development technologies and open-source software, says making Java EE 7 Java's point of entry into the cloud is a bad idea.
"Just as you can't tweak a mainframe app to go client server, or a client server app to go Web, you can't just tweak a web app to go cloud," he told me recently. "It requires some fundamental changes."
The sponsors of JSR #342 disagree: "Since its inception, Java EE has offered a managed environment in which access to the system and any external resources, such as relational databases, is controlled and mediated by containers. This container-based model has allowed portable applications to target single-machine deployments as well as large cluster installations without fundamental changes to the programming model. We see the cloud as a further evolution of this paradigm and propose to address it via some incremental changes to the existing (and popular) Java EE programming model."
"That evolutionary step may introduce such dramatic changes to the DNA of Java that it implodes," Driver argues. "And the focus is so heavily on maintaining backward compatibility and stability for Oracle's current user base that they're heading down a dead-end road. We need an entirely new specification around a Java Cloud Edition."
The cloud-focus of Java EE 7 emphasizes multi-tenancy, application versioning, and support for non-relational data stores. Big Blue's comment pointed out that the next release of Java EE should provide the basis for modular Java capabilities in the next version of the Java Standard Edition (Java SE 8). Modularity, of course, is needed to support a move to the cloud.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 16, 20111 comments
Red Hat launched JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 last week, which gave me an excuse to chat with Pierre Fricke. The director of the company's JBoss division's product line is always a great, nuts-and-bolts interview.
"If I had to summarize this announcement in one line, I'd say, 'Turn the data you have into the information you need,'" Fricke said, beating me to my opening question. (I guess the marketing guys eventually get to everybody.)
The big news in this release is a superset of the SOA platform: the JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform (5.1). This an open source data virtualization and integration platform that includes some tools for creating data services out of multiple data stores with different formats. It also allows you to present information to applications and business processes in an easy-to-use service.
"Data integration and utilization of data has sort of been an orphan in the SOA discussion over the last decade," Fricke said. "But it's become a real hot topic in the last year or two. This basically brings this whole notion of data virtualization and integration into the data services platform."
Virtually all organizations have many data sets in many different formats. An org could have information on one customer, for example, in the CRM app data stores, in financial data bases, and customer support flat files. So it become difficult to establish a whole view of that customer, and if you hard code to all those data sources, management down the road is a bit of a nightmare.
Enter the Data Services Platform, which is an extension of what is effectively Red Hat's next-gen ESB.
"This is how we've solved this problem," Fricke says. "The Data Services Platform comes with tools in JBoss Developer Studio that enable you to create a virtualized view of the data you need in the specific application, or business processes, or set of applications. And you're drawing from your existing data sources, so you can leave the data in place; you don't have to make replicated copies and create data marts and all that kind of stuff, which is very expensive. You just leave the data in place and do rewrite transactionally, maintaining the integrity of the data and everything -- through the Data Services Platform -- leveraging that data in an SOA, business processes, and applications through the data virtualization engine."
The 5.1 version of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform itself comes with an Apache CXF Web services stack; the latest version of the JBoss Developer Studio IDE (4.0), which includes updated SOA tooling for ESB and data virtualization; a technology preview of WS-BPEL; a technology preview of Apache Camel Gateway; and updated certifications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows 2008, IBM, and JDK, among others.
The two technology previews are interesting. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) is a standard executable language from OASIS that's used for specifying interactions with Web services, both executable and abstract processes.
Apache Camel is a popular enterprise integration pattern framework. The open source framework is based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. (A must read.)
"BPEL is a standards-based service-orchestration engine and set of editor tools that help to automate a process flow," Fricke says. "The Camel Gateway brings Apache Camel to our enterprise customers. It's a very popular integration framework that makes integration development easy by providing patterns and adapters to start from. Both of these technology previews extend the ESB. "We're providing an early view of the code, which people can take a look at, use in development, to attract early adopters to give us feedback."
The Apache CXF Web services stack is also kind of a big deal in this release, Fricke pointed out. The stack has attracted a popular community and enjoys broad support. Red Hat has joined that community, too.
