During a EclipseCon 2013 session March 26 in Boston, Sinha cited some pretty staggering statistics. Among them was one he attributes to IBM, which says up to 90% of a developer’s productive time is spent trying to understand code.

Devoting even half your time unraveling a mess of code can be daunting, admitted Sinha, but that doesn’t mean developers should try to reinvent the wheel. Rewriting code can be costly and time consuming. Instead, he offered some pragmatic advice that starts with building architectural maps. It’s not uncommon for team members to have different pictures of a project’s main components.

“Even if you have 100 developers, get the team leads into the same room,” Sinha suggested. Armed with old-fashioned paper, the participants should document the top components and connections between the components. “I’m essentially saying; try to get them to merge their ideas.”

This exercise helps make sure everyone is on the same page. “The first time we did it we split the things we agreed upon,” said Sinha. “We had a whole list of things we needed to think about the next time. One hour and we had that.”

Writing on a whiteboard may also prove beneficial in helping people understand a system. Sinha noted how people in his organization began to plan around what they saw on the board.

With everything clearly documented, the team will have a more central view and will have an easier time obtaining necessary information down the road. “If you are writing any new code, you are not putting it in the wrong place,” said Sinha.

While untangling the web of code implemented by someone else may seem like a thankless task, it’s important to remember what you are doing can be extremely difficult. Setting aside time on a regular basis, whether it be at the personal or team level, for fixing is also important.

Sinha offered another commonsense tip: celebrate your successes. Even the smallest victories are meaningful as they can be used as stepping stones towards long-term goals.

Issues confronting the JavaOne throng are many. The community is looking for Java updates that were held off going back to the tumult that ensued as Java originator Sun Microsystems  was courted by IBM and eventually acquired by database giant Oracle. Java on the server is under some stress, as mobile computing moves to the fore, pushing JavaScript, Java’s faux language cousin, higher in the pecking order.  That has led some to question the future of Java.

Meanwhile, a host of new languages are being fielded on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) platform, giving developers much to digest. Finally, OSGi  has edged into production as a means for modular Java app making – but it is challenged, some would say, by Jigsaw, a newer modularization scheme that apparently will not make the next Java rev. One thing is clear: Oracle is now firmly established as chief Java overseer.

For Java consultant, trainer and JavaOne presenter Venkat Subramaniam,  founder of Agile Developer, Inc.,  JavaOne is a chance to reach developers who need new ways to be effective on the JVM platform. Among key concerns he cites are concurrency. New multicore chips, he says require new programmatic ways of working with Java, whether the target platforms are conventional or new cloud varieties.

On multicore chips, [software] multithreads are on steroids, Subramaniam said. That brings out problems in Java coding that have not been uncovered in familiar single-core implementations. Multicore chips bring multiple levels of caches, he added.  “Programs that pretend to work correctly get broken. This is not a problem we invited,” he said.

For those worried about Java’s future, Subramaniam has relief. “It will continue. It is powerful. But the way we use it is going to change in the future,” he said.

How will it change?  Subramanian suggests Scala, Groovy and JRuby will appear on the JVM with greater frequency to help deal with a new architecture paradigm that places Web applications in juxtaposition to enterprise apps.

As has been seen in  other recent JavaOne events, JVM and Java as a platform are becoming as important as – or more important than – Java, the language.

“I think Java is very strong and healthy but you have to look at all the different languages that are available,” said Kirk Knoernschild, software developer. He points to Groovy, Scala and Clojure, as well as other languages as examples of the new “Java platform” landscape.

“You really need to focus more on the separation of Java as a runtime platform. More and more, we will see organizations using the right language on top of the platform,” said Knoernschild, author of “Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples Using OSGi” [Prentice Hall, 2012]. “This language could be Java. It could be Groovy. It could be Grails.”

