April 2011 Archives

I had a bit of an epiphany on Twitter this week. Some ne'er-do-weller blurted out that Android was "plateauing" - as if that should be some kind of bad thing.

Celebrated fellow tech journalist Mr Tim Anderson immediately commented: @ABridgwater it is OK to plateau if you are on a high level!

Good point Tim!

The onslaught of Android is generally seen as a good thing. Indeed, I blogged last night on the US programmer's site Dr Dobbs that developers have, for the most part, warmly embraced the opportunity to program within an ecosystem that engenders rapid and creative code commits.

I went on to quote new research by market intelligence company ComScore, which suggests that one out of every three new phones sold in the US is an Android-based device.

The dilemma facing developers now is whether to focus their efforts on developing for Android or Apple OS X, or split their time between the two environments.

Edinburgh-based RunRev is trying to aim for both markets it appears.

The company's LiveCode development platform has this week been augmented with an Android package. The company says that, "With its roots in Hypercard, the offering is an English-syntax development platform that is geared towards seasoned developers as well as those looking to tap into the lucrative apps market."

RunRev claims that the development platform means that you only need to write once and deploy anywhere. This suggests that developers can create apps for Android and then port them to the iOS platform without recoding. RunRev also suggests development time can be dramatically shortened.

Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri is attending RunRev's event to deliver his "3 Mega Trends Facing Application Development" presentation -- let's hope he keeps focused on cross-platform software application development then eh?

But that's another blog for another day...

With a heritage and team steeped in Microsoft history, Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at the ASP.NET platform.

Developed under the auspices of the Outercurve Foundation, the version 1.1 release of Orchard was announced earlier this month at the Microsoft Mix '11 conference in Las Vegas.

Looking at the product itself, Orchard 1.1 is a .NET-based CMS (content management system) application designed to allow users to create content-driven websites.

Orchard's owners specify that it includes an 'extensibility framework' -- a function designed to allow developers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.

Orchard 1.1 includes a number of new features and enhancements:
• a fresh design of the administration panel
• a rapid way to set up a new Orchard site using "recipes"
• additional extensibility hooks for developers
• flexible "shape tracing" tools for designers to inspect and customise the rendering of an Orchard site.

"Our goals with Orchard 1.1 were to address community feedback, improve design and usability of administration, and simplify setup and reduce the time it takes to configure a new site. We streamlined the workflow to install modules and themes, manage widgets, and create lists of content. We also made improvements targeted at deployment and hosting," said Bradley Millington, project lead and manager of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery.

Orchard 1.1 is available from the Orchard Project site at http://orchardproject.net It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI.

Fact number #1: Android is the fastest growing mobile operating system in the world right?

At least that's what the Wall Street Journal reported when citing Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt, who has said that more than 300,000 Android devices are activated every day.

Fact number #2: Twitter is quite popular.

So should we not be focused on Twitter clients for Android? This must be a massive area for potential growth surely?

New to my awareness this week was Twidroyd, an offering described as an industry-standard twitter client for Android -- available as a free and commercial pro version that supports all twitter features as well as functionality that is customised to the capabilities of android.

Twidroyd can be downloaded from Google's Android market for all devices running android 1.5 and above.

Areas of technology to be aware of here:

Other Android-compliant Twitter clients do of course exist, the very popular Tweetdeck is available on Android -- although it is said to operate better on other platforms.

TweetCaster by Handmark is also in this list. This client has the nice ability to censor tweets from certain users without having to physically actually "unfollow" them.

Final point here -- especially for you if you are a developer...

Twitter recently disabled Twidroyd and other UberMedia apps from accessing the service itself due to what was described as a "violation of policy."

Twidroyd was suspended along with UberTwitter and UberCurrent -- all of which come from the same company, California-based UberMedia.

So if you are going to develop the next big thing, the next Twitter client for Android, or the next Twitter-killer itself even -- then think about Twitter policy compliance, or you could come unstuck.

In something of a victory for purists devoted to the contribution model of application development, OpenOffice.org has regained its status as a purely community-based open-source project as Oracle drops its commercial version of the productivity suite.

After acquiring OpenOffice when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, the company had infuriated vendors and users alike by refusing to turn the suite's development path over to the community.

In response to Oracle's stubbornness, the Document Foundation was formed to create a truly open fork known as LibreOffice, which has arguably enjoyed success, popularity and high-profile interest since its launch.

At the time of writing this weekend, some OpenOffice links on the Oracle website are already showing up and dead:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/open-office-170241.html

Oracle's chief architect Edward Screven has already issued this statement, "Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organisation focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis."

The company says it will immediately start working with community members to further the success of Open Office and support standards such as ODF (Open Document Format).

Screven went on to confirm Oracle's commitment to other open-source technologies, such as Linux and MySQL. "Oracle is focused on Linux and MySQL because both of these products have won broad based adoption among commercial and government customers," he said.

So what of the future now?

