Blogs

Redmonk

Activate 09: The Guardian’s Catalyst for UK Open Culture

July 2, 2009 – 5:35 pm

Yesterday I lucky enough to go the inaugural Activate event, organised by the Guardian newspaper.

“an exclusive one-day summit providing a unique gathering for leaders working across all sectors to share, debate and create strategies for answering some of the world’s biggest questions.”

At the risk of getting carried away Activate felt like a seminal event, perhaps even a watershed in UK business and media culture. The Guardian has created a space to pull together a lot of really important conversations about where we go from here. Now the investment banks are “profitable” again we’re all fine, right? Global warming – its just a fad. No – the fact is the hard work starts now and a return to the status quo would be crass. We need new ways forward. Activate is unashamedly targeted at makers and doers, people that will build things…. such as the future.

I remember having a similar feeling at the first Future Of Web Apps conference, when Ryan Carson helped kick start the current buzz in the London web design and development community. The feeling in question… “it’s time”.

From Hacks to Hackers: The Guardian’s Transformation

In some respects Activate09 is simply the logical culmination of a newspaper aggressively reinventing itself as a community-driven news operation. Emily Bell, editor in chief of the Guardian’s online operations, should get a lot more credit from the new media than she currently does. Emily has all the online nous of a Jeff Jarvis, but she is actually putting it into practice at a major news operation. She is smart enough to have Jeff as a regular contributor and advisor. But Emily is evidently no pushover.

I had to chuckle when she reintroduced one of the superstars at Activate, as

“Ariana Huffington, editor in chief of the second best comment site on the web…”

What’s the best evidence the Guardian’s online strategies are working effectively – US readership. At a time when US newspapers are collapsing the Guardian is winning many new readers there.

There is another important strand to the Guardian’s current reinvention. It is now employing some of the UK’s best application developers.  There probably isn’t a web company in the world that wouldn’t hire Simon Willison. He built the MP’s Expenses crowdsourcing application – which employed Guardian readers to investigate thousands of pages of MP’s expenses claims. Now that’s active reading!

The Guardian has long campaigned that the public sector free our data so its good to see the organisation actually do something with it when the government “obliged”. And developers are key to doing useful stuff with data. The Guardian even has an application programming interface, opening its own content up to outside use. Matt McAlister is chief developer herder and API wrangler at the Guardian, and he invited me to the event (and comp’d me). I understand Matt was a, if not the, driving force in organising it. There’s a lot more to be said about the transition from Hacks to Hackers, but that’s a story in its own right.

Open Culture and its Curation

Open culture will require new modes, mores and methods. We had a great opportunity to see how this can work during one of the sessions yesterday morning. I was a little surprised that a negative comment I made about Adam Afriyie, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills was edited out of the twitter stream that was being projected onto the huge screens like so:

Moderating twitter for spam makes a great deal of sense-but of content less so. It was fun to be involved in a vigorous debate about the issue going on behind the talking heads on the panel. The resolution was amicable and showed a real commitment to the tenets the Guardian claims to represent. Well done Chris Thorpe aka jaggeree. Roo Reynolds, writes up the episode up here.

Open Culture and The Truth To Power

Until yesterday as far as I was concerned the jury was still out on digital MP Tom Watson but to see him tear Ordnance Survey a new one from the stage was magnificent. Watson called OS refusal to open its data to the public a disgrace, and said that as taxpayers we’d already paid for the information the organisation holds, and sells to commercial companies. He went further and said that any privatisation would make matters even worse. What made these remarks remarkable was that Ordnance Survey was one of Activate’s sponsors. It would appear Watson is enjoying life outside the cabinet.

Open Culture and Epidemiology

One of the presentations I most enjoyed came from Ian Lipkin, Director, Center for Infection & Immunity, Columbia University. Lipkin made the case for open data in talking about our ability to respond to diseases. When it comes to virus identification and tracking, proprietary information kills people. Pretty simple, no? Swine Flu is a great ad for open data.

Lipkin is Big Pharma’s worst nightmare. If his ideas catch on then privatised science could take a good hard knock. For a deep exposition of the argument for Public Science I thoroughly recommend James Suroweicki’s Wisdom of the Crowds.

