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Glen Kunene's Recent Posts |
But we know that already. The really interesting part of McNealy and Gosling's exchange came at the end, when McNealy voiced his doubts that the Moscone Center where the conference is being held was big enough to hold OpenWorld and JavaOne simultaneously. Some in the Java community have speculated that the 2009 JavaOne Conference this past June would be the last. The rumors have Oracle killing the show and holding some scaled down version of it during OpenWorld. What would that look like?
The largest convention center in downtown San Francisco has three halls, Moscone North, South, and West. Oracle needs all three, plus rooms at an off-site Hilton, to accommodate the 40,000+ attendees. Not to mention that Oracle blocks off the street between the facing Moscone North and South halls, lays carpet down on the street, and erects tents above it (129,000 square feet of tenting, that is). It's a huge production. How Oracle would host another 15,000 people (the reported attendance at JavaOne 2009) is a logistical challenge I'm glad I don't have to face.
There probably wouldn't be much overlap in attendees who go to both shows either. Fundamentally, the conferences speak to different audiences: OpenWorld is an enterprise IT show for executives, while JavaOne is a developer show for Java programmers. Just observing the unwritten dress code at each one makes the difference obvious. Casual attire at OpenWorld is khakis and a button-down shirt with your company's logo embroidered on the breast pocket. That same outfit at JavaOne would be formal (What's with the khakis?).
Beyond the issues of sufficient space and differing styles is that of content. OpenWorld actually already offers content for Java developers. Oracle Develop is OpenWorld's three-day program dedicated to developer topics, and it held a number Sun-hosted sessions that were JavaOne-esque, including overviews and updates of JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1, Java SE, Java EE 6 and GlassFish, JavaServer Faces 2.0, and JavaFX. However, Sun is hosting only 10 out of a total of 217 Oracle Develop sessions--a fraction of the content JavaOne offers. Oracle would need to scale the number of sessions up significantly and find the room to host them.
Where Oracle Develop takes place also speaks volumes about the focus of OpenWorld. To get to Oracle Develop from the main show, you have to walk to a hotel about 10-15 minutes away. Shuffling off to the Hilton felt a little like being invited to a fancy dinner party and then been relegated to a wobbly ironing board in the den for your meal while the "grown-ups" (the IT executives) eat at the dining room table.
For Java developers, that feeling of being second-class citizens would be an unavoidable consequence if the shows merged. As the steward of Java, Sun constantly interacts with the Java community to help shape and plan JavaOne. During Goslings conversation with McNealy at the opening keynote, he confessed that Oracle was "a little unprepared for the volume of the Java community." Sun's developer programs, according to Gosling, are much larger in terms of downloads and interactions than those Oracle currently offers.
The developers who are downloading bits from the many java.sun.com projects, reading Sun distinguished engineer blogs, reporting bugs, and otherwise getting involved in the development of the Java platform make for an enthusiastic audience when Sun puts on a show just for them. (You won't hear the Brazilian contingent whoop and holler every time their country's mentioned here at OpenWorld, but you can count on it at JavaOne--and more than one keynote presenter has when his presentation starts to lose some steam.)
A backlash from developers who fear being marginalized in a merged OpenWorld/JavaOne likely won't be enough to save JavaOne if Oracle decides to end it; OpenWorld has swolled other conferences (PeopleSoft Connect and BEAWorld are just two). However, the audiences for the other shows it consumed have been more aligned with the IT executives who attend OpenWorld. With the logistical challenges and divergent audience, OpenWorld might choke if it tries to swallow JavaOne.
If you're going to host a tech conference in the middle of a global recession, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) wouldn't be a bad choice. What does a bear market mean to an open source project that thrives on programmers who code passionately—for coding's sake, not for the almighty dollar? And haven't cost savings always been the great promise of open source software for buyers? I'm oversimplifying things, but economic concerns did become a theme at this year's OSCON where one huge organization, the U.S. government—tasked with leading an economic recovery here in the States—took center stage.
Founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly and Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, both gave presentations centered on the emerging U.S. initiatives to establish an open government platform. One of the first projects in that effort is Data.gov, whose stated mission is "to improve access to federal data and expand creative use of those data beyond the walls of government." To put the site in a developer's context, O'Reilly described Data.gov as an attempt by the government to put together an SDK for all their APIs. If successful, civic-minded developers will be able to build an ecosystem around the platform.