Overall, Oracle's move presents "a double-edged opportunity," said Michael Cot, an analyst with RedMonk.

"On the one hand, paranoid community folks are keen to have Oracle spin out beloved open-source projects, thinking this would prevent Oracle from commercialising those projects too much or somehow making them more closed than open," he said.

NB: Other commentators have also suggested that the whole process is not an open and shut case. "I don't think the licensing has changed... so the fork should remain until OpenOffice is released under GPL/BSD/etc," said Jason L. Froebe, independent database developer from Illinois.

Oracle likes to demonstrate. More specifically, Oracle tries hard to demonstrate commitment to open source in its various manifestations since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

The problem Oracle has is that the company's heritage rests heavily upon some fairly proprietary foundations -- and this has meant that we have developed what I like the call the following:

"The make fun of Oracle's open source commitments because the company is only doing this for show and is really more interested in making money from proprietary big business GAME."

This game is popular among many media and can be seen being played out on IT news report websites from San Francisco to Vladivostok.

Of course, this is a silly game to play because Oracle does do "some" real work in open source. This week we see the announcement of the first development milestone release for MySQL 5.6, the (as they put it) "world's most popular open source database" system.

"From significantly investing in the technology, to working closely with the community, Oracle continues to make MySQL better," said Tomas Ulin, Oracle's MySQL vice president of engineering. "With this first MySQL 5.6 development milestone release, we are offering early access to new stable features for testing. Oracle continues to innovate and enhance the MySQL database, delivering a higher performing, more scalable, reliable, and easier to use MySQL."

The more technically minded might like to know that this first MySQL 5.6 development milestone release delivers increased MySQL performance and scalability enhancements, an improved InnoDB storage engine, and enhanced replication capabilities.

The less technically minded might like to know that Oracle is holding its first ever MySQL on Windows Online Forum at 9.00 am Pacific Time on March 16th, 2011.

You can find that on the web without me pointing you to it.

Oracle's Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, will kick off the forum detailing how enterprise users and ISVs can benefit from Oracle's investment in making MySQL even better on Windows.

So there you have it, Oracle does something real on open source.

Next week we'll be looking at Bill Gates and his secret meetings with Linus Torvalds.

Novell's director of Linux marketing Michael Applebaum has been vocal this week on the subject of Linux and its relationship with enterprise level deployments.

Noting that Novell has a "rich" history of open source contributions and community-driven software application development, Applebaum says that this dates back over 10 years to the original days of SUSE Linux.

"We are active participants in projects such as the Linux kernel (where we are one of the top contributors); the Xen and KVM hypervisors; Linux for System z technologies, openSUSE, GNOME and KDE; openSUSE Build Service; Mono; the Linux high availability stack; and many more. We also sponsor a wide range of community activities and events, such as the openSUSE Conference, Desktop Summit, and LinuxCon North America and Europe, to name a few," said Applebaum.

His comments come in the shadow of Red Hat putting forward several new specifications for Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 7 (JSR 342) in a move to back the company's corporate stance on Java EE 7 as the "platform of choice" for the cloud.

So how does Novell feel about Red Hat Enterprise Linux these days?

"On the question of providing support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is an offering that Novell developed in response to frequent customer requests. As we spoke with customers running other Linux distributions who wanted to move to SUSE Linux Enterprise, they often asked if we could support their existing RHEL systems until they could migrate those workloads to SUSE. We launched this offering in 2008 (called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support) and now have numerous customers worldwide taking advantage of it, including Moneygram, National Stock Exchange and Infracom," he said.

Questioned on Red Hat's recent changes to its kernel source packaging and its potential impact on Novell and its ability to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux --
Applebaum says that his company does not face any problem in providing regular kernel updates for RHEL.

"As part of our standard process, we take the publicly available source RPMs, remove any trademarks, and rebuild the packages, to deliver completely binary-compatible RPMs," he said.

Novell says it has in fact already dealt with this issue when it recently provided an updated kernel for RHEL 6. The Red Hat patches were not separated from the upstream kernel source, but had been already applied to it. Novell says it did not encounter any problems dealing with this situation.

"Moving forward, the major opportunities we see for Linux centre around the mass adoption of Linux in cloud environments (both public and private), virtual and cloud image management, bringing high performance computing solutions into the enterprise, and advancing the state of availability and reliability technologies so Linux can further distinguish itself as the best platform for business critical workloads," said Applebaum.

One of the most commonly cited themes coming out of the open source software industry at the moment is the presence of more flexible customisation options compared to bigger, heftier, lumpier proprietary vendor's software.

Of course, our proprietary vendors would say, "Bigger, heftier, lumpier? What are you talking about? You mean more powerful, broader and more robust right?"

Anyway, let's not go down that line of argument.

News came past me last week that open source customer relationship management (CRM) company SugarCRM has announced new platform additions to Sugar 6.

The latest platform enhancements include support for (guess what?) simpler customisation, wider database support and greater support for cloud-based deployments.