Format This

Of course nothing is perfect, and for all my praise there is plenty of work for the Guardian to do to make Activate10 better. My biggest concern was that the schedule of talks and panels was so regimented there was not much time to just relax and talk to people and share ideas. The best 20 minutes of the day for me was lunch: standing on the terrace, overlooking a canal, with Werner Vogels – Amazon’s chief technology officer. I am a big fan of Werner, and though we know each other online, there is still no substitute for meeting somebody face to face. Especially in these surroundings. What does Werner want now, and why was he perfect for Activate? Big, Open Data: If you have it, Amazon wants to help you share it.

Another opportunity is to include more of the attendees, perhaps by using the unconference format or some open mike lightning talks. When you have Stephen Wolfram at your event you probably want more from him than one question for a panel.

My other complaint is the Guardian Newspaper seemingly didn’t have the courage of its event’s convictions. To be fair I know the online operations are currently evaluating new search technology for the site but the fact I couldn’t immediately find any new content from Activate09 on the Guardian homepage or through its search bar shows the online and offline ops are not completely integrated yet.

I am not going to try and write up everything I saw and heard at the show, although there may be some follow up posts. Roo Reynold’s roundup is very good, and I stole a picture from him. I did eventually find, by tipoff, the Guardian’s online write ups of the event – and I particularly recommend you find out more about Jay Parkinson, a Williamsburg, NY doctor trying to build the future of healthcare. He wants seeing the doctor to be as easy as picking up a Zipcar. I know Stephen would approve… And as a company that subsidises our employee’s healthcare in the US better, cheaper healthcare using web technologies and open information would be good for us too.

Format issues aside, the event totally rocked. I am already looking forward to next year.

photos – thanks to Roo Reynolds and Glemak for the photos.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 1 Comment

An interview with my business partner

June 30, 2009 – 10:00 am

Thanks to Barton “Only Floss The Ones You Want To Keep” George from Lombardi Software for the interview. We, the media, indeed.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in AR | 1 Comment

Chatter as goodness, the danger of cliques

June 29, 2009 – 1:51 pm

This post by the Effective CIO was just too good not to quote at length, concerning as it does the real benefits water cooler conversation.

A happy team is constantly communicating with themselves, in matters both large and small. As changes occur and problems arise, they go out of their way to make sure people know what is going on. The communication is fluid and consistent. Ideally, most of the chatter should fall into the “helpful advice” category, although it could be fun to taunt your DBA during a big upgrade. (”Drop, table-table-table!”)

As a leader, are you listening for chatter in your team? Are you even in a position to hear it? Chatter is in the break room, the hallways, and the parking lot. It’s both verbal and electronic, via Twitter, SMS, and instant messaging. Chatter isn’t in the formal memos, project charters, and design documents. It may not even be in the general email flow. In fact, formal communication is the enemy of chatter.

When teams get bogged down in Memos and Documents, they stop chattering. They begin to formalize their communication, creating paper trails and looking to cover their read ends. They think before sharing and selectively reveal information to suit their own agendas. This kind of thinking, putting self before team, is disastrous for any group. If it persists, the whole group will fail.

Another reason to post on the subject is that I have something to add, based on interesting research from the Florida Institute of Research in Melbourne, written up in a New Scientist article, Email patterns can predict impending doom. Reseachers looked at email usage patters at Enron, to identify organisational stress patterns.

EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.

The piece continues,

the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

Its very early days for this field of research, but its pretty obvious that communities and organisations, like people under stress, are likely to have some obvious “tells” or physiological signs. But I really love the Effective CIO’s argument for the benefits of encouraging chatter. That’s like encouraging Twitter, right?

Clearly the topic of this post refers back to this one from earlier today, which looks at some of potential chilling effects of institutional cliques.

photo courtesy of Son Of Groucho

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 7 Comments

Industry analyst relations and Twitter: The Dark Side

June 29, 2009 – 11:54 am

I wrote a post last week about the positive impact Twitter is having on industry analysts collaborating across company boundaries. It seems to me the more ideas we share, the more ideas we peer review, the more we make ourselves available, the better the business will be. But of course- I have bias towards open.

