The challenges of building applications that need to handle the massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure are myriad. Because of the uniquely critical need for efficient communication among dev team members working with what is known as "time series" data is critical, distributed teams especially challenged.
Enter time series database provider InfluxData, which recently announced a solution to this challenge, at least within the InfluxDB Cloud. The new InfluxDB Notebooks allows developers to discuss time series data analyses and trends inside the platform, so team members don't have to use third-party messaging apps, which can slow them down significantly. This new capability allows users to create what the company calls "a durable artifact" that shows teams how time series data is analyzed to solve business problems.
"Development teams are more distributed than ever, but until now, they haven’t had the tools they need to seamlessly communicate around time series data," said Russ Savage, director of product management at InfluxData, in a statement. "To solve this problem, we’ve reimagined InfluxDB as a way to collaborate around data, not just store it. This new approach will dramatically save time for developers, so they can focus on building software."
InfluxData provides a time series database platform aimed at developers building Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, and monitoring software. The company's new InfluxDB Notebooks adds a number of capabilities to the platform, including
- Design time series data pipelines with dynamic data, live code, and real-time visualizations — all with inline explanatory notes. This capabilities allows dev team members to show their work and sharing it with others.
- The ability to share incident investigations to explain root causes following service outages, and to build "runbooks" to avoid future outages.
- The ability to document how Internet of Things sensor data has been collected, normalized, enriched, and "downsampled" to facilitate preventive maintenance and forecast device obsolescence.
The company says it plans to add another new capability to its platform: InfluxDB Annotations, which will make it possible to add notes directly on dashboard cells to more quickly highlight and explain the meaning of anomalies in time series data, and to coordinate troubleshooting efforts. It will be used to capture context and share details about ongoing investigations into outlier data points that are underway.
This capability will save teams time "by eliminating the need for multiple people to repeat the same investigation," the company says. Both features are designed to support "better collaboration workflows between developers, SREs, and every stakeholder involved in time series collection, enrichment, and analysis."
Where InfluxDB Notebooks allows teams to "weave together computational information" such as code, data, and statistics with narrative and graphs, InfluxDB Annotations will help developers "share contextual clues" so they can quickly determine the root cause of incidents and restore services faster.
Posted by John K. Waters on April 29, 2021 at 9:54 AM0 comments
An epic battle between titans splashed across news banners and came to a history-making end last week. No, I'm not talking about Godzilla vs. Kong, but the decade-long legal clash between Google and Oracle over software copyright and fair use. (I know… I know… but the comparison was just lying there.)
As I reported earlier, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled last Monday that Google did not commit copyright infringement when it used 37 Java APIs in its Android mobile operating system without Oracle's permission. There was a lot of money on the line--Oracle wanted an $8.8 billion piece of Google's Android business and $475 million in lost potential licensing revenue--but there was more at stake here than an obscene amount of cash. More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 15, 2021 at 3:53 PM0 comments
Java developers got a preview today of the soon-to-be-released Microsoft build of OpenJDK, a Long-Term Support (LTS) distribution of Redmond's version of the ubiquitous open-source Java dev kit. This preview release includes binaries based on OpenJDK 11 for x64 platforms covering the three major operating systems: macOS, Linux, and Windows.
The Microsoft build of OpenJDK binaries for Java 11 are based on OpenJDK source code, the company says, following the same build scripts used by the Eclipse Adoptium project and tested against the Eclipse Adoptium Quality Assurance suite (including OpenJDK project tests. The binaries for Java 11 have passed the Java Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) for Java 11, which is used to verify compatibility with the Java 11 specification. More
Posted by John K. Waters on April 6, 2021 at 6:22 PM0 comments
VMware unveiled a new distributed, multi-cloud platform this week designed to help its customers simplify the adoption and operation of multi-cloud environments.
The pitch for the new VMware Cloud is aimed at both software developers and IT operators. The platform is designed to boost the productivity of devs by enabling them to build and deploy to any cloud. The platform also gives IT the ability to modernize infrastructure and operations with better economics and less risk. More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 31, 2021 at 3:59 PM0 comments
The Eclipse Foundation this week announced the formation of the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group, a collaboration of vendors supporting the efforts of the Eclipse Adoptium Project, formerly known as AdoptOpenJDK.
AdoptOpenJDK is an open, community-led initiative formed to provide free, pre-built binaries of the reference implementation of the Java platform from OpenJDK. Since it was founded in 2017 by Martijn Verburg, a leader of the London Java Community, AdoptOpenJDK has seen more than 240 million downloads. More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 24, 2021 at 3:54 PM0 comments
Programming language rankings get regular headlines, and they should, at least from trend trackers like us. Among my favorite is the RedMonk quarterly, published this week. I like the methodology of their system, which extracts data from GitHub and Stack Overflow and combines them for "a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction."
In other words, it correlates what the cool kids are talking about with actual language usage "in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends." It's a mix that makes it meaningful. More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 4, 2021 at 3:54 PM0 comments
Foojay.io, the community site for developers who use, target, and run their applications on top of Java and OpenJDK, today announced the companies who will make up its advisory board. The roster includes Azul, Datadog, DataStax, JFrog, Payara, and Snyk. This board will guide the direction, content and oversight of the site, with a focus on growing the community and meeting its mission to provide free information for everyday Java developers.
In case you missed it (which I must confess, I did), Foojay is a nascent-but-evolving-at-warp-speed Java information consolidation site for everyone from hard-core, in-the-trenches Java jocks to the Java curious. And it is a thing of beauty. It organizes information from multiple sources into logical categories and delivers the warts-and-all info you won't see on the vendors' sites. More
Posted by John K. Waters on February 4, 2021 at 3:59 PM0 comments
The Eclipse Foundation's move to Europe continues apace with the formal establishment last week of the Eclipse Foundation AIBL, its new international non-profit association in Brussels, Belgium. The new European entity launches with the support of founding members Bosch, Daimler TSS, IBM, and SAP, the Foundation said in an announcement.
The Eclipse Foundation is one of the world's leading open-source software foundations, steward of the Eclipse IDE, enterprise Java, and the Eclipse MicroProfile, and the heart of a global ecosystem of developers, companies, and public sector entities. By moving its legal residence from the United States to Belgium, the Foundation has created "a global institution that builds on its existing membership base, active developer community, and strong institutional relationships to enable collaboration and the free flow of open source software innovation throughout the entire world," the announcement reads. More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 21, 2021 at 4:00 PM0 comments
One of the biggest events in the Java universe last year was the official release of the Eclipse Jakarta EE 9 Platform, Web Profile specifications, and related TCKs. It moved enterprise Java fully from the javax.* namespace to the jakarta.* namespace. That's about all it did, actually, but it was an extremely consequential change.
I talked with lots of people about the latest shift in the evolution of enterprise Java, and one of the guys I was most excited to connect with on this topic was Bruno Souza, founder and leader of the Brazil-based SouJava, the largest Java User Group (JUG) in the world. Souza was one of the initiators of the Apache Harmony project to create a non-proprietary Java virtual machine, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), and he's on the board of advisors at Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Jelastic. More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 7, 2021 at 4:00 PM0 comments