SpringSource is joining the list of Java application server vendors adding support for Groovy.  IBM has been supporting Groovy with WebSphere sMash, and Project Zero since July 2007.  Sun’s GlassFish recently added support for Groovy in GlassFish v3 Prelude.  JBoss has integrated Groovy with JBoss Seam.  I couldn’t find any product specific info from Oracle or BEA about Groovy.  Oracle/BEA offers developer documentation that describes how to use Groovy, but nothing about Groovy support within an Oracle/BEA product.  (Oracle/BEA readers, please correct me if I’m wrong).

What does this acquisition mean for customers (considering or using Groovy)?  According to the SpringSource acquisition FAQ:

“SpringSource has built a global support and governance operation for the Spring Framework. This infrastructure, coupled with G2One’s experts and some investment, can deliver a 24×7, worldwide support network for enterprises investing heavily in Groovy and Grails. Additionally, there will be some immediate product enhancements and we will be investigating the creation of enterprise grade Eclipse tools for Groovy and Grails development.”

Selling support for Groovy (a language) or Grails (a framework) doesn’t sound like a great business to me.  Look at Zend, the company behind the PHP language.  They’re making money from ancillary products around the PHP language, not simply from supporting the PHP language.  Next, there isn’t a whole lot of revenue to be had from support of a framework.  SpringSource knows this better than most vendors.  The Spring Framework is widely used, but the majority of customers are in production without any support from SpringSource.  This is why SpringSource has introduced Spring products, because as I’ve been saying, products are valuable, support, not so much.  But maybe SpringSource will introduce enterprise grade products with Groovy & Grails?

It’ll be interesting to see how the acquisition plays out. Best of luck to G2One and the SpringSource team.

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Force.com for Facebook enables developers to easily use the Facebook APIs within their Force.com applications. Freely available at http://developer.force.com, Force.com for Facebook provides a new set of tools and services to enable developers to build applications that bring together social data from Facebook with the database, logic and workflow and Sites capabilities in Force.com and run them on salesforce.com’s trusted global service infrastructure. The tools will give developers a new means of creating business applications that greatly expand Facebook users’ ability to do corporate work on the site, by managing sales data, organizing business events or automating marketing decisions

Developers Can Now Bring Together Facebook and Force.com Platforms

With Force.com for Facebook, developers have new tools to bring together the Facebook and Force.com platforms to build new kinds of social and business applications. Force.com provides a complete feature set for the development and delivery of business applications. By leveraging the social graph data on Facebook Platform, developers will have unprecedented capability to create applications that take advantage of the best of both platforms. As with applications built on Facebook Platform, users’ data remains secure and can only be accessed by developers with users’ permission.

Developers can use Force.com for Facebook to:

• Enable a new class of applications for business on Facebook Platform. Force.com for Facebook enables the creation of applications that run 100 percent as a service, powered by Force.com. Applications built and run on Force.com inherit all the benefits of a proven platform, including security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration, and mobile access as well as the reliability, availability and global scale of salesforce.com’s trusted infrastructure.

• Leverage Facebook Connect to enrich new and existing Force.com applications with social data from Facebook APIs. The Facebook social graph layers on top of the Force.com platform. With Force.com for Facebook, social data is now readily available to the more than 100,000 developers in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Now they can leverage Facebook’s social graph to build a new class of enterprise applications.
• Create new ways for Facebook users to share and connect. By making it easy for Force.com developers to build robust applications in areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration that can be quickly integrated through Facebook Platform, users on Facebook will be presented with new tools for activities such as sharing a job opportunity or collaborating with co-workers or friends on an event or project.