What about those that see the world differently. What is the flip side to my argument? Just ask @merv. He recently wrote a post, that when I read it didn’t surprise me at all, although I have not yet come across the behaviour:

Colleagues have recently told me of a disturbing AR/PR practice they’ve run into of late: some vendors have asked them to refrain from tweeting about the plan to have a briefing. Why? They don’t want others not being briefed to know about it.

Merv continues:

But this “pssst…don’t tell anyone we’re talking” thing is something else entirely. It smacks of gamesmanship, of opacity, and feels like the inverse of the suspicion some AR folks have about whether some analysts will talk to you if you don’t pay. This isn’t “All The President’s Men” here – we’re not meeting in a garage at midnight to talk about the fate of the country. Get over it. Don’t make me complicit in some private clique.

Well said Merv. I have always found the notion of a private clique defining what is good for the enterprise to be the wrong way to go about things. It already worried me that industry analysts have access to privileged information that we’re not able to share with the market, but which two or three hundred of my colleagues in the analyst business have access to. Considering the amount of expenditure the analyst business claims to influence I have always found the potential for conflict of interest rather too high for the kind of “default to NDA” that is now illegal in the world of financial analysis.

But the behaviour Merv identifies take this chilling effect to a somewhat obscene level. The first rule of vendor briefings is… don’t talk about vendor briefings. That is just crazy. If vendors want to make me third tier and not brief me then so be it, but please be upfront about it. Of course you have resource constraints, particularly in these parlous times, and you can’t invite everybody to everything. I know some vendors are more top down in their messaging, and prefer not to talk to RedMonk – that’s ok, if sometimes annoying. But trying to cajole colleagues at other analyst firms not to say who they are talking to – that way madness lies.

Secrecy has a cost of administration. Why make your life even more difficult by trying to make the analysts you work with keep even more secrets? Its a law of diminishing returns.

Come into the light, people. Its nice out here – with full transparency and disclosure. Really it is.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 9 Comments

Analyst Cross Firm Collaboration: Twitter changes dynamic

June 24, 2009 – 11:06 am

Its easy to scoff at Twitter. But the online service is having a real impact on businesses. Dell, for example, claims to have sold $3m worth of kit using the service. Sure that’s a rounding error compared to its revenues, but its the kind of rounding error that would make any company executive smile.

One interesting aspect of Twitter is the way it accelerates cross-border interaction. It is a Porous Membrane. While a fair amount of attention has been given to the dangers of giving away internal secrets, accidentally or otherwise, via Twitter, less attention has been given to the new opportunities for collaboration. One industry we’re seeing a real change in that respect is my own, the industry analyst business.

Collaboration traditionally has a cost, but Twitter collapses that cost to near zero. Got an idea? Say it in 140 characters! At an event- share your thoughts with everyone else using a #hashtag. No need to gather your thoughts on blogs, and then wait for feedback. What do we think now? Anyone can comment. And they do. Twitter also, for good or ill, encourages a certain honesty. The immediacy of the service lends itself to unvarnished opinion, which also tends to encourage collaboration. Its a lot more fun to help fill out a partial thought, than deal with a completely polished one.

When RedMonk jumped onboard the trend for Twitter it was mostly the cool kids, even though we were post SXSW adopters. But today there are more than 500 analysts on twitter according to Carter Lusher’s tracker.

Of course analysts have always chatted at events. We all have friends at different firms and so on. This is nothing new. But the scale of this activity has changed completely in the last six to nine months.

If I explain something inadequately then Anne Thomas Manes from Burton will pull me up for clarification.

I closely track Forrester’s Ray Wang (by far the most interesting guy to follow if you want to know what the life of analyst at a major firm is like) and have been known to help with context, if its an area I know, with a direct message. Of course its no surprise Mr Web Stategy Jeremiah Owyang is more than happy to share ideas and ideals.

Jamie Lewis CEO of Burton Group has been known to retweet my stuff.

