Significant Software Development Developments of 2012

I have written before (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) on my biased perspective of the most significant developments in software development for that year. This post is the 2012 version with all my biases and skewed perspectives freely admitted.

10. Groovy 2.0

Groovy 2.0 have been an important version for Groovy. Groovy 2's arguably most notable new features are its static type checking and static compilation capabilities.

9. Perl Turns 25

Perl celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012. Love it or loathe it, Perl has definitely become the predominant scripting language, especially in the non-Windows environments. Perl is not my favorite (I'd rather use Groovy, Python, or Ruby), but I find myself needing to use it at times, usually because I'm modifying or using an existing script or set of scripts already written in Perl. Happy Birthday, Perl!

8. Git and GitHub

Git is the trendy choice now in version control and GitHub is equally trendy for hosting code. The post Why Would Anyone use Git in their Enterprise? states, "Git has a cult-like following in the development community." The book Pro Git (2009) is freely available for reading online and can be downloaded as a PDF, mobi, or ePub electronic book.

7. NoSQL and Polyglot Persistence

The NoSQL concept seems to be maturing and moving from unabated hype and hyperbole to understanding when it works well and when it doesn't. In 7 hard truths about the NoSQL revolution, Peter Wayner writes: NoSQL systems are far from a perfect fit and often rub the wrong way. The smartest developers knew this from the beginning. ... the smart NoSQL developers simply noted that NoSQL stood for "Not Only SQL." If the masses misinterpreted the acronym, that was their problem.

Martin Fowler's nosql page states: "The rise of NoSQL databases marks the end of the era of relational database dominance. But NoSQL databases will not become the new dominators. Relational will still be popular, and used in the majority of situations. They, however, will no longer be the automatic choice." With this, Fowler introduced the concept of polyglot persistence (which he mentions was previously coined by Scott Leberknight in 2008) and explicitly compared this to the concept of polyglot programming. If we as a software development community believe that the advantages of using multiple languages in the same application (polyglot programming) are worth the costs, then it follows that we might also determine that the advantages of using multiple data stores within the same application (polyglot persistence) are also worth the costs of doing so.

6. Mobile Development

Mobile development continues to rapidly rise in 2012. The December 2012 write-up on the Tiobe Index states that Objective-C is likely to be the language of the year again in 2012 due to its rapid rise (third in December 2012 behind only C and Java and ahead of C++ and C#). The writers of that summary conclude about language ratings on this index, "In fact it seems that if you are not in the mobile phone market you are losing ground."

Suzanne Kattau's post Mobile development in the year 2012 succinctly summarizes the changes in popular mobile device platforms and operating systems in 2012.

5. Scala (and Typesafe Stack 2.0 with Play and Akka)

I have highlighted Scala multiple times in these year-end review posts, but this is my highest rating of Scala because Scala has seen a tremendous year in 2012. On 23 August 2012, Cameron McKenzie asked, "Is Scala the new Spring framework?" An answer to that question might be implied by the 1 October 2012 announcement that Spring founder Rod Johnson had joined Typesafe's Board of Directors (Johnson left SpringSource in July). Scala provides the intersection of again-trendy functional programming with widely popular and proven object-oriented programming and is part of the increasingly popular movement to languages other than Java on the JVM. It's not difficult to see why it had a big year in 2012.

The Typesafe Blog features a post called Why Learn Scala in 2013? that begins with the statement, "2012 was a big year for the Scala programming language - with monumental releases, adoption by major enterprises and social sites alike and a Scala Days conference that knocked the socks off years past." The post then goes on to list reasons to learn Scala in 2013 with liberal references to other recent positive posts regarding Scala.

Ted Neward has predicted that in 2013 "Typesafe (and their Scala/Akka/Play! stack) will begin to make some serious inroads into the enterprise space, and start to give Groovy/Grails a serious run for their money." I am not calling Play and Akka out in this post as separate significant developments in 2012, but instead lump them together with Scala as part of justifying Scala taking the #5 spot for 2012. There is no question, however, that 2012 was a big year for Akka and Play. The year 2012 saw the release of Typesafe Stack 2.0 along with Play 2.0 and Akka 2.0.

4. Big Data

Big Data was big in 2012. AOL Government has named Big Data its Best of 2012 for the technology category. Geoff Nunberg argues that "'Big Data' Should Be The Word Of The Year." Interest in the statistical computing language R has (not surprisingly) risen along with the surging interest in Big Data.

3. HTML5

2012 was another big year for HTML5. Although HTML5 continued to be evangelized as a standards-friendly favorite of developers, some hard truths (such as performance versus native code) about the current state of HTML5 also became more readily obvious.

That being stated, I think HTML5 still has a very positive future ahead of it. Although it has certainly been over-hyped with emphasis on what it might one day become rather than what it is today, it would also be foolhardy to ignore it or underestimate its usefulness. Two articles that remind us of this are FT exec: HTML5 is not dead and HTML5 myth busting. The article 'HTML5 is ready' say creators of mobile HTML5 Facebook clone talks about attempts to prove HTML5 is ready today from a performance standpoint.