Emerging languages on the JVM are covered in various sessions at JavaOne. Under consideration will be improvements in the JDK, and support for dynamically typed languages on the JVM.  A conference track covers some of the most popular dynamic languages  now appearing on the JVM, such as Groovy, JavaScript, JRuby, Kotlin, and Scala.

In fact, the JavaOne event offers over 500 wide-ranging sessions. Some notable choices include “Rapid Robot Programming,” “Building Mobile Apps with HTML5 and Java,” “Going Real-Time: How to Build a Streaming API,” and “How RESTful is Your REST?”

Among the nearly 540 speakers at this year’s JavaOne are the so-called “Java Champions,” a selection of community-nominated technology leaders who will run a series of technical talks and community-building activities at the conference.

Stephen Colebourne, project lead at Joda.org, is one member of that group. His talk, “From Instants to Eras, the Future of Time in Java,” will look ahead to the inclusion of an easy-to-use, expressive API for times and dates in Java SE 8. “Java Champion” Bruno Souza will talk about “101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters.” He will lead a community brainstorming session about how developer participation can influence the development of Java technologies. -Stephanie Mann and Jack Vaughan

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With standard Java and standard Java servers, fairly strict and familiar three-tier architecture came about. The question to ask now is “Will it last forever?” Like so many things, the fundamental tiers of computing do come up for reconsideration once and a while.

These breezes have been blowing subtly since people cast about for lighter versions of Enterprise Java Beans. More recently, Node.js has arisen as a JavaScript alternative to Java on the server side. Increasingly, the client is the object of interest.

Node.js and other browser-influenced technologies seem to encourage software architects to cast skyward their monolithic three-tier components. As these flying components drift down to earth, they may not settle back up in the same alignment. The sudden near-hegemony of mobile clients is pushing things ahead quickly.  A variety of new architectures are brewing.

In some ways, there seems a growing reaction to the rule of Java and the server. That view emerges from a look at a reporters’ notebook. It’s not going away, but as described in an interview with James Strachan, now senior software consultant with JBoss: “The server side is becoming thinner and thinner.” When SearchSOA.com and TheServerSide.com spoke with Strachan earlier this year at the CamelOne event, the topic of Node.JS was on the docket, but Strachan was expansive.

He said, looking forward:

The server side might just be Amazon Simple DB or Mongo DB or something; there might not be much of a three-tier architecture anymore.

Meanwhile, with flair, he continued:

….the client side is becoming bigger and more and more complex; it’s real-time now, everyone’s doing Ajax, real-time updates, and people are doing lots of single-page applications – which is when one Web page starts up and the entire app is in there. There are lots of models, containers, relationships and persistence and “yada-yada.”

Strachan notes this is highly driven by mobile applications:

In many ways the browsers won. Almost every mobile platform has Web capabilities inside it – Android, iPhone, iOS all have Web browsers and so forth. So the Web has kind of won … most browsers use JavaScript and HTML 5. Silverlight’s dead, Flash is kind of dying … the browser is really where it’s at …  with HTML and JavaScript.

Are the new approaches overblown? Is real change far off? Do you see a shift in emphasis to the client? If so, do you think services or SOA have had a hand in breaking down the status quo? -Jack Vaughan

@searchsoa

There are some clouds on the horizon, as could be expected for a language and architecture that has been atop the heap of enterprise middleware for so many years. Writes Hilwa: “Java is under pressure from competing developer ecosystems, including the aggressively managed Microsoft platform and ecosystem and the broader Web ecosystem with its diverse technologies and lightweight scripting languages and frameworks.”

While looming lightweight languages, frameworks and runtimes do portend a new state of Java , Java’s ability to evolve to absorb new technologies has indeed proved remarkable to date. There is reason to believe there is still more to come.

Rob Terpilowski, lead Java developer, Lynden, Inc., explained how he and his team used Apache MQ messaging middleware and other open source messaging software to replace homegrown tracking software. He said the original tracking software was built to overcome immediate needs without consideration for later modernization or integration requirements. Terpilowski described the project in a session titled “Building a reliable messaging system for an unreliable (and diverse) world” that took place as part of the CamelOne conference last month in Boston.