Johnson knows first hand what type of innovation can grow out of this type of accessibility. Sunlight Labs is an agency that actively works on finding useful applications for the government data and creating tools that will enable users to apply them.
Both men stressed that this "government as a platform" idea won't reach its full potential until the federal procurement process (i.e., the required procedures for a government agency to acquire goods and services) is streamlined. The process is currently so complex that Johnson couldn't fit a chart of it on a single slide. What he did manage to capture looked like a Gantt chart wrapped in an object diagram inside an org chart (Take a look).
When a bid actually meets all the process requirements, the results can be very lucrative for the bidder and exorbitant for the government, like the $9 million contract awarded for the construction of the web site Recovery.gov (according to Johnson).
Open source developers (Drupal, anyone?) don't need to be civic-minded to be interested in a share of payouts like that. But they'll have to wait for a more accessible procurement model.
Some other notes from OSCON '09...
Open Source as the 'Exit Strategy' for Government Projects
An interesting idea for overcoming the procurement problem came from the audience. As the keynote speakers were taking questions, a man (I didn't catch his name) argued that a retirement strategy for government software projects is fundamental, and that open source licenses were a good match for that strategy. As I understood his point, if the government were to employ open source software, it could simply abandon (or retire) projects when they stopped being useful. With the vast sums the government invests in those projects today (see the Recovery.gov contract above), just retiring them isn't economically viable.
The Open Source Project as a Boys Clubs
If you're a male developer who wants to know what it's like to be a woman on an open source project, go get a pedicure. That was the proposition Kirrily Robert made in her "Standing Out in a Crowd" presentation. One of a small minority of women who work on open source projects, Robert argued that no matter how welcoming the nail salon staff and clientele may be, a man probably would feel somewhat out of place there.
Such is the experience of female coders, who can face everything from openly displayed pornography to sexist jokes to outright harassment—along with the burden of representation. According to the feedback Robert has received from the mostly female development communities at Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, women contributors felt that their contributions to projects weren't valued and that their skills were relegated to ancillary duties like documentation.
If you're a woman who's involved in open source, I'd be interested in your comments.
Microsoft Keynote Topic an Odd Choice
After Microsoft made perhaps the biggest open source news of the week by releasing 20,000 lines of Linux code under the GPLv2 license, I was surprised the company didn't use its allotted presentation time to take a victory lap in front of an audience of open source developers. Instead, VP of External Research Tony Hey spoke about Redmond's open tools and services initiatives in academic research. The work Microsoft is doing in this area is certainly important and interesting, but why ignore the 800-pound penguin in the room?
Most Entertaining Presentation of the Show
Hands down, Simon Wardley's hilarious and informative talk on cloud computing was the highlight of the show for me. Not only did he send up the numerous definitions of the term (he found 67 on Google, some self-serving, many confused), but he put the technology in a historical context that you won’t find in vendor releases about supposed cloud computing products. Best of all, he saved the pitch for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud until the end. Well done, Simon.
Interesting Out-of-context Quotes
"Federation is, maybe, the new open source."
– Tim O'Reilly discussing the possibility of federating the disparate data services that millions of web users access everyday
"I should be able to knock you over with a feather right now."
– Google's Chris DiBona during his presentation of Google Code Search crawl data, referring to a slide that showed GPLv3 penetration at nearly 46% this year
The new Sun boss put the OpenOffice and JavaFX groups on notice during the JavaOne opening keynote today: Produce some JavaFX libraries for the OpenOffice suite and do it quickly. Larry Ellison, head of the soon-to-be Oracle/Sun Java giant, said: "I've been meeting with different groups inside of Sun, and one of the things we're looking forward to is seeing libraries come out of the OpenOffice group that are JavaFX-based."
He offered spreadsheet and word-processing programs as the types of JavaFX application he expects. (Never mind that OpenOffice already has a spreadsheet program called Calc and a word processor called Writer.)
