A BZ Media Publication - SD Times12 Hadoop 2.0 spins new YARN 12 Big Data TechCon: Bringing in the...

A BZ Media Publication

NOVEMBER 2013 • ISSUE NO. 295 • $9.95 • www.sdtimes.com

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FROM THE EDITORS 9 SD Times on the Web

11 Editorials

NEWS 12 Hadoop 2.0 spins new YARN

12 Big Data TechCon: Bringing in the business side

13 Why Hadoop is still No. 1

16 This year’s JavaOne news a lot like last year’s news

17 Rebuilding the JCP

18 Coders go the distance for charity

20 Oracle steps up to SAP with in-memory database

22 Load testing can now include developers

24 Telerik integrates Icenium with Visual Studio

24 JIRA now comes with a help desk

26 Developers take Big Data to the rugby pitch

28 Black Friday 2013: A perfect storm of online shopping

31 Telerik analytics go beyond simple likes and dislikes

COLUMNS 57 CODE WATCH by Larry O’Brien

It’s enough to make you sick

59 GUEST VIEW by Joe Herres

Is responsive design overhyped?

60 ANALYST VIEW by Jeffrey Hammond

Mobile is growing, but the Web still rules

62 INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein

Let them know what you think

Contents ISSUE 295 • NOVEMBER 2013

Scrum: Being Incremental

Educating the new class of developers

page 49

page 32

Software Development Times (ISSN 1528-1965) is published 12 times per year by BZ Media LLC, 225 Broadhollow Road, Suite 211, Melville, NY 11747. Periodicals postage paid at Hunting ton Station, NY, andadditional offices. SD Times is a registered trademark of BZ Media LLC. All contents © 2013 BZ Media LLC. All rights reserved. The price of a one-year subscription is US$179 for subscribers in the U.S., $189 inCanada, $229 elsewhere. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to SD Times, 225 Broadhollow Road, Suite 211, Melville, NY 11747. SD Times subscriber services may be reached at [email protected].

FEATURES

SPECIAL REPORT

One-size-fits-all websites: Not always a genius move

page 45

The making ofVisual Studio

page 39

ON THE COVER: Ninth-grade students at the Academyfor Software Engineering. Erlyn Ysit (left) wants to be aGoogle software engineer, while Michael Torres wants tofound a gaming company. See story, page 49.

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EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF David Rubinstein

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COPY EDITOR Adam LoBelia • [email protected]

SENIOR ART DIRECTOR Mara Leonardi • [email protected]

SOCIAL MEDIA AND Rob Marvin • [email protected] ONLINE EDITOR

COLUMNIST Larry O’Brien

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Chris Barylick, Alyson Behr, Joe Dysart,

Patrick Hynds, G. Arnold Koch,

Lisa L. Morgan, Dave Smith,

Alexandra Weber Morales

CONTRIBUTING ANALYSTS Rob Enderle, Mike Gilpin, Mike Gualtieri,

Jeffrey Hammond, Al Hilwa

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PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Ted Bahr



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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times 9

SD Times wants to hear from you. Join us on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Man

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etNot even Bill Gates is safe!Okay, it’s only three out of Microsoft’s top 20 investors, but

they’re the first to go on record to say that the bigproblem with Microsoft is not just Steve Ballmer:It’s Bill Gates himself. “Dissatisfied with Ballmeralone stepping aside, the investors are worriedthat Gates—also a member of the special com-

mittee searching for Ballmer’s successor—wouldhandcuff the next CEO’s autonomy as chairman.These investors believe Gates’ presence wouldcurb the new CEO’s ability to implement newstrategies and substantial changes, changes thecompany is in sore need of,” writes Rob Marvin.

You can read more about it at http://sdt.bz/64169.

This one easy trick for bypassing Apple Touch IDThe Touch ID fingerprint system for the iPhone 5s issupposed to be the most secure yet. But almost immediately after introduction, the hacker groupknown as Chaos Computer Club came up with a dangerously simple way to bypass it: After

acquiring a user’s fingerprint, “invert andlaser-print the photo onto a transparentsheet using a thick toner setting. Thensmear pink latex milk or white wood glue intothe pattern created by the toner onto the transpar-ent sheet. When it dries, lift the thin latex sheet,

wrap it around your own finger and place it onto thesensor to unlock the phone.” Wow! It’s just that easy!More details can be found at sdt.bz/64134.

For Ada’s sake, we need more women in computing!Software companies are trying to invite women intothe fold, but they could be doing more. In honor ofAda Lovelace Day, Alan Zeichick outlines sug-gestions from the Anita Borg Institute toattract talented women to the workforce(and to make them want to stay), such ascreating mentorships and invitingdiverse opinions in the corporate culture.You can read more of these critical tips atsdt.bz/64235, and if you have a success story, leave one there!

The Top 5 GitHub projects from OctoberThe world’s largest project repository allows you to seewhat the most popular projects are. Here’s what sawthe most action in October:

1) Free Programming Books

2) Ghost

3) Lime

4) Full Screen Mario

5) Semantic-UIOcto

cat,

© 2

013

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ub, I

nc.

Is the Big Data market perhaps too big?MongoDB recently took on US$150 million in venture capital.

Is the company really worth an estimated at $1.2 billion?Or is it (and the rest of the Big Data market) way overvalued? The price fits, says Alex Handy: “Whetheror not MongoDB as a company is worth $1.2 billion,

however, is basically irrelevant to developers. What reallymatters is that MongoDB is super easy to use.” You can read

more about Alex’s vote of confidence at sdt.bz/64181.

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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times OPINION 11

FROM THE EDITORSFROM THE EDITORS

It is unknown if the HealthCare.govwebsite will be up to optimum per-

formance levels as you read thesewords. With the President of the Unit-ed States looking down his nose at a“failed” software project, one can onlyimagine what it must feel like to be asoftware developer on the Health-Care.gov team.

Remember your worst chewing-outfrom a manager/VP/C-level boss? Thattime the site was down for 24 hours dueto a software bug that made it throughyour processes and testing systems?That one time the SLA was breachedand there was no way you could passthe buck? Remember the time KnightCapital let a bug loose that cost itUS$172,222 per second for 45 minutesstraight?

Well, those scenarios pale in com-parison to what it must be like to havethe leader of the free world picking upthe phone and screaming at the nearestaccountable manager. And we feel verybadly for the folks who are gettingchewed out, because it’s probably not

their fault. The front end isn’t the issuehere, thanks to modern developmentpractices, cloud hosting and a generalcompetency in the development teamsthat worked on this.

The problem is that each querythat goes to the HealthCare.gov site isalso an inquiry into dozens or evenhundreds of ancient, poorly main-tained, ugly healthcare systems. Askfor an insurance quote, and you couldvery well be waiting for a VAX in somebasement in Omaha to run an algo-rithm. Worse yet, you could be wait-ing on 20 internal systems running ata healthcare provider, none of whichhave any SLAs involved in theresponse time.

The HealthCare.gov fiasco isemblematic of digital sandbagging bythe healthcare companies. And it’s notgoing to be fixed anytime soon. Thesooner the Affordable Care Act’s Janu-ary deadline comes and goes, the soon-er healthcare companies can get backto making a profit on bureaucracy andconfusion. z

The past five years have seen theincredible growth of Hadoop, from

small Apache project to the “next bigthing.” Of course, as the next big thing,everything up to this point has simplybeen experimentation. Some organiza-tions already have Hadoop deploy-ments, but the vast majority of enter-prises are still looking at thisnewfangled open-source project andweighing their options.

The truth is, now that Hadoop 2.0has arrived, there are no more excusesfor not starting down the road toHadoop adoption. Your organizationshould seriously consider beginningexperiments if it has not already.Why? Because Hadoop competency

can drive business advantages. Whilethose advantages were severely limit-ed by Map/Reduce and the difficultlearning curve for this new data-analy-sis platform, Hadoop 2.0 allows anytype of workload to be moved ontothis platform.

The time to get started is now. TheHadoop platform is enterprise-ready.All that remains is for the various distri-bution providers to polish their 2.0branch offerings, and for the variousenterprise necessities (security, gover-nance, training) to start sorting them-selves out. By the time those problemsare solved, your experiments shouldgive you an idea of what, exactly, you’llneed to adopt this growing platform. z

Don’t blame HealthCare.gov

In business, we love our 20-some-things. They bring energy and per-

spective that rejuvenates the workplace.One thing they often don’t come with,though, is skill. A recent story in TheNew York Times cited an Organisationfor Economic Cooperation report detail-ing a widening skills gap that acts as adrag on the American economy.

Particularly, the report noted thatAmerican students lag behind mostother nations in math skills: Only Italyand Spain performed worse.

So, the opening of the Academy offor Software Engineering in New YorkCity is welcome news. The idea is tooffer students interested in computerscience and software engineering aschool where they can get an introduc-tion to the basics while working onprojects and landing internships atmajor technology companies.

