We all know development and operations often act like silos, with "Just throw it over the wall!" being the battle cry. Many organizations unwittingly contribute to gaps between teams, with management by (competing) objectives; a clash of Agile practices vs. more conservative approaches; and teams using different sets of tools, such as Nginx, OpenEJB, and Windows on developers' machines and Apache, Glassfish, and Linux on production machines. At best, you've got sub-optimal collaboration, at worst, you've got the Hatfields and the McCoys. The book DevOps for Developers helps bridge the gap between development and operations by aligning incentives and sharing approaches for processes and tools. It introduces DevOps as a modern way of bringing development and operations together. It also means to broaden the usage of Agile practices to operations to foster collaboration and streamline the entire software delivery process in a holistic way. Some single aspects of DevOps may not be new, for example, you may have used the tool Puppet for years already, but with a new mindset ("my job is not just to code, it's to serve the customer in the best way possible") and a complete set of recipes, you'll be well on your way to success. DevOps for Developers also by provides real-world use cases (e.g., how to use Kanban or how to release software). It provides a way to be successful in the real development/operations world. DevOps for Developers is written my Michael Hutterman, Java Champion, and founder of the Cologne Java User Group. "With DevOps for Developers, developers can learn to apply patterns to improve collaboration between development and operations as well as recipes for processes and tools to streamline the delivery process," Hutterman explains.

The Java Champions have expanded in October, 2012, adding (at least) four new members: Agnes Crepet (France), Yara Senger (Brazil), Martijn Verburg (UK), and Lars Vogel (Germany). You may have heard of some of these people, depending where you live and your level of involvement in Java in your region and globally. I present here a brief introduction to each new Java Champion. Agnes Crepet has been using Java since 1999, and is a Java EE Architect for a French pharmaceuticals company. She also founded Ninja Squad, a company dedicated software craftsmanship. She leads both the Lyon JUG and Duchess France Yara Senger is President of SouJava and co-founder and director of GlobalCode, the largest Brazilian training company. Martijn Verburg is co-leader of the London Java Community, CTO of the startup JClarity, a speaker (aka "The Diaboloical Developer"), and active advocate/creator in the Adopt-a-JSR and AdoptOpenJDK efforts. Lars Vogel is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. Lars is Committer in the Eclipse project and received in 2010 the "Eclipse Top Contributor Award" and 2012 the "Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award". Java Champions are leaders. More importantly, they are teachers -- all of us can learn so much from their experiences. At the same time, among the Java Champions I know personally... Almost universally, they'll tell us that they have learned, and continue to learn, from everyone else in the Java community. You can follow Agnes Crepet @agnes_crepet, Yara Senger @yarasenger, Martijn Verburg @kariana, and Lars Vogel @vogella on Twitter. From there, you can find everything you'd like to know about their current endeavors. I myself am always curious about what leaders in my field find interesting! Java.net Weblogs Since my last blog post, there have been some new java.net blogs: John Ferguson Smart, Improve Your Java Code, Functional-Style - NOW!; and Kirk Pepperdine, Memory Leak in Eclipse 4.2????. Articles Our latest Java.net article from Manning Publications is Do You Want to Get This Message? by Mark Fisher, Jonas Partner, Marius Bogoevici, and Iwein Fuld, authors of the Manning book Spring Integration in Action. Poll Our current Java.net poll asks Would you use a cloud platform to host a new start-up today? Voting will be open until Friday, November 2. Spotlights Our latest Java.net Spotlight is Heather Van Cura's Meet the EC Candidates Recording and Materials: Yesterday the JCP hosted a Meet the EC Candidates call for Java Community members. The recording and materials are now available on the JCP multimedia page. (Audio only file.) All nominee information is available on JCP.org. The 2012 EC Election ballot will remain open until 29 October at midnight PDT... Java News Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java News section: Micha Kops: HTML5 Server Send Events using Node.js or Jetty; James Gosling: JavaFX Ensemble; and Geertjan Wielenga: Play Framework Plugin for NetBeans IDE. Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. -- Kevin Farnham (@kevin_farnham) AttachmentSize agnes_crepet_sml.jpg27.59 KB LarsVogelArticle8_sml.png32.84 KB

HTML5 is more than a few years old and no longer a curiousity. Web pages that used to simply emulate a piece of paper are now expected to do something snazzy to justify their existence. Thanks to HTML5, along with innovations in JavaScript and CSS, interactive logic is a standard strategy for Web programming, and full-fledged Web apps are everywhere. All it takes is a few extra tags to rewrite the world's software as a Web page.

IntroductionSome of you may have already seen our first Spring video, but if not, let me give you a little bit of background. DZone HQ is the home of a local meetup for Java, Groovy, and Grails developers. The purpose for the meetup is to be discussion based; a place for people to learn, share, and teach. We keep things informal but informative. Preview Text: ...

