Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 16 May 2008, 3:21 PM
Mobile Surfin’ USA
If everybody had a mobile – across the USA… OK, I’ll stop there. Actually, I’m not much of a Beach Boys fan. But betwixt a number of US-based events as I am, I think I’m more acutely aware of the ability to keep online on the go. I actually found myself in ‘Best Buy’ last night sizing up the Asus against the 10 and 11 inch screen rivals from Sony, Acer etc… yes, I know, I’m waiting for the Atom-powered Asus too.
Anyway, the need to stay connected (and follow Bristol City’s inexorable rise to the Premiership playoffs of course) has never been higher for many of us – and in many cases this means web on mobile. I did a research piece on Africa late last year and spoke to an excellent chap from the GSM association called Gabriel Solomon – he asserted that for many people in the poorer nations, a mobile device would be all the computing power they would see for the foreseeable future.
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But the web on a small screen (a handheld I mean) is a pain isn’t it? Web 2.0-powered collaboration software is even encroaching on this space with the likes of IBM and RIM partnering up for all they’re worth.
Apparently, eMarketer (nope, I’ve never heard of them either – a web market research and trend analysis outfit by all accounts) forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012. No major surprise then to see this kind of info sitting close to reports that this year more people in the world will have a mobile device than a landline telephone.
IBM's Institute for Business Value predicts one billion mobile web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the web over the next decade.
Big deal, I hate mobiles, small device form factor web search sucks and anyway, I’m a database administrator and I sit at a high-end workstation or desktop machine for 80 per cent of my working life – I hear you say.
As I’ve said before, the trends point to suggest that if you are a developer – you are therefore a mobile developer. All applications migrate in some form to the mobile device. Deference and respect to my pal Neil Roodyn in Australia for writing that in a piece he worked on with me once.
So, you don’t do mobile. Maybe not yet, but soon maybe? Big Blue is stoking up the fires that drive its WebSphere portal and its latest dashboard software, according to IBM, allows you to build web sites and single screen dashboard views for pumping data out to various apps and processes for mobile devices.
Completing the circle here is the fact that this type of technology is designed to appeal. It has the potential draw you in even if you don’t think you’ll enjoy using it. If it’s web 2.0-powered collaboration software personalised to your individual BlackBerry – chances are, you might find it handy.
Or as the Germans might say: mein handy ist handlich!
Wednesday 14 May 2008, 12:53 AM
A wider meaning for cross platform development?
With Sun pushing JavaFX Desktop 1.0 out into the Rich Internet Application space last week (and Microsoft’s Silverlight & Adobe’s AIR already out there), the blending of the web with the desktop has never been such a hot topic. It’s no big surprise then to see a whole barrel of publicity surrounding cross-platform application frameworks being talked about.
This is the kind of technology that is purported to enable developers to create applications that blend content from the web itself into native desktop and mobile applications. The goal being, ideally, to create a consistent user experience across Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems (and on mobile devices too) so that we all stay happy.
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As wary as we should all be of any company claiming to hold the ‘de facto standard’ in any field (is Bud really the “King” of beers I wonder?), the company grabbing more than their fare share of headlines in this space is Trolltech with its cutely named “Qt” product.
Trolltech says that it is striving to provide a common framework to deliver applications and services across both desktops and devices. The company’s recent 4.4 release now also embraces devices running Windows Embedded CE. This means that cross-platform in this sense now embodies devices from smartphones and barcode readers to consumer products like set-top boxes and digital picture frames.
The analysts seem to be behind this. “The market is continually creating a higher bar for deploying increasingly graphically rich applications on a multitude of different devices,” said Al Hilwa, program director at IDC. “Giving developers a single platform for development across desktop operating systems and embedded platforms can help speed the timely process of taking code from desktop to desktop, desktop to embedded, or embedded to embedded.”
An interesting (I hope) final point is that Qt 4.4 is available under Trolltech’s standard dual-licensing approach and for developers creating open source applications, it is available under the GPL (both version 2 and 3).
