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Monday, October 26, 2015

10/26/2015 08:06:00 PM

LinkedIn learns to do devops


Bruno Connelly is not a fan of the term devops, mainly because it means different things to different people.

In certain startups, for example, devops simply means that developers shoulder tasks once performed by operations. But at LinkedIn, where as VP of engineering Connelly has led the company's site reliability efforts for five and a half years, operations has expanded its role to become more vital than ever while providing developers with the self-service tools they need to be more productive.


You might call that devops done right. In fact, Connelly's buildout of operations holds valuable lessons for any organization that needs to scale its Internet business. For LinkedIn, that growth has been dramatic Over the past five years, the service has ballooned from around 80 million to nearly 400 million users and from basic business social networking to a wide array of messaging, job seeking, and training services.


Throughout that expansion, Connelly has played a key role in creating new sets of best practices and infrastructure-related technologies. More importantly, he has helped lead a transformation of operations culture that has affected the entire company.

A shaky situation

When Connelly joined LinkedIn in 2010, both traffic and the brand were taking off  and LinkedIn.com was creaking under the load. "We struggled just keeping the site up. I spent my first six months, maybe a year, at LinkedIn being awake and on a keyboard with a bunch of folks during those periods trying to get portions, if not all, of the site back up."


The team he inherited was great, he says, but there were only six or seven of them, as opposed to a couple of hundred software engineers writing code constantly. "I was hired at LinkedIn specifically to scale the product, to take us from one data center to multiple data centers, but also to lead the cultural transition of the operations team," he says.


As with many enterprise develop shops today, developers had no access to production nor even to non production environments without chasing down ops first. “The cynical interpretation is that operations’ job was to keep developers from breaking production,” Connelly says. Essentially, new versions of the entire LinkedIn.com site were deployed every two weeks using a branch-based model. “People would try to get all their branches merged. We’d get as much together as we could. If you missed the train, you missed the train. You had to wait two weeks.”


Adding to the frustration were the site rollouts themselves, which Connelly remembers as “an eight-hour process. Everyone was on deck to get it out there.” At a certain point in that process, rollback was impossible, so problems needed to be fixed in production. At the same time, the site ops team had to maintain the non production environment “just to keep that release train going, which is not a healthy thing.”

Redefining roles

Change came from the top, driven by David Henke, LinkedIn’s then-head of operations, and Kevin Scott, who was brought in from Google in 2011 to run software engineering. Connelly reported to Henke and was charged with changing the role of operations.

The first priority across the company was to stop the bleeding and get everyone to agree that site reliability trumped everything else, including new product features.


Along with that imperative came a plan to make operations “engineering focused.” Instead of being stuck in a reactive, break-fix role, operations would take charge of building the automation, instrumentation, and monitoring necessary to create a hyper scale Internet platform.


Operations people would also need to be coders, which dramatically changed hiring practices. The language of choice was Python -- for building everything from systems-level automation to a wide and varied array of homegrown monitoring and alerting tools. The title SRE (site reliability engineer) was created to reflect the new skillset.


Many of these new tools were created to enable self-service for developers. Today, not only can developers provision their own develop and test environments, but there’s also an automated process by which new applications or services can be nominated to the live site. Using the monitoring tools, developers can see how their code is performing in production -- but they need to do their part, too. As Connelly puts it:

Monitoring is not something where you talk to operations and say: “Hey, please set up monitoring on X for me.” You should instrument the hell out of your code because you know your code better than anyone else. You should take that instrumentation, have a self-service platform with APIs around it where you can get data in and out, and set up your own visualization.

On the development side, Connelly says that Scott established an “ownership model and ownership culture.” All too often, developers build what they’re told to build and hand it off to production, at which point operations takes on all responsibility. In the ownership model, developers retain responsibility for what they’ve created -- improving code already in production as needed. Pride in software craftsmanship became an important part of the ethos at LinkedIn.