The latest release of ADF Mobile comes with the intriguing ability to embed JVMs inside of cross-platform native mobile apps (including iOS), utilising PhoneGap to serve up Java-powered embedded web pages. It can even access native device services such as the camera, contacts and notifications. Could Oracle have somehow snuck Java onto Apple’s notoriously closed ecosystem? In a market increasingly composed of post-PC devices, Java is struggling to match the success it found on traditional desktops. An iPhone JVM was proposed as early as 2008, before developers realised that app store reviewers had a very low tolerance for apps coded in anything but Objective-C (although this policy has been relaxed somewhat since). Meanwhile on Android, Google’s attempts to sidestep Sun/Oracle’s licensing restrictions by using Java syntax without running actual Java have led to endless lawsuits, and even the upcoming Windows 8 will not run Java apps in the new ‘Metro’ environment. In this bleak context, bringing “cross platform Java dev to mobile devices” sounds too good to be true. A post on the ADF Mobile blog (thankfully absent from typical PR-speak) outlines the architecture: ADF Mobile is a “hybrid” architecture that employs a natively built “container” on each platform that hosts a number of browser windows that are used to display the application content. We add the Java VM as a natively built library to the container for business logic. As you may have gathered, this isn’t exactly WORA finally reaching the app stores. On iOS, ADF-produced apps will likely be subject to even worse performance than regular web apps running Mobile Safari (as WebView containers are not allowed to use the Nitro JavaScript engine), let alone the speeds of native code. With the overhead of running an entire JVM on top of this, it’s difficult to imagine any ADF Mobile apps being described as anything other than “sluggish”. Perhaps to developers of internal enterprise apps, serving up boring, static lists and dialogues, this might be acceptable, but as Oracle VP of product management Bill Pataky admits, games even as basic as Angry Birds are impossible under these circumstances. The truth is that these platform manufacturers don’t want runtimes outside of their control on their new systems. This is an era of increasingly closed platforms, whether developers like it or not, and Java will remain a second-class citizen - only able to run via ugly hacks like this embedding of JVMs. Unless something radical happens, Java will continue to disappear from the client-side, banished forever to run on servers instead; after all, even the traditional desktop is abandoning it, in part thanks to endless security gaffes. Perhaps ADF Mobile will suddenly bring new relevancy to Java on post-PC devices, but we wouldn’t count on it.

Oracle is augmenting its Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) to allow developers to create mobile applications for Apple and Android devices.

An unexpected surprise of this year’s JavaOne was the news that the codebase was to be fully open-sourced by the year’s end, spurring fresh interest in the four-year-old platform. However, the lofty promises of the JavaOne stage were brought back down to earth last week as client Java platform architect Richard Bair admitted that it “may take until February”, having been bogged down by red tape and security reviews. In a message sent to the ‘openjfx-dev’ mailing list, Bair gave a frank assessment of the progress made so far, and outlined the internal steps needed to be taken to allow code to be released to the public. This includes updating the build system, reviewing code for security, sanity checking of headers and identification of licensed sections. The long pole in this process is the "review for security". In some parts of the code, as we audit we may find a potential security hole. Much of the code we will be able to simply fix and then release (or may have no issues anyway in which case it can just be released after audit), but there will likely be some parts that need to wait until the next security release in February 2013 before we can even apply the patches to the workspace, let alone open source the code. Also revealed in the message is that the project’s open-sourcing, which started around nine months ago, “stalled [while] awaiting internal approvals”. Bair also said that the project structure has become “difficult and cumbersome”, which he said will be the project’s next big task. Still, these are relatively minor issues compared to the criticism that plagued JavaFX during its early years. Perhaps, four years on, the project may finally be finding its feet.