Even overlooking the selfish underly-ing reason (New York Mayor MichaelBloomberg wants to develop developerswho will help the city grow out its visionof “Silicon Alley,” gaining reputation inthe industry and tax revenue in the treas-ury), this is an effort long overdue. Theschool, the city, universities and softwarecompanies are partnering to make thishappen—a rare bit of cooperation.

As for the students we spoke to, theyhave big dreams, from creating their owngaming companies to creating the nextgeneration of spacecraft. The academyand others like it around the country givethem a jumpstart down that path.

One key point made in our story isthat students do not have to pass anentrance exam or be selected to attendthe school. It’s open to all New York Citystudents with an interest in computerscience, and as such is creating a diverselearning environment—just the ticketfor taking software engineering in direc-tions we haven’t even thought of yet. z

Programming:It’s academic

Hadoop 2.0 makes its mark


SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comNEWS12

BY ALEX HANDY

Bringing together Big Data and bigbusiness is much more work fordevelopers than they may anticipate.At the Big Data Technology Confer-ence, representatives of both worldsmingled to discuss their successesand failures in the field.

One company on hand was Meta -Scale, a wholly owned subsidiary ofSears Holdings. Ankur Gupta, whoheads sales and marketing at Meta -Scale, said that Sears began experi-menting with Hadoop four yearsago, giving the company a leg up onmany other enterprises when it comesto Big Data processing maturity.

“We saw a business opportunity, andwe thought we could provide an enter-prise-based overview that’s vendor neu-tral and platform agnostic,” he said. “Sowe formed MetaScale to help other

companies accelerate their Big Data ini-tiatives, so they don’t make the samemistakes we made.”

Andy McNalis, Hadoop infrastruc-ture manager at MetaScale, explainedsome of the customizations to itsHadoop cluster architecture during histalk, titled “Running, Managing, and

Operating Hadoop at Sears.”He said that typically, within

the Sears Hadoop cluster, eachmachine is a simple non-redun-dant machine, with a singlepower supply and a single 4TBhard drive. The cluster’s NameNode, however, is a more robustand redundantly equipped box,capable of handling heavierworkloads and remaining intact.

McNalis also said Sears usesa second, backup Name Nodeserver, which is not necessarilyhot-swappable. Instead, thissecond Name Node is purelyused to back up the metadata of

the cluster, allowing for that data toremain in place if the primary NameNode is lost.

McNalis said the Sears project hasgrown significantly since it was startedalmost four years ago. “On Hadoop, I’mat a point now where we add entireracks of servers at a time, and there’s no

BY ALEX HANDY

The Apache Foundation has releasedHadoop 2.0, significantly expandingthe platform’s capabilities with a newYARN cluster resource manager. Addi-tionally, the Hadoop File System(HDFS) was upgraded to support highavailability and data snapshotting.

Shaun Connolly, vice president ofcorporate strategy at Hortonworks, saidthat Hadoop 2.0 is the culmination of agreat deal of work between his companyand Apache. “If you look at the Hadoop2.0 line, it’s been in development forover two years. Our strategy has contin-ued to be that we put a premium on theYARN work because each of these sys-tems needs to plug in and inform YARNwhat the resources are so it can schedulethe workloads appropriately,” he said.

With Hadoop 2.0’s new core resource

management implemented in the YARNproject, Hadoop clusters will no longerbe limited to Map/Reduce jobs, saidConnolly. YARN will allow other types ofjobs to be run across the cluster againstthe data inside HDFS. And becauseHadoop 2.0 is binary compatible withexisting Hadoop 1.x applications, dataalready stored inside of a Hadoop clustercan be left where it is while upgrading.

The HDFS was also upgraded inversion 2.0; the primary change was tomake it highly available. As a result,HDFS can now be used to underpinreal-time applications.

The most common use case of this iswhen an HBase database inside of aHadoop cluster is used as a back-enddata store for an external-facing appli-cation. Prior to the high-availabilitychanges in HDFS, HBase could not

reliably host a database to the world.Based on these changes, several next-

generation Hadoop projects have beenin the works at Hortonworks and insidethe Apache Incubator. One of these is

Big Data TechCon: Bringing in the business sideConference looks at datainitiatives, analytics

Hadoop 2.0 spins new YARNAlso, highly available file system, support beyond Map/Reduce

PayPal’s Chris Rogaski demonstrates how to create value from

data at the enterprise level.

Hortonworks’ Connolly is enthusiastic about

Hadoop not being limited to Map/Reduce jobs.

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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times NEWS 13

BY ALEX HANDY

As Apache Hadoop 2.0 was released,Doug Cutting, creator of the ApacheHadoop project and chief architect atCloudera, was preparing to give thekeynote at the Big Data TechnologyConference. We caught up to himbefore he spoke and quizzed him aboutHadoop 2.0, Hadoop 3.0, and the stateof the Hadoop community.

SD Times: Four years ago, you said that if

Hadoop was the only Big Data processing

platform in the market in four years, that

it would have won, and would remain the de

facto standard for many years to come.

Hadoop 2.0 has shipped, and there’s really

no sign of a competing product still. Does

that mean Hadoop has won?

Cutting: It looks like nothing else hasappeared. It’s really become the de fac-to standard. I honestly expectedMicrosoft or Oracle or IBM to comeout with something competing.

I think that’s a credit to the open-source methodology. It’s doing some-thing everyone can get on board with.Apache tries to make sure we have proj-ects everyone can support.Hadoop 2.0 includes support for batch

jobs outside of the Map/Reduce model.

Was this something you ever considered

while writing Hadoop?

We talked about it fairly early on. Arun[Murthy of Hortonworks] had this pro-posal to refactor Map/Reduce into amore general platform, and makeMap/Reduce an application-level logicon top of that. At the time, it was like,“That’d be nice some day, but we needto get Map/Reduce working well first.”Arun held onto that dream, and eventu-ally when Map/Reduce was stable andout in wide use, he went back and start-ed pushing that agenda again. HDFS becomes highly available in

Hadoop 2.0, yet for years HDFS has been

ridiculed as a less-than-stellar file sys-

tem. Do you think the HDFS updates in

Hadoop 2.0, combined with the contin-

ued popularity of HDFS, is a vindication

of your original designs?

I think it’s a vindication of the originalGoogle design being a great startingpoint. As the strategy we went with—which was to get something that wasworking that demonstrated the scalabil-ity and utility, and not worry about hav-ing all the features from day one—Ithink people often get distracted by notrealizing what is a critical thing. Triageis the term they use in medicine. A lotof projects don’t have enough triage.

Now we’re back, filling in the gaps.We’ve had to do a lot of work on security,and the same with the single point-of-failure problem. Rolling upgrades, snap-shots and disaster recovery are all thingswe’ve been able to add after the fact. Ithink it’s roughly the order of featuresGoogle added. You need to make sureyou’ve got the scalability right before anyof it matters, and basic usability. If youhaven’t proven that, then it doesn’t mat-ter if it is secure or not.

I think it helps if your strategy canbe a grassroots adoption strategy, whichI am very fond of. At the outset, therewere no grand claims made [aboutHadoop], there were no sales pitches. Itwas, “Here’s some stuff, try it out. If itdoes something useful, use it, if italmost does something useful, help us

Why Hadoop is still No.1And creator Doug Cutting discusses where it will go next

continued on page 14 >

Apache Tez, a framework for near-real-time data processing in Hadoop.

Tez is designed to allow a Hadoopcluster to perform interactive queries,rather than batch processing jobs thattake time to execute. It takes advantageof YARN to allow them to be deployedacross a cluster, eschewing Map/Reducefor a directed acyclic graph. And it ties inclosely with Hive and Pig, allowing usersto construct, check and refine querieswithout waiting for the cluster to finish.

Another new Hadoop project isApache Falcon. It provides a data life-cycle management service for Hadoop,easing the ingress and egress of data tothe platform.

“You’re able to begin to have a frame-work that allows you to orchestraterecovery and retention. You can say, ‘Iwant to manage this dataset and makesure it’s moved to another cluster andages out after a year or two.’ This is aframework that enables those types ofscenarios to be managed,” said Connolly.

Apache Hadoop 2.0 is available fromthe Apache Foundation’s website. z

outage, and Hadoop starts using thenew machines automatically,” he said.

Predicting a change in dataElsewhere at the Big Data TechnologyConference, Precog founder John DeGoes discussed methods for embed-ding predictive analytics into databas-es. He prefaced this discussion byadmitting that SQL was ill-suited tosuch a task, particularly because it can-not handle ordered lists, also known asarrays.

To illustrate this fact, he discussedthe process of implementing the k-means algorithm on data. (K-means is acommon algorithm used to group likedata into clusters, or graph-like struc-tures.) To implement k-means on a rela-tional database, he said, the first thingyou have to do is figure out how manyclusters of data you’re going to have atthe end—a tricky guessing game.