Building together

Altogether, a great deal of self-service automation has been put into place. I asked if, on the operations side, whether some engineers feared they were automating themselves out of a job. Connelly’s answer was instructive:

    My personal opinion is that is absolutely the right goal. We should be automating ourselves out of a job. In my experience, though, that never happens -- it’s an unreachable goal. That’s point one ... point two is there’s a lot of other stuff that SREs do, especially what we call embedded SREs. They are part of product teams; they are involved with the design of new applications and infrastructure from the ground up so they are contributing to the actual design. “Hey, there should be a cache here, this should fail this way ...”

Meanwhile, the monitoring, alerting, and instrumentation has grown more sophisticated. To ensure high availability, operations has written software to simulate data center failures multiple times per week and measure the effects. "We built a platform last year called Nurse, which is basically a workflow engine, where you can define a set of automated steps to do what we associate with a failure scenario," Connelly says.


Currently, he says he's building a self-service escalation system with functionality similar to that of PagerDuty.

The most important lesson from LinkedIn's journey is that the old divisions between development and operations become showstoppers at Internet scale. Developers need to be empowered through self-service tools, and operations needs a seat at the table as applications or services are being developed -- to ensure reliability and to inform the creation of appropriate tooling. Call it develops if you like, but anything less and you could find yourself on shaky ground.

10/26/2015 07:59:00 PM

Traditional-IT-Career-Path (Part-2)

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“Companies are driving greater efficiency,” says Work Market’s Chou. They’re “handling more and more work, while expanding partner, vendors, and contractor relationships. One example is Apple. Its product development is all about design, so it keeps the quality control function in-house. This points to a need for positions that involve strategy, supplier management, R&D with skills in project management, strategy, operation control, communication, contract negotiation, and management. All things that are core to the business will not likely be outsourced.”

Are the full-time jobs that remain more strategic, closer aligned to business, more about products than projects?

“Employers are looking for those with the technical skills to carry out or implement projects, but they are also seeking employees who are able to provide thoughtful recommendations for the business,” says Robert Half’s Reed. “Whether it’s new processes that may increase efficiency and decrease spend or presenting business leaders with the latest and greatest in technologies or data security measures. The most valuable technology employees right now are those with the ability to balance technical skill and business acumen.”
Fieldglass’ Brimm, like others we spoke with, brought up the push from the bottom. A new generation of IT workers enjoys the flexibility of contract jobs -- but there’s an obvious downside.

“It’s been said that millennials like to ‘job hop’ more than other generations, but what I find especially interesting is that in today’s economy, the flexible workforce allows individuals to pick and choose the projects they’d like to work on,” Brimm says. “Workers can also use this flexibility to improve on an existing system by applying their personal experience into a project. If the project goes well, a company may take notice and create additional projects for the flexible worker at hand.”

The kicker may be that in a gig economy, the end may not be in sight, but at some point, it’s coming.
“Flexible workforces don’t offer the same stability that a full-time work structure does,” Brimm says. “There’s a risk associated with contingent work because there is always a timetable and an end date to the assignment.”

10/26/2015 07:56:00 PM

Coming Tech Gig Economy (Part-1)

Contract and contingent work is shaking up the traditional IT career path.

Disruptive technologies do more than shake up markets they drastically alter the way we work. And it’s not only nonstop cost cutting that has businesses favoring IT contractors they can bring on or scale back  as necessary without paying benefits. Emerging platforms, in particular around the cloud, have many organizations shifting their staffing models toward project based, contingent work in hopes of landing the key skills necessary for their businesses to stay competitive in a constantly evolving technical landscape.

In short, the days of decades-long careers in corporate environments may be dwindling for many IT pros, and while millennials coming of age in tomorrow’s gig-based tech employment market may be attracted to the idea of remote work for multiple clients -- as can be seen by the growth of co-working environments not everyone is prepared to embrace a nomadic future of career contingency.

shifting employment landscape? Should you broaden your skills or specialize? Should you develop a plan to strike out on your own or double down on the skills that will remain invaluable for retaining long term, full-time employment? Here we take a look at how tech staffing will evolve in the years ahead and how you can make the best of the shift.