Tuesday 13 May 2008, 2:26 AM
Addendum Ad Infinitum
Any addenda to the manoeuvrings of JavaOne last week run the risk of trying to round off and actually complete a fully comprehensive report on what was, quite simply, a huge event. So, passing nod to inevitable fallibility aside, I’ll make the extra notes I have had in mind since leaving Sun’s developer-fest last week.
Firstly – and most technically important – Sun has said that it plans on new releases of its OpenSolaris operating system every six months. Although the company is undecided as to which version will form the next ‘foundation’ of the mainstream release, it is clearly keen to whip up and maintain momentum behind the product now that it has officially been released to open source – which in itself should ensure that this end of the product’s development experiences faster (than previously seen) development. It sounds fairly promising doesn’t it?
Next, did you know that a food bug hit the Moscone Centre on the last day of the conference? Fair play to Sun for making it known to us all – but I bet they’re secretly glad it didn’t hit on day one… can you imagine the cheesy “virus” headlines from us so-called ‘creative writers’ eh?
Oh, did I mention that Smash Mouth played the end of show gig with their hit that goes, “you might as well be walking on the sun…” - and that nobody (to the best of my knowledge) made mention of this and tried for a cheap laugh? Oops, I just did.
Also, I bumped into a lot of people using Verizon (and the like) mobile broadband USB modems. The Americans typically pay up to about US$70 bucks for these services as compared to what I believe are much cheaper deals for us in the UK.
On that point, after leaving the conference I was re-routed out of San Francisco into Los Angeles – and then had my SouthWest plane go “technical” with a faulty fuel pump to the left engine (they can fly on one can’t they?) and then get delayed and re-routed to Chattanooga, Tennessee before finally getting routed back to Baltimore for a 3am landing. We stopped in Dallas, Fort Worth too if I think back on the whole nightmare. My fault, I booked it – but boy was I glad I borrowed a Vodaphone mobile broadband USB wotnot so I could log on from the plane (on the apron I hasten to add) and tell my wife’s parents not to bother picking us up at the airport.
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Lastly, did I not mention that I queued up to get a picture with Duke? Of course I did.
Wednesday 7 May 2008, 11:55 PM
JavaOne: the ‘best of the rest’ awards
If you’ve been digging into ZDNet.co.uk’s coverage of JavaOne in its entirety by now you’ll know that alongside news, there has also been show blogs (such as this one), video content, technical session overviews, Q&As and a variety of images to view taken at the event itself.
To really earn a couple of hours off tomorrow for a walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf and a ropey old ten dollar boat ride around Alcatraz before the evening bash with Smash Mouth playing live – I thought I’d put out a few extra notes that haven’t made it into our core reports so far. For my own amusement mainly, I thought these “extras” could each be awarded a mention in a special prize category of my own design.
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Best use of ‘vendor-speak’ soundbite:
"Everybody communicates in their own way," said James Mustarde, director of corporate marketing, Twisted Pair Solutions. "Like individuals, companies leverage different combinations of technology to achieve their communications requirements. Fortunately, today's Unified Communications solutions are enabling businesses to unify these disparate technologies into a single platform for increased user productivity.”
Best use of ‘try too hard’ press release:
Britney Spears beats out Paris Hilton in Open Source Code Popularity – Code search company Krugle’s story was based around a list of top Java queries that developers world-wide have submitted during the last month at Krugle.com, as well as the number of times various celebrity names are included in the billions of lines of open source code the company tracks. As for distinctly non-Java searches uncovered by Krugle management, “Knuth” returned the highest number of hits in honour of leading computer scientist and ‘father of algorithm analysis’ Donald Knuth, far outstripping Satan in a close second place. Next on the list, George Bush was edged out Britney Spears, with both dominating the fifth-ranked Fidel Castro – all of whom were behind Paris Hilton who rounded out the bottom of the rankings.
Best example of a hardware company trying to position itself as a software company to coincide with JavaOne:
AMD made much of it the fact that it says it has armed the developer community with the tools, resources and hardware-assisted technology they need to develop software more easily. The company has announced a specification for software parallelism to help a managed code environment (like Java) run more efficiently. It has also provided a new plug-in called “Code Sleuth” that provides the Eclipse community with increased performance management and monitoring of Java software code.