The two-hour keynote closed with a symbolic passing of the torch from the old “Chairman of JavaOne,” former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, to the new one, Oracle CEO Ellison. With so much speculation about how the acquisition will shake out for Java, both men had to address the topic for the largely developer audience. But their exchange was carefully worded because the acquisition has not yet been finalized.
As expected, Ellison reiterated Oracle's commitment to Java (Oracle’s entire middleware stack is 100-percent Java) and twice pledged to expand its investment in Java, which drew applause both times. But his most pointed remarks were the challenge to the OpenOffice and JavaFX groups and later wondering out loud why Sun/Oracle couldn’t produce mobile devices like netbooks or Google and T-Mobile's G1 phone, all based on the JavaFX platform.
In a setting where Ellison had to be particularly mindful of his words, choosing to declare these challenges publicly provided some insight into where Oracle will place its focus for Sun Java.
For you JavaFX devotees, hearing Ellison put the platform front and center has to be encouraging. At one point, he said: "We're very committed to seeing JavaFX exploited throughout Oracle and throughout Sun."
When Oracle bought Sun, it got Java. If you make your living in Java development, that statement can make you cringe, smile, or shrug—depending on how well you think Sun has handled owning Java, and whether you think Oracle will do better or worse. You might even believe that the Java platform is too entrenched for this deal to have any real impact.
For its part, Oracle announced the acquisition with praise for Java ("the most important software Oracle has ever acquired") and a commitment to keep it vibrant ("continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community"). And you don't have to take Oracle's word for it; the company's software products ran on the Java platform long before it decided to buy Sun.
So what's really going to change for the Java developer? Following the money may provide an answer. The Java platform has spawned countless development projects over the years with Sun providing the care and feeding—read: cash and staff—for hundreds of them. Sun spends billions of dollars in R&D every year, much of it going to Java-based innovation. (Java itself came out of the Green Project at Sun back in 1990.) The problem for Sun seems to be turning innovation into profits; being bought by Oracle may mean the end of R&D without ROI.
Oracle expects Sun to contribute over $1.5 billion to its operating profit in the first year, according to Oracle President Safra Catz. To fulfill that mandate, Oracle may start pulling staff and funding from Sun Java projects that don't immediately contribute to the bottom line or at least show promise of contributing in the near future.
Instead of worrying about Java itself, the types of questions Java developers really need to ponder are: What's the return on investment for JavaFX? Is it possible to monetize Project Looking Glass? What would the migration from Project GlassFish to Oracle WebLogic Server be like? And so on and so on for all those cool, interesting projects that aren't paying their own way. Soon, it may be the communities—alone—who keep them going.
Now—are you cringing, smiling, or shrugging?
- Advocates of traditional software development approaches, such as waterfall and V-Model, are myopic bureaucrats who worship detailed specifications and denigrate the code necessary to build those specs.
- Agile development practitioners, on the other hand, are logical pragmatists whose only goal is to build what the customer wants.
In a parody of the Apple television ads where a hapless businessman personifies a PC and a know-it-all hipster portrays a Mac, Ambler and Quatrani debated the relative merits of traditional and Agile development models. Ambler, the practice leader for Agile Development at IBM, played his Bizarro doppelganger: a staunch traditional model supporter (the PC). IBM Rational Evangelist Quatrani portrayed an Agile proponent (the Mac). The results were much like the TV ads: the brain-dead PC always played the fool.
Watching Ambler mock the traditional approach was good for a few laughs. He sarcastically advocated detailed specifications with complicated models that an architect could throw over the wall to the "programming monkeys," who he joked are good only for writing code exactly to spec and documenting every detail as they go. All the while, Quatrani countered with Agile's iterative, test-driven process, where stakeholders are involved and the spec evolves as the team targets working code for each iteration.
In the second half of their talk, Ambler and Quatrani traded comedy for statistics, presenting some data to validate their pro-Agile satire. Based on surveys of Dr. Dobb's Journal readers (i.e., developers), the data compared the project success rates and effectiveness of the Agile and traditional development paradigms.
Considering the source—people who may have an axe to grind against a model that elevates the architect specialization while relegating developers to "programming monkey" status—I took the survey results with a grain of salt, but they still revealed some interesting tidbits. For example, the vast majority of modeling is performed by sketching on a white board or paper rather than by using software-based modeling tools. Also, while Agile came out ahead in most categories (surprise, surprise), the traditional model had a higher success rate in distributed development. Ambler admitted that Agile teams don't know how to do distributed Agile yet, and claimed the available tools aren't helping them.