2. Security

Awareness of security holes, risks, and vulnerabilities has been increasing for the past several years largely due to high-profile incidents of lost sensitive data and new legal requirements. However, 2012 seemed to be a bigger year than most in terms of increasing awareness of security requirements and expectations in software architecture and design.

Java seemed to be particularly hard hit by bad security news in 2012. Articles and posts that provide examples of this include 1 Billion computers at risk from Java exploit, Oracle's Java Security Woes Mount As Researchers Spot A Bug In Its Critical Bug Fix, Java Vulnerability Affects 1 Billion Plug-ins, Another Week, Another Java Security Issue Found, Oracle and Apple Struggle to Deal with Java Security Issues, and Java still has a crucial role to play—despite security risks.

The article Oracle to stop patching Java 6 in February 2013 suggests that users of Java should upgrade to Java 7 before February 2013 when Oracle will supply the last publicly available security patch to Java SE 6 outside of an Oracle support plan. Another article is called Oracle's Java security update lacking, experts say.

1. Cloud Computing

It seemed like everybody wanted a cloud in 2012 even if they didn't really need one. Archana Venkatraman put it this way, "2012 was the year cloud computing hit the mainstream." Steve Cerocke stated, "2012 will go down as the year of cloud computing." Other articles and posts on the biggest cloud stories of 2012 include The 10 Biggest Cloud Stories Of 2012 and Top five cloud computing news stories in 2012.

Cloud Computing is in the sweet spot many trendy technologies and approaches go through when enthusiasm is much greater than negativism. Charles Babcock's Cloud Computing: Best And Worst News Of 2012 is more interesting to me than many cloud-focused publications because it highlights the good and the bad of cloud computing in 2012.

Honorable Mention

I couldn't fit everything that interested me about software development in 2012 into the Top Ten. Here are some others that barely missed my cut.

C

As mentioned earlier, the C programming language appears headed for #1 on the Tiobe Index for 2012. One of programming's most senior languages is also one of its most popular. When one considers that numerous other languages are themselves built on C and when one considers that many languages strive for C-like syntax, the power and influence of C is better appreciated. C's popularity has remained strong for years and 2012 was another very strong year for C.

Another piece of evidence arguing C's case is the late 2012 O'Reilly publication of Ben Klemens's book 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School. The author discusses this book and C today in the O'Reilly post New school C.

Although I have not written C code for several years now, I've always had a fondness for the language. It was the language I used predominately in college (with Pascal and C++ being the other languages I used to a less degree) and I wrote the code for my electrical engineering capstone project in C. I remember (now fondly) spending almost an entire Saturday on one of my first C assignments fighting a bug to only realize that it was not working because I was using the assignment operator (=) rather than the equality operator (==). This lesson served me well as I learned other languages in terms of both what it important to differentiate and in terms of how to better debug programs even when a debugger is not readily available. I think my C experience grounded me well for later professional development with C++ and Java.

Gradle 1.x

Using an expressive programming language rather than XML or archaic make syntax to build software seems like an obviously beneficial thing to do. However, make, Ant, and Maven have continued to dominate in this area, but Groovy-based Gradle shows early signs of providing the alternative we've all been looking for. Gradle still has a long way to go in terms of acceptance and popularity and there are many other build systems with some of Gradle's ideals that have failed, but Gradle did seem to capture significant attention in 2012 and can hopefully build upon that in future years. Gradle 1.0 was formally released in June 2012 and Gradle 1.3 was released in November 2012.

DevOps

Among others, Scott Ambler predicted that "DevOps will become the new IT buzzword" in 2012. If it is not "the" buzzword of 2012, it is not for a lack of trying on the DevOps evangelists' part. The DevOps movement continued to gain momentum in 2012. The DZone DevOps Zone sees one or more posts on the subject added each day. The only reason this did not make it into my Top Ten is that I still don't see "Typical Everyday Coder" talking about it when I am away from the blogosphere talking to in-the-trenches developers.

Amber's concluding paragraph begins with this prediction, "Granted, there’s likely going to be a lot of talk and little action within most organizations due to the actual scope of DevOps, but a few years from now, we’ll look back on 2012 as the year when DevOps really started to take off." Only time will tell. There continue to be posts trying to explain what exactly DevOps is.

Departures of Noteworthy Development Personnel

There were some separations of key developers from their long-time organizations in 2012. As mentioned previously, Spring Framework founder Rod Johnson left VMWare/SpringSource (and ultimately ended up on the Board of Directors for Scala company Typesafe). Josh Bloch, perhaps still best known for his work at Sun on the JDK and for writing Effective Java, left Google in 2012 after working there for eight years.

Resurgence of Widely Popular but Aged Java Frameworks

Two very popular long-in-the-tooth Java-based frameworks saw a resurgence in 2012. Tomek Kaczanowski recently posted JUnit Strikes Back, in which he cites several pieces of evidence indicating a resurgence in JUnit, arguably the most commonly used testing framework in Java (and, in many ways, the inspiration for numerous other nUnit-based unit testing frameworks). Christian Grobmeier's recent post The new log4j 2.0 talks about many benefits of Log4j2 and how it can be used with more recently popular logging frameworks such as SLF4J and even Apache Commons Logging.