Next, you’ll have to write an externaldriver program that generates the SQLneeded to massage the data into a for-mat that k-means can work with. As a




get at that last percentage.” Peoplecame to it with reasonable expectations.Now, we have the risk of hyping it.How long will Hadoop remain the de facto

Big Data platform?

The platform is destined to be the main-stay platform of data centers for quitesome time. Ten years from now, we’regoing to continue to see Hadoop gainingmarket share as the primary player. Allthe trends look that way. There’s nothingthat undermines it. If there’s some needthat developers have that Hadoopdoesn’t fit, it’s flexible enough and looselycoupled enough of a platform that it canembrace the changes it needs. Theydon’t have to abandon Hadoop becausethey can change Hadoop.What do you think of the Spark project to

build an in-memory Hadoop process exe-

cution model?

I think it’s great stuff, Spark. If we see alot of people adopting it, we’ll support it.That’s the way HBase came along. Initial-ly, it was out of scope, but our customerssaid “We need it.” It was a big investmentin getting the developers on board, get-ting us up to speed and making HBasesuitable and supportable.

The way Cloudera is prioritizing itsengineering efforts is to require there tobe a specific customer who needs anynew thing that’s added. We make a laun-dry list of things we might do, and thenwe go and attach customers to it. Theone with the most customers gets done.

If we see a lot of people demandingSpark and Storm, we’re going to pullthose in, certainly.What will be the big additions in Hadoop

3.0, if you can speculate out that far?

What types of things are still needed in

Hadoop?

I think we’ll see a continued demand forhigh-quality multi-tenancy support.YARN gets us a huge step toward bettersupport for multi-tenant, but it’s not thelast step. It’s a complicated thing to do toreally support a wide range of differentapplications. It’ll be an ongoing projectto get things to integrate well and tohave institutions really use one cluster

both for production and research. Whenwe can fulfill this promise, you can storeyour data once and bring different kindsof processing to it, and different parts ofthe organization can share a single clus-ter, with a single copy of the data.

Another obvious feature is support fortransactions. I think, in the grand schemeof things, Hadoop will support onlinetransaction processing. It’ll be a ways out,and it won’t be in Hadoop proper. Butit’ll be somewhere in the stack.How is Mahout doing? It seems to have

lost some of its shine.

I think Mahout is a library of differentalgorithms written by different peopleand maintained by different people, sothe quality and consistency isn’t there.Some are of the algorithms are excel-lent and best in class, but sometimesbest in class is in other projects. I thinkthe original dream was it would becomethe home of all the best machine-learn-ing algorithms, but I don’t know thatthat’s quite come to fruition. But also,people are regularly using Mahout.Hortonworks is pushing Tez as a transfor-

mative way to allow Hive users to work

faster and more interactively with the

data. What do you think of Project Tez?

Tez will make Hive queries faster, whichwill be a big improvement for a lot offolks. It’ll permit job flows that vary fromMap/Reduce, and allow people to exper-iment with different tools and differentdata flowing through them. I think it’ll bea nice thing to have. Anything that adds afundamental performance improvementcan be a game-changer.What other projects are of interest to you?

What’s the next big thing in Hadoop?

We know what Spark and Storm aregoing to bring to the table. I’m reallyexcited about getting search into the plat-form. Pretty soon, people will wonderhow they did search without Hadoop.Predicting what the next huge thing willbe is hard to say. A lot of what we spendtime on these days is polish: filling in fea-tures enterprises need so they can handletheir compliance issues. These are thingsthat are somewhat boring, but importantin supporting auditability. z

Why Hadoop is still No. 1< continued from page 13

Precog’s De Goes made several endorsements

at the show, such as for the MADlib library.

result, the process gets very complicat-ed very quickly, said De Goes.

But modern solutions to this prob-lem are available. One such solution hereferenced was MADlib, an open-source library of database extensionsthat automate much of the boilerplatecode needed to write predictive typeapplications. For example, k-means isimplemented within MADlib, and canbe triggered with just a few lines ofcode, he said.

De Goes went on to detail a numberof other solutions to the limitations ofSQL, such as MonetDB and Rasdaman,both of which approach the problemfrom allowing the database to supportarrays and other important data-accessmodels.

Perhaps the most interesting of hissuggestions was the Datalog program-ming language. A relative of Prolog,Datalog allows for expressive descrip-tions of data transformation and rela-tionship tasks. However, Datalog is notwithout its problems.

“In theory, Datalog is a good fit formany kinds of predictive analytics,” saidDe Goes. “The problem with it is thatyou can’t just start writing Datalog intoyour database because no mainstreamdatabase supports that. Supporting thatwould require changes to the inside ofthe database. SQL is not designed forthat. Also, there’s no real distributedimplementation of Datalog with the fullset of features yet.” z

Big Data TechCon is produced byBZ Media, which publishes SD Times.

Big Data show< continued from page 13



http://sdtimes.com/pdf/Mission_Kit/3148


BY ALEX HANDY

While Oracle OpenWorld was abuzzabout the release of Oracle 12c, Javadevelopers found their big news at thisyear’s JavaOne, which was essentiallythe same as last year’s big news. MarkReinhold, chief architect for the JavaPlatform at Oracle, gave a keynote atJavaOne where he further detailed thechanges coming for OpenJDK 8, whichinclude closures and a merging of manyof the APIs in Java ME and Java SE.

Those changes to Java ME areintended to make development easier.Java ME and SE will use the same APIswithin the OpenJDK and Java SE 8releases. The move should eliminatemany of the differences between thetwo platforms.

These changes are also designed toexpand the appeal of Java to embeddeddevelopers. Reinhold demonstrated achess-playing robotic arm on stage,which he said was controlled by Java,end to end.

Vendors have their own rolloutsAside from the planned changes in thenext version of Java, which is expected tobe released by March 2014, most of thebig news came from third-party vendors.

For Java developers, a great many

options for distributed applications,development environments and cloud-based deployment were shown on theJavaOne expo floor.

Azul Systems discussed Zing 7, thelatest version of its highly scalable JVM.Zing 7 includes faster lock-handlingoperations, performance improvementsfor Hadoop and Cassandra users, andextended support for in-memory datastructures larger than 250GB.

CloudBees was on hand to demon-strate new PaaS support for iOS, as well

as integration points for externally host-ed enterprise SaaS applications. SachaLabourey, CEO of CloudBees, said thatthese new features were added inresponse to customer demand.

“One of the things we announced thisweek is app-centric integration,” he said.“A lot of the time, you get a requirementthat says, ‘Each time a new Salesforceaccount is created, I want to do some-thing.’ The amount of code you need todo a lot of that is large. Now, we havelibraries to make it easy to connect in theJVM. You can get whatever you need inSalesforce. It’s just JSON called on your

object.”Codenvy, a browser-based IDE

focused on the enterprise market,showed off its new Factory capabilities.These give developers the ability to cloneIDE instances and share them online, ina manner similar to the way a GitHubrepository can be forked and shared.Developers can set up online workspacesaround a specific software project andquickly clone them for sharing.

Mike Milinkovich, executive directorof the Eclipse Foundation, pointed toAtlas, by Ensoft, as his new favoriteEclipse-based product. The tool allowsdevelopers to highlight segments of Javacode, then immediately see a visual rep-resentation of what that code does. It isdesigned to help developers tasked withmaintaining complex code they didn’twrite themselves.

Gradleware released version 1.8 ofGradle. This version features improvedperformance and better memory con-sumption. It also includes a new methodof handling duplicate files, and the abili-ty to create native libraries and executa-bles from C and assembler sources.

Jelastic used JavaOne as a platform tolaunch Tomitribe, its new initiative toexpand the community around TomEE,the Apache Tomcat distribution for Java

This year’s JavaOne newsa lot like last year’s newsClosures, SE/ME merger again detailed, due in March

Java-programmed robots stand watch over the exhibit hall floor. Another Java-programmed robot tries its claw at chess.

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Oracle OpenWorld: All in with an in-memory database

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EE. Tomitribe offers TomEE consultingand community engagement throughthe encouragement of open-source con-tributions to the project.

JFrog demonstrated its forthcomingArtifactory HA release. Artifactory userswere experiencing a great amount ofpain if and when their servers crashed,which would hold up their builds due tounavailable artifacts. Artifactory HA willbe highly available, and include failoversupport to allow for clusters of Artifacto-ry instances to perform redundantly.

ReportMill gave attendees a glimpseof its forthcoming Java RAD environ-ment, Java Inventor. The goal of JavaInventor (and of ReportMill) is to recre-ate Microsoft Access in Java. Thus,developers using Java Inventor can skipmost of the boilerplate work that isrequired to simply stand up a Java-baseddatabase-driven application. The soft-ware also includes the ability to generatereports from these applications withoutwriting complex report-generation tools.

Thinking Software was at JavaOne toshow developers SUM4JVM, a tool thatallows them to find race conditions. TheSUM4JVM tool set attaches to runningJava applications, and when a race con-dition occurs, it offers a visual interfaceto finding where the bug is originating.