Apps-O-Rama (http://www.appsorama.com) is a developer of an online tool called Get Stuff Done for Facebook that helps individuals and groups collaborate on projects on Facebook. Apps-O-Rama built Get Stuff Done because they were frustrated by how hard it was to juggle all the activities going in their lives, especially when other people were involved. Since projects are inherently social, Facebook was a natural environment for a next generation project management tool. Now the world can Get Stuff Done collaboratively within their Facebook network and reliably with Force.com. Get Stuff Done can be used for anything users want to get done together, including sharing files, creating and assigning “to-do” lists, managing projects and seeing what happened while they were offline. It lets users go beyond group formation, and allows them to do things together such as plan trips, organize events, move to a new apartment and much more.

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Windows Azure is part of a set of new and existing technologies behind the Azure Services Platform, a development and execution platform that runs end-user and corporate software on Microsoft’s own servers, accessible over the web. It joins Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s EC2 in an increasingly competitive market. (…)

[Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie] said that the Azure Services Platform won’t run on a company’s own servers: “Rather, it’s a service running on a vast number of machines housed in Microsoft’s own datacentres.” Microsoft will also use it as a delivery service, David Thompson, vice president of Microsoft Online, said during the keynote presentation. “All our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service, as an option,” Thompson said.

More is available at Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform website.

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Most small and midsize businesses are eyeing one or more software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, yet have already made numerous investments in on-premises software. And despite the potential cost upsides of making the move to SaaS, one crucial success factor for running part or all of your business in the cloud is going to be the ability to tie cloud computing applications to on-premises systems.

Recognizing that obstacle, three software and hardware vendors - Boomi, Cast Iron, and SnapLogic - have their sights set on solving the SaaS integration challenges. While their approaches differ for on-premises software, hosted integrations, and even on-premises appliances, these vendors can all help companies integrate their business software, whether it lives on-premises or “in the clouds.”

Integration: The Achilles’ Heel Of SaaS

The state of integration gives many potential SaaS adopters pause. Indeed, a recent Forrester Research survey of companies’ SaaS attitudes found integration was the most common concern for the 38% of businesses that said they had no plans to adopt SaaS applications.

Furthermore, SaaS applications can’t just go hauling out data from inside your firewall. “You prevent that, just as a policy; never will anyone get through my firewall to my application to access my data,” says Chris Marino, CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based SnapLogic. But at some point, many companies do want their SaaS applications to communicate with systems located inside the firewall. “How do you solve that problem?” Marino asks. “You need integration technology.

Integration Creates Interdependencies

Just as the typical SaaS application requires a degree of set-up and customization before it can be used, integration tools also require planning. In particular, integration creates interdependencies, and that requires keeping the big picture in mind.

“You can’t just throw applications in there and expect to be able to integrate the data across all the systems,” Awana’s Smith says. “That’s not a shortcoming of Cast Iron - that’s just a limitation of business processes and reality.”

That means setting some ground rules is in order. “The best approach is to try to only have the information on one system and use the integration to only display it on the other system, [and] don’t allow editing in other than the system of record,” she says.

What Application Ecosystems Offer

When it comes to solving SaaS integration, Boomi, Cast Iron, and SnapLogic are not the only players in town. Other approaches include numerous SaaS application ecosystems - collections of applications and add-ons certified to work with the core application. Examples include the open-source SugarCRM SugarExchange, NetSuite NS-BOS, and the Salesforce AppExchange.

Ecosystems, however, play by their own circumscribed rules. “Their approach to solving this integration problem is, ‘We solve the integration problem - just bring your data over here,’” Marino says. “And for some classes of uses, that’s the solution. But it’s not going to work for everybody.

Then there’s the question of pricing. SaaS applications often attract companies looking for a bargain. And perhaps not surprisingly, SaaS integration services do seem priced to appeal to the masses. For example, Boomi charges $65 per month, per connection, to an application such as QuickBooks or Peachtree, and $135 per connection, per month, to the likes of Salesforce, Intaact, or a database. “We wanted the reaction of the customer to the pricing to be, “‘Oh, this is a no-brainer,’” says Rick Nucci, chief technology officer of Boomi.