"You could say that our whole Web services story has become very simple," Fricke added. "It's simple to leverage Web services within the ESB. Anyone that struggles with leveraging the data they have, and faces a bunch of custom work to make the data fit their application, this is the tool for them."
Posted by John K. Waters on March 15, 20110 comments
Application security expert and Cigital CTO Dr. Gary McGraw is off to Europe this week to spread the gospel of the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). McGraw will be on the continent for a week, mostly in Germany and Switzerland.
McGraw is scheduled to speak to company developers during SAP's Quality Day today, in Mannheim, Germany. On March 16, he's off to Geneva to talk with the IT pros at CERN, and then to talk about how to start and evolve software security initiatives at the Cigital Europe Roundtable discussion. He'll also spend some time at Siemens, which is apparently taking a hard look at its security posture since Stuxnet, the first known malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, struck last summer.
McGraw has written a bunch of must-read books on application security, including the classic (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) Software Security: Building Security In. He's also created the BSIMM with Sammy Migues, director of the Knowledge Management group at Cigital, and Dr. Brian Chess, chief scientist at HP's Fortify Software division. (HP acquired Fortify last year.)
I caught McGraw between planes last week to ask him about his trip and what we might expect in the next BSIMM release. (Think hard before you give your cell phone number.)
"We haven't really announced BSIMM3 yet, but there are two things of note coming," he said. "First, some large firms that have lots of business units internally asked us to do multiple BSIMM measurements and then come up with a roll-up score. That's a way for the CIO or central services to compare apples to apples when business units diverse. Second, we've done ten re-measurements of firms that have been involved in the BSIMM for a couple of years. The results are incredibly cool, but you'll have to wait for the summer to hear about them."
The BSIMM (pronounced "bee-simm") is the first maturity model for security initiatives created entirely from real-world data -- which is just the right approach for C-level execs.
"You have to speak to enterprises in the language they understand," observes Gartner Fellow Joseph Feiman. "Processes and methodologies are things that CIOs and department managers know. The BSIMM provides this maturity model, which would be accepted by those not on the security team. It's a very good idea, and an important first step."
A "maturity model" describes the capability of an organization's processes in a range of areas, from software engineering to personnel management. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a well-known maturity model in software engineering.
The BSIMM is based on in-depth interviews with thirty well-known companies considered to have implemented the most successful software security initiatives in the world. They include among others, Microsoft, Adobe, Bank of America and Google. The organizations span seven verticals: financial services, independent software vendors, technology firms, healthcare, insurance, energy and media. The BSIMM researchers collected a range of data on each organization's software security activities, including things like strategy and metrics, standards and requirements, security testing, code review and training.
"Our goal was to build an empirical model for software security based on real, observed practices," McGraw told me when the BSIMM was first published in 2009. "We believe that the time has come to put away the bug-parade boogey man, the top-twenty-five tea leaves, the black-box Web-app goat sacrifice, and the occult reading of pen-testing entrails. This is an entirely data-driven model. If we didn't observe an activity, it didn't get into the model."
BTW: You can see Gary playing kick-ass jazz fiddle at a BSIMM mixer during the recent RSA Conference here. (I'm also a fan of his columns on informIT.)
Posted by John K. Waters on March 14, 20110 comments
The JRuby community announced this week the release of the JRuby 1.6.0 RC3 -- and promised that this third release candidate would be the last.
"We are going to seriously try and make this our last RC before going final," the company wrote in the JRuby blog announcing the release. "Unless we find something devastatingly bad we will release 1.6.0 and then try and spin smaller point builds every 2-3 weeks to address reported problems."
This release candidate of the 100 percent Java implementation of the Ruby programming language is mostly about an unexpected inflow bug reports, Thomas Enebo and Nick Sieger told me this morning.
"One of the major themes of JRuby 1.6 is adding solid Ruby 1.9 support," Enebo said. "In JRuby you can run in either Ruby 1.8 mode or Ruby 1.9 mode. We got a surprising number of bug reports on our 1.9 support, so we decided to sort of re-circled the wagons and address those reports and make 1.9 support really solid."