ZeroTurnaround demonstratedLiveRebel, its deployment-focusedfollow-up to JRebel. LiveRebel allowsdevelopers to automate the entiredeployment process of their applica-tion using the LiveRebel Server,which can kick off builds, tests, anddata installation into test, staging andproduction environments. z

BY ALEX HANDY

The Java Community Process has beenundergoing a bit of reinvention over thelast three years. Starting with JSR 348,the actual process of changing Java hasbeen, itself, changing.

Finalized in October of 2011, this wasthe first JSR to address the JCP’s execu-tive committees, formalizing their dutyguidelines, and pushing for more openspecification development processes.JSR 355, completed in August of 2012,merged the executive committees. As aresult, this October’s JCP electionrequired everyone to be re-elected, notjust those members whose terms are up.

Patrick Curran, chair of the JCP, saidthat the next change within the JCP willbe the Java Specification ParticipationAgreement (JSPA). The JSPA is the setof legal terms that JCP members andcontributors must agree to. It governsthe intellectual property rights of spec-ifications and assets created whenbuilding a JSR.

Said Curran: “We want to modify[the JSPA] to increase the transparency,to simplify the IP rights, to embraceopen-source licensing and developmentprocesses. All JSRs will be developed inan open-source development process inthe future, and available under an open-source license. We’ll come up with asimpler contribution style.”

Java keeps growingOpenJDK and Java SE 8 are on sched-ule for release in the spring of 2014.This new version of Java will includeclosures (also referred to as Lambdas).This capability allows developers todesignate a unit of functionality asbeing ready for parallelization in theJVM during execution. Many talks atJavaOne focused on preparing develop-ers for this major change to the lan-guage.

Version 8 of the Java language,whether OpenJDK 8 or Java SE 8, willalso include the Nashorn JavaScript

engine. Nashorn allows JavaScript torun on the JVM, and it is also featuredin Java EE 7’s Project Avatar, which wasrecently made open source.

Java 8 also includes a new date-and-time API, generalized target-type infer-ence, repeating annotations, and a half-dozen cryptographic changes, updatesand improvements. Additionally, JDBCwill move to version 4.2, Unicode sup-port will hit version 6.2, and JAXPupdates to 1.5.

What’s not in Java 8, however, isProject Jigsaw, the effort to modularizeJava. While it was specifically pushedback from the Java 8 release timeframe,the OpenJDK has seen a great reduc-tion in interdependencies (meaningconnections were removed betweencomponents so that they can be decou-pled). This work will later allow formodularization, but for now, Java SE 8and OpenJDK 8 will both include moremanageably interconnected parts,instead of the tangled mess of earlierreleases. z

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey (right)

announced new PaaS support for iOS.

The next object for the JCP, says chair

Patrick Curran, is modifying the JSPA.

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Rebuilding the JCPReforms designed to ease member participation



BY SUZANNE KATTAU

Geeklist, a social networking site fordevelopers, recently hosted #hack4good,a 48-hour global coding marathon dur-ing which more than 2,000 independentdevelopers in 21 cities created applica-tions to help world charities solve vari-ous humanitarian and environmentalproblems.

Participating cities includ-ed Kathmandu, Nepal;London; Minsk,Belarus; New Delhi;New York; San Fran-cisco; Tel Aviv; andToronto. Just as onewould expect in acoding marathon,there was a lot of coding, a lot of coffeeand very little sleep, according toReuben Katz, founder and CEO ofGeeklist.

“But what was different about thisevent was that it was the first-ever, tan-dem, global hackathon where all thecities participated all at the same time—with the same start and end times intheir respective time zones,” he said.

Doing it for love of the codeNourished with free pizza, soda and cof-fee, developers designed their applica-tions to solve issues including environ-mental conservation, climate change,education issues, global hunger, andemergency communication after earth-quakes and other natural disasters. Eachcity had its own winning application,which was chosen based on its ability tobest address its respective issue.

“We don’t promote big prizes for thewinners,” Katz explained. “We do haveone grand prize, who is more of a win-ning ambassador, selected to representGeeklist and #hack4good at our futureevents. Or they get to travel to otherhackathons on Geeklist’s behalf.”

Katz said that the people that he

wants for these events are not peoplethat really want or expect a big rewardfor building an app that, for example,helps Amnesty International findrefugees. “The reward that they get isthat they’ve done something for socialgood that helps,” he said. “And to main-tain that sanctity of social good, we reallytry to focus in very heavily on running

events that developers reallyget personal, long-term

value out of.”Katz was impressed

by the caliber of appscreated during themarathon. “There wasan incredible appmade that helps peo-

ple locate their lost pets,” he said. “It’sbasically a pet rescue app where rescueagencies that get cats and dogs into theirshelters are able to pinpoint where theywere found and their characteristics anddevelop a registry of lost cats and dogs.”

Charities such as Amnesty Interna-tional, Friends of the Earth, Interna-tional Medical Corps, Macmillan andUNICEF UK will benefit from thewinning applications, but onlybecause they will help their causes.Geeklist emphasized that the applica-tions will remain open source and arenot for profit.

The Geeklist Corps of DevelopersGeeklist also recently launched theGeeklist Corps of Developers, a com-munity of experts who can be on handduring global disasters to help solveproblems in real time. The companydescribed it as the world’s first andlargest corps of tech leaders who aretrained and prepared to be the first tech-nical responders for disaster, humanitar-ian and wildlife relief solutions. Current-ly, the Geeklist Corps of Engineers isopen only to invitees or to #hack4goodparticipants, the company said. z

Developers go the distance for charityCoding marathon takes on global issues

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BY ALEX HANDY

At Oracle OpenWorld, the highlight ofthe show typically comes from thekeynote from Oracle founder Larry Elli-son. This year, however, he skipped thekeynote in favor of watching his sailboatrace around the San Francisco Bay, soOracle president Mark Hurd was onhand to introduce the new Oracle In-Memory Database.

Hurd characterized the new data-base as a simple way to speed up exist-ing applications. “You flip a switch, andwith no rewriting of your applicationsyou get the performance benefit of in-memory,” he said.

And while Oracle is pitching its in-memory option as an entirely new prod-uct, many at the show asked Hurd specif-ically how it stacked up to SAP’s HANAin-memory datastore.

“I don’t like it when Exadata or theIn-Memory option gets compared toSAP’s HANA, because I don’t eventhink they’re comparable. HANA has tobe programmed. What we told youabout doesn’t have to do that. You’renot rewriting anything. All the magic isbelow the database layer,” he said.

The SAP bus tourSAP, for its part, is pushing HANA as ananalytics platform. In early September,SAP’s Byron Banks, vice president ofdatabase and technology, hosted anunveiling of a bus his company pur-chased. This bus will rove the country,spreading the word of HANA.

Banks has been following this bus cityto city, showing off HANA demos. Onecomes from the NFL, showing a footballstadium. Each seat’s status can bechecked through a HANA-backed appli-cation, and by using facial recognition,sentiment can be gleaned from fans.

But Hurd maintained that, despitethe introduction of Oracle In-Memory

Database, the company has been sellingin-memory solutions (like TimesTen) forsome time. “When you look at In-Mem-ory, I don’t want anyone walking awaythinking In-Memory was first announcedtoday. We’ve been in-memory longbefore HANA was a product,” he said.

Amit Sinha, senior vice president ofdatabase and technology innovation atSAP, said that Oracle’s solution lacks

some of HANA’s capabilities.“SAP HANA has one columnar store

for both transactions and analytics,” hesaid. “Oracle’s approach keeps tworedundant copies of data, one for trans-actions in a row, and a duplicate one foranalytics in a column. They have funda-mentally not erased the traditional dividebetween OLTP and OLAP—simplymasked it. This implies greater data foot-print, complexity and more DBA-inten-sive work.

“While Oracle was in catch-upmode, SAP HANA matured from adatabase to a platform to perform appli-cation functions close to the database,e.g., predictive libraries, business func-tions and app-server capabilities are allperformed in memory.”

But Oracle and SAP aren’t the onlyones playing in the in-memory market.ScaleOut Software announced the

availability of hServer version 2, whichbrings real-time analytics capabilities toMap/Reduce in Hadoop.

And JavaOne, the sister show thattook place alongside Oracle Open-World, also saw the release of anothernew in-memory datastore: Hazelcast.

While Oracle focuses on one-to-onecompatibility between its traditionalSQL database and its new In-Memory

Database, Hazelcast has been focusingon offering Java developers simple waysto construct data-driven applications.

Miko Matsumura, vice president ofmarketing and developer relations forHazelcast, said that this in-memory datagrid offers a lot more than just a place toquickly store data during execution. Andthat’s where Hazelcast distinguishesitself; it’s not just an in-memory data grid;it also includes a message queue, meta-data for each operation in the queue, andother handlers typically associated withcomponents further up the stack.