Finally, SaaS integration providers solve a slightly different challenge. The notion of a business being driven by a set of monolithic applications has begun to change, with mash-ups, widgets, wikis, blogs, and the like heralding a new era of lightweight applications that may just do one thing, albeit extremely well, says Laurent Lachal, research director at London-based Ovum. “The need now is not just to integrate a system, but to integrate a much wider array of systems - from a software-as-a-service to a small Google widget,” Lachal says.

Will Integration Become Baked In?

Today, SaaS applications offer soup-to-nuts software functionality, all hosted in the cloud. In the future, might integration itself become “baked in” to SaaS applications? In fact, that’s exactly what Ovum’s Lachal predicts will happen during the next five years.

In addition, Lachal expects distinctions between on-premises and cloud computing software to become largely irrelevant. “We are entering a hybrid world,” says Lachal, one in which on-premises and cloud computing approaches will co-exist and be offered by the same vendor. Accordingly, “the key is not to say, ‘I want one over the other,’ but determining - based on your own requirements - how you weave the two approaches together,” he says. “And that’s where integration as a service comes into play.”

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Dan Lyons starts things off by agreeing with Richard Stallman about the risks surrounding cloud computing. Dan says:

“Just think of all the little hooks and Velcro straps a cloud service provider can create to keep you locked in. For one thing, they’ve got your data. But think also of all the business logic, the customized apps created uniquely for you. Just look at what Facebook does to make it extremely painful for users to move. That’s a tiny taste of the cloud.”

Stallman tells the Guardian:

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The Guardian also has a quote from Larry Ellison on cloud computing:

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

On the other side of the debate is Geir Magnusson:

“I think that notions of privacy and user control aren’t intrinsically at odds with the big spectrum of technologies that are called ‘cloud computing’. Rather, like any other computing technology used by humans, there are options, and we can choose to use and create tech that is secure and open, both in the implementation (as in open source), but maybe more importantly in terms of portability and data freedom, being able to move one’s data to where one chooses.”

Like many other technologies purported to completely reshape the vendor landscape, cloud computing won’t deliver. However, cloud computing definitely has a role to play in the future of the IT marketplace. Some applications are well aligned with the cloud. Others, especially really important business-critical apps, aren’t. Will this change over time? Maybe, but how many companies still do the majority of their business critical transactions on a mainframe-based system? Hint, a lot. Also, as more customers start making noise about data portability and freedom, expect vendors to respond with support for related open standards.

In the end, cloud computing will become a valuable part of every company’s IT strategy. However, cloud computing simply won’t be the foundation upon which an average company’s IT strategy is built.

What do you think?

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Run it on Windows and you’ll see a dialog where you can check the Dev option and hit the Update button. Restart Google Chrome, and in the Options -> About Google Chrome dialog, click the Update button.

Google explains that the Dev channel “lets you test the latest fixes and get access to new features as they’re being developed,” with automatic updates coming “every 1-2 weeks” (a release notes page is also available).

On the downside, these updates will also be less stable in comparison, as Google implies.

Careful if you have themes installed: running the updater killed my currently installed Chrome skin.

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Up today 2,181 machines have been scanned with OSS Discovery, discovering over 767 unique open source packages and nearly 300,000 open source package inm    stallations. founding on average 57 unique packages per enterprise.

Stormy Peters, now Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation, in the press release talking about how open source software compares across different operating systems says:

 As expected, Linux (an open source operating system) had the most with an average of 87 instances of open source found per scanned system. FreeBSD (also open source) was a close second at 81, but Mac wasn’t far behind with 75. Judging by the large number of Macs seen at open source conferences like OSCON and LinuxWorld, there are probably a lot of Mac users who are open source fans.

Windows, although not open source, still had a respectable amount of installed open source software, with an average of 39 instances per scanned system.

I suspect that the average Mac user is not an open source enthusiast, likely respondents belong to the OSCON and Linuxworld crowds. I would definitely be more interested in reading surveys run in broader audiences, though.

Register anonymously to the census, if interested.