The rise of contract work in IT

The pace of technical advancement in recent years is no doubt shaking up employment models for organizations large and small alike. Recruiting for skills that didn’t exist a few years ago has pushed companies toward hiring more contractors on a project basis. And the need to adopt new and emerging platforms quickly is affecting plucky startups and long-established tech firms to the extent that this rising dependence on contract work could become a near industry-wide norm in the not-too-distant future.
Rob Brimm, CEO, Fieldglass
“It’s important for companies to find the right talent, and today it’s certainly the norm to look to flexible workers.”- Rob Brimm, CEO, Fieldglass
“Experienced workers, who are able to jump into a project quickly, save a company valuable time and resources,” says Rob Brimm, the CEO of Fieldglass, a cloud-based vendor management system. “It’s important for companies to find the right talent, and today it’s certainly the norm to look to flexible workers.”
As evidence of this trend, Brimm notes a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey that found 70 percent of financial services CEOs citing the availability of key skills as a top threat to their organizations. And most recruiters will tell you they see more demand for contract work among the employers they represent. But it’s not only the firms doing the hiring that are fueling the trend toward flexible employment relationships. To some degree the demand is coming from those seeking IT work as well.

“On the talent front, millennials are in a prime position for advancing contract work,” Jim Chou, CTO of Work Market, a marketplace for freelance work. “Popularized by the startup companies, they seek independence and freedom to work from wherever and whenever. Larger organizations are taking notice and adapting their policies to cater to this growing workforce demographic.”

Pilot projects and emerging platforms aren't the sole focus of this shift toward contract gigs, according to Chou.

“[We’re] also seeing more and more traditional work categories in IT being packaged into definable work tasks that can be performed by verified contract workers, and with their work measured and priced,” Chou says. “For example, in software testing, we see contract work where companies pay by the number of defects found. Others pay by the resulting algorithms, big data ETL created, or even by the IT trouble tickets fulfilled. We also observe that more and more young IT professionals are taking on projects outside of their workplace  a twist to moonlighting.”

Doug Paulo, who leads Kelly Services’ IT staffing business, says these free agents prefer contract work because they can develop new skills and have more control over their schedules. They see themselves as entrepreneurs who are in it for the long haul.
Jim Chou, CTO, Work Market
“[We’re] also seeing more and more traditional work categories in IT being packaged into definable work tasks that can be performed by verified contract workers, and with their work measured and priced.”- Jim Chou, CTO, Work Market
“Employers need to be aware of this trend as they manage their talent supply chain,” Paulo says. “To continue to attract professional and technical candidates with the high level of expertise and diverse experience they need, employers will have to keep their doors open to just in time talent by offering the more flexible, nontraditional work arrangements that free agents are looking for.”

Skills test: Go deep or go broad

Long-term IT success has always hinged on keeping your skill set fresh, but with staffing mixes trending toward more contract-based work, and presumably fewer full-time gigs, what’s the best approach to developing a bulletproof set of IT skills? Should you dive deep into a certain area or develop a hybrid approach so that you’re able to wear many hats?

“I would focus on depth in a specific area like data mining or security and do my best to gain experience in a specific industry, such as financial services or automotive, for example,” says Margaret Gernert, research director at CDI Corp., an IT staffing services company. “Many of our clients want talent that has both technical skills and knowledge of their industry, which is why knowing your technical discipline and immersing yourself in it is required, but the vertical experience is becoming more and more essential -- it’s literally part of many of our clients’ job descriptions.”
Doug Paulo, Kelly Services
“To continue to attract professional and technical candidates with the high level of expertise and diverse experience they need, employers will have to keep their doors open to just-in-time talent by offering the more flexible, nontraditional work arrangements that free agents are looking for.”- Doug Paulo, Kelly Services
Gabe McDonald, senior vice president in Addison Group’s contract IT practice, says developing skills in a specific area not only makes you a more attractive hire, it also boosts your paycheck.
“The premium rates that accompany contract work are typically paid for people who are subject-matter experts,” McDonald says. “If you’re pursuing a role in development, I’d recommend mastering a specific language and keeping up-to-date with new versions, instead of expanding the number of languages you’re familiar with. Professionals who provide a more specialized expertise ultimately will secure the highest-paying, more sought-after roles.”