The traditional-versus-Agile debate is nothing new, of course. Six years ago, an editorial by the DevX editor-in-chief at the time titled "Are You Passing the Requirements Buck?" prompted vehement rebuttals from a DevX author and even Scott Ambler himself. Since then, DevX has published editorials on the thorny developers-vs.-architects issue, from the polemical (David Talbot's "To Software Architects: Serve End Users, Not Your Egos," December 2004) to the conciliatory (Andy Schneider's "Bridging the Divide Between Developers and Architects," July 2006).
I sat in on Ambler and Quatrani's keynote to get a sense of whether cooler, more pragmatic heads had prevailed. I ended up more entertained than informed, and left with the impression that the debate remains as religious as ever.
Conducting an interview via email can be very convenient. I can formulate my questions exactly the way I mean them (avoiding my propensity for rambling), and the interviewee has the time to compose thoughtful answers that address my specific questions (avoiding his/her propensity for rambling). Plus, I get the complete Q&A returned to me in "cut-and-pasteable" text: No tedious trawling through my digital recording to transcribe quotable answers or deciphering my hastily-written scrawl while trying to write as fast as the interviewee talked.
Like most modern conveniences though, email interviews have their downside too. Not only do they forfeit control over when I will receive answers to my questions, but more importantly, they take away an essential interviewer's tool: the immediate follow-up question. Such was the case with this blog: An email Q&A with two members of the JavaFX team, JavaFX Chief Architect John Burkey and Senior Director of JavaFX Marketing Param Singh. The interview covers a variety of topics related to the recent JavaFX 1.0 release.
The interview wasn't completed as close to the actual release date (early December 2008) as I would've liked—the holidays not withstanding—and a couple of the responses beg for follow-up questions. But that's the price of convenience. I'll let you be the judge:
Sun's Zero-Sum Java Development:
DevX: With many Java developers clamoring for language features such as properties, closures, and data binding in Java 7 (not all of which will be included in that release) and fearing that Java is falling behind C# in terms of features, some view any development effort dedicated to JavaFX as resources diverted from core Java language development. How does the JavaFX team respond?
JavaFX Team: JavaFX is a series of technological initiatives, some of which just couldn't [be] done on top of the existing Java frameworks. Specifically, the industry is moving towards animation, visual tools, and scripting, all around a core of a scene graph. People are excited when we talk about these things, from traditional Swing developers, to visual designers who have never considered working in Java.
JRE and Applet User Interaction:
DevX: How does/will the JavaFX user experience (e.g., security dialogs, JWS downloading JNLP files, etc.) compete with that of Flash?
JavaFX Team: JavaFX is powered by Java, and hence leverages the underlying features and functionality of Java. For instance, JavaFX uses the robust and proven security model of Java. Consequently, JavaFX uses industry best practices for security for items such as cross-domain access and access to system resources.
DevX: If JavaFX is currently run as an applet in the browser, is there any way for a web developer to use JavaFX without placing applets on his or her web site?
JavaFX Team: No. Applets are just the standard container for doing JavaFX, managing the lifecycle of the JavaFX objects within the browser. However, we do have some nice features here, including bi-directional interaction with JavaScript, allowing very nice communication with the rest of the web site.
JavaFX Mobile:
DevX: Which mobile device manufacturers are the JavaFX team working with? If you can't divulge that, which mobile platforms will developers be able to use JavaFX with starting in spring '09 (announced release date for JavaFX runtime for mobile devices)?
JavaFX Team: Sun works with most of the major telecommunications carriers, operators, and OEMs with Java ME. Sun is working closely with these partners to bring JavaFX Mobile to market.
Sun will announce key partners around Mobile World Congress and will continue to roll out partners at other key events.
DevX: How soon do you plan to support JavaFX on Android?
JavaFX Team: Sun is committed to delivering JavaFX Mobile runtime on a wide range of platforms (device/OS combinations) that our partners demand. Sun has demonstrated the potential to deliver JavaFX Mobile on Android at JavaOne 2008.