Is Scala too complicated for widespread adoption in Java teams, or is it that Devs who tinker around with things they don’t fully understand make Scala seem overly complex. The technical review of Scala’s benefits and disadvantages presented in this report makes the JVM language a compelling choice for Java organizations to explore. Scala’s dynamism should be enough to let you write more concise and intentional code than in Java, but getting there is challenging. The deeper parts of the Scala “swimming pool” are sometimes fun to explore, but can be scary at first. Once comfortable with the simpler part, your Java team can consider taking advantage of advanced features and going further in a purely functional direction. In this 30-page report on Scala from Rebel Labs, the research & content division of ZeroTurnaround, we interview Scala creator Martin Odersky, supply detailed technical analysis on the pros and cons of Scala programming and incorporate commentary by Josh Suereth, author of “Scala in Depth”. A little background Scala is a language created by Martin Odersky and his desire to combine object-oriented and functional programming on the Java Virtual Machine. Odersky's previous work on Pizza, GJ, Java generics, the javac compiler and Funnel eventually led to the creation of Scala and its first release in 2003 at EFPL. Scala is purely object-oriented as every value is an object, and functional as every function is a value. The successful mix of OOP and FP paradigms has made the language relatively popular and a “better Java” for many. It's also a good language for those looking for Haskell-like capabilities on the JVM. Following the language's rise in popularity, Typesafe was founded in 2011 by the creators of Scala and the Akka middleware, to provide easy to use packaging of both in the form of the Typesafe Stack, as well as better development tools and commercial support. In the last few years there has been some criticism of Scala; it's mostly been accused of being too complex. In this report, we opine that the perceived complexity of Scala actually arises more from the diversity of the ecosystem rather than the language itself. We then look at a simpler subset of Scala that is perhaps a good place to start for Java teams who are considering adopting it. Stay close to the shallow end of the “Scala pool”? Numerous blog posts during the past year or two have accused Scala of being too complex or highlighting other issues with Scala adoption. Some of the criticism is fair, but some of it could be targeting almost any JVM language out there. Scala seems to get more of the flak because it’s more popular and possibly pulling ahead of the others. And also probably because Scala actually is rather complex, but only if you want it to be. Think of Scala as a swimming pool -- there is a deep end and a shallow end; it seems that many people who haven’t learned to swim yet jump straight into the deep end. Inevitably, after splashing about for a while are surprised to find that their legs don’t quite reach the floor, or that they sank to the bottom and are startled by not being able to breathe underwater. Why does this happen? Maybe it is hard to distinguish the deep end from the shallow end — it’s not quite as simple as having a glance and getting a clear picture of how deep the pool is. Maybe the deep end seems more exciting at first, when you haven’t gotten a true taste of it yet. Why talk about such a dichotomy in the first place? Because the Scala community is very diverse. It can cater both to newbies and expert type-safe library designers. Some Scala users come from an object-oriented programming background (e.g. Java), some come from a functional programming background (e.g. Haskell). Scala blends together these programming styles, but still lets you code mostly in an “impure” imperative or mostly in a “pure” functional way. And that might be the main problem — the very different coding styles enabled by Scala means that a lot of code written by people from a school outside of one’s own might seem downright illegible. Each Scala team needs to find a common style that they agree upon, or the result will be a mess. The Scala Style Guide might help with this. Scala 2013: A Pragmatic Guide to Scala Adoption in Your Java Organization is mostly written for those coming from the Java (object-oriented / imperative) school. Some of the suggestions are very much a matter of taste, background and so on, so we’re not expecting everyone to agree with it. Sign up to read the full report.

vFabric tc Server is the ideal web application server based on open source Apache Tomcat. It adds features to Tomcat such as operations management and advanced diagnostics. vFabric tc Server has a very lightweight footprint so it is ideal for virtualized environment. To give you an idea how you can benefit from vFabric tc Server, SpringSource has released a free 2.5 hour eLearning training called vFabric tc Server Fundamentals. This 2.5 hour eLearning training provides an introduction to the features of tc Server, its architecture, how to install tc Server, and the basic and advanced runtime configuration of tc Server. In addition, the course also describes tc Server integration with Hyperic. The training provides a brief overview of the product, explains the concepts and features, and also enables you to perform basic operations, such as cache configuration, data caching, region creations, and working with functions and listeners. The training consists of five modules: Module 1: vFabric tc Server Introduction and Features Module 2: Installation and Instances Module 3: Integration with Hyperic Module 4: Basic Configuration Module 5: Application Deployment Module 6: Advanced tc Runtime Configuration Click here to download the training For developers interested in winning the professional 4-day vFabric tc Server training or a Spring Training in November click here

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, October 15 AWS CloudFormation now supports RDS DB Parameter Groups and Provisioned IOPS. Tuesday, October 16 SAP Hana One is now certified for production use on AWS....

Creating one HTML5 based application to rule over all of the various mobile devices on the market is a compelling idea, but the reality is, many mobile development teams are looking beyond the enticement of developing mobile applications with HTML5 and choosing to go native, creating an independent, native, mobile application for each platform they want to target.

Earlier this October, I was given the privilege of speaking at JavaOne regarding the fusion of contemporary Continuous Delivery processes and practices with the established and widely-accepted Maven release process. Preview Text: Learn about the fusion of contemporary Continuous Delivery processes and practices with the established and...

For today's episode of the AWS Report, I spoke to Michael Crandell, co-founder and CEO of RightScale. RightScale was founded shortly after Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 were introduced, with the goal of taking advantage of pay-as-you-go infrastructure as service....