The recent decision by a federal district court jury that Google's use of 37 Java APIs in the development of its Android OS was a "fair use" of that technology and did not infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights came as a relief to the developer community, generally speaking, if a temporary one. The reaction of Josh Juneau, a Chicago-based app developer, blogger and author, was typical:
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Posted by John K. Waters on June 6, 20160 comments
Containers offer a number of advantages over traditional virtualization software, but easy visibility isn't one of them. Modern modular application architecture has, in fact, created a kind of "black hole" of complexity swarming with packages and dependencies developers can't readily sort out.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 24, 20160 comments
Much of the press around this year's Google I/O event focused on the company's day-one consumer app-economy announcements, but there was plenty of news for enterprise developers in the opening keynote.
The most immediately relevant announcement was the launch of Preview 1 of Android Studio 2.2. The upcoming version of the official IDE for Android app development includes a rewritten layout designer, an automated test recorder, a Firebase plug-in, and the latest updates of JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA and CLion development environments, on which the IDE is based.
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 19, 20160 comments
The Java EE Guardians this week unveiled a public draft of their charter, and it's worth reading for anyone interested in the future of enterprise Java. The charter makes and supports the argument that Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) continues to be essential to the long-term health of the Java ecosystem, and then it lays out compelling evidence that Oracle is "conspicuously neglecting Java EE."
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Posted by John K. Waters on May 6, 20160 comments
It's official: Jenkins 2.0 has arrived. Available today, this is the first major release of the open source continuous integration (CI) server in 10 years, and the excitement surrounding it is palpable. (Sorry, that was my Apple Watch telling me to stand up -- again.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 26, 20160 comments
The big news in the evolving container ecosystem this past week was Mesosphere's announcement that it will be open sourcing its flagship Data Center Operating System, rebranded as DC/OS. (The company will also offer a commercial Enterprise version.) Among the long list of companies partnering with Mesosphere on DC/OS beta is a startup called Avi Networks, which got my attention at the Container World 2016 conference.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 25, 20160 comments
To describe the 2.0 release of the Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server as long-awaited would be the understatement of the decade -- which is literally how long Jenkins has been a 1.0 release. Really. Ten years.
"I don't know if it's the longest 1.0 release in history," CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey told me during a recent visit to Silicon Valley, "but it's got to be close."
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 12, 20160 comments
The list of Java evangelists exiting Oracle got a little longer this month when Reza Rahman announced that he would be leaving the company. But Rahman is not going quietly. In a personal blog post, he stated that he left because of his growing skepticism about Oracle's stewardship of enterprise Java, which he said was "independently shared by the ever vigilant Java EE community outside Oracle."
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 22, 20160 comments
You know how I'm always banging on about how we need a technology-agnostic conference focused on the challenges facing the makers and maintainers of the purpose-designed software that drives organizations in virtually every industry in the world -- in other words, the readers of Application Development Trends? Well, it turns out, the organizers of the enormously popular Live! 360 conference agree with me. (Or maybe they just got tired of the noise.)
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 18, 20160 comments