Electronic Books (E-books)

Electronic books (ebooks) are becoming widely popular in general, but also specifically within software development books. This is not surprising because e-books provide many general benefits, but also have benefits particular to software development. In particular, it is nice to be able to electronically search for terms (overcoming the poor index problem common to many printed programming books). Other advantages include the ability to have the book on laptops, mobile devices, e-readers, and other portable devices. This not only makes a particular book readily available, but makes it easy to carry many books on many different technical subjects with one on travel. It is also less likely for the electronic book to be "borrowed" unknowingly by others or turn up missing.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of electronic books is cost. It is fairly well known that technical books are generally not big profit makers for publishers. However, with printing and distribution costs being a significant portion of traditional publication costs, e-books make it easier to publishers to price these books at a lower cost than the printed equivalent.

The reduced cost to the publisher for an electronic book can be passed onto the consumer. I recently took advantage of an offer from Packt Publishing to purchase a total of eight of their books as electronic books for a total price of $40. Given that a single printed programming book can cost $40 or more, this was a bargain. I have also blogged on other good deals on e-books provided by other technical publishers such as O'Reilly and Manning.

I have especially appreciated the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). This program is only viable thanks to electronic books and allows readers to read a book as it is developed. Because technologies change so quickly, it is often helpful to get access to even portions of these books as quickly as possible.

Finally, another advantage of e-books is their ultimate disposal. In reality, they take up such a small portion of even an old-fashioned CD or DVD, that I can usually dig up a copy if I want to. However, I can remove them from my electronic devices when I no longer need them and need the space. There are no environmental or logistic concerns about their disposal. This is important because these books do tend to get outdated quickly and sometimes an outdated programming book is worse than having no book at all because it can be very misleading.

PhoneGap / Cordova

Given the popularity of mobile development and HTML5 in 2012, it's not surprising that PhoneGap and Cordova had big years in 2011/2012. In the web versus native debate, one of the advantages of web is the portability of web apps across multiple devices. The PhoneGap/Cordova approach brings some of this benefit for writing code but maintains some of the performance advantages of running native applications.

Objective-C

Objective-C looks to win the Tiobe Index language of the year again in 2012. This is yet another indicator of mobile development prevalence as Objective-C's popularity is almost exclusively tied to iPhone/iPad development, though Objective-C's history is closely coupled with the NeXT workstations and even has been called an inspiration for Java (advertised as quoted by Patrick Naughton) instead of C++.

Kotlin

For several years now, it has been trendy for the "cool kids" to post feedback messages on articles or blogs about Java features proclaiming that Groovy or Scala does anything covered in that blog post or article better than Java does it. Many of the "cool kids" (or maybe different "cool kids" with the same modus operandi) now seem to be doing the same on Scala blog posts and articles, advocating the advantages of Kotlin over Scala.

As Scala and Groovy still lag Java in terms of overall popularity and usage, Kotlin lags both Groovy and Scala in terms of adoption at this point. However, there are definitely some characteristics of Kotlin in its favor. First, the Kotlin web page describes the language as, "a statically typed programming language that compiles to JVM byte codes and JavaScript." I could definitely see how "statically typed" and "compiles ... to JavaScript" would be endearing to developers who must write JavaScript but prefer static compilation. Andrey Breslav, Kotlin Project Lead, believes that static languages compiling to "typed JavaScript" will be a major development of 2013 and he cites Dart and TypeScript as other examples of this. Being able to run on the JVM can also be an advantage, though this is no different than Groovy or Scala.

One major positive for Kotlin is its sponsor: JetBrains. It is likely that their IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, will provide elegant support for the Kotlin language. This is also a sponsor/owner with the resources (monetary and people) to improve chances for success. Because JetBrains is "planning to roll out a beta of Kotlin and start using it extensively in production," they are more likely to continue investing resources in this new language.

There was no way I could justify to myself putting Kotlin in my top ten for 2012, but once it is released for production use, it is possible that Kotlin may make another year's Top Ten list if it is widely adopted.

Ceylon

Kotlin isn't the only up-and-coming static language for the JVM; Ceylon is also relatively young in this space. I wrote about the JavaOne 2012 presentation Introduction to Ceylon and that post provides brief overview and description information.

The first milestone of Ceylon IDE (Eclipse plug-in) was released in early 2012 and was followed in March with the release of Ceylon M2 ("Minitel"). This was followed by the Ceylon M3 ("V2000") release in June and Ceylon M4 ("Analytical Engine") in October.

The newer JVM-friendly languages with the seeming best chances of long-term viability are those with strong sponsors: Groovy has SpringSource, Scala has TypeSafe, Kotlin has JetBrains, and Ceylon has RedHat.

End of Oracle/Google Android Lawsuit

The lawsuit between Oracle and Google over Android seems to have, for the most part, concluded in 2012. There still seems to be bad blood between the two companies, but the settlement of this probably allows for continued success of the Android platform and potentially for collaboration at some future point between the two companies on Java. It will be interesting to see if Google allows its employees to submit abstracts to JavaOne 2013.