(This is a bit unfair of me; Intel talks on software a lot too of course and had a huge booth here at the show – but you get the spin idea I hope.)
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Picture source: courtesy of the Moscone Center
Best middleware announcement (in a supporting role):
Red Hat used JavaOne this week to announce the release of JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.0, an integrated middleware management platform that it says simplifies application development, testing, deployment and monitoring. Red Hat’s Katrinka McCallum was quoted as saying, “Our customer base is getting more sophisticated and specialised within their IT operations environments when it comes to middleware management."
Best pressroom sandwich:
Wednesday’s roast beef with onion jam on ‘tiger bread’ with mayo and French’s mustard. Best enjoyed with Mountain Dew fizzy pop.
Best attendee quote:
Richard Foxworthy, student from nearby San Carlos, California.
“JavaOne has been great for me as a student, it’s really interesting and I have learned a lot. The only problem I’ve had is with sessions that have been more technical than I had thought they might be from the way they were described in the show handbook and guide. It would be great if the presenters asked the room what the spread of competency is on the subject they are about to talk on before they kick off so that they can perhaps tailor what they say slightly on each occasion.”
Most insightful analyst quote:
“The world is going multi-core, but parallel programming skills are thin on the ground. The market is slow to adopt new programming models and some of the traditional parallel programming tools are (possibly unfairly) seen as old hat,” said John Barr, research director with The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in his report. “Pervasive Software's development of DataRush – a Java framework for highly parallel, data-intensive applications – could be in the right place at the right time.”
Best geek giveaway:
James Gosling (all hail the father of Java) firing t-shirts from a giant rubber band catapult at the audience in the day one keynote session.
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No really, he did, look at the picture. I can’t top that or say any more really.
So I won’t.
Wednesday 7 May 2008, 11:37 PM
JavaOne from the inside
In addition to my general reports and news on Sun’s JavaOne developer conference this week in San Francisco, I also have the chance to feature some comment from inside the technical sessions. Although I am not attending these myself, I’m able to provide these opinions by virtue of the fact that my wife Terry-Lynn (a senior Java developer in her own right) is attending these meets. Below are her thoughts:
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Picture source: courtesy of the Moscone Center
Session TS-6271 Java Platform, Standard Edition: A Youthful Maturity
This session was an excellent kickoff to my 75 hours of learning activities at JavaOne this year. In this session, several essential (Standard Edition) SE technical initiatives were conveyed. For example, I was pleased to learn that the JRE6 Release 10 is currently available. This release is designed for the 64-bit platform and it is also now bundled in with Ubuntu 8.04.
In answer to my deepest technical desires, this release focuses on improvements in performance, optimisation and tuning. These improvements can be seen in the Java classes (XML Parsing, TreeMap etc.), the Java libraries and the Java VM. Also, as a Swing developer, I was very excited to learn of the 'Nimbus Look and Feel' for Swing that has been incorporated into this release.
Other notable improvements with JRE 6 Release 10 that I became aware of in this session included a new plug-in architecture that allows each applet to have its own VM process outside the browser and a seamless Java Deployment Toolkit.
Another interesting topic in this session included a demonstration of Visual VM. Visual VM is a diagnostic tool that aids in assessing garbage collection routines and it is perfect (in my humble opinion) for determining memory leaks. With the aid of this tool, I really think I am finally through with those dreaded 'out of memory' exceptions that are sometimes thrown at me.
Lastly, in this session, I was very excited to be enlightened as to the future plans for the Java SE for the SE 7 version (which is to be released in mid 2009) and beyond. These future releases intend to focus on modularity, closures, extensions to annotations, improving type references and string insulation. I can't wait!
Back to Adrian…
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To conclude, one aspect of JavaOne that struck us both was the scale of the event and the mammoth queues that formed for each meeting from the general keynotes, to the classes, to the birds of a feather sessions. We heard figures around the 15,000 mark for the number of attendees, so perhaps it’s no surprise.
What this did mean was that classes were on the large size and arguably slightly more impersonal than at similar events. For more reaction on the individual sessions please visit Terry-Lynn’s own blog.
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