Matsumura said that Hazelcast is alsoabout bringing processing to the data.Instead of pulling, modifying and replac-ing data from the database, Hazelcastallows developers to quickly access andmodify data without needing to write itback to disk or waste time reading proce-dures from that same disk. z

Oracle steps up to SAPwith in-memory databaseBoth companies aim to dominate analytics world

Mark Hurd stresses that In-Memory Database is not the first in-memory product from Oracle.

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http://sdtimes.com/pdf/ActiveReports7/3150


BY SUZANNE KATTAU

Cloud-based load-testing service pro -vider Load Impact has announced anautomated Service Metrics Agent thatlets developers detect, measure, analyzeand predict server performance prob-lems in their applications or websites.

Traditionally, when developers load-test their websites or applications overthe Internet, they could only measurehow fast the data came back from Webservers, according to Ragnar Lonn,founder and CEO of Load Impact.“But what we do now is we actuallyextract data from inside the system,from database servers that are behindthe Web server, and we can see howthey are also performing,” he said.

This is something that Lonn saiddevelopers haven’t been able to dobefore. “You will be able to correlatehow heavy a load your database serverhas and why you are stressing your web-

site with a thousand concurrent users,for instance,” said Lonn.

The Server Metrics Agent can beextended to test any server function byadding plug-ins compatible withNagios, an open-source IT infrastruc-ture-monitoring tool. “Nagios has a veryflexible plug-in architecture that allowsyou to write your own small programsto monitor whatever you want moni-tored,” Lonn said.

“We thought it would be excellentfor us [to integrate with] because wecan’t spend a lot of time writing code toextract data about all sorts of databaseservers and things. So, basically, youinstall our Service Metrics Agent, andthen you can download any of the 3,000or so Nagios plug-ins, using those toextract performance data about thehardware and software that you have.”

Traditionally, Lonn said that loadtesting fell on IT’s shoulders, but devel-

opers are now expected to take anactive role in it.

“Developers are the ones who set upthe database schema; they’re responsi-ble for structuring the database andusing database indexes to speed thingsup and so on,” he said. “So if there’s abottleneck in the database, it’s likelydue to bad code.

“And so developers need to have astaging environment where they load-test in an environment that resemblesthe real-life environment as close aspossible. And with the new continuousintegration and continuous deliverymovement, it’s becoming necessary todo this in an automated fashion as partof your nightly builds. Because onceyou’re in production, the only thing theoperations people can do is add morehardware, and that’s usually an expen-sive and not-so-efficient way of improv-ing performance.” z

Load testing can now include developersCloud-based tool automatically extracts data to pinpoint bottlenecks

www.faircom.com© 2013 FairCom Corporation

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http://sdtimes.com/pdf/HighPerformance/3151


http://sdtimes.com/pdf/SpreadStudio_NET/3152


BY SUZANNE KATTAU

Application development tool providerTelerik has announced that its cloud-based mobile development tool Iceni-um now directly integrates with VisualStudio 2012. This integration is for.NET developers who want to createAndroid and iOS applications yet stilluse Visual Studio.

Visual Studio does not offer develop-ers a way to do any kind of cross-platformmobile development, according to BurkeHolland, developer relations lead forcross-platform tools and services atTelerik. “This is the unprecedentedmove to [give enterprise developers] theability to build an iOS application onWindows inside of Visual Studio withoutever owning a Mac or Apple platform—and being able to deploy directly to thedevice,” he said.

This latest release of Icenium letsdevelopers use their CSS, HTML5 andJavaScript skills to develop, test andpublish hybrid Android and iOS(including iOS 7) mobile applications.

In addition to being able to accessVisual Studio’s coding environment,IDE plug-ins and configurable build sys-

tem, the company said that developerswill now be able to directly access Iceni-um’s device simulators for Android andiOS. “You actually see the device withyour app running inside,” Holland said.“And you can switch between Android,iPad, different form factors, and you cansimulate some device events.”

Holland said that another benefit of

Icenium’s integration into Visual Studiois that it allows enterprise developers toleverage their infrastructure and currentworkflow. For example, if they have theirown code repository system, they cannow tie directly into that with Visual Stu-dio. He added that Icenium will supportVisual Studio 2013 “as soon as possibleafter the final bits are released.” z

Telerik integrates Icenium with Visual Studio

BY ALEX HANDY

Atlassian’s annual user summit in SanFrancisco played host to the release ofa number of new features for JIRA,Confluence and the Atlassian Market-place. The largest of these updates isthe new Service Desk feature in JIRA,which allows the issue tracker to doubleas a trouble-ticketing system for techsupport and internal support uses.

Atlassian’s take on support-desktools comes out of its discovery that asmuch as 30% of its JIRA user base wasalready building this type of functional-ity on top of the platform. But the focusof Service Desk isn’t just the formaliza-tion of these customizations; rather, it’sservice-level agreements.

“On the team side, we focused on

SLAs. We realized there were productsthat talked about SLAs, but they had ahard time defining those SLAs insidethe product,” said Bryan Rollins, JIRAbusiness manager at Atlassian.

This SLA awareness is built intoService Desk from the ground up. Thatmeans when a ticket is created around aspecific customer, the SLA they’veagreed to is tracked in the ticket as well.A specific response time, mandated bythe SLA, is also included, showing thetech support person how high of a pri-ority each ticket is.

To bolster this capability, Conflu-ence received a number of updates toease the use of this corporate wiki as aforum and knowledgebase for internalworkers.

“You may want a forum where usersinside your company can post questionsand have questions answered, like StackOverflow, but for that corporate knowl-edgebase,” said Rollins. “In addition,with Service Desk coming out, you canmake a knowledgebase blueprint. As apart of Confluence, you can have aknowledgebase that has the richestediting experience. The result is yousee less tickets inbound because cus-tomers can service [themselves] off therich content you deliver.”

Handled properly, said Rollins, thatinternal knowledgebase wiki canbecome a tech support FAQ for bothinternal and external users alike, solvingcommon problems before users have tocontact tech support. z

JIRA now comes with a help deskUpdates also come to Atlassian Marketplace and Confluence

.NET developers can build cross-platform mobile applications without leaving their favorite IDE.



http://sdtimes.com/pdf/Studio_Enterprise/3153


BY ROB MARVIN

Big Data is proliferating more andmore into everyday life. As better toolsfor moving, storing, processing and ana-lyzing massive data streams emerge,widespread use is becoming common-place. In sports, where detailed statis-tics have always played a key role in theplayer, coach and fan experience, it’sonly natural Big Data would ultimatelyfind its way in.

Multinational insurance companyAIG, a major partner with NewZealand’s national men’s rugby team(the All Blacks), is collaborating withNew Zealand Rugby, USA Rugby andsports data company Opta to launch theAIG Rugby Innovation Challenge. Thechallenge gives software developersunlimited access to Opta data of the2012 New Zealand All Blacks season, aswell as USA Rugby data. Using datafeeds like match results, season rank-

ings and totals, stadium feeds, playerprofiles and stats, and x/y coordinatedata of where each play took place onthe rugby pitch, developers will createand submit apps designed to changethe way rugby fans experience thegame, or educate users about the sport.

The applications fall into three plat-form categories. Developers can createapps that run on Android, BlackBerry,iOS or Windows Phone smartphones ortablets; in Web or mobile browsers; oron Windows or Mac desktops. Androidapps need to be submitted using .apkfiles; Windows Phone apps with .xap;and Windows PC apps with .exe. Con-testant resources also include APIs andSDKs with the freedom to integrate asmany as the developer likes.

AIG, USA Rugby and the All Blacksprovided rugby images and video footagefor the competitors to incorporate intothe apps. They’re putting on the app

challenge to grow awareness for thesport, and because their relationshipswith these rugby associations and Optaput them in an ideal position to super-sede data copyrights and give developersaccess to a wealth of otherwise hard-to-obtain data and multimedia content.

“Rugby is not quite that big in theU.S., but outside it’s one of the largest,most recognizable sports in the world,”said Daniel Glantz, global head of spon-sorship for AIG. The InternationalRugby Board claims a record 3.9 billionviewers saw the 2011 Rugby World Cupworldwide, and it expects that numberto grow in 2015. Rugby will also be afull Olympic sport in 2016 for the firsttime since 1924.

Glantz had never experienced rugbybefore AIG began its partnership withNew Zealand Rugby in 2012, but hequickly took to the sport. When thecompany posed the idea of creating a

AIG Rugby Innovation Challenge feeds data to developers creating apps centered on the sport

TEAM STATS, 2009-2013

YEAR PLAYED WON LOST DRAWN

2013 9 9 0 0

2012 14 12 1 1

2011 12 10 2 0

2010 14 13 1 0

2009 14 10 4 0

SDT295 page 26,27_Layout 1 10/24/13 1:17 PM


rugby app, he hadthe idea of opening the opportunity upto software developers.

“Why build an app ourselves?”Glantz said. “Why not encourage thedeveloper community and see whatthey can come up with? We would lovesomeone to come up with a creative for-mula, a new metric like in ‘Moneyball.’A new stat to gauge the performance ofa player.”