Everyone a Programmer

When HTML first started to expand across the universities and colleges in the early-to-mid 1990s, it seemed that everyone I knew was learning HTML. Most of us were "learning" it by copying other peoples' HTML source and editing it for our own use. Of course, everything then was static and fairly easy to pick up. It probably also skewed my perspective that I was majoring in electrical engineering with an emphasis in computer science and so was around people who had a tendency to adopt and use new technology. Perhaps for the first time since then, I have felt that there is an ever-growing interest in pushing everyone to learn how to program at a certain level. I don't need to provide any supporting points for this because I can instead reference Joab Jackson's 2012: The year that coding became de rigueur. Not only does this post enumerate several examples of the debate about whether everyone should learn programming, but it also makes cool use of "de rigueur" in its title.

Java

I did not include Java itself in my Top Ten in 2012. Perhaps this is an indication that I too felt that 2012 was a slow year for Java (and agree that this is not necessarily a bad thing). That being stated, Martijn Verburg has listed some "personal highlights of the year" in the world of Java in 2012 in What will 2013 bring? Developers place their bets. These include the JVM's entry into the cloud, Java/JVM community growth, OpenJDK, Java EE 7, and Mechanical Sympathy.

It's a small thing in many ways, but I think James Gosling returning to JavaOne and throwing out t-shirts was symbolic of a strengthening resurgence among an already strong Java development community.

Jelastic

Java on the cloud in general had a big year in 2012. Jelastic had a particularly big year. The screen snapshot below is from an e-mail sent out by Jelastic COO Dmitry Sotnikov.

Jelastic was prominently mentioned at JavaOne 2012 multiple times. Some of these mentions were due to winning the Duke's Choice Award for 2012. Other mentions resulted from James Gosling's positive review of his use of Jelastic. As I blogged on earlier, Gosling described himself as "a real Jelastic fan" at the JavaOne 2012 Community Keynote.

Linux-based ARM Devices

Oracle announced release of a Linux ARM JDK in 2012. The ability to run even JavaFX on Linux ARM devices provides evidence of Oracle's interest in supporting Linux ARM devices. Given that Oracle is well-known for investing in areas where returns are often great, it follows that perhaps Oracle sees great potential for the Linux ARM devices in the future. An interesting article that looks into this is Java 8 on ARM: Oracle's new shot against Android?

One couldn't go to a keynote presentation at JavaOne 2012 without hearing about one very trendy Linux ARM Device, the Rasperry Pi. Similarly, the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard have also become very popular.

Improving Job Market for Software Developers

2012 seemed to be a good year for those with careers in software development and this seems likely to continue. CNN Money ranked software developer as #9 in its Best Jobs in America story (software architect was #3). For example, Lauren Hepler has written that Software developers top 2013 job projection and cites a Forbes slides-based presentation.

Perhaps more importantly than these stories are my anecdotal observations of a surging market for software developers. I have seen an uptake in number of unsolicited employment queries from potential employers and clients. I am also seeing an increase in billboard advertising for developers, especially in areas of the United States with high concentrations of software development. This improving job market might be one of many reasons for increasing interest in programming in general.

Other Resources

There are other posts of potential interest. Katherine Slattery's Takeaways from the Top Development News Stories of 2012 talks about the Node.js "hype cycle," open source hardware, native apps versus HTML5 apps, and the "'learn to code' craze."

Ted Neward's annual predictions (for 2013 in this case) and review of his prior year (2012 in this) predictions is an interesting read.

Conclusion

2012 was another big year in software development across many different areas and types of development. Many of the themes discussed in this post overlap and are somehow associated with mobile development, cloud computing, and greater availability of data.

JavaOne 2012: Building Mobile Apps with HTML5 and Java [Tiggzi]

I returned to Parc 55 (Mission conference room) to see Max Katz's (Exadel Developer Relations) "Building Mobile Apps with HTML5 and Java" Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) presentation. Specifically, Katz is in Developer Relations for Tiggzi, a cloud-based app platform.

Katz only had a single slide before going into demonstration mode. He explained that this is a cloud-based tool as we waited for it to load. He stated by working on an example application to connect to Twitter via their exposed REST interfaces. He pointed out that because this example is based on JavaScript and jQuery, it can be used on any web browser.

Katz made his example public and created a TinyUrl for it. Desktops could access http://tinyurl.com/javaone12m and mobile devices could access http://tinyurl.com/javaone12m1. It was pretty impressive to be able to reload/refresh the application as he worked on it on my laptop and on my Droid. It really drove home how easy this cloud-based solution is to use and deploy. It was one of the more impressive real-time demonstrations I've seen.

Katz moved onto another example that accessed data from the database rather than from Twitter's API. One of the nifty things he demonstrated was the reporting of the equivalent curl command for accessing the data via REST.

All of Katz's demonstrations were implemented within the Google Chrome web browser. I was surprised at how fluid the behavior was for the most part. It seemed to have responsiveness similar to a decent desktop Java IDE. I'd say that the tool's interface itself is probably more complicated than the applications most developers would develop on it, but that could probably be said for Java IDEs as well.