The challenge was to combine disparate systems including a decades-old pre-relational database platform, Solaris 10, Glassfish application servers, both graphical and green-screen user interfaces and barcode scanners that are embedded devices running on Windows CE.

One of the major reasons the old homegrown system needed to be replaced, according to Terpilowski, was that it couldn’t scale up to meet the shipping company’s growing needs. The polling system that was in place ran into issues with growing database load and with endpoints getting overwhelmed with irrelevant data. Terpilowski and his team were able to add messaging via Active MQ and an additional MQ table that the existing system would write to, keeping the inflow of data fairly consistent. But the flow of data back out to the endpoints went from a constant pull of large amounts of data to a much more targeted push of relevant data via Active MQ and location-based topics.

There were also challenges associated with intermittent Wi-Fi connections at storage and freight routing facilities where workers with barcode scanners would constantly move in and out of thick-walled storage containers, breaking the connection. Early efforts at overcoming the connectivity issues centered on a .NET failover system on the devices themselves, but that failover system was deemed non-optimal.

Eventually the team decided on rolling its own proxy server. The main purpose of the proxy server was to maintain connections on behalf of the endpoints as they appeared and disappeared, and then close out the connection properly when it was appropriate. With the messaging proxy in place to handle connectivity issues, Terpilowski’s new system was able to monitor proxy related statistics, summarize client information and reset a client’s connection to the system when necessary.

Stay tuned for more on embedded middleware issues. Let us know about your experience with open source messaging software.

Almost two years ago, Oracle launched its patent and copyright suit against Google, claiming the search giant illegally grabbed Java intellectual property when it created its Android mobile device software around Java. The case now faces a 12-member jury that will decide if Google violated Java programming copyrights that have been brought up by Oracle.  The first week of testimony showed that APIs specifically, like software techniques generally, are complicated – and contentious.

Forgoing a Java license saved vendors of Android Smartphones millions of dollars, but that could change if Oracle prevails in court. Oracle became steward of the Java standard when it purchased Java-originator Sun Microsystems in 2009.

Both Oracle and Google have been in front of a judge since Monday and will continue to do so for a projected 10 weeks. Negotiations preceded the trial, but ended with the two companies indicating that they were not close to any agreement. Google was willing to pay up to a few million dollars while Oracle demanded hundreds of millions. Early estimates put Oracle’s claims at over $6 billion, but, as parts of Oracle’s case were pared down running up to trial, estimates of Oracle’s potential takes have slid down under $1 billion.

Prior to the trial, Oracle’s contentions seemed to focus on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that hosts the Java language at run time. In the first week, the trial has focused on Java APIs. While there is some consensus that a computer language such as Java cannot be patented, Oracle contends that specific APIs using a language can be copyrighted.

Tech’s biggest “Larries” – Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page – testified in the first week of the trial, along with Mark Reinhold, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect, and Timothy Lindholm, Google engineer, and others. Both Reinhold and Lindolm were formerly with Sun.

According to Oracle-Google trial documents, Google is asserting that “computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs.” Google says that “the Court should hold that the structure, selection and organization of the APIs are un-copyrightable.”

In its own filing, Oracle maintains that the Java APIs in question required effort and time to build, and that they do come under copyright protection. The company’s latest statement states, “Copyright protection of a computer language is also consistent with the Copyright Act’s statutory purpose to ‘promote the creation and publication of free expression’ by rewarding authors.”

Java’s creation came somewhat before the advent of a popular open-source software movement. In its last days, Sun Microsystems tinkered with open source strategies for Java. An OpenJDK was embraced as part of that effort. In turn, Google used OpenJDK as part of its effort to create the Android platform for mobile applications.