DevX: How will the JavaFX team address the issue of provisioning JavaFX applications to mobile devices?
JavaFX Team: [Through] a standard set of tools to allow developers to deploy to mobile devices, as well as emulate those devices on Desktop. Over the next few releases, expect these tools to get better and better.
DevX: What portions (if any) of JavaFX will be left out of JavaFX on mobile platforms?
JavaFX Team: You won't be able to call the Desktop profile, which includes Swing-based API's on Mobile, and in fact, we encourage you do stick to our "Common" architecture, which is a focused set of API's enabling next-generation media and graphics, as well as effects and timeline-based animations.
Language Interaction and Web Service Support:
DevX: Besides Java, which other programming languages (or scripting languages) does JavaFX interact with and at what level?
JavaFX Team: There is a bi-directional JavaScript bridge, which allows deep access to our JavaFX API, or DOM. In addition, JavaFX is built on top of Java, and calls into any Java API in Java SE just as a Java applet would.
DevX: With JavaFX 1.0's added web service support (calling RESTful web services and making asynchronous HTTP requests that return XML or JSON), is this how Sun recommends JavaFX clients communicate with server-side applications? Are there plans for additional web service support capabilities in the future?
JavaFX Team: We fully support RESTful web services and the web standards, but will continue bringing more capabilities to the platform. There are several things in play, enabling easier tie-in with more sophisticated web services.
Open Source Roadmap and JavaFX Gadgets:
DevX: What's open source today? What will be in the future? What (if anything) never will be open source?
JavaFX Team: Sun is committed to open source. Key parts of the JavaFX platform are in open source, including the JavaFX compiler.
DevX: Do you intend to release a set of JavaFX-based gadgets any time soon, or do you plan to leave it up to the community to develop them?
JavaFX Team: Yes, in addition to the great work already occurring in the community, we have a standard set of gadgets coming in the next several releases.
"Not Invented Here" Questions:
DevX: Instead of JavaFX Script, why not just adopt Groovy, which already had all the necessary language constructs and was quite mature?
JavaFX Team: JavaFX Script is designed specifically for doing visual scenes, and because it is a statically compiled language on top of a world-class virtual machine, it is quite a bit faster than Groovy, as well as being more expressive for visual scene construction.
DevX: What features in JavaFX couldn't have been implemented directly to the Java language with some minor enhancements, such as Properties (with data binding) or the {} construct (like in Groovy) to cut down on the verbosity of the code?
JavaFX Team: JavaFX script is a scripting language, and as such is built for fast declarative style coding, and takes as its precedents several scripting languages. The entire look of the language would be different if it were a Java derivative. Both Java and JavaFX script are important languages.
Editor's Note: Thanks to DevX authors Edmon Begoli, Jacek Furmankiewicz, Anghel Leonard, and Jim White for contributing questions for this interview.
A recent Gartner Research study found that 10 percent of the PHP community are corporate IT developers, and predicted that during the next five years, that number will grow to 40 percent. That's good news for PHP developers looking for corporate gigs--and very good news for PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, which cited the Gartner finding at the Zend/PHP Conference last week as evidence of widespread, more strategic adoption of PHP in enterprises.
Zend is trying to position its products, the PHP development framework Zend Framework and the PHP IDE Zend Studio for Eclipse, as the de facto standards for enterprise PHP web development as the language becomes more mainstream. If Zend is judged by the company it keeps, then it has chosen its allies well, forging relationships with IT heavyweights such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and most recently, Adobe.
Zend co-founder and CTO Andi Gutmans told me the products resulting from these partnerships position Zend to deliver interoperability in an enterprise environment. He added that its move to Eclipse with Zend Studio will get the tool into traditional enterprises where Eclipse is a standard, and developers are familiar with it. The main product announcements Zend made at the conference were:
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The collaboration with Adobe, in which Action Message Format (AMF) support will be integrated into the Zend Framework: AMF support enables data integration between Zend's server-side PHP and Adobe's client-side Flex data and logic components. The companies will also enable their respective IDEs (Flex Builder and Zend Studio for Eclipse) to work as one.
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General availability of Zend Core for i5/OS 2.6: This Zend-certified PHP stack is designed for IBM i5/OS, with extensions for PHP to access native i5 resources.
