We're looking for the best places to go to run into developers in your town. Where do you go when you want nachos and some .NET talk? Or, a beer, burger and Java? We'd like to know. Send us your suggestions for best developer hangouts in the comment section below, and we'll put it all together on our website.
-- David
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Friday, May 8, 2009
Community Choice Awards
There's no slime nor trophies shaped like blimps like at the Kid's Choice Awards (I know this because I have a 9-year-old), but that program don't have a monopoly on honoring wacky categories such as "Worst Movie Kiss." SourceForge has announced the nomination period for its fourth annual Community Choice Awards is open, with prizes to be given out in 12 categories. Among them: "Best Project for Academia" and "Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything." There is no panel of judges to decide the winners, because "we want the open source community to tell us, first hand, what the most exciting projects are," said Ross Turk, the director of community for SourceForge. Projects do not have to be hosted on SourceForge to be eligible, and nominations will be accepted until May 29. The winners will be announced on July 23 at a party at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, Calif, during the week of OSCON, the Open Source Conference. Should be quite the affair.
-- David Rubinstein
-- David Rubinstein
Friday, April 24, 2009
An Agile Process Maturity Model
I've begun reporting out the June 15 special report on Agile Development, and just got off the phone with IBM's Scott Ambler. He indicated the company has created an Agile Process Maturity Model, which will be detailed in a white paper due out in the next week or so. The maturity model defines three levels of agile process maturity. The lowest level is implementation by small, co-located teams using point tools for such tasks as continuous integration and testing, perhaps using Scrum or XP for collaboration. The next level demonstrates a more disciplined, full lifecycle approach and adds a level of governance. The third level is what Ambler called "disciplined agile at scale." Some critics have called this a mythical level, but Ambler details this in a very recent blog post. This links to a page on IBM's developerworks site, which had been down for maintenance, but check back.
Lining up more interviews now for the rest of this report.
-- David
Lining up more interviews now for the rest of this report.
-- David
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Where does 'Dublin' leave BizTalk Server?
Last Friday, I caught up with Microsoft's Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems Division, and asked him a question that had been burning in my mind ever since he briefed me on Microsoft's "Dublin" application server technology: Where does Dublin leave BizTalk Server?
Dublin is an add-on that extends Windows Server's Application Server Role with infrastructure code to handle composite applications that have workflow oriented processes. Put simply, it executes XAML-based applications. That is significant because Microsoft's upcoming "Oslo" wave of development products serialize "M" application models into XAML. That made me question why customers would be to install BizTalk.
Dublin is complementary to BizTalk; it targets different workloads, Kawasaki said. "Integration [which BizTalk provides] is a separate [need] from customers that want to build customer applications and have an application server to run it in." Dublin and BizTalk will remain separately packaged offerings, he added. "They will be used together in many cases."
For example, BizTalk will be required when an application needs to connect to a mainframe, or conversely, when an ESB needs to connect to a back end, yet needs custom application logic, he said. Kawasaki acknowledged that Microsoft needs to provide more customer guidance.
"BizTalk will continue to be a key component in the Dublin/Oslo world. However, just how it will fit in is still a bit murky. I expect more announcements on this front in the near future," Forrester principal analyst Ken Vollmer wrote in an e-mail.
Dublin is an add-on that extends Windows Server's Application Server Role with infrastructure code to handle composite applications that have workflow oriented processes. Put simply, it executes XAML-based applications. That is significant because Microsoft's upcoming "Oslo" wave of development products serialize "M" application models into XAML. That made me question why customers would be to install BizTalk.
Dublin is complementary to BizTalk; it targets different workloads, Kawasaki said. "Integration [which BizTalk provides] is a separate [need] from customers that want to build customer applications and have an application server to run it in." Dublin and BizTalk will remain separately packaged offerings, he added. "They will be used together in many cases."
For example, BizTalk will be required when an application needs to connect to a mainframe, or conversely, when an ESB needs to connect to a back end, yet needs custom application logic, he said. Kawasaki acknowledged that Microsoft needs to provide more customer guidance.
"BizTalk will continue to be a key component in the Dublin/Oslo world. However, just how it will fit in is still a bit murky. I expect more announcements on this front in the near future," Forrester principal analyst Ken Vollmer wrote in an e-mail.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Dance Dance, Robot
If you've ever wondered what European robotics developers do in their spare time: they prepare their hexapods to dance!
Microsoft: 'Open source is a source of innovation'
Microsoft appreciates open source as a source of innovation, and will expand its involvement with the open source community, Robert Duffner, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, said over coffee Monday morning.
During our discussion, he also opined that open source is not Linux, nor should Linux be the poster child of open source. You may want to sit down before you read on.
All sources of innovation are significant to Microsoft - regardless of the methodology that was used, Duffner said. No less than chief software architect Ray Ozzie appreciates open source and envisioned a broader role for it at Microsoft when he hired Sam Ramji (directory of Microsoft's open source software lab), he noted.
update: Microsoft informs me that Duffner misspoke about Ozzie's role in Ramji's hiring. I am told that Ray Ozzie didn’t actually hire Sam (it was Bill Hilf that hired Sam to run the open source lab, but Sam was actually already at Microsoft before that.)
Indeed, Ozzie has served as an internal proponent. It was Ozzie who insisted that Windows Azure, Microsoft's development platform for the cloud, be open to Eclipse tooling and PHP programmers, Duffner said. But the company is admittedly more pragmatic than altruistic.
Microsoft has a market driven approach Duffner said. Duffner, an IBM alumnus, explained that the company's involvement in open source projects is driven by product groups, and is in that regard no different from IBM. However, he conceded that there has been more altruism out of IBM to date.