Kelly’s Paulo, however, argues that a broad set of skills can increase your options.

“Companies that are working leaner may appreciate having employees who are not steeped too deep in one area and can handle multiple types of projects.” But he points out that his firm’s own research suggests that IT pros themselves want to get specific when it comes to skill sets.
Margaret Gernert, research director, CDI Corp.
“Many of our clients want talent that has both technical skills and knowledge of their industry, which is why knowing your technical discipline and immersing yourself in it is required, but the vertical experience is becoming more and more essential.” - Margaret Gernert, research director, CDI Corp.
“IT professionals place a substantially higher emphasis on developing specific skills, with 25 percent citing that not having additional training would be a factor in leaving their existing employer,” Paulo says.“On the other hand, 66 percent cited training as a significant attraction factor to new opportunities or companies as opposed to 58 percent of the overall population. Because IT is a function that has a very high probability of working in virtual teams, the ability to work well with team members abroad is considered common, so deeper expertise receives a higher emphasis.”

Break out: Wolf pack or lone wolf?

If you're considering going on your own, you may wonder whether it’s better to go solo or work with a partner. Should you join up with another IT pro with a different skill set to increase your opportunities or is independence more important to you?

Kelly’s Paulo suggests going on your own is, well, more fun. “To be a true free agent and enjoy the flexibility the lifestyle affords, it would be more beneficial to go on your own,” Paulo says. “That way, you are more adept and able to be agile and seize opportunities quickly.”
Gabe McDonald, senior vice president, Addison Group
“Professionals who provide a more specialized expertise ultimately will secure the highest-paying, more sought-after roles.” - Gabe McDonald, senior vice president, Addison Group
But he recognizes working with a partner has benefits: “If you are starting your own business, having a partner can spread the risk and costs involved.”
Work Market’s Chou also sees the benefits of creating your own team, and he says it can ease the transition from full-time work.

“To mitigate the risk of the unknown that comes with going solo, it may make more sense to work with a partner when you're first starting out. This will ensure you have work from day one and don't need to spend a majority of your time building out a client roster. This will also allow you to gauge the independent lifestyle and determine if it works for you. It's a sort of try-before-you-buy scenario, where you can really evaluate if being a freelance professional aligns with your salary expectations, schedule preferences, and so on. If you find it's everything you hoped for and yearn for the independence it provides, you're always able to go off and build your own business.”

Skills to pay the bills: Overhaul or tune up?

If you’re feeling uncertain about your skill set, you could start with a clean slate and become steeped in the latest advances in technology. But since deep skills in specific industries are in demand, it may be time to double down instead of starting anew.

“Theoretically, both professional reinvention and training tune-ups are great; however, most critical is ensuring you have a strong base,” says Addison Group’s McDonald. “If you are motivated, articulate, intelligent, and professional, either reinvention or training will improve your demand. That said, training is likely more valuable in the short term given most jobs are seeking skilled technical professionals, and reinvention implies you’re starting over.”

Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all plan for making yourself more marketable in the coming tech gig economy. Kelly’s Paulo suggests first taking a step back and doing a little self-analysis.
John Reed, senior executive director, Robert Half Technology
“The most valuable technology employees right now are those with the ability to balance technical skill and business acumen.”- John Reed, senior executive director, Robert Half Technology
“If you want to capitalize on some of the newer tech opportunities, such as mobile app development or cyber security certifications, you may need to reinvent yourself if you do not have that kind of experience,” he says. “If you want to stay in the same general area of specialty you are currently in, you could likely tune up with training and higher-level certifications.”

“Whether or not to ‘reinvent yourself’ depends on your skill set,” says John Reed, senior executive director at staffing firm Robert Half Technology. “If you’ve been working with older languages that may not be as relevant broadly throughout the job market or if you want to venture into an area that you haven’t worked in before -- for example, data roles -- it could be advantageous to take on additional training in order to gain new skills.”