Enebo and Sieger, of course, are two of the core JRuby contributors; the other one is Charles Nutter. They all work at Engine Yard, the primary commercial supporter of JRuby, which snatched them up in back in July 2009. Their move to Engine Yard "means we've got a dedicated Ruby and Rails company backing our project," Nutter wrote in his blog said at the time.
"Another surprise for us was how many people are testing 1.9 features," Sieger said. "Since there's no formal specification of the Ruby language, I think it takes lots of developers trying it out on their own."
JRuby 1.6 also makes Windows a primary supported platform with the addition of a continuous integration platform.
"We're now dog-fooding on Windows several days a week," Enebo said, "and we think that it's a decent OS for JRuby use now -- even to the point where we've begun implementing Windows-specific libraries."
This JRuby release is the biggest one to date, Sieger said, and this release candidate involved more than 2,000 commits and resolves 265 issues.
"Committers are definitely the life blood of the project," Enebo said.
The list of what the JRuby teams calls "notable changes" since RC2 include:
•New readable backtrace format
•Easier to embed in OSGi environment
•Fixed regression which slowed down jar-based requires
•Add native JFFI bits for x86_64 SunOS (Solaris)
•More platforms with pre-built C extension support
•New jruby-core and jruby-stdlib maven artifacts
•More 1.9 compatibility fixes
Enebo and Sieger said they expect the final release of JRuby 1.6 next Tuesday (March 14). Only three problems that might have kept the release from going final have been reported since RC3 was released, they said, and they plan to put out point releases every two to three weeks for the foreseeable future.
"We could really go GA right now," Enebo said, "but we're giving it a couple more days."
Posted by John K. Waters on March 11, 20110 comments
I try not to let my fanboy tendencies leak into my coverage of tools and tech, but I have to admit to a fondness for JetBrains, the Prague-based maker of the venerable code-centric Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, one of the relatively few such tools to survive the Eclipse Juggernaut. (I've referred to the advent of Eclipse that way so often I thought it was time I capitalized the moniker.)
It's hard not to root for the scrappy survivor, and the company was scrappier than ever last month when Oracle announced that it would be dropping support for Ruby on Rails in the NetBeans IDE. The company tweeted: "We welcome all NetBeans users to start evaluating RubyMine as your new Ruby/Rails IDE! Expect some great news very soon on our pricing page!"
See? Scrappy.
JetBrains was probably the first dev tool maker to support Rails 3.0, which it did via its RubyMine IDE. Like IntelliJ, RubyMine is known for its intelligent refactoring and code analysis capabilities. When I talked with the company late last year, the product's lead developer, Dennis Ushakov, said, "We are doing our best to keep RubyMine on the cutting edge, which is a must with a technology as dynamic as Ruby on Rails."
In addition to IntelliJ IDEA and the RubyMine IDE for Ruby on Rails, the company makes a Python tool (PyCharm); a PHP tool (PhpStorm); and a tool for JavaScript, HTML and CSS (WebStorm).
We reported last week on the company's release of version 10.5 of the IntelliJ IDEA tool, but I wanted to make sure we also mentioned the February 14 release of PhpStorm 2.0.
PhpStorm was one of the first smart IDEs for PHP development. It gave users of the popular dynamic language some features they hadn't seen before in a tool designed just for them, including automated refactoring, deep code analysis, on-the-fly error checking, and quick-fixes. Version 2.0 of the IDE focuses on more intelligence, better code quality assurance, and support for the latest PHP trends. It adds support for PHP 5.3 namespaces and closures, ECMAScript 5, and LESS and SASS extensions for CSS.
It also aims to improve the environment itself, as the company says, "making debugging easier with a zero-configuration debugger, extending its code analysis capabilities to provide more code inspections and quick-fixes, reworking the UI, and simplifying working with issue trackers and version control systems right out of the IDE."
The company unveiled its newest tools during a celebration of new offices in Munich, Germany. Snapshots and status updates are available on the company's Facebook page.
More info about PhpStorm and a 30-day evaluation version are available on the company Web site. But also check out the "WebStorm & PhpStorm Blog" for tips and news about these tools.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 28, 20111 comments