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On 24 September 2008, the World Day Against Software Patents will provide volunteers with the opportunity to express the growing concerns of users, businesses and developers. The granting of software patents by patent offices around the world affects their freedom to innovate. The organisers expect 24h of activities across the globe. Volunteers will gather in front of patent offices to inform the general public of the problems underlying software patenting.

A global petition demanding to effectively stop software patents worldwide will be launched on the same day. In some regions of the world such as Europe, the United States, or India, dedicated campaigns are being prepared by local supporters. The organisers intend to celebrate the World Day on an annual basis unless substantive clarifications are adopted in national laws that stop software patenting along with their effects on the digital economy.

Sign the petition.

Read FFII press release and go to the Stop Software Patents website for further information.

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It’s refreshing to read quotes from open source leaders who “get it” because they’re living through the challenges of converting “Category B” users.

Marten Mickos is quoted in the BW story:

“Open source is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You have to have patience.”

While Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is quoted:

“There’s a concern that our growth rate will slow. We’ve been in that funk the last couple of years.”

Frankly speaking, I’m quite excited about the following comments from Whitehurst re. Red Hat:

is shifting engineers and marketers away from nice-to-have projects toward areas where Red Hat gets paid. He’s pulling resources out of consumer desktop Linux, and he shuttered an online store that sold other companies’ open-source programs. “I took a look at that and said, ‘We’re not eBay,’” he says. “Red Hat is open source, but that doesn’t mean we do everything in open source.”

Whitehurst is definitely making the tough decisions to help Red Hat’s business grow. It appears he’s leaving the philosophical discussion about the virtues of open source to someone else.

I’ll leave you with a final Whitehurst quote. I’m taking it to be completely supportive of my call to OSS vendors to sell products, not just support and services around a freely available OSS product:

“A pure service business is not particularly defensible. Some open-source companies have not truly figured that out.”

I may not have been invited to dinner with Whitehurst, but he seems to think very much along the lines that I do. Very cool. My mom will be quite proud. lol

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“Matthew Paul Thomas - a long-time critic of FOSS user interfaces in general, and Linux in particular - lamenting the lack of usability in FOSS projects.”

Here’s Matthew’s list of 15 reasons why FOSS projects lack usability:

1. • Weak incentives for usability
2. • Few good designers
3. • Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed
4. • Usability is hard to measure
5. • Coding before design
6. • Too many cooks
7. • Chasing tail-lights
8. • Scratching their own itch
9. • Leaving little things broken
10. • Placating people with options
11. • Fifteen pixels of fame
12. • Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth
13. • Release early, release often, get stuck
14. • Mediocrity through modularity
15. • Gated development communities

I’d urge you to read Matthew’s original post as it offers ideas on how to address the usability issues he raises.

For the set of open source projects that are truly developer driven, and don’t rely on a vendor with profit motives, some, or all of Matthew’s list could apply. But how many of us truly interact with software from this category? However, even in this case, examples such as Mozilla, as Matthew points out, make use of usability and design experts.

For the vast majority of open source products that you and I use, there is a vendor or group of vendors behind the related open source project. As such, usability and design experts employed by the vendor behind the open source product are able to impact the final product. Scratching an itch, placating people with options and leaving little things broken aren’t encouraged when there is revenue on the table and you’re being paid to work on a product. In a vendor sponsored open source project, the 15 reasons that Matthew lists could probably be applied equally for closed source and open source products.

However, some vendor-backed open source projects started out as a group of developers scratching an itch. Could these projects suffer from Matthew’s list of 15? Adding vendor backing to the project could address future design issues, but some issues would simply be carried forward with every release. Maybe this is more relevant to established open source products/vendors. Vendors behind new (i.e. past 2-5 yrs?) OSS products simply leveraged the open source business model but employed designers etc from day one.

I’m torn. I could argue that Matthew is wholly off the mark for vendor-backed projects, or that he may be on to something (because of how these projects were first created).

What do you think?

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