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Zend Studio for Eclipse: The first version of the IDE built on Eclipse, Zend Studio for Eclipse includes support for the Zend Framework and integration wih the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit.
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Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) for Zend Framework: This is a new Zend certification to go along with the existing ZCE for PHP certification.
Zend's efforts seem to be paying off. Gutmans and (during his opening keynote) Zend CEO Harold Goldberg shared customer success stories from organizations including Bell Canada, Magento, and Fox Interactive Media. But the growth of the PHP language is a credit to the work of the entire PHP community, which includes not only Zend, but also alternatives such as CakePHP and projects like the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) and the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) as well. Members of the PHP community, who already may be uneasy with media types (like me) conflating PHP (the open source language and community) and Zend (the PHP product vendor), may not be as supportive of Zend's relationships with the likes of Microsoft--anathema to the most virulent open source advocates in the PHP community.
Still, Microsoft had a clear presence at the conference, stepping up as a Platinum sponsor via its open source community web site, Port25, and hosting a session titled, "Microsoft's PHP Community Involvement." Presented by the Director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center Tom Hanrahan, a more accurate title of the session would have been "How Microsoft Plans to Support Open Source Software on the Windows Platform." Hanrahan devoted most of the hour to Microsoft's open source efforts on all fronts. The PHP-specific news saved for the end included:
- An ADOdb patch contributed under the LGPL
- A SQL Server PHP Driver
- An IIS7 + Fast CGI module, which fixes IIS (Internet Information Services) compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications
- A new site, windows.php.net, dedicated specifically to Windows support for PHP
One representative from the PHP community who attended the Microsoft session was Paul Reinheimer, the host of a popular radio-style PHP podcast called P3 (php|architect's PHP Podcast). Reinheimer began his career as a Java developer, but discovered PHP eight years ago when he grew frustrated with the rigors of "Java casting." He, for one, took a pragmatic view toward both Microsoft's open source pitch and Zend's PHP drive into the enterprise.
Reinheimer acknowledged that some of his peers in the PHP community would not have stepped foot into a Microsoft session, but praised Redmond for "doing a lot of good work." He also views enterprise adoption as "good news for PHP." Reinheimer said, "More eyes looking at the problems makes the language better."
He explained that the larger companies have the resources to allow their engineers who make fixes to contribute them back to the community, whereas smaller organizations may not have the bandwidth to do so.
Setting the legal nuances of the chosen open source license aside, wouldn't two products under any open source license have the same claim to the open source moniker? Maybe so technically, but for many engineers who contribute to the development of open source projects, like Linux Foundation Chief Platform Strategist Ted Ts'o, there's much more to the open source designation than just the license.
Borrowing the Mozilla term "organic," which describes a development process that draws upon the contributions of a diverse developer community and many different companies, Ts'o draws a distinction between organic open source and non-organic open source. Ts'o explained this distinction to me as he headed to the airport for a flight to Portland, Oregon, where he's attending the OSCON show and participating in a panel discussion about this very issue.
According to Ts'o, the difference between organic and non-organic is related to how much influence a single corporation has in the development of an open source product. The broader the developer community around a project and the lower the barrier to contributing, the more organic it is. Citing Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and Eclipse among those in the organic open source camp, Ts'o singled out OpenSolaris as a prime example of non-organic open source. In fact, he objected to "Sun claiming that Solaris is just like Linux because it's open source"--a characterization that seemed to inspire his interest in asserting these definitions.
Ts'o, an IBM employee, said 99 percent of OpenSolaris development comes from Sun engineers. He added that Sun has a "heavyweight development process" in place for OpenSolaris, in which Sun engineers must sponsor any individual contributions as well as shepherd submitted patches. "If you're not accepting patches from the outside world, you have to wonder whether things have really changed a lot since the Solaris 8 and 9 days [when a developer could purchase the operating system on a CD for $75]," said Ts'o.
Ts'o does concede that the organic/non-organic distinction is more of a business argument than a technical argument, even labeling the OpenSolaris 'just like Linux' message as marketing to young developers. He made no judgments about how a non-organic development process impacts the quality of the OpenSolaris end product. He did, however, praise the organic approach for its individual rather than corporate stance, which he believes nurtures a very broad developer community, shields the project from corporate upheavals such as layoffs--which in a non-organic project can lead to a debilitating loss of developers, and ensures that decisions are based on the project's best interests rather than market interests.