Either way you play it, Fieldglass’ Brimm says it may not even require new certifications, merely a competency at rolling with new tech.

“It’s becoming a lot easier to download tutorials, watch clips of videos, and connect with others digitally that can increase an existing skill set and help flexible workers broaden their niche talents,” Brimm says. “There is always room to grow and always room to improve. In any industry there should be a continued appetite to learn and grow.”

Step out or stay put?

Despite the obvious appeal of running your own show and setting your schedule, going freelance isn’t for everyone. What if the gig economy isn’t for you? Job security, steady pay, and the benefits that come along may be the prime motivators in your work life. And if companies are likely to increase staffing via contract work in the years ahead, how can you set yourself apart in the potentially dwindling full-time IT employment market?

PART 1-1

 SOURCE

Thursday, October 8, 2015

10/08/2015 02:15:00 PM

SQL on NoSQL? Couchbase 4.0

NoSQL document store's new SQL


Version 4.0 of Couchbase Server, a NoSQL document store that competes with the likes of MongoDB and Cassandra, is now available. Its main mission is to make working with unstructured data (namely JSON) as easy as querying more conventional row-and-column databases.

Couchbase is following the success of projects like Spark to provide easy-to-program tools that obtain quick, actionable results. In Couchbase's eyes, SQL is still one of the best ways to accomplish the task.

I speak SQL to my document store

Couchbase Server 4.0 uses N1QL, a query language that extends the SQL syntax with commands specific to JSON documents. JSON syntax can nest data within other data, so some of the extensions allow developers to unnest documents and treat them as if they were conventional tabular data.
The language only targets SQL '92, so it doesn't provide some of the latest and most powerful SQL syntax, nor does it support transactions. But other developer-oriented functions are available, such as the EXPLAIN keyword for describing how the query optimizer processes a statement. Plus, Couchbase plans to add features like transactions over time.

InfoWorld's Ian Pointer took a prerelease version of Couchbase 4's N1QL for a test-drive. Based on what he saw, Pointer claimed the view system for Couchbase, which is currently used to extract data from the system, could in time "slowly [fade] away as N1QL becomes the standard for interacting with Couchbase documents." Couchbase wants N1QL to be akin to the SQL that people know and use, not merely a crippled subset of it.

Couchbase isn't alone in providing a SQL-like query language. Cassandra has CQL, which has been the official query interface for the system since version 2.0. But N1QL provides some features not offered in Cassandra 2.0, such as JOIN operations. MongoDB also has a SQL connector, slated for the 3.2 release, designed to help interface with third-party products like Tableau -- but it too lacks the ability to perform JOINs.

Old school vs. new school

If the transformative power of big data tools is best unleashed through programmatic interfaces -- for example, Couchbase's view and map/reduce jobs -- why are envelope-pushing products like Couchbase, Cassandra, and MongoDB adding old-school SQL interfaces? (The irony of "SQL on NoSQL" is hard to ignore.)

One obvious reason is to connect their products to legacy BI tools that use SQL for querying. But another reason, according to Couchbase, is that despite its limitations, SQL allows for rapid application development since a good deal can be accomplished in a query with relatively little code. Sometimes, a simple SQL query is more than enough.

Similar claims are made for the Hadoop data-processing framework Spark -- not because it offers its own SQL query mechanism, Spark SQL, but because it provides native data-access methodologies that tend to be less verbose to work with than the competition. Couchbase is touting SQL via N1QL as a way to get results fast while still respecting connectivity with existing BI products.

The real change, though, may come when front-end BI products choose to speak the new native languages of big data. Tableau, for instance, added a Spark SQL connector earlier this year -- a possible prelude to deeper integration with Spark.
In the meantime, Couchbase is making itself useful to the SQL-based analytics systems out there right now.

SOURCE
10/08/2015 02:04:00 PM

Who has your back? Not this IT team

For one techie, a pair of unresponsive colleagues.

