Software Development Times Blog

The three types of mashups

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (jfeinman) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:14:00 -0400

Mashups are still relatively new to the technology world, but little by little, it seems they are picking up steam among enterprise businesses.

While their definitions are still somewhat shadowy and standards are still quite a ways off, mashups are defined in some generally accepted ways: presentation, process and data mashups. J. Jeffrey Hanson, author of "Mashup Patterns: Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise," describes the three main categories:

Presentation mashups: "A presentation layer mashup deals mainly with user interface artifacts," Hanson said. "Alot of things that can be created with widgets, JavaScript, HTML snippets, DOM manipulation and that sort of thing."
Process mashups: "These are more of an IT operation, with inter-process communication and message queues. It's more of a traditional source code integration."
Data mashups: "Mashups that are integrated at the data level, whether it's integrating files, databases, external Web service APIs."

These categories were also noted by companies providing mashups, including Serena and JackBe. No doubt as mashups continue to evolve, these three categories will intertwine, and we will likely even see other forms of mashups being spawned. When asked what the challenges are in bringing mashups to the enterprise level, Hanson said ensuring privacy and making sure data and identities are secure can be the most tricky parts. Additionally, governance needs to be addressed right away because mashups are a public model with company information exposed in the public realm.

The end of Sun

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (ahandy) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:05:00 -0400

At 10:05 a.m. Pacific time today, Sun Microsystems' fate was sealed. At that exact moment, shareholder voting closed, and the motion to accept the acquisition offer from Oracle was approved. There was little fanfare. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, and Scott McNealy, its chairman, were both absent. Schwartz was said to be sick. I can't help but think it was psychosomatic.

As the meeting began, a room full of old folks, suited investors and a healthy helping of Sun employees quietly took their seats and chatted politely amongst one another. When Craig Norris, vice president of corporate law and assistant secretary took the stage, the room went silent. As the brief call for votes took place, the room was dead quiet, save for the click click click of investor-relations women walking in their high heels from investor to investor, collecting ballots.

The whole event took less than 10 minutes. And when it was over, most folks quietly funneled out of the room, looking vaguely dejected.

There are many more beaurocratic hurdles for the acquisition and mountains of paperwork to be completed, to be sure. But make no mistake about it: This was the last real day of Sun's existence. The acquisition itself has already happened: It is backdated to April 19 and June 5. The vote today changed history, slightly, effectively giving Oracle power over Sun since this past spring.

Make no mistake about it: This was the end. Such an ending it was, as Schwartz andd McNealy couldn't bring themselves to show their faces. They know what is going to happen to this company, and I expect they both feel guilty and responsible for the result. How could you not feel responsible after presiding over almost 10 years of declining revenues and profits? There were moments of light along the way. But there is no denying this singular fact: While other technology companies are growing, Sun was barely keeping up, and usually shrinking.

But the shrinkage that is yet to come is far greater. Analysts are expecting a 33% cut in headcount at Sun, and I think that's conservative. Oracle expects to make more money on this deal than it did on its deals with BEA and PeopleSoft combined.

And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees. And because he can't stand to look them in the eye knowing that most of them are about to lose their jobs.

Hadoop companies everywhere

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (ahandy) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:02:00 -0400

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Hadoop is going to be its own ecosystem that I must cover as a whole beat unto itself. Call it the Map/Reduce beat, call it the big-data crunching beat. Call it the elephant with its footprints in the butter. But no matter what you call it, companies are generating more data every day, and many of them aren't deriving business intelligence from said data. And that spells opportunity.

This morning, I spoke to Chris Wensel, cofounder of Scale Unlimited. His company specializes in Hadoop training and consulting, and he offered some good insight into how the Hadoop world is expanding. He set me straight on the fact that Hadoop is already its own ecosystem, with numerous related projects making it up: Hbase, Pig, HDFS and all the other things folks have built to expand Hadoop's capabilities.