Twitter is even having a marked impact on Gartner, which traditionally tended to keep itself to itself. Twitter seems to be accelerating the Meta Groupification of Gartner. Meta always had a more collegiate culture than Gartner, and now in a kind of reverse takeover we’re seeing a more collaborative Gartner, with a more porous membrane. Meta alumni like Andy Bitterer and Nick Gall share and share a lot.

If you work with analysts, or are interested in their thoughts and opinions, and how they formed them, all this chatter can be invaluable. The mystique of analyst omniscience is crumbling, which is all too the good. Peer review by Internet is the most powerful way to test ones ideas. We can’ think in isolation, nor should we. Some analysts may prefer to be in ivory towers, and avoid contact with the rough and tumble of the bazaar – but they are missing out.

If you work in analyst relations and are not tracking at least some analysts on Twitter you are quite literally not doing your job. [But please don't be offended if we don't follow you back. Account management collaboration is important, but its surely not as important as Twitter's incredible utility as a research tool. ]

If you work in an enterprise but don’t have a budget for analyst services I can pretty much guarantee you can have a good dialogue with industry analysts without needing to ask anyone’s permission. Free advice – there is such a thing. Especially if we learn from you. I know I am incredibly grateful to be able to learn from software developers, sysops and architects. Its what Twitter was made for.

I think the trend of cross border collaboration at analyst firms will accelerate. This will create challenges for us as businesses, but it will make the industry as a whole more effective. Talent collaborates.

photo credit- I stole it ruthlessly from Ray Wang’s background image on twitter. Its a perfect illustration. I will take it down if he asks me to.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 29 Comments

Eclipse Galileo Birds Nest: on Twitter Avatars, Social Media, Product Management and RedMonk Business Models

June 23, 2009 – 11:57 am

I have recently been working on the social media strategy for the launch of the Galileo Release of the Eclipse Platform. Unusually for RedMonk, we have not just provided advice, but have also provided one of the social media platforms Eclipse is using in order to build its community. I wasn’t sure how to structure this post so I fell back on my business partner’s trusty, patented Q&A format.

Q: What is Galileo?

A: Eclipse has a simultaneous release process, whereby once a year it updates all of the components in the platform – that’s SOA, modeling,  runtime, rich ajax platform, Eclipse project platform, mylyn. Everything.  Managing a release schedule is hard enough, but what’s really impressive about Eclipse governance is that it manages this process across literally hundreds of developers and ISVs. Open source governance at its best, with a twist of agile development.

Q: RedMonk is in the analyst business, but you say you’re providing a platform. What’s up with that?

A: It is certainly true that RedMonk is in the business of providing advisory services. What might not be immediately obvious is that a great deal of the advice we provide is in the area of community development. Generally this advice concerns software developer communities, but we’re pretty strong in community management more broadly. Its also worth noting that in many respects RedMonk is just a social network, which explains the slogan “analysis by the people for the people”.

Q: Doesn’t providing a platform and associated community development services create conflicts of interest?

A: Potentially- sure. But then again the industry analyst business is all about managing conflicts of interest. RedMonk chooses to do so by being as open as possible, practicing full disclosure. I certainly had a few raised eyebrows over the last couple of weeks about my current Twitter avatar, which looks like this:

Was this the first sponsored Twitter avatar? Kind of. We’re getting paid for the project, and as a byproduct of testing and using the Eclipse Galileo Birds Nest this was my avatar.

Q: What is this Birds Nest You Keep mentioning, anyway?

A: The Birds Nest is a social network for Twitter users in the Eclipse ecosystem, designed to illustrate the release schedule through avatar timelines. That is- the Galileo release schedule has a series of milestones, and our idea was to offer twitter overlays for each release.

Q: Twitter overlays? How do you upload them to the system? Do users have to share their passwords with the Birds Nest? Isn’t that a potential security problem?

A: Not so much. Twitter has implemented OAuth, which is a brilliantly simple mechanism for API authorisation to web services.  We all owe a debt of gratitude to @blaine, @daveman692, @factoryjoe and others. OAuth is the authentication mechanism the open web has always been looking for. It allows one service to call data from another, in a process managed by the end user. It overcomes the password antipattern, which was going to cause major security problems for social networks generally, and Twitter specifically. For more information read Marshall here.