As an IT professional, you're trained to finish a project on time and on budget while meeting the set objectives. However, it's hard to prepare for co-workers who don't support you and instead give you the runaround. Not even a successful rollout can wipe away the frustration of working on a team that doesn't seem to have your back.

At this company, my team consisted of my manager “Tom” and a co-worker “Irene.” Since before I was hired, they were responsible for an outdated email system that they also neglected to maintain. The arrangement resulted in many problems, but one in particular stood out: The spam filter settings were out of control.
As a consequence, users saw increasingly more emails marked as spam in their inbox -- including emails that were not spam. To be able to read the legitimate message, the users would have to send a note to IT requesting the email in question be unmarked as spam and resent. This was a long, laborious process for all involved. But for some unexplained reason, Tom and Irene were very vocal within IT about not modifying the spam filter settings.
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Two years later, out of the blue, Tom gave me the task of finding a new email solution. I was a little uneasy about being in charge of this project because Tom and Irene had much more experience with administrating email and had been so adamant in the past that nobody else deal with it.

The first hurdle

I wasn’t given a lot of initial information, but to start, I had business managers’ names to help in getting requirements for the new email system. Later, “Bob” was added to the email project team. Bob was not an employee of the company, but a neighbor and friend of one of the board members -- and he had his own business as an IT consultant. I’d seen Bob in action before and was not impressed; it seemed that whenever he was involved, the IT project failed.

We proceeded with a meeting with the managers, and overall it went well. I got all of the requirements that I needed, and the managers had very reasonable requests. Bob, however, sounded clueless in the meeting. Based on the information that I got from the managers, I had enough to make a matrix of features that were mandatory, important, and optional.

Then, without warning, Bob sent an email to me, Tom, and the president and vice president of the company about an email system quote. It included a stand-alone server, an email application (without user licenses or fees), and local storage all for less than $10,000.

The execs were excited about it at first, but I explained that this was not an adequate solution for the requirements. My estimates for an email system, including a rack-mounted server, additional storage, email application, and user licenses would exceed $50,000. However, I pointed out that I had not finished evaluating options, including cloud-based, and would have more information very soon.

We ended up going past the expiration date of the 30-day trial. Tom still did not give an answer on what he wanted to do and stopped answering my emails on the project. The president of the company was getting upset and wanted to know the project’s timeline, but Tom would not give me an answer, even when I asked him face to face. The president, on a weekly basis, started to check in with me about the status of the email project -- while Tom continued to stonewall me. Finally, Tom said he would update the president on the project status and would take accountability for the delays. That did not make me comfortable.

Finally, Tom made a very noncommittal decision that we would test it further. Fortunately, I was able to get an extension on the trial. Then Tom started to actually test the email solution himself and nitpicked every detail with comments like, “I don’t like their email client and no one will ever use it,” or “I don’t like how it syncs with the email client everyone is currently using,” or “It takes too long to download emails,” and on and on it went.

I addressed Tom’s feedback about the email client and reported that it worked faster and better than our old one, but Tom was not interested in listening to me.

Then Tom decided that we also needed email archiving -- and it was mandatory, or I would have to look at other solutions. Fortunately, that was one of the options available.

Tom finally gave me the approval to test the new email system with actual users. I worked with the business managers and a few users. The tests worked well, and although I wasn’t supposed to do this, I tested the installation, including how the email client worked on users’ mobile devices. I was pleased that it worked on every one without any issues or problems.

Two against one

After three weeks of more stalling and Tom still being very unsatisfied, we were ready to go with it and started planning for a migration to the new email system. Irene, Tom, and I met to discuss how the process would work and who would be responsible for each item of the migration. We wrote the items, responsibilities, and names on a meeting notepad. Irene’s most important task was to forward any incoming emails to the new email system once we were ready to cut over, and this was written clearly in the migration process.

Before the email migration weekend, Irene, Tom, and I reviewed the email implementation from the meeting notepad and re-affirmed everyone's responsibilities. We did the migration over the weekend, including updating the email clients on every computer.