He also pointed out that there is a big gap between what Hadoop can do and what most companies need right now: That is, Hadoop is for big, slow data crunching, and many companies need smaller, faster solutions. That seems to be the expectation of super-startup Aster Data.

Another thing Wensel pointed out to me was the fact that Hadoop should live in your data center. It's all fine and dandy to put up an Amazon instance and fill it with your data, but when you're crunching a petabyte, he said, it's just too expensive. That's why Amazon lets you mail them disks. And that's also why Hadoop should be inside the firewall. Try as we might, a petabyte isn't easy to push anywhere, even inside the network.

So I'll be watching Hadoop like a hawk now that it's on my radar. We'll have lots to talk about, I'm sure, and with companies like Cloudera and semi-quiet startup Stampede, I'm sure there will continue to be innovation around the edges of the project. Of course, the core will continue to evolve too, but third-parties have a way of increasing the visibility and scope of an open-source ecosystem. Let's hope that all these companies can play well together and contribute upstream.

The Sun slowly sets

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (ahandy) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:06:00 -0400

Sun Microsystems is vanishing on Thursday. That's the day that shareholders will assemble in Santa Clara to vote on the acquisition by Oracle. I'm not expecting any turmoil or difficulty for the board of directors: Sun's stock has been sinking more reliably than Old Faithful in recent years. The company has tried everything it can think of to save shareholder value, but nothing has worked. Not even changing the ticker symbol to JAVA and consolidating shares to raise their prices. Sun says three are more milestones along the garden path, but the real symbolic end is this Thrusday.

It's sad, and yet, it's also a sign of hope. Thinking that Sun could soon be part of a larger whole is somewhat comforting, when you consider that the alternative was for this beheamouth of a company to lumber on down the road, dribbling useless products from almost every orifice. Even when Sun did create a worthwhile product, its sales people seemed to be some of the least effective in the business. There's certainly something to be said for the soft sell, but when we're dealing with large technology companies staffed with some of the most vicious and dedicated sales people in the world, soft sell doesn't usually work.

So it is with a heavy heart that I write this preliminary obituary for Sun. I've been covering them since 2005, and I must say, it's been interesting. During this time, the company struggled desperately to reinvent itself as an open-source software company and a storage powerhouse. But in every case, Sun couldn't move quickly enough, nor could it generate enough sincerity to convince the zealots.

After all, Sun practically invented cloud computing with its Sun Grid offering after the turn of the millennium. Of course, Sun is also the perfect example of a pioneer getting scalped. Kind of like DEVO.

So long Sun. I'd say we hardly knew you, but I think we actually knew you all too well.

SD Times: A resource for cloud computing

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (dworthington) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:38:00 -0400

Over the past several months, I wrote a series of articles about cloud computing. The main idea was to get cloud providers to answer tough questions about concerns our readers have raised about outsourcing their IT. We learned what some of the challenges are and gained clarity about the benefits that cloud computing brings to the table. Here are those stories:

Cloud providers vow interoperaiblity

Taking steps to clarify cloud governance

Cloud providers answer the tough questions

Seeking compliance in the cloud

Reality check on cloud portability

Re: Bilski - The end of software patents?

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (dworthington) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:51:00 -0400

A court case filed by Bernard Bilski, which involves a patent claim for a business method for hedging risks in commodities trading, has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. What the court decides could have far reaching affects on the software industry.

The Supeme Court must either uphold or vacate a decision by a lower Federal circuit court that ruled that while it is okay to have an invention that has a computer in it to perform computations, that pure computation in general is not patentable.

In April, I wrote about three court cases that directed the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to make software patents substantially more difficult to obtain. Bilski was one of those cases, and I feel that it was an important decision to put the breaks on patent trolls.

However, it is to be expected that any case the Supreme Court hears is subject to reversal. Why else would they hear a case if the case is settled or is not controversial?

Today, I received an e-mail sent on behalf of Robert Plotkin, a Boston patent attorney and author of Genie in the Machine. Plotkin warned that "it is quite possible that the Supreme Court's decision could affect whether software can be patented in the U.S."