Q: Why would anyone want to autoupload a new Twitter avatar?

A: Good question. Clearly many people do, as has been proved by the Iran situation this last week. Over 160k people have turned their avatars green in solidarity with the Mousavi movement. With one click.

Q: Can You explain what an avatar timeline is?

A: Sure. Most social networks give you an avatar, but they are usually static. You can upload a new one, but the service usually throws out the old when you do. Me and Chris Dalby, the guy that built the Birds Nest (with a bit of help from @fidothe), always felt this approach was overly constrained, if not silly. An avatar, like a face, changes over time. People get new haircuts, or want to look grumpier than normal, or want to go green, or whatever. People change, and so do avatars. I always find it slightly jarring when someones profile picture has jet black hair, while in real life they are salt and pepper.

Q: Storing avatars – is that all the Eclipse Bird’s Nest is for?

A: Not at all. The base platform is designed to capture and foster conversations among the Eclipse community. If I am entirely honest this is the area that needs the most work. Thus far, we have been getting the platform right, ironing kinks out and so on. But I am hopeful this week we can take it to the next level.

Q: Take it to the next level? What do you mean by that?

A: We don’t only support avatar changes in the platform. We also support twitter as a command line. People can update their Birds Nest Profile with a simple command in twitter. Users can register as Modeling, EquinoxOSGi, SOA, EnterpriseJava or PHP, like so:

@eclipsegalileo profile php

Then when they tweet about Eclipse, and use the hashtag #eclipse35 (we chose the tag name because its shorter than eclipsegalileo and this is the 3.5 release), the tweet will be under the tabs on the homepage.

Q: What is next for the Birds Nest?

A: Our initial goal, set with Eclipse marketing director Ian Skerrett, the brains behind the project, was 500 users. We breezed through that. Next job- get people using the hashtag more extensively. With that in mind, Eclipse is kicking off a competition – use #eclipse35 with an overlay avatar and potentially win schwag.

Q: Do you want other clients for the platform if they can see a use for it?

A: Damn straight we do.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 8 Comments

Cisco and Microsoft: virtual analyst conferences

June 19, 2009 – 6:18 pm

Really not sure how it got to Friday with no blogs posted yet this week. I blame analyst conferences! ;-)

But I wanted to get some thoughts down about the future of these events. In the last two weeks Cisco and Microsoft have both run events for analysts designed to minimise travel budgets. Welcome side effects of not flying include:

  • Spending more time with our families. Any day that I get to see my wife and son is a better day.
  • Cutting our carbon footprints. The main carbon in any professional services firm is travel. As I often say, I could live in a mud hut and only eat vegetables and my footprint would still be unacceptably high.
  • People won’t accuse us of constant boondoggles

The missing element of both conferences was testing the experience. Live Meeting and Cisco Webex both have their pros and cons, but neither offers a painless and guaranteed access experience, especially when you want to use multimodal sharing off desktops, videos and so on. My only criticism then was that both vendors should have got us online to get the experience right before the events themselves.

Judith Hurwitz wrote a good piece about her experiences of the Microsoft Virtual Analyst Summit.

There is no substitute for personal interaction with people. When I attend an industry analyst meeting I pay attention to more than the words the speaker is saying

Fair point. But actually I found the 1:1 phone calls with Microsoft to be excellent. Particularly the session with a customer of Visual Studio.NET Team Services, Ted Malone of Configuresoft. I had never met Ted before but we just clicked. With no video or anything else. GREAT conversation. The human voice is a wonderful instrument for comprehension. Ted is funny, and astute and totally gets that software development is about collaboration rather than just “workflow”. Honestly – the quality of the 1:1s was good enough to generate 8/10+ ratings for four out of five one:ones.

Note that a computer can tell if someone on the phone is being truthful or not. Well we are better at parsing truthiness than any computer. All that said, given Microsoft send us a video camera before the event, and a hefty bag of candy, I assumed we were expected to do more video conferencing.