The nature of APIs proved to be difficult to describe as the first week of the trial unfolded, as Oracle’s Reinhold sought to explain what has become a lynchpin of modern application integration. In an earlier computer era, APIs were usually proprietary, shared in the form of voluminous documentation, and shared often only as part of big, expensive corporate licensing deals. This has changed somewhat of late as Web giants like Twitter and Facebook have created “public APIs” that require no license.

Reached for comment via e-mail, software patent critic and software industry veteran Lou Mazzucchelli said, “Software patents should be abolished. Others are starting to wake up to this.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “if there is a clear copyright violation, that is a slightly different story.”

It is early in the trial and the outcome is uncertain, Mazzucchelli concludes. “Not much in this case seems to be clear, so far,” he says. – Ryan Punzalan and Jack Vaughan

What do you think? Are the people who pay for Java licenses being foolish?

This year, a fair consensus held that Oracle might be a little better than Sun Microsystems at moving Java along, Gosling was sited around the show periphery, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison continued to sell hardware and again took pot shots at Mark Benioff’s Salesforce.com cloud.

At the event, Oracle tried to push JavaFX forward, while moving on the HTML5 front as well. It discussed closure support for J EE 8 and Project Jigsaw, a new form of module system standardization.  Meanwhile, Glassfish was demoed with cloud deployment features.

But Oracle’s big cloud push may take the form of cloud management software such as its new Enterprise Cloud Manager. Among other things, this software will go in, study your present systems, and then come up with an architecture you can use to take your applications to the cloud. The end result still seems to include a healthy helping of the Oracle SQL RDB – this despite the company’s roll-out of some alternative Hadoop and NoSQL support at the conference.  As with a lot of Oracle software these days, the NoSQL software rides some fairly high-end Oracle hardware.

When seeking comparisons to the Oracle cloud, Oracle leader Ellison ignored most alternative clouds, to focus on Salesforce.com. He inferred that Salesforce.com offered a false cloud.”Beware false clouds,” he advised. ”True cloud? False cloud? You decide.” This said in the wake of SalesForce.com leader Marc Benioff’s on-again/off-again attempts to stage an alternative keynote near Oracle Open World.

It is true that Salesforce.com’s cloud is largely proprietary. And, Oracle’s cloud as described has a healthy helping of Java and J EE middleware. But cloud architectures are such that it is difficult to judge how open, interoperable and portable a given cloud architecture is – at least at this stage. 

Truth be told, Ellison’s and Benioff’s cloudy bickering looked especially silly as word emerged that personal computer and smart phone pioneer Steve Jobs had died.

We probably don’t have much to add to the parade of Jobs’ tributes that followed his passing, but let’s say this: He worked tirelessly to enhance people’s abilities and experiences using computers, broadening technology’s use far beyond the IT glass house that existed when he started out.

Even his failures fascinated. At NeXT Computer, Jobs went full-tilt forward on object computing. His period at NeXT – the period in exile from Apple – was something of a low-point for him, but out of it came a highly modular operating system that has subsequently enabled Apple to support a variety of hardware formats. He expected object computing to improve developer productivity. What do you think? Let us know. – Jack Vaughan

Exceptions to the ”.NET-mainly” trend for Azure have emerged. Earlier this year, interoperability specialist JNBridge released JNBridge Pro 6.0 with support for cross platform cloud implementations that span the .NET and Java languages. This week, Java in-memory data grid pioneer GigaSpaces announced tools that take complex Java application and integration software as-is and places it on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

Known as Cloudify for Azure, the software prepares applications by providing a Groovy-based domain-specific language for bundling deployment scripts, as well as basic out-of-the-box patterns for launching Java-on-the-cloud elements that can include the Apache server, Cassandra distributed database, the Spring framework, the XAP in memory data grid and others.