He continued: "If the Supreme Court were to rule that software is not patentable, or even if the Court were to impose restrictions on the patentability of software, this could have significant negative effects on software innovation and on the software industry in the U.S. Innovative software companies, like all innovative technology companies, rely on patents to protect their investment against copiers."

The Court could unintentionally ban software patents through the legal test it uses to determine whether business methods are patentable, he explained. "If the Court says that processes which perform calculations are not patentable, this could be interpreted by lower courts to prohibit patents on software because software performs calculations.

"This is exactly what happened as the result of a previous Supreme Court decision in the early 1970s. It took many years to undo the damage done by that decision."

Well-earned patents are an economic driver, but questionable patents can negatively impact innovation, particularly when they are enforced against innovative companies, said Mark A. Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and director of Stanford's program in law, science and technology, in an April interview.

Changes that impact the patent system must strike a careful balance, and the Court must also realize that a solution that is ideal for one industry may be harmful to others.

Java vs. Mono

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (dworthington) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:48:00 -0400

In light of today's news about Microsoft adding Ecma CLI and C# to its Community Promise, I thought I would wet your appetites for an upcoming feature story. What's a more popular techonlogy on the Linux desktop: Java or Mono? The answer (which will be in the Aug. 1 edition of SD Times) may surprise you. We'll also compare the open-source IDEs that Linux distros package for developers.

Seeking your out-of-work stories

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (jfeinman) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:27:00 -0400

The current economy is turning out to be a tough time for everyone, and the software development field is no different.

One advantage that software developers have, however, is that they can use the time while unemployed to sharpen their technology skills and use open-source and/or free technologies to create applications of their own, free of corporate deadlines and restraints. If there's a programming language they've been looking to learn or a hot new IDE that everyone's been talking about, they now have the chance to check it out!

SD Times would like to hear your stories. If you would like to share what you're doing with neat applications or anything software-related while out of work, please email me at jfeinman@bzmedia.com.

Even in today's economy, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. But for now, that tunnel doesn't have to be so dark.

A knockout blow for Borland?

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (drubinstein) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:26:00 -0400

In the wake of a mystery suitor's $1.25-per-share offer for Borland, Micro Focus has upped its offer for the company to $1.50 in an apparent attempt to blow the other suitor out of the water. While an offer of $1.35 would have satisfied Borland from a price standpoint, Micro Focus is clearly sending a signal that it wants to chase off this unnamed third party and get the deal done.

An anonymous financial analyst said that while the new offer sends a strong message, it doesn't really have much impact on the final price of the deal, noting that every 10-cent increase in share price translates to about $7.5 million. He said, "That doesn't seem like much when Micro Focus is guiding analysts to (approximately) $40 million of annual synergies in the long term."

Borland's shareholders are set to vote on the deal July 22, so we'll see if the mystery suitor increases its offer before then, or drops out of the chase.

Is the mystery Borland suitor Serena?

drubinstein.nospam@nospam.bzmedia.com (drubinstein) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:55:00 -0400

A few weeks back, we reported that Micro Focus had tendered an offer to acquire ALM software maker Borland. Since then, another company has come forward to make a play, and one rumor has it that the suitor is Serena.

The company looking to top Micro Focus' bid is privately owned, according to SEC filings (remember Serena was taken private by SilverLake Partners back in 2005), and has the financial wherewithal to come in to play. There is quite a bit of overlap in the product lines—both offer SCM, requirements management and change management products—but Borland does have a few jewels Serena might covet. Among them are TeamDefine, an interactive simulation tool designed to be used during the requirements gathering process; Together, the venerable tool for modeling software architecture; and Silk, for quality assurance.

"Borland's value seems cheap," said a hedge fund manager who requested anonymity. "It's an opportunity for Serena to pick up assets on the cheap."

In an SEC filing, the unnamed company said it could reach an agreement with Borland in two weeks, and that was a week ago. So, the Borland saga could very well be resolved by then. Unless, of course, Micro Focus raises the stakes once again.