"Following the debut of Sugar Logic this past fall, the latest release of Sugar 6 includes updates to Sugar Logic that simplify the customisation process, yet provide developers and administrators with powerful new tools for building process-centric applications in Sugar 6," says the company.

Google "open source flexibility" and you get something like this LINK

Perhaps we should all start to associate the term FLEXIBILITY with open source just that bit more than we do already?

Picture the scene... a modern small to medium sized business working in the FMCG sector is selling a newfangled toilet brush with a fab new ergonomic handle and is about to expand.

The company operates a variety of systems and has now reached over 40 employees; things are starting to get serious.

The IT manager is starting to quietly panic, does he or she employ a junior code monkey -- or will simply adding more physical hands on deck not fix the real situation in hand?

"If they sell any more of these crazy ergonomic toilet brushes I'm going to need something that can monitor our fragmented assets and business-supporting applications proactively. I need network management alerts so that I can obtain a holistic view of performance and I can keep my hair on," says Monty Cornwall (he's our IT manager OK?).

The problem is (if you believe advocates of open source), that using application monitoring tools from large proprietary vendors (if you aren't quite a multinational conglomerate yet) can arguably be cumbersome and result in IT teams paying for functionality that they don't require.

Opsview says it has a more customisable option for IT monitoring in the shape of Opsview Enterprise, built on the Nagios open-source IT monitoring engine. With a new product refresh released this week, the company says that it is designed to provide IT managers with tools to monitor applications on up to 20,000 host devices across physical and virtual infrastructures through a master dashboard.

So let's skip over the Opsview Enterprise 3.12 news details such as improved cluster monitoring, SUSE 11 support and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) aggregation.

Instead lets ask if this is a truly interesting point here?

Application monitoring at the mid sized or SME level is best left to more customisable (and usually cheaper) open source tools -- discuss?

Saturday April 16th sees Vodafone developer, Sony Ericsson and Ideaworks Labs join forces as the companies attempt to provide some insight into creating 3D applications for Android.

Vodafone specifies that the Eventbrite powered London-based 3D apps developer day event will feature developer workshops from all three partners involved.

The company also specifies that there will be pizza served for lunch, but no further information on toppings, stuffed crust options, infused oil drizzles or additional seasonings or herbs was available.

Aside from the yummy lunch, Vodafone says it will be drilling down into the serious issues relating to a) developing and, crucially, b) monetizing apps in this space.

As such, one of the sessions is entitled: "Marketing your app / benefits of Vodafone Shop alongside Android Market."

In terms of technical enablement on the road to 3D apps, Ideaworks Labs will showoff the Airplay SDK, which is a C/C++ SDK designed to enable the development of rich apps and games for Android, iOS and other smartphone platforms.

According to the event's website, "Today, 3D is one of the most recurring buzzwords we keep hearing in the mobile domain, but what does it really mean? Erik Hellman (a software innovator at Sony Ericsson in Lund, Sweden) will show some new 3D concepts and also give a technical overview, which will be useful for third-party developers. As Erik will show, 3D on mobile devices is more than just adding depth to the user interface."

Canonical is inviting developers to join its at its annual Ubuntu App Developer Week, which is being presented virtually via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) from the 11th - 15th April.

Canonical says that there will be a series of sessions that will "enable and inspire" developers by showing off the wide variety of application development tools available on the Ubuntu platform.

Practical in its form, this event is also intended to showcase some applications that have already been created, explaining how they were made.

"Ubuntu App Developer Week brings together an community of developers to help them understand and build the apps that excite users and developers," said David Planella, Ubuntu translations coordinator. "The whole week is packed with interesting subjects, aimed both at new and experienced developers, that shows them how to get started, how to do truly advanced things and showcase those who have come before."

Highlights are said to include:

 Enabling multi-touch support in applications
 Rapid Application Development with Qt Quick and QML
 Using the Bazaar revision control to track source code history

To join, connect using any IRC client or browser. Simply go to: irc.freenode.net

This week sees the start of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which also includes the Android Builders Summit. Held from April 6 - 8 in San Francisco, this invitation-only summit is a gathering of core kernel developers and end users.

The Linux Foundation suggests that Linux is growing well out of adolescence in the commercial world -- and says that it will have 'working group' announcements that detail the formation of a new group to address more sophisticated enterprise requirements.

"We'll also be launching the 20th Anniversary of Linux celebrations with this year's Linux Foundation Video Contest, which is focused on the 20th anniversary theme and will be judged by a pretty high-profile Linux celebrity (wink, wink). The Linux Foundation will also release an exclusive video it has produced to commemorate this important milestone and, we hope, inspire people to submit their own videos for the contest as a way of contributing to this year's celebrations," says the Foundation.

If you happen to find yourself located closer to the Humber Bridge than the Golden Gate Bridge this week, then you can sign up for live video streaming of the keynotes online just here -- most of the news will break on Wednesday this week by all accounts so watch this space.