The developer can work in a familiar Java environment, which distinguishes Cloudify for Azure from first-generation clouds that required the development team to adopt the cloud provider’s language of choice. That can be a difficult aspect of what has come to be known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

”People get the direction to move to the cloud. Then they find out it can be much harder than they thought,” said Paul Burns, Analyst, Neovise. ”If they could move their applications ‘as-is,’ it is not that hard after all.””There has been evolution in thinking about the cloud platform as a service over the last year,” said Burns. ”That is why I see GigaSpaces [for Azure] as interesting. It allows developers to keep doing what they have been doing. Cloudify for Azure helps them move those apps out to the cloud.” Meanwhile, said Burns, the software takes advantage of the Azure’s elasticity, or auto-scaling qualities.

GigaSpaces worked with the Azure platform to ensure Java developers going ‘cloudward’ would have easier deployment, too. They ”would not have to implement [for example] scalability or high-availability on their own,” said Uri Cohen, VP of Product Management, GigaSpaces.

”It is important to say that Azure was built to run .NET,” said Cohen. “If you want something that is not .NET-based, you have to do the configuration, dynamic scaling, restart of failed components and [similar tasks] yourself.” 

He said the new tools also provide better management of applications once they are up and running, adding that Cloudify for Azure was now in private beta, with a public beta due at the end of this month, and general availability anticipated by the end of the year.

GigaSpaces has evolved quite a bit since its first days. The evolution has led pretty directly to clustered cloud computing architecture.
 
”At first the company primarily focused on data caching,” said Massimo Pazzini, Analyst, Gartner. ”But it kept layering capabilities on the platform until, fundamentally, it became an application server – a container for building application logic and deploying this on a distributed grid of servers sharing the state of the application to the memory data grid.”
 
”Given that architecture, it was very natural for them to move into the cloud, which is a big, huge cluster,” he said.
 
The work with Azure is important to both GigaSpaces and Microsoft, Gartner’s Pazzini added. Much of the workload of future clouds will run on Java. And a cloud provider, be it Microsoft or Acme, has to sell CPU cycles.
 
“Microsoft has a huge infrastructure in place for Azure, and their problem is to sell the infrastructure as much as possible. They want to attract as much workload as possible,” he said.

Most pointedly, WebSphere V8 moves into the realm of J EE6, bringing to market updates to enterprise Java that are intended to bring more flexible, lighter-weight implementations. Dependency Injection, widely used in the wake of the Spring framework’s success, is an important addition to the enterprise Java standard.

”We are trying to bake things people are using into a spec they can use – that is reflected in the ‘EE6′ portions [of the new product] as well as our OSGi support,” said Don Boulia, director for Private Cloud and Application Infrastructure, IBM.

OSGi can empower lighter implementations, he indicated, because of its inherent modularity.

”OSGi is a modularity thing. Starting up just the parts of the server that you need to use [as needed] is what you want. OSGi’s separation gives efficiency,” said Boulia.

The WebSphere 8 implementation of OSGi is meant to provide development teams the ability to chunk up application modules. It is intended to do so while avoiding possible OSGi pitfalls. WebSphere 8 feature packs are focused on providing you a well worn path through OSGi and applications,” according to Boulia.

SpringSource’s Rod Johnson, whose Spring Framework rose to prominence as a kinder and gentler way to do Java ventured into this battle earlier this year when he admitted to OSGi’s complexity. As SpringSource’s OSGi dm Server is one of the poster children for OSGi success to this point, Johnson found he had to do some clarifying. The server is now part of the Eclipse Foundation portfolio. Here, per TheServerSide.com is Rod Johnson’s take on OSGi:

(a) OSGi is a great solution for complex applications with stringent modularity requirements;

(b) typical business applications (from which we make the bulk of our revenue) don’t have such requirements;

(c) our efforts to reduce the complexity of writing server-side OSGi applications were promising, but the road to simplification was longer and less certain than we’d hoped. Thus continuing down that road at the Eclipse Foundation, in partnership with other companies and individuals, was a natural move.