Glantz is especially excited aboutone particular data stream: the x/y coor-dinates, allowing developers to re-enactthe whole game visually, plotting thelocation of each play as it took place.According to Glantz, the Opta data hasreceived more than 400 downloadsfrom 30 countries since the data wasmade available for the challenge, and atleast 20 to 30 apps were alreadyentered with two days left in the sub-mission period ending Oct. 9.

Building the challengeWhen it came down to organizing andrunning the challenge, Glantz turned

to ChallengePost, a platformthat powers software compe-titions and in-person hack -athons. Last December,Glantz was riding the NewYork City subway when hesaw an advertisement for theChallengePost-powered MTAApp Quest, a challenge to create apps that enhancedriders’ public transit experi-ence. He reached out to thecompany about the rugby appchallenge.

“It’s not a work-for-hirething, where we give you achance to win money andthen we own your app. It’snot that at all,” said Chal-lengePost CEO BrandonKessler. “We want you to

build somethingamazing and own itfor yourself, but useour data or ourplatform to achievesomething cool.This challenge, tome, is key becauseit’s the first one to

say, of course sports data is important.People have been obsessed with sportsdata forever, but let’s actually releasethe data to the public and let develop-ers create incredible apps, which arebetter than anything these rugby organ-izations could do on their own.”

Kessler was just as animated talkingabout the implications these apps couldhave on the way fans consume rugby,and sports in general.

“Maybe using the geographical datathat comes from X and Y coordinates,you could show data visualizations thatcould be insightful in a way you’ve nev-er seen before,” he said. “As opposedto sportswriters talking about whathappened in a given game, how inter-esting might it be to see visualizationsacross an entire sports team’s actions?In the same way you can visualizeclicks on a website, maybe it would beinteresting to visualize certain patternsgeographically.”

While Kessler couldn’t yet talk aboutany app submissions, he allowed him-

self to explore the possibilities.“Maybe you’re really obsessed with

one particular player or team,” he said.“A developer could create somethingfor fans who have no interest in sortingthrough data; someone could considermaking something for the average fanas opposed to the hardcore fan. Thereare unlimited options for improve-ments and interesting creative takes onthe sport and the way the data couldimprove it.”

By the Oct. 9 deadline, contestantsmust submit their app incorporating atleast one AIG Opta rugby data feed, aswell as a video demonstrating how theapp works. A panel including membersfrom AIG, Opta, Adidas, USA andinternational rugby, the Brooklyn Netsand New Zealand All Blacks players willjudge the quality, implementation andpotential impact of the apps, before thewinners are announced in November.Another judge is entrepreneur and rug-by enthusiast Mark Cuban, who got hisstart in software as a salesman for YourBusiness Software (one of the first PCretailers in Dallas), before starting hisown tech companies: Micro Solutionsand AudioNet.

The winning developers will receiveprizes anywhere from cash, round-tripNew Zealand flights and All Blacksmatch tickets, to free data feeds andconsulting meetings with Opta, plusapp exposure on both Rugbydump.comand Allblacks.com.

Aside from the overall first-, second-and third-place prizes, there will also beawards for Best App by a UniversityStudent, Best Rugby Education App,the Popular Choice App, and the AIGRecognition Award for large companiesthat entered apps.

“Software innovation in sports is inits infancy, and in my view it’s inevitablethat it’ll become part of our everydayinteraction with sports, among new anddiehard fans alike,” Kessler said. “Sogetting in on the ground floor of thiscould suggest and open up really strongbusiness opportunities to developers,not just as fans but as business-orientedapp creators. This is just the beginningof software developers playing a bigrole in the consumption of sports.” z

2011 RUGBY WORLD CUP STADIUM Venue: Forsyth Barr Stadium

Location: Anzac Avenue, Dunedin, New Zealand

Coordinates: 45° 52' 9" S 170° 31' 28" ECapacity: 30,748

Stadium features: Retractable glass roof

Pitch type: Desso GrassMaster hybrid grass turf

Nickname: “The Glasshouse”

PLAYER STATS

PLAYER TRIES CONVERSIONS PENALTIES DROPPED TOTALGOALS

AARON BARRETT 1 12 12 0 65

BEN READ 10 0 0 0 50

BEAUDEN SMITH 3 5 3 0 34


A perfect storm of online shopping


BY ROB MARVIN

This Nov. 29 will usher in a Black Fridaythe likes of which we’ve probably neverseen before. Hanukkah begins onThanksgiving Day this year (a day peo-ple have now taken to calling Thanks-givukkah), converging with peak Christ-mas shopping on that fateful Friday in aperfect storm of holiday e-commerce.

Considering this potentiallyunprecedented online shopper load,now is a good time to reexamine yourapplication performance management(APM) strategy.

“People need to get ready for theholiday season,” said Andreas Grabner,technology strategist at CompuwareAPM. “They need to invest early on intesting. More and more people areshopping online, and especially ontablets and smartphones.”

The mobile shopping boomCompuware predicted in its DevOpsSurvival Guide for the 2013 shoppingseason that more than 50% of online cus-tomers will shop using mobile devices, soit’s essential for developers to extend test-ing to smartphones and tablets.

For businesses relying heavily onholiday sales, like personalized giftretailer Things Remembered, load test-ing desktop and mobile website func-tionality becomes the most importantstep in preparation.

“The growth of tablets has shakenthe computing industry to its core,” saidThings Remembered senior vice presi-dent and CIO Mark Lilien.

“We actually have a code freezebefore we start load testing,” he said.“We allow developers to change con-tent, but we stop changing features andfixing defects.”

Things Remembered, Lilienexplained, is a business extremelydependent on card-giving holidays.

Essentially everything on thingsre-membered.com is purchased as a giftfor someone else, often with personal-ized embroidery or engravings. So inpreparation for this year’s holiday sea-son, the company will use Compuwareto run roughly three-dozen scripts, ordifferent procedures a customer mightuse as they browse the site.

“This season our forecast expects agreater amount of traffic, pages andentry points,” Lilien said. “So we takethe forecast and cross it with the scripts.If an item is expected to comprise 9%of sales, the script will incorporate theitem 9% of the time.”

Game-planning the rushA holiday season often brings businessdemands of new features and promo-tions to an e-commerce site, but Com-puware’s Grabner stressed the ability toquickly turn them on and off, in case a

feature is bringing down app perform-ance during a rush.

“If a feature isn’t producing moreconverted users, turn it off,” Grabnersaid. “You’ve already brought them intothis process, you don’t want to lose themalong the way. The last thing we want tosee is abandoned shopping carts.”

He explained how APM solutionsallow developers to analyze code anddevelopmental architectural patterns.On the production side, they can moni-tor how every end user moves throughthe website. This is where perform-ance-management solutions come intoplay, to figure out what’s going on in thecode, he said. Developers receiveimmediate info for, say, a poorly imple-mented function, to either fix it rightaway or turn it off. You can’t solve everyproblem up front, so the site architec-ture needs to accommodate forchanges, he said.

How retailers can anticipate and test for the Thanksgivukkah rush

Black Friday 2013



“Make sure you build the apps toscale horizontally, and select an archi-tecture which allows you to add addi-tional hardware resources on-demand,”said Grabner. “Make sure the app sup-ports artificial scaling.”

Good development is good for businessThings Remembered’s Lilien sees thisBlack Friday as an opportunity. If thisyear’s heightened holiday shopping sea-son is a success, it bodes well for onlineshopping in the future.

The National Retail Federationexpects U.S. sales to rise 3.9% toUS$602.1 billion this November andDecember, up from the 3.5% increaseseen in 2012 and the 3.3% averagegrowth over the past decade. The NRFis projecting an even greater increase inonline holiday shopping, expected toincrease 13-15% to as much as $82 bil-lion compared to an 11.1% increaseduring the 2012 holiday season.

“If more suppliers are prepared forpeak volume, it’s better for everybody,”Lilien said. “If online shoppers seeheadlines the next day or apologies

online about sites that went down dur-ing the Black Friday rush, the Internetas a commerce channel loses respect,and that’s a problem for everybody.

“A few years ago, the Internet hadan expectation of broken links, and itaffected everyone in e-commerce and[mobile commerce].”

Testing and APM strategies areabout as sure a bet as online shoppingsites have going up against the rush on

Black Friday, but as prepared as ThingsRemembered is, Lilien can’t help butbe a tad bit worried.

“I’m excited for Black Friday becauseevery business wants to maximize rev-enue, but it’s hard not to be nervous too,”he said. “I deal with my anxiety by testingthingsremembered.com in every waypossible. If I wasn’t at least a little nerv-ous about this year, I wouldn’t behuman.” z

Compuware technology strategist AndreasGrabner cautioned against “land mines”that slow down site performance or crashapps when load testing. 1. Bloated Web front ends: Developersshould use caching, compression and con-tent distribution networks.2. Slow third-party content: Keep plans inplace to manage third parties in case ofan outage.3. Wrong framework usage: Configure theframeworks with the right cache strategyand API functions. 4. Network infrastructure problems:

Check the network and server time outliers

compared to the values of the baselinetraffic. 5. Cloud gotchas: The cloud isn’t an end-less resource pool of CPU, memory ordisk on-demand. 6. Too many database calls: A single Webrequest queries thousands of databasestatements, eating all the memory. 7. Big Data not optimized: You can’tprocess more data by simply addingadditional resources.8. Undetected memory leaks: Memoryissues with class loading, large classes ornative memory are often the result of sin-gle objects consuming a lot of memory.