IBM's early involvement with the Apache Geronimo project was done out of self interest to help it flesh out its Java EE 5 strategy, he said. "Customers demanded [Java EE 5]," and IBM needed another year to complete an update to WebSphere, he claimed. Similarly, customers in the financial industry prompted Microsoft join the AMQP project, he said.
When asked what projects Microsoft is contributing to, he rattled off a list including Apache HBase, Apache, Apache Qpid, AMQP, and PHP. However, Microsoft has not yet contributed code to AMQP, and Microsoft's involvement in HBase happened through an acquisition. Regardless, the fact that its work with HBase has persisted is a, "big deal," he said. Microsoft also funds the Apache Foundation.
Microsoft's PHP work has a lot to do with SQL Server. The company is working to create a database abstraction layer for PHP so that developers will not be beholden to Sun's MySQL, he said. Not surprisingly, Duffner noted that Microsoft is intent on tying PHP to SQL Server to offer developers, "more choices for development and deployment."
The open source technology center team at Microsoft has around 15 dedicated employees, not including contractors or product teams that engage in interoperability work. The team holds internal events to promote the use of open source at Microsoft, and is acting as, "change agents within Microsoft," according to Duffner.
While it is not working with every group at Microsoft yet, the team does work closely with Microsoft Research and the CodePlex open source project hosting team, he said. In our discussion, he expressed a strong desire to collaborate with the SharePoint product team. The takeaway was that the scope of open source is not limited to operating systems.
As a matter of fact, the company would very badly like to shake the perception that open source is commercial Linux versus Windows. "[Linux] never had head to head competition against Windows anyway," he said. "It's UNIX VS Linux and Windows." However, he acknowledged that Linux will become more of a competitor if UNIX market share continue to slip.
While I do share his belief that there is much more to open source than Linux, accepting that Microsoft is not concerned about Linux requires the willful suspension of disbelief. One of the open source team's most recent releases is the new Web installer for Microsoft's Web services stack - Microsoft's answer to the LAMP stack.
In case you were wondering, the 'L' in LAMP stands for Linux. And Microsoft recognizes why LAMP is attractive to Web developers. LAMP has an attractive, pluggable architecture, Duffner said.
During our discussion, he also opined that open source is not Linux, nor should Linux be the poster child of open source. You may want to sit down before you read on.
All sources of innovation are significant to Microsoft - regardless of the methodology that was used, Duffner said. No less than chief software architect Ray Ozzie appreciates open source and envisioned a broader role for it at Microsoft when he hired Sam Ramji (directory of Microsoft's open source software lab), he noted.
update: Microsoft informs me that Duffner misspoke about Ozzie's role in Ramji's hiring. I am told that Ray Ozzie didn’t actually hire Sam (it was Bill Hilf that hired Sam to run the open source lab, but Sam was actually already at Microsoft before that.)
Indeed, Ozzie has served as an internal proponent. It was Ozzie who insisted that Windows Azure, Microsoft's development platform for the cloud, be open to Eclipse tooling and PHP programmers, Duffner said. But the company is admittedly more pragmatic than altruistic.
Microsoft has a market driven approach Duffner said. Duffner, an IBM alumnus, explained that the company's involvement in open source projects is driven by product groups, and is in that regard no different from IBM. However, he conceded that there has been more altruism out of IBM to date.
IBM's early involvement with the Apache Geronimo project was done out of self interest to help it flesh out its Java EE 5 strategy, he said. "Customers demanded [Java EE 5]," and IBM needed another year to complete an update to WebSphere, he claimed. Similarly, customers in the financial industry prompted Microsoft join the AMQP project, he said.
When asked what projects Microsoft is contributing to, he rattled off a list including Apache HBase, Apache, Apache Qpid, AMQP, and PHP. However, Microsoft has not yet contributed code to AMQP, and Microsoft's involvement in HBase happened through an acquisition. Regardless, the fact that its work with HBase has persisted is a, "big deal," he said. Microsoft also funds the Apache Foundation.
Microsoft's PHP work has a lot to do with SQL Server. The company is working to create a database abstraction layer for PHP so that developers will not be beholden to Sun's MySQL, he said. Not surprisingly, Duffner noted that Microsoft is intent on tying PHP to SQL Server to offer developers, "more choices for development and deployment."
The open source technology center team at Microsoft has around 15 dedicated employees, not including contractors or product teams that engage in interoperability work. The team holds internal events to promote the use of open source at Microsoft, and is acting as, "change agents within Microsoft," according to Duffner.
While it is not working with every group at Microsoft yet, the team does work closely with Microsoft Research and the CodePlex open source project hosting team, he said. In our discussion, he expressed a strong desire to collaborate with the SharePoint product team. The takeaway was that the scope of open source is not limited to operating systems.
As a matter of fact, the company would very badly like to shake the perception that open source is commercial Linux versus Windows. "[Linux] never had head to head competition against Windows anyway," he said. "It's UNIX VS Linux and Windows." However, he acknowledged that Linux will become more of a competitor if UNIX market share continue to slip.
While I do share his belief that there is much more to open source than Linux, accepting that Microsoft is not concerned about Linux requires the willful suspension of disbelief. One of the open source team's most recent releases is the new Web installer for Microsoft's Web services stack - Microsoft's answer to the LAMP stack.
In case you were wondering, the 'L' in LAMP stands for Linux. And Microsoft recognizes why LAMP is attractive to Web developers. LAMP has an attractive, pluggable architecture, Duffner said.
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