But what about online videos? Microsoft basically pre-canned presentations rather than live-streaming them. Judith said:

Will a typical analyst have the patience to watch five hours of pre-recorded videos? Not likely. I might listen to a video that I am particularly interested in (like cloud computing or service oriented architectures, for example). But I will not listen to all the presentations. There are simply too many distractions and too many things to do. That is the reality of my life as a researcher, analyst, and writer. The reality is that unless you present compelling presentations with information that draws me in you will not capture my attention for long periods of time.

Stat. On the other hand, I don’t like going to keynotes and sitting there for two hours. All tech vendors err on the side of WAY too much information in keynotes. These days I like to follow the example of my colleague Cote, and watch the keynote from the hotel room, where the net connection is assured, and my twitter community is with me. Canned video suits me pretty well.

Interestingly enough Cisco this week used telepresence tools for some presentations from Corp. (it ran a half day face to face event and a second day purely virtual) and honestly, at least one of these might as well have been a video. Some speakers were reading from scripts, and it showed. No eye contact.

Frankly, boring content or boring speakers are going to suck whatever the context.

Judith’s conclusions are basically my own:

1. Virtual conferences need really good planning and execution. It cannot simply be a disconnected voice with some slides on a shared screen. That is called a conference call.

2. Streaming or live video is wonderful but it needs to have the technology foundation so that it will work no matter what the customer/participant’s environment happens to be.

3. If virtual conferences are to work they have to be conferences.  I don’t think that we have good models for executing virtual conferences that work. They need to be electric, informative, and have interactivity.  Right now the virtual meeting is not a true model. It is simply old execution applied to a new idea.

I think that we will see the emergence of a true virtual conferencing model. I can’t tell you that I can visualize a virtual conference that I would enjoy. Like many analysts, I am not good at passively sitting and watching. I need to be engaged and part of the action. I am not sure how you do this virtually. But I am ready to be surprised and delighted since it would be great not to get on an airplane.

All in all though this was a first time for both Cisco and Microsoft, so of course you’re going to get teething problems.  And I am looking forward to seeing Robb Mapp, from Microsoft analyst relations face to face when he visits London in a couple of weeks. I will buy him a pint.  One thing you can’t do virtually is share a beer.

disclosure: Microsoft is a client. I did drink beer during its event, after six pm.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in AR | 8 Comments

From JavaOne to Java 2.0: Java is Dead, Long Live Java

June 12, 2009 – 4:47 pm

Last week was JavaOne. Perhaps the last one ever – its all up to Larry Ellison, Oracle  CEO now, bar the shouting. Whatever decisions Oracle makes with respect to Java, you can rest assured that JavaOne will be a very different event. It certainly will be for us – Sun has been a valued patron of RedMonk and its model over the years, and JavaOne was always a key event in the ongoing conversation.

JavaOne is one of RedMonk’s favourite events. We all like it. Not least because our RedMonk unconference at CommunityOne in 2007 is still fondly remembered by some of the world’s top developers: people like Charles Nutter (JRuby) and David Pollak (Scala LIFT). Why does these guys give us props? Because we were pushing the dynamic language agenda forward at a critical time. Sun has now been a patron of dynamic languages on the JVM over the last few years, and RedMonk helped turn that dial. Sun hired people like Thomas Enebo and Ted Leung (Python) to make sure that the Java Virtual Machine was hot for dynamic languages. Tim Bray was an officially-sanctioned agent provocateur, playing the role of loyal opposition, a grain of sand in the corporate oyster.

Beyond Java The Language

Sun’s moves into dynamic languages were a tacit admission that Java as a language was not the only game in town – which allowed invention to flourish. Netbeans support for dynamic languages was far ahead of Eclipse. Sun’s Glassfish application server was designed in the knowledge Java wasn’t the only language choice for a “java application server”.

Beyond Java The Runtime

Another aspect of Glassfish that has not been much remarked on is that the group behind the code made a very interesting decision. Rather than adopting the Sun and Java Community Process (JCP) sponsored JSR 277 specification for Java class modularity Glassfish went with OSGi. That is, even Sun’s products were “forking Java” by 2008. Instead the newly anointed standard for Java modularity was OSGi. If this all sounds deathly dull its actually pretty important when it comes to Java runtimes. OSGi allows you to build a stackless stack, where modules of Java classes are loaded on demand.