Top 8 application performance land mines


http://sdtimes.com/pdf/SmartGWT/3154


http://sdtimes.com/pdf/workingWith/3155


COMPONENT WATCHCOMPONENT WATCH

■ Imaging software provider Accusoft

has released Prizm Content Connect ver-sion 8, a server-based document viewer.The new version includes improved textand font fidelity, speed enhancementsacross all document types, and new APIsenabling easier integration. It alsoenables collaboration on more than 300file types, such as PDFs and images,through a viewer that does not need to beinstalled on employee devices.

■ Microsoft development tool providerComponentOne has released Spread Stu-dio 7 v2, a suite of spreadsheet tools forapplication development. The primaryaddition includes new maintenancereleases of Spread for Windows Forms 7,

ASP.NET 7, WPF-Silverlight and WinRT.Also included are performance enhance-ments, updated support for touchdevices, added charting support, and anew Web installer. The tools also boast ofeasy editing capabilities by mimicking thestyle of Excel files.

■ DevExpress has has updated its XAMLcontrols suite to support new Windows 8.1features. Now included in the suite is aPDF Viewer Control with support fortouch gestures, printing and multiplepage-view styles; a data-filtering UI, withvirtualization support; and Tile Controlenhancements that support new sizingoptions found in Windows 8.1. Additional-ly, the controls take advantage of suchWindows 8.1 features as application resiz-

ing, faster XAML loading and on-demandstyle loading.

■ HTML5 development tool providerSencha has updated its Sencha Touchmobile framework. Sencha Touch 2.3 isthe latest upgrade to the HTML5 mobileframework for designing, developing anddeploying HTML5 apps to any mobiledevice. The enhanced version now inte-grates with Apache Cordova for seam-less support of native phone functionali-ty direct from HTML5 apps. It also hasout-of-the-box native functionality withAndroid, BlackBerry 10, iOS and Windows8 systems. Additionally the Touch Gridcomponent is designed to work with var-ious grid functions by way of a plug-inarchitecture. z

In other component news…

BY ADAM LOBELIA

Mobile application tool makerTelerik has released the Q3 versionof its .NET development tool suite.This release is designed to boostthe suite’s analytics capabilities.

Developers have historicallybeen unable to gauge interest intheir products aside from simple“likes” or “dislikes.” Telerik is nowproviding integrated analytics in itsSilverlight and WPF controls byusing the EQATEC Application Analytics platform. Thisallows developers to leverage more in-depth data such asinteractions, crash reports and feature usage.

Another new feature comes from a Backend-as-a-Serviceoffering, called Everlive, which has been integrated into Rad-Controls for Windows Phone. This integration allows forWindows Phone support for scenarios like user registrationand login, picture uploading, browsing, and more.

On top of that, Telerik released a RadCloudUpload con-trol, which allows ASP.NET developers to upload files foruse with Amazon S3, Everlive or Windows Azure, withoutwriting code.

Within the Q3 release is the merger of the Icenium app-development program and the DevCraft Ultimate collection.

This integration is focused onassisting with the creation ofcross-platform applications. .NETdevelopers can use this to createand deploy to Android and iOSwithin their preferred IDE,including Visual Studio.

Another cross-platform benefitcomes from the addition ofTelerik’s components for Lightbox

(for image and template display)and MediaPlayer (for audio and

video playback in HTML5-capable browsers). This is round-ed off with RadControls for the ASP.NET AJAX suite, whichhas improved lightweight rendering for mobile and cross-platform applications.

Miscellaneous features include a radial menu for Windows8 HTML and XAML; a scheduler for Windows 8 HTML; a“Pinterest”-like RadDataBoundListBox and RadCloudCalen-dar for Windows Phone; a RadSpreadsheet control for Sil-verlight and WPF, along with an Office 2013 theme; andenhanced JustCode Test Runner, JustTrace line-level profil-ing, leak analysis in JustTrace, and instrumentation of DLL-import methods in JustMock.

The Q3 release is available now; a free, 30-day trial is avail-able for download at the company’s website. z

Going beyond simple likes and dislikes Analytics and cross-platform capabilities focus of Telerik release

Telerik has added RadControls for its ASP.NET AJAX suite.


SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comSPECIAL REPORT32

Success comes with its own set ofdemands. Whether Ken Schwaberlikes it or not, 2013 is the year of

the “agile market,” and Scrum hasreached the boardroom. The softwaredevelopment process Schwaber and JeffSutherland first presented at OOP-SLA’95 is now the predominant tech-nique used by agile software engineer-ing teams. It faces new growing pains,however, as entire organizations try toadopt it, and new continuous deliverymodels bring complementary tech-

niques (such as Kanban) to the fore.Capitalizing on this momentum,

Boulder, Colo.-based agile tool vendorRally Software made an initial publicoffering in April, and companies such asAtlassian and CollabNet could be nextin line to IPO. Ever the “robe-and-san-dals Agilista,” to use Microsoft principalprogram manager Aaron Bjork’s label,Schwaber shakes his head at all this.

“I was at a [Department of Defense]conference back in 2002. The CMMIpeople and a couple of us from the agile

community were on a panel. At thattime, CMMI was big, with lots ofexpense and consultants who wouldcome in and make you Level 2, Level 3,etc. Bill Curtis and Mark Paul said, ‘Wedon’t think we have any difference ingoals from people in the agile commu-nity. We all intend to improve the pro-fession of software development,’ ” saidSchwaber.

But CMMI had become commercial-ized, with an explosion of consultantsand products. “The moment that hap-pened, the initial purpose was lost. Theguys on the panel asked us, ‘How willyou cope with it when this happens tothe agile community?’ ” Schwaber con-tinued. That moment has arrived, bring-ing with it methodologists, consultantsand vendors. But not without protest.

Scrum.org, Schwaber maintained, has“worked very hard not to come up with amethodology. I have a Scrum methodol-

Scrum creator Schwaber says it’s not a methodology, but a set of values thatcan be applied to any industry

BY ALEXANDRA WEBER MORALES

SDT295 page 32-36_Layout 1 10/25/13 11:19 AM

www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times SPECIAL REPORT 33

ogy that I developed in 2003... But I putit away. Someone said all these fads runabout 10 years, it’s time for the nextthing. But Scrum is based on values, likewe stated in the Agile Manifesto. If thevalues take hold, we succeeded.”

From revolution to evolutionScrum calls teams to be iterative andincremental, to eliminate waste, listen tobottom-up intelligence, inspect andadapt, make people count, and use value-stream mapping. “The Agile Manifestoapplies to all industries. When we read itand its 12 principles, and switch eachmention of ‘software’ with ‘customer-vis-ible value,’ we have an elegant methodol-ogy that applies to all business,” said JoeJustice, whose day job is being a Scrumconsultant for Jeff Sutherland’s Boston-based firm, Scrum Inc.

Justice spends nights and weekendsrunning Wikispeed, an automotive-pro-

totyping company whose volunteers aimto design and build the world’s first 100miles-per-gallon commuter cars. Theproject dovetails nicely with his Scrumconsulting, with customers such as JohnDeere coming into the Seattle Wik-ispeed workshop to build a car for twohours, then asking him to fly to India toteach its engineers Scrum techniques.

According to Dean Leffingwell, cre-ator of the Scaled Agile Framework(SAFe), Scrum now represents 70% to80% of all agile practices. ThoughSchwaber has publicly criticized SAFeas being a commercial methodologythat bears too many similarities to theRational Unified Process of the 1990s,he did concur that Scrum has won thehearts of most agile developers.

At a luncheon in San Jose, Rally’sCTO Zach Nies gave a brief history ofinnovation in different markets. Hisexamples included Apple’s ever-shorten-ing product cycle, Tesla’s attempt at rev-olutionizing electric cars, and even Web-van’s notorious breakdown. Each storyhe shared, however, was a stark illustra-tion of a Moore’s Law-like curve wherebythe time from garage band to fame wasshrinking ever faster, from decades toyears to months.

Where old management techniqueswould “obscure uncertainty with detailsof a false precision,” said Nies, “What I’dencourage you to do is use tools andtechniques to embrace that uncertainty.”Since no one’s business is getting lessuncertain these days, he said, the trick isto find the sweet spot between discoveryand complacency. “If you’re always get-ting the expected market result, there’stoo much safety in your process. Ifyou’re never getting it, you need moreempathy with customers,” he said.