One of the audience members asked if Tiggzi supports SOAP. The answer was "no" and that Tiggzi supports XML or JSON over REST only.

Katz recognized that we "don't want to buy stuff," but provided an overview of Tiggzi's pricing strategy (pricing based on number of deployed applications and all plans have all features). He said that if you use promo code "javaone12" at tiggzi.com you can get the Pro Plan for a trial period.

The title of the session seemed a little misleading as there was next to no coverage of Java other than mention that Twitter uses Java and the first example uses Twitter. The abstract seemed a bit misleading as there was no mention of Tiggzi-specific solution in that abstract. Those points being stated, I still did enjoy the presentation and found it interesting. It's probably not something I'll be able to use in the near future, but it was fun to see and think about the possibilities.

Typesafe Stack 2.0 Released: Q&A with Typesafe President and CEO

Typesafe issued a press release today including this initial paragraph:

Typesafe today announced the release of Typesafe Stack 2.0, the latest version of its open source software stack. Typesafe Stack 2.0 is a comprehensive platform for building applications in Java and Scala that can scale to the largest workloads in cloud computing and virtualized enterprise datacenter environments. The release adds the innovative Play web framework for the first time, and includes Akka event-driven middleware 2.0, with significant enhancements for building concurrent and distributed applications.

This newly released Typesafe Stack 2.0 might provide a nice way to introduce oneself to Scala while addressing modern development needs. I've long felt the best way to learn a new language, framework, or library is to use it in a practical situation. Jan Machacek made a similar point in the JavaWorld article Learn Scala with Specs2 Spring, where he discussed learning Scala as one used it with his company's Specs2 Spring Extension.

Because I'm new to Play, Akka, and even Scala, I welcomed the opportunity to ask the folks at Typesafe questions about the Typesafe Stack 2.0 from a beginner's perspective. The following questions were asked of and answered by Typesafe President and CEO Donald Fischer. With these questions, I tried to find out what I needed to know to determine the motivation for beginning use of Typesafe Stack 2.0 and where to start in my efforts to learn and use it.

Q&A with Typesafe CEO Donald Fischer

Question: What are the most compelling advantages of the Typesafe Stack 2.0?

Some of the most compelling advantages of the Typesafe Stack versus legacy platforms are:

• Strategies for working in a world of horizontal scale. Modern software needs to take advantage of more cores and more machines, rather than faster single cores.
• An emphasis on developer agility, productivity, and enthusiasm. Developers want to work quickly and focus on business logic rather than boilerplate.
• Fewer bugs. The Typesafe Stack has tools to avoid bugs up front. For example, Akka helps you avoid tricky thread synchronization issues, and Scala helps you write side-effect-free, typesafe code with fewer opportunities for error.
• An emphasis on pragmatic interoperability. The Typesafe Stack APIs can be used from Java or Scala or both; and they can be adopted incrementally. It's as simple as adding some jars to your project.

Question: How much familiarity with Scala is required to use Typesafe Stack 2.0?

While the Typesafe Stack includes Scala, and is built on a Scala foundation, both the Play web framework and Akka middleware offer native APIs for both Java and Scala. So developers can build applications that leverage all of the capabilities of the Typesafe Stack without any specific knowledge of Scala (though we don't think they'll be able to resist the added productivity that Scala provides once they get a taste).

Question: On a spectrum of 100% Java to 100% Scala with a combination of the two between those ends of the spectrum, what portion of the spectrum is supported by Typesafe Stack 2.0? (Can one use Typesafe Stack 2.0 with Java only?)

100% of the functionality in the Typesafe Stack frameworks (Akka and Play) is supported for both Scala and Java.

Question: What is the easiest way to get started using the overall Typesafe Stack 2.0?

We've put together a Getting Started Guide, here: http://typesafe.com/resources/getting-started/

Question: What online resources are available regarding the use of Typesafe Stack 2.0?

We've collected a variety of resources including videos from project contributors, commercial users, and the community here: http://typesafe.com/resources

Question: Are there any books available or planned that cover the individual products within Typesafe Stack 2.0 as well as the overall integrated stack?

Yes, we've accumulated a collection of books here: http://typesafe.com/resources/books We're proud that several of these books are authored by Typesafe employees, including Martin Odersky, Josh Suereth, Heiko Seeberger, and Philipp Haller.

Question: What is the licensing for Typesafe Stack 2.0 and is it consistent across the individual products and the overall stack?

The Typesafe Stack is 100% open source. It's complemented by the commercial Typesafe Subscription, which adds support, maintenance, and tools including the new Typesafe Console. The Typesafe Console is available exclusively to Typesafe Subscription customers.

Question: What potential enhancements are planned for Typesafe Stack 2.0?

Upcoming releases of the Typesafe Stack will include additional clustering features and enhanced support for building applications that adapt to elastic cloud environments.

Screen Images

I was provided with some images that I have posted next. Note that these display the Typesafe Console, which is only available via the Typesafe Subscription option.