“There is no need to load the entire Java stack to run an application – just the runtime services it actually requires. OSGi therefore enables a more dynamic, less constricted Java.”

The JCP basically lost this war, and now OSGi is supported by every major app server vendor. It is also the key technology used by all of the enterprise service bus (ESB) players.

Beyond the Java IDE

One of the most enthusiastic backers of OSGi has been the Eclipse Foundation, which successfully wrenched control of great swathes of land from Sun in an earlier putsch. IBM led the initial Eclipse uprising in 2001, but without popular support it would have been nothing. Eclipse became how tools integration is done. Implementation beat specification. Now Eclipse is, quite simply, how Java tools are built. Eclipse today though goes far beyond IDEs, and OSGi underpins its runtime ambitions. If you’re a Java person and haven’t heard of Equinox yet… you will.

A Jetty for Web Apps

Talking of Eclipse, something I noticed last week is that Jetty, which recently became an Eclipse project, is popping up in some unexpectedly cool places. Jetty is the new smallness, and therefore the new hotness- the most embeddable app server of the moment. Less cludge means more productivity. Focus on the app not shaving the yak.

GitHub is a popular Software as a Service platform for distributed source code management. It is where the Ruby On Rails community lives. You want find libraries for building web apps? These days Ruby is the first language to check. GitHub is the first place. Last week came the announce of GitHub:FI, a behind the firewall version of the hosted platfrom- it’s based on JRuby running on Jetty. It is also used in the Yahoo Hadoop Cluster.

Meanwhile Java is evidently hot at Google, not something you would have bet on.

Java Syntax Not Dead Shocker

Google’s Android mobile platform SDK- is effectively a forked implementation of the Java 2 Mobile Edition spec. But Google doesn’t call it Java, so apparently it has no legal exposure. Stefano explains:

Android uses the syntax of the Java platform (the Java “language”, if you wish, which is enough to make java programmers feel at home and IDEs to support the editing smoothly) and the java SE class library but not the Java bytecode or the Java virtual machine to execute it on the phone (and, note, Android’s implementation of the Java SE class library is, indeed, Apache Harmony’s!) The trick is that Google doesn’t claim that Android is a Java platform, although it can run some programs written with the Java language and against some derived version of the Java class library.

Google App Engine Java Services – run on Jetty

Google Widget Toolkit – are being ported to Jetty

What all this amounts to is that Google is now a serious player in Java. But its evidently not a big fan of the JCP. Could we see a future lawsuit brought by Oracle against Google? I don’t think its beyond the realms of possibility. What’s old is new again. As has been pointed out, Eric Schmidt, now Google Chairman, was the guy that signed the original Java licensing deal with Microsoft before things went sour… what goes around may come around.

And Then There Were Three

It seems to me the future of Java could be fought out between IBM, Oracle and Google. There are some obvious wildcards- SpringSource has arguably been the most important player in Enterprise Java apis for the last couple of years – the strapline says it all Eliminating Enterprise Java Complexity. IBM, Oracle, BEA all now support the Spring Framework. SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson will definitely have a say in the future of Java. As will Red Hat.

But IBM and Oracle are the leviathans, the companies making serious money from Java. They have the most to lose and the most to gain. While Google- has developer mindshare like noone else right now. The new JavaOne- that’s looking like Google I/O.

Java isn’t dead though, any more than SOA is.

I started this post on a Friday afternoon – always risk for any project. Chances are it will need some cleaning up on Monday morning. But I wanted to give you, dear reader, something to sink your teeth into.

Pretty much every organisation mentioned in this piece except Google is a RedMonk client.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in | 9 Comments

Wherefore Java at Java One. Microsoft and OSS: Increment or Tipping Point?

May 29, 2009 – 2:52 pm

“The Future is already here. Its just unevenly distributed”

- William Gibson

“Its easy to live in the future when everyone else is living in the past”

- James Governor

Over the last couple of years I have watched as Microsoft has made real and substantive changes in its approaches and attitudes to open source software, licensing and IP protection. But every time Microsoft makes an announcement I get the same calls from the same clients and reporters, seemingly surprised that Microsoft could do such a thing. The fact is people have a view of Microsoft that is hard to change. Its a lot harder to gain a good reputation than to lose a bad one. And Microsoft, more than any other company in the industry, has been the anti-OSS lightening rod.