So depending on whom you speak to, a license alone doesn't determine open source. The development process--as well as the degree and ease of individual participation allowed--are just as important. And don't even bring "free" into the discussion: Do you mean free as in beer, or free as in speech ...
At one point during salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's keynote yesterday at the SaaS leader's Tour De Force stop in Santa Clara, he presented a slide with a signpost of a forked road. One road led toward software and the other toward cloud computing. Above them was the declaration: "it's time for software developers to ask 'which path am I going to take?'"
The slide served as a launching point for Benioff to promote the advantages cloud computing (on the Force.com platform, in particular) offers application developers over traditional on-premise datacenters. But the proposition it posed was, of course, overstated. While the advantages of cloud computing--minimal start-up cost and systems maintenance, and the ability to deploy with a click of the mouse--are compelling, most developers today aren't facing an either/or proposition. They work in organizations that are heterogeneous mixes of on-premise applications with just a few business or infrastructure functions deployed in the cloud (if any). New projects might be considered for the cloud-computing model and web startups definitely would have to look at that option, but for most businesses, existing investments in datacenters and enterprise software licenses guarantee that the on-premise model isn't going away any time soon.
For those developers who are already programming on the Force.com platform using the Apex programming language, Salesforce.com announced the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data (GData) APIs. I sat down with Steven Fisher, Senior Vice President of the Platform Division at salesforce.com, who explained that Apex had all the bare capabilities for a developer to call the GData APIs manually prior to the toolkit's release, but coding against the API required parsing through all the XML in the GData ATOM and RSS API. "What we really announced today at the technical level is an Apex library that does all that parsing for you, so you can just interact with objects," Fisher told me.
"Behind the scenes, this library formats out the appropriate XML, and does the HTTP callouts, and all of that kind of stuff. It was so much effort (calling GData from Apex) that people just weren't going to do it, and now it's one line of code."
Google launched its largest and first paid-admission developer conference, Google I/O, yesterday in San Francisco with a 90-minute keynote session to show off a number of its web development products and initiatives. The message of the presentation, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" and led by Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra, was nothing new; much of it echoed O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" conception, Salesforce.com's and BungeeLabs' platform as a service (PaaS), and the Sun Microsystems corporate motto, "The Network Is the Computer."
Gundotra explained Google's high-level goal as moving the web forward by enabling web developers to:
- Access the cloud more easily (with Google App Engine);
- Leverage more power from the browser (with Google Web Toolkit); and
- Maintain pervasive connectivity in their applications (with Android and Gears).
Google App Engine
The PaaS pitch for developers was Google App Engine: Google will host their applications on its servers for free and charge only when the applications exceed either 500MB of persistent storage or the bandwidth and CPU necessary for 5 million monthly page views. Although the pricing model won't be finalized until the end of the year and App Engine is still in preview, Google announced open signup for all interested developers. Developers need only sign up, develop the web applications on their local machines, and deploy them to Google. Launching the application then is just a matter of serving the application's URL to your end users. However, the App Engine runtime environment currently uses only Python. Google is considering other languages and runtime configurations for future releases. So if you're not a Python developer, you'll have to learn the language or wait.
Google Web Toolkit
The announcement of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate (GWT 1.5 RC) was Google's effort to make the browser more powerful. GWT uses an optimizing cross-compiler to convert Java code input, written in the IDE of your choice, into compiled JavaScript output for target browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). GWT 1.5 RC adds full Java 5 language support—the most requested feature from GWT users, according to Bruce Johnson, Google's GWT engineering manager.
During his demo, Johnson explained that when developers write an application directly in pure JavaScript, they're responsible for optimizing and maintaining that code themselves. But with GWT, developers write applications in maintainable Java code, and the cross-compiler produces the fastest JavaScript possible for that application—with no concessions to maintainability.
If you like the GWT functionality but code in C#, check out Script# as an alternative.