My Own Thoughts and Observations

Typesafe Stack 2.0 appears to offer developers several advantages, one of which is the ability to learn the Scala language, the Play framework, and the Akka toolkit all while solving difficult problems associated with modern software development. The press release alludes to these problems in the sentence, "Typesafe provides the most scalable software platform designed for the computing architectures of the future -- multicore, parallel and cloud applications."

Typesafe's licensing model is a familiar one with significant product (the Typesafe Stack 2.0) available via an open source license and add-on tools available for a commercial subscription. The advantage of this is that a developer can "play" (no pun intended) with Typesafe Stack 2.0 and then later move to Typesafe Subscription as needed and desired. It has been my experience that, generally speaking, it is an advantage to have a large corporate sponsor of an open source product I am using. Corporate sponsorship tends to mean dedicated resources invested in improving and maintaining the product. Examples include the Spring Framework and Groovy (SpringSource), NetBeans and GlassFish (Sun/Oracle), Eclipse (IBM), etc. Typesafe's optional commercial support for Typesafe Stack 2.0 is potentially useful for customers, but Typesafe's apparent commitment to the product's development and maintenance is highly valuable as well.

Specific licensing information for the products of Typesafe Stack 2.0 can be found at the Typesafe Licenses page. As of this writing, this page reports that "Scala and the Scala IDE for Eclipse are available under the Scala License", Play and Akka are licensed with the Apache License, Version 2.0, and "Simple Build Tool (sbt) is available under the BSD license."

Conclusion

The press release, the answers to my questions above, and the plethora of resources available on the Typesafe site all imply a highly beneficial product. I am not in any way affiliated with Typesafe and I have not yet tried Typesafe Stack 2.0 out for myself, but it looks very promising. If nothing else, playing with it and possibly applying it to real problems might be one of the best ways to learn Scala, Play, and Akka, but one can always fall back to Java when using it if necessary.

Late February 2012 Software Development Links of Interest

This post summarizes and provides links to some online resources related to software development that have recently captured my attention. Topics include Linux, DevOps, dynamic typing versus static typing, abstraction versus simplicity, and cloud computing.

Linux

Several posts on Linux have recently captured my interest. The post 10 free Linux e-books provides a list of ten freely available Linux books. Each book is featured with an image of its cover along with a brief description and a link to the electronic version of the book. Titles include Advanced Linux Programming (2001), Java Application Development on Linux (2005), and Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition (2000). One of the free referenced electronic Linux titles is The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction, a book that receives rave reviews from Peter N. M. Hansteen in yesterday's post The Linux Command Line Is A Very Appealing Story. The Linux Command Line has tremendous breadth, covering topics ranging from use of vi, to shell scripting to basic Linux commands. Speaking of Linux commands, the post Linux Command Line Tips that Every Linux User Should Know provides an interesting summary of Linux command-line commands.

DevOps

I remain uncommitted to the long-term value of the DevOps movement, but have certainly not made up my mind for good yet and am waiting it out to see if more substance comes from it. For example, even though I've tangentially touched on DevOps before, I still have not made a "Label" for it to mark my blog posts that cover the topic. Edward Capriolo's post DevOps has no chance is not on the fence about the subject. The post concludes with a point that I think's worth considering: "It is a left brain right brain thing. The qualities that make a good dev usually make a terrible ops person and vice versa. The world is ok that way."

Dynamic Typing

As software developers, we cannot seem to help ourselves and must continue the debate about whether static or dynamic typing is best. I've found advantages to both (that most realistic and fair developers will acknowledge), so it truly is a case of what best fits the particular task at hand as well as the task's surrounding development environment. As a general rule of thumb, I prefer dynamic typing for small efforts, especially scripting, but begin favoring static typing as a program gets larger and more people are involved. It sounds bad, but in essence I prefer static typing when I cannot trust "the other person" (which may be myself on a large enough code base). In Why I don’t like Dynamic Typing, John Mount states, "I find the pain of having to type or read through extra declarations is small (especially if you know how to copy-paste or use a modern IDE). And certainly much smaller than the pain of the dynamic language driven anti-patterns of: lurking bugs, harder debugging and more difficult maintenance. ... Initial coding is not the only phase of the software lifecycle." Mount appropriately recognizes that "there is, of course, no prior reason anybody should immediately care if I do or do not like dynamic typing," but offers some valid arguments for static typing (just as Martin Fowler has offered for dynamic typing). The reddit/programming comments/responses are a reminder that if you want a blog post to get attention, write about static typing versus dynamic typing.

Too Much Abstraction

Several experienced colleagues and I have been discussion off and on over recent months the seeming over-abstraction we've seen in certain frameworks and in code bases we've been exposed to. In the post Peak Abstraction, Tom Hammersley hits on this topic. Hammersley has done a nice job of articulating how this is especially likely to happen with a developer who is no longer new, but has not yet learned some hard lessons from more experience: "There is a common pattern. It typically occurs after 3-4 years of professional practice. A programmer is growing in his confidence. He begins to tackle more complex, challenging problems. And, he reflects those problems with complex, challenging data structures. He has not yet learnt the fine art of simplicity." Simplicity is often recognized as a desirable virtue in software development, but it is all too easy to become enamored with excessive abstraction, especially when one sees abstraction replied layer upon layer frequently in so many other aspects of software.