The Monday after the email migration was going smoothly until the afternoon. Some of the users started to complain that they were not getting all of their email, and customers and vendors were calling about not getting email responses from our company.

While investigating, I tried to ask Irene about the forwarding setup from the old system, but she was nowhere to be found -- and neither was Tom. On Tuesday morning, I talked to the vendor support engineers, and as we went through it more thoroughly, they also stated that the email forwarding was not working properly or was not set up.

On Tuesday afternoon, Tom called me into his office very upset, asking me why users were not receiving all of their email. Tom said, “I don’t want you to spend any time troubleshooting the problem, I just want you to fix it.” I told Tom that I had not been able to get a response from Irene, but I thought that the email forwarding wasn’t set up correctly from the old email system. Tom said, “Oh … let me take care of it.”
Tom tracked down Irene and they emerged from his office soon after, laughing and joking. Irene went to her desk and half an hour later the reports of missing emails stopped. When I finally was able to ask her, she denied there was ever any problem and never apologized.

It pays to be thorough

Things settled into a smooth routine until a month later when Tom came to me, frantic, saying, “What are we going to do? The vice president wants to get email on his mobile device and I don’t know what to tell him!”

I told Tom, “I got it covered. I tested email on mobile devices and it works on every one of them so far. I will send you some documentation on how to do it.”
He calmed down, but didn’t say anything.

After two years, almost everyone was using the new email client -- and Tom was one of its biggest fans. We had even started using more of the features available.

The execs publicly commended the new email system. Tom started using it to get email on his mobile device, and Irene was happy that she didn’t have to do email administration anymore. Though all ended well with the email system, it was hard to feel like I could trust Tom and Irene again -- a vital part of a working situation.

SOURCE

10/08/2015 01:51:00 PM

Oracle considers a new effort

OpenJDK community has until Oct. 12 to vote on the proposal to ease development for iOS, Android, and mobile Windows.

Oracle is considering ports of the Java Development Kit (JDK) to support iOS, Android, and the mobile version of Windows, in an effort that would expand Java's presence in a growing part of the technology market.

Under the Mobile Project proposal, Oracle would contribute a build system, the HotSpot JVM, and JDK source changes to target mobile platforms. The resulting environment could produce static Java runtimes and modifications to the Zero interpreter needed for iOS devices. A headless JDK 9-based port is planned.

Initial reviewers would include current reviewers in the JDK 9 project. Other parts of the Mobile Project plan include a Java Launcher helper interface to simplify the inclusion of Java in mobile applications, sample "hello world" applications, and project templates for each platform.

Current OpenJDK member may vote on the proposal until Monday, Oct. 12.

Oracle has described the proposed project as simply an effort to contribute code: "Oracle has been maintaining ports of Java technology for some of our own mobile-related middleware products. We felt it made sense to make this code available to developers in the Java ecosystem through OpenJDK and to hopefully benefit from any contributions back. There are no plans or objectives beyond that."

Although Java Micro Edition (ME) has provided an implementation of Java on embedded and mobile devices, Oracle's Java has taken a backseat in the smartphone and tablet realms. Google's Android runs the Dalvik virtual machine, which leverages Java APIs, but this use of Java has been the subject of ongoing litigation between Oracle and Google. Apple has permitted use of Java programming in building iOS applications, but it does not allow the JVM itself on iOS.

Forrester Research analyst John Rymer says Oracle faces an uphill battle with Java in the mobile market. "Java Micro Edition is a nonfactor in smartphones and tablets -- the most widely used mobile devices. Android is now the Java-based environment for smartphones and tablets." But he understands why Oracle might want to keep trying to get more traction for mobile Java: "The theory is that a standard, sanctioned implementation is better at driving adoption than a bunch of proprietary point solutions."

Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond is also skeptical: "This looks more like Oracle looking to more generally surface the modifications it's made to Java deployment to get its Mobile Application Framework on these platform, and a very different approach than a single ME or SE runtime. ... Of course my concern as a dev would be how much size does embedding this add to my apps. Hopefully it will be a smaller, skinnier VM that doesn't cause app bloat.:

SOURCE