Android and Gears
The Android and Gears demos filled the pervasive connectivity role. Android Engineering Director Steve Horowitz demonstrated the much-talked-about mobile development stack on a mobile device. The home screen featured the typical items you'd expect (e-mail, Internet, contacts, etc.), and Horowitz's touch-screen navigation would've had more appeal if the iPhone hadn't already been on the scene. But things got interesting when he pointed the WebKit browser to Google Maps. Horowitz set the device to Compass mode while viewing a Google Maps Street View of the San Francisco waterfront. Holding the device at arms length, he turned around 180 degrees in either direction and the Street View moved in relation to him, providing a sweep of the waterfront image. That trick drew applause.
MySpace's Senior VP of Engineering, Allen Hurff, conducted the Gears demo. A browser plug-in, Gears (formerly Google Gears) uses a local server, database, and worker pool to enable users to interact with web applications while they're offline. Hurff showed this capability by doing a full text search of his 300-plus MySpace Mail messages without calling back to the MySpace servers. Each search term he entered dynamically narrowed his messages to only the matching results, and the search was powered completely by his local machine.
The keynote's message of "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud" was nothing I hadn't heard before. But what made it compelling was that it came from a child of the Web era (you could say the poster child—in the canon of web-based services alongside Amazon, eBay, and now MySpace). Google itself was born of open standards/open source software, the Internet as the platform, and the proverbial web company founder story: two computer whiz kids in their college dorm room with a brilliant idea and no money. What's possible for those kids—and whiz grownups—today? Google believes it has the tools to help them find out.
If I didn't know better, I would've thought I was at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Vegas yesterday morning instead of the opening keynote at the JavaOne 2008 Conference in San Francisco. Demos featured handheld book readers and graphics-rich "eye candy" applications on mobile devices, desktops, and the web; video presentations featured young hipsters immersed in the pop culture content and communication features of their mobile devices; and much of the talk from Sun Software EVP Rich Green centered on the consumer's digital life and rich experiences on various devices. So what's all that stuff have to do with Java? The devices all run Java, and the JavaFX Runtime that Sun announced during the session attempts to allow seamless portability of Java SE and ME applications among all devices through the Java platform.
Enter the theme for JavaOne this year: Java + You (if you're reading this, you're probably a Java developer and that "You" likely is closer to the 2006 Time Magazine Person of the Year than to you in particular); it refers to consumers, graphic and web designers, and scripting language programmers who use PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, and others. Sun continues to court designers and scripters by making the Java platform more accessible to them, largely because their numbers are much larger than those of core Java developers. With enterprise Java entrenched in data centers all over the world, Sun can—and has—turned its attention to higher levels of the software stack—focusing sharply on RIAs (rich Internet applications) for desktops, mobile devices, and the web, and their ability to leverage features of the underlying Java platform. JavaFX is another step in that direction.
I wasn't overly impressed when Sun first announced JavaFX at last year's JavaOne, but this year, the demos (more to come on those) showed that Sun has worked to close the gap between a JavaFX vision and real JavaFX technology.
Stay tuned to the DevXtra Editors' Blog for more details from JavaOne...
The launch of the DevXtra Editors' Blog is bound to raise the YAB (yet another blog) questions: Why, and why now? Those are fair in an age when everyone with an Internet connection and an opinion is blogging. Let me explain.
Simply stated: The DevX editors have more to say. Being located in Silicon Valley places DevX at ground zero for developer news and events. In the past month alone, Eclipse, RSA, and MySQL/Sun (I'm still getting used to that) have hosted conferences in the Valley, and JavaOne kicks off on May 6 in San Francisco. While that's a blessing for keeping us in the know about major developments in the application development space, it's also a curse in terms of managing the information overload that can accumulate--while still producing the practical how-to content you've come to expect from DevX.
The DevXtra Editors' Blog enables us to pass along the observations and interesting tidbits that in the past have been relegated to water cooler discussions and editorial meetings--too short to be full articles, too extemporaneous to be tutorials. Now we have a space to share this (we think) valuable information, and DevX readers get to see who's behind the curtain, find out what's got us buzzing, and participate in a dialogue.
We hope you'll find the DevXtra Editors' Blog informative, enjoyable, and provocative. Most importantly, we urge you to share your thoughts about our postings and help make this more than just YAB.
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