Anticipating Cloud Failures

In my summary of 2012 software development developments, I talked about the continuing prevalence of cloud computing in software development literature and also highlighted cloud failures in 2011 in the "honorable mention" list. The post New Year, New Security Breach; Three Potential Cloud Provider ‘Screw Ups’ to Watch cites 3 big screw-ups you can expect from cloud providers in 2012, which lists three expected cloud provider blunders in 2012: security, migration cost, and performance. The "New Year, New Security Breach" post also provides an interesting "Security Breach Timeline" for 2011.

Conclusion

There is a lot going on in the world of software development and the posts referenced above provide a very small taste of what's going on out there in the blogosphere.

JavaOne 2011: Why Java Is An Ideal Platform for Devops Automation

Wednesday morning is the only morning of the four main technical days of JavaOne 2011 that does not begin with a keynote presentation. I began the day by attending Michael Neale's "Java/JVM - an Ideal Platform for DevOps Automation" (25146) in Hilton Imperial Ballroom B. Neale provided a brief definition of devops as development + operations/deployment. He acknowledged the concern that many of us have that this is just another movement to sell books and consulting. He even acknowledged that in some areas there is some degree of truth to that. The presentation only had about twenty people in attendance and I think that while some of that is due to the "early" hour on a day without a keynote to drag people out at 8:30 am, it is probably even more so due to the fact that many in the Java community are still skeptical of the devops movement.

One of Neale's slides stated, "Developers do/help with deployment - realtime feedback, adjustment, adaptation." Neale said that he likes to think of this as two separate roles conceptually even though there may be cases where a single person is both the developer and the deployer. Neale provided a brief history of deployment including virtualization and up to today's cloud phenomenon. He described "layers" of cloud: infrastructure, platform, and software. His slide stated, "In all cases provision is decoupled from plugging in hardware." Another slide said cloud is "infrastructure as code" and is "aggressive automation."

Neale introduced jclouds. The open source (Apache 2.0 license) jclouds runs on the JVM, is "battle hardened," and supports numerous providers and their APIs. Neale added that jclouds "can reduce runtime dependencies on your servers" and talked about provisioning the inside of the server from the outside. He stated, "Automation is no longer a script run as needed, but a core part of application operation."

Neale talked about BlobStore and ComputeService as generic binary storage and generic service provisioning respectively as "cross cloud API abstractions." Neale referenced Adrian Cole's JavaOne 2011 presentation for more details on BlobStore. His slide stated that BlobStore is "proven to be very, very reliable and scalable." There are multiple providers of the BlobStore and Neale's slide concludes, "BlobStore's are all very similar - no reason to not use a cross cloud API for binary objects." There are two levels of ComputeService: high for common denominator/generic API and low for type-safe cloud specific APIs.

Neale showed a slide on "jclouds api" that listed several API capabilities that are "all cross-platform." He described some more definitions: the "image" is a pre-cooked virtual machine image and the "template" is an image plus a virtual hardware configuration that is "ready to go." A "run script" is "something to run immediately after bootup" and "location" is the "physical details of where cloud is."

Neale stated that Java is not the only language with jclouds support and added that Clojure has first-class support in jclouds. He also stated that Scala works fine "out of the box" with jclouds, though he'd like to see Scala get an idiomatic API.

In a portion of the presentation on cloud-specific APIs, Neale talked about using Amazon EC2. He showed specific examples using EC2. He talked about use of JSON in the API.

Neale mentioned supplemental tools such as Puppet and Chef for recipes and cookbooks for managing scripts.

Neale contrasted "image preparation" against "post boot preparation" and outlined the advantages and disadvantages of each after discussing each approach's characteristics. He stated that "post boot preparation" is "easier to automate," but can have some performance penalties. I recommend looking at his five or slides carefully if trying to decide which approach to use.

Neale's slide "Cloud vs Traditional" had some interesting points. One point he made in this slide is that "cloud servers typically are shorter lived." He also cautioned in the slide, "Do NOT expect cloud hosting to behave traditionally. Have spare capacity, roll in new images often.

Neale did have a slide on "Cloud API peril." I always appreciate a speaker explicitly acknowledging issues, limitations, and problems with whatever they are talking about in the presentation. Neale showed more pragmatism when he said "No one size fits all" and even recommended "be pragmatic." Neale acknowledged that the "infrastructure as code" concept may seem "too hard." He said this is "where Platforms (PaaS) come in." He likes this because it "lets someone else do it" and "lets someone else wear the pager."

Neale's presentation led me to google for more details on the relationship between devops and the cloud and that search quickly led to Ben Rockwood's interesting Three Aspects of DevOps: What’s in a word and Matt Zimmerman's insightful DevOps and Cloud. Neale's focus on cloud computing was welcome because it provided something "concrete" to a discussion on devops. It is helpful to see an "concrete instantiation" of the devops concept. Neale delivered a fast-paced presentation that provided a nice start to the day. Although his quick pace made it difficult to write a blog post on what he was saying, it kept the energy level high and kept the audience engaged.