This is partly by its actions, and partly by its words. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have both talked more FUD about open source, or at least been reported doing so, than.. well, anyone else in the world I guess.

But suffice to say the facts on the ground have changed a lot and the reality is ahead of perception right now. Good work has been done, but not recognised. It might as well be so much noise from a dog whistle, going in one ear and out the other.

I think I probably freaked a few people out by how gung-ho I was a while back when I twittered announcements from OSCON concerning Microsoft’s sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation.

“today feels kind of like the day ibm open sourced eclipse“

“Microsoft is an industry king maker and today it finally crowned open source“

While I am obviously not saying Microsoft is going to open source all of its code, or even a large proportion of it, certainly open source is now part of business as usual at Microsoft. Which brings me to Java One next week.

Microsoft is keynoting. That’s right- Microsoft is to give a keynote at Java One. Now first off I have to say I have no idea what the content of the announcement will be, but I am led to believe there will be real news. This will not be a content free keynote. Given how much Microsoft and Sun have jointly invested in interoperability there hasn’t been that much news.

So what could it be?

  • Silverlight JavaFX interoperability? Certainly Adobe is in the sights of both technologies.
  • Something around the Sun JVM and distribution of same? This one seems likely, given how hard Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been pushing the Java distribution and volume story. IE through through the Java downloader? [nah that just crazy talk. ed.]
  • Azure to support Java? The spectre of Google App Engine running Java looms large. From a Microsoft perspective the last thing it wants to see is the entire Java community swanning off into the arms of Google’s cloud. Enemy of my enemy and all that.

I could speculate all day. Like I say – I don’t know what the announcement will be. But I won’t be surprised by it. Even if Microsoft is contributing some source code to Sun and its Java stack.

update: It wouldn’t be Java related per se, but this speculation has it that we could see news about Microsoft’s Geneva Identity and Sun OpenSSO.

disclosure: Microsoft and Sun are both clients. I will be at Java One, with Sun paying my T&E, so I will know more next week and report back to you, friends.

Not sure how the illustration suits the story, but its great, so I used it.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in Java | 10 Comments

SAP Situational Apps: Tracking Public Sector Stimulus Dollars

May 26, 2009 – 6:19 pm

Earlier today I twittered about some interesting news from SAP.

SAP releases app for public sector reporting to American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to track stimulus $ http://bit.ly/10vTQY

Something that struck me very clearly reading the release was that this compliance application was being led by Business Objects, rather than SAP Classic. Now I haven’t had a chance to get an update on the direct from SAP but this makes perfect sense. For one thing- look at the speed of delivery. This is not a traditional SAP module development schedule. Also, organisationally Business Objects now owns Governance, Risk and Compliance.

We’re in a period in history where new laws are being made on the fly, which calls for more situational approaches to application development. The usual rules don’t apply. From that perspective you’d have to say the timing of the Business Objects acquisition was nigh on perfect. Now is a time for getting things done, not agonising over architectures and the need to support every possible international jurisdiction.

The new package consists of a software solution designed to help public sector organizations make the best use of economic stimulus funds by delivering transparency into spending, accountability and performance evaluation.

What is a bit surprising is that SAP evidently hasn’t realised it has a new umbrella marketing campaign for this kind of stuff yet. Where IBM has Smart Planet SAP has Clear New World. But guys- no one is going to join the dots for you (well except me, I guess). Where are the branding and marketing police when you really need them? If it was me I would be pitching this as the first app of the Clear New World.

The new app should hopefully bring some much needed clarity to spending in local government through the Stimulus. Well somebody has to track this stuff. Frankly I’d like to see the tracker as a cloud-based application that concerned citizens could also query. That really would be a clear new world.

disclosure: IBM is a client. SAP is a client of Greenmonk services and will very likely shortly jump on the RedMonk train again in short order.

Share This

By James Governor | Posted in transparency | 4 Comments

Bad Behavior has blocked 0 access attempts in the last 7 days.

Close
E-mail It