Recent Posts of Significant Interest (Java Security, XML, Cloud Computing)

I maintain a list of topics that I would like to blog on sometime in the future. This list continues to grow as I cannot blog quickly enough to keep up with the ideas. In some cases, I simply cannot write the full blog post I'd like in response to a really good blog post and, when enough of them are gathered up, I publish a post like this one that covers multiple blog posts at the same time. In this post, I reference recent online posts that I have really enjoyed on topics such as Java security issues, Javadoc, XML, and cloud computing.


JavaDoc: The unloved child. A pragmatic approach.

One of the things I think it done better in Java than in just about any other language I have used is documentation via Javadoc. I frequently use Javadoc-generated documentation for the Java SE, for the Java EE, and for other products in the Java ecosystem such as JFreeChart and Groovy (which has three!: GDK, Javadoc for Java Classes, and Groovydoc for Groovy and Java Classes). I find using others' Javadoc to generally make it easier to use their APIs (assuming correct documentation!) and I like the ability to have ready access to API documentation online and in my favorite IDE. I also enjoy being able to document how to use my APIs, packages, and classes, in package descriptions. This allows the clients of my APIs to see examples of how to use my API and nicely includes the documentation in the same area/file as the source code itself. In the post JavaDoc: The unloved child. A pragmatic approach., Markus Eisele concisely describes why Javadoc is useful and suggests some tips for making writing and maintaining of Javadoc comments more effective.


XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill babies

We software developers (as a whole) seem to be prone to violent swings between positions on things. Derek Thurn's post XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill babies does a nice job of pointing out how this happened with XML (loved and revered for a while and now not discussed in polite company). As with most of these extreme shifts, neither extreme was appropriate. XML was overhyped for a while and was used in many unnatural ways, but now developers in general (if the blogosphere is at all indicative) seem to wish to avoid XML without regard to the problem. I believe the appropriate position is somewhere in between. Thurn's post briefly discusses situations where alternatives like JSON and YAML are preferable to XML and the outlines two situations where he believes XML is appropriate (and I agree). I also like that Thurn states "XPath turned out to be a godsend" (something I have found as well in my work with XQuery and other things areas where XPath support is useful). It's also very difficult to argue with Thurn's use of SOAP as an example of "terrible things" people have done with XML.


10 Reasons to Say “No” to Cloud Computing?

I like posts that challenge the Lemming Effect. The previously discussed XML post challenges the potential lemming behavior of avoiding XML regardless of whether the situation warrants it or not and is an example of bucking the lemmings' general direction avoiding something (negative reaction). On the other side, it can be just as useful to avoid thoughtless following of lemmings to adopt something (positive reaction). I like 10 Reasons to Say “No” to Cloud Computing? because the author starts out with this:

I have been writing about the benefits of migrating to the Cloud in previous articles but it is also important to highlight in which circumstances the Cloud Computing route may not be the appropriate one.

When I first read this paragraph, I was afraid this post was going to be another one of those that would have ten reasons such as "you want to do things the hard way" and "you like a good challenge." Fortunately, this post turned out to be what was really advertised. The ten reasons are good ones to think about and I also appreciate the author's pointing out that "Cloud Computing is NOT an all-or-nothing decision." No tool or methodology can be all things to all people all the time and I suspect anyone who claims their favorite to do just that. It is much more useful to read from an evangelist of an approach about where that approach fits or does not fit and this post fits into that more useful category. Some people think cloud computing is not a good idea, but it (or portions of it) can be useful when applied correctly in the appropriate situations.


Java Security

Two recent articles of interest related to Java security are RSA: Java is the Most Vulnerable Browser Plug-in and Google extensions could aid Java security.

In "RSA: Java is the Most Vulnerable Browser Plug-in," Sean Michael Kerner reports that Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek stated that 42% of monitored web users had "vulnerable out-of-date" Java plug-ins and that this plug-in was the most frequently out-of-date and vulnerable of those measured. Other plug-ins that were vulnerable due to being frequently out of date include Adobe Reader, Apple QuickTime, and Adobe Flash. As I read this, the ranking is not of how vulnerable one plug-in is as compared to another, but how vulnerable they are because they are out-of-date. Kerner also points out that Cisco had reported that Java vulnerabilities are now more exploited than those in Adobe Acrobat and Reader.

Joab Jackson writes that Google Contracts (Contracts for Java or cofoja), which is often advertised as and thought of as an approach for making it easier to appropriately use methods (above and beyond what the previously mentioned Javadoc provides), can also help make Java code more secure. He states that this project based off of Modern Jass can provide some of the same security benefits to Java that Eiffel developers claim are inherent in Eiffel's support for Design by Contract (DbC).


Conclusion

There are far too many interesting and insightful posts about software development to keep up with all of them. In this post, I've tried to summarize and publicize some recent posts that I believe are worth a look if you have not read them already.