Rally has spent the last 12 years hon-ing a set of Scrum-based tools and per-fecting the techniques with which toteach them. And it’s no accident thatthe language the company uses todescribe agile appeals as much to entre-preneurs as it does to software develop-ers: In 2013, the company went public.

Betting on ScrumThe Standish Group estimated thatagile techniques are being used for 29%

of new software development projects,while IDC summed up the applicationlife-cycle market (including configura-tion management, IT project and portfolio management, and automatedsoftware quality) at an estimatedUS$5.2 billion. According to Rally’sSEC registration statement, it claimed154,982 paid users and more than 1,000customers, including 36 of the Fortune100 companies. With proliferating soft-ware and increased awareness of agilepractices, that’s a promising market forthe cloud-based tool vendor—one thathas earned props from Microsoft andVersionOne.

“You can look at niche players thatare making only an agile project-man-agement play, and they are clearlyahead of us,” said Microsoft’s Bjork.

Andy Powell, VersionOne’s VP ofcustomer experience, said the marketsentiment is encouraging. “Rally is thefirst one to IPO,” he said. “We’re excit-ed that they were able to go publicbecause it shows how important agile isto the community as a whole. There’sinterest for Atlassian to do the samefrom the investment community.”

Nor is Rally underestimating thethreat from ALM suite vendors, accord-ing to its SEC filing. “Our primary com-petitors include private companies suchas Atlassian, CollabNet and Ver-sionOne, and public companies such asHewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft,some of which can bundle competingproducts and services with other soft-ware offerings, or offer them at a lowerprice as part of a larger sale,” it read.

Part of the growth strategy for Rally,then, is to broaden its agile appealbeyond teams to the next level: Programand portfolio management. Of course,rising above the team level brings Rallyand its ilk into contact with a new class ofvendor, as well as more entrenchedwaterfall-based project-managementtools. Being ISVs themselves, mosthaven’t been immune to Scrum’s call.

In 2006, Bill Reagan’s team, ClarityPPM (a division of CA Technologies anda $4.4 billion IT management softwareand solutions company), began testingthe agile waters. Clarity is a leading IT

continued on page 34>


BY ALEXANDRA WEBER MORALES

That commitment holds the hope ofScrum in an ever-changing technologylandscape. The movement is essentiallyphilosophical, with simple shifts in focus: 1. Shrink the change. When trainingcompanies in agile, Rally transforma-tion consultant Ken Clyne often toutsthe book “Switch: How to ChangeThings When ChangeIs Hard,” by Chip andDan Heath.

“Sometimes youhave to shrink thechange,” he said. “Theexample in the book isabout people who getin so much credit-card debt that theyget themselves in trouble. Logic says topay off the highest interest first, butsometimes it’s better to shrink thechange and pay off the smallest debtfirst. You start seeing success and makethat a habit.”2. Let go of what’s done. A conceptthat often dogs developers, accordingto Microsoft program manager AaronBjork, is completed work. In his book,“Professional Scrum with Team Foun-dation Server 2010,” he noted thattracking remaining effort on the sprintbacklog is critical, even if teams “havean initial problem with letting go ofcompleted work.” It’s important to doso, he wrote, because completed workestimates are rarely accurate, distractfrom the more important task of tack-ling remaining work items, and can pitteam members against each other in acompetition to complete the most.3. Find the passion. In a world whereeveryone is potentially replaceable,does Scrum hold out any hope formeaningful work? Rally’s CTO ZachNies thought so. “When I look at mypast experiences, what contributed toburnout was building products nobodywanted,” he said. “Whereas if I’m pas-sionate, I can work really hard. Also, Ilike to see the cadence side of it. Asteady cadence is important. You don’thave these huge spikes of effort. I

believe we’re all makers, and it’s a craft.If you take pride in your craft... nobodywants to build a crappy product.”4. Make it fun. “Keeping engineershappy is about providing an excitementfactor,” said Yoram Tal, senior directorof engineering at Model N. “It’sengagement. To move from old tech-nology to new language, new architec-ture, contributing to open source,potentially building something cool.Now we even have some engineersworking on weekends.”5. Use the surplus. But wait, there’smore, said Nies. “I ask teams a contro-versial question: As you get to 20%,30%, even 200% increases in through-put, what are you going to do with thesurplus? That’s a hugely important partof the cadence. Be selfish with it.Improve things for the team,” he said.6. Improve the world. “The Scrumstuff, the whole agile framework makescompanies go faster and cheaper andmakes happier teams,” said Wikispeedhead Joe Justice. “That’s fine, but whatI actually care about is this idea: What ifwe put social good work in the backlog?If we’re losing sight of making theworld a better place, then we’re justrunning the rat race with a faster rat.”

In a similar vein, Rally supportsEngineers Without Borders, whichaims to tackle global warming withtechnical aplomb.

The good news is, while noble goalsmay not always be Scrum’s purpose,they are often its dividend. Justice told astory about how his “boss,” Jeff Suther-land, described Scrum in purely eco-nomic terms. “I was really put off bythat. It was so aggressively capitalist anddivorced from meaning,” said Justice.

Later, Sutherland told him thatScrum has to be made attractive to theboard and the CEO. “Good things willhappen as an artifact of them chasingrevenue. When you speed up a Scrumteam, that’s where it gets all warm andfuzzy really fast,” said Justice. And that’sprobably in the best interest of share-holders everywhere. z


What’s my motivation? project and portfolio management solu-tion with more than 1,000 customers,according to Gartner. Like many of itsilk, the product was built with waterfall,though, according to him, “We didn’tadmit we were waterfall.”

However, executives were “used togetting visibility a certain way, withcheckpoints, milestones and knowingscope upfront,” said Reagan, formerdirector of product management for CATechnologies and now a Clarity consult-ant for Digital Celerity. But the dive intoScrum happened for two reasons.

“One, agile was an emerging marketwe believed in. And we also thought weought to figure out how to get the two towork together; it was more like extendingour capability, not replacing it,” said Rea-gan. As Scrum began to take hold, first ina pilot team in 2006 and then in a fullyagile approach in 2010 to develop version13 of Clarity, the company saw results.

“Beyond the final results, just withinthe team itself, agile was good formorale, energy and productivity,” saidReagan. “We got a lot more done. Thereason for that is you’re very engaged.It’s a very collaborative, engaged devel-opment style. Everyone knew whateveryone was doing.

“It’s also very adaptive... The team’sin control, so you deliver, as opposed tothe big waterfall schedule, where noone is really responsible for the finalproduct, just pieces of it.”

The team was also able to build aSaaS piece on the Salesforce platformfor Scrum teams using Clarity Agile.According to Reagan, the tool is forCelerity users who wish to connect thePPM to their agile teams, but it’s notapplicable to the wider agile market.

Microsoft, too, has embraced agility,both for its tools and teams that buildthem. “Our strategy has always been,we’re an ALM suite. We want to provideyou with everything you need,” saidBjork. “We also want to be open to oth-er pieces. We have Visual Studio, whichwe think is the best IDE out there. Wehave three templates we ship with TeamFoundation Server: Scrum, agile andCMMI. We introduced Scrum in 2010,and the response was phenomenal. It’s

< continued from page 33


www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times SPECIAL REPORT 35

our most popular template—in fact ourdefault template right now.”

A YouTube video from a few yearsago shows a Microsoft team conductinga standup meeting in a hallway, chosenfor convenience and to discourage lin-gering past the allotted time. Accordingto Bjork, stand-ups don’t happen in thehalls anymore, because there are none.

“Our new building on campus isbuilt around team rooms. We don’thave offices anymore. We all sit inrooms that seat 12-18 people. You walkinto any of these and see task boardsand Kanban boards displayed,” he said.

Today, the TFS team operates onthree-week iterations with a uniquetwist, said Bjork: At the end of the sprint,every team sends an e-mail to the broad-er group celebrating with a demo video.“This way, you get everybody contribut-ing in a way that’s sharing more broadlyoutside of our team. It adds to a teamelement across the organization.”

Enter KanbanWith its massive user base, Microsoft hasthe luxury of analyzing developer behav-

ior as it pertains to tools. “Team Founda-tion Service, the online version, over thecourse of the last two years has reallycome to life,” said Bjork. “We’ve beenable to instrument it and study the databehind it at a deeper level than everbefore with Team Foundation Server.”

So what aspects of Scrum are mostpopular, and which get ignored? “Itdepends. If you’re a new team to agile,most pick up right away with Scrumtooling; everybody uses the productbacklog tool,” said Bjork. “A new trendwe’re seeing is, as teams become moremature, they’re doing less task decom-position and moving to Kanban, whereyou don’t have iterations but have morecontinuous flow.”

While task decomposition still hap-pens for these teams, Bjork surmisedit’s probably not to the granularity ofpure Scrum. “We have data that provesit. Kanban is a more mature concept,”he said, describing a team’s ability tomanage more advanced scenarios like adeployment pipeline.

“Scrum had more traction in theboxed product era; Kanban has more in

the service or continuous delivery era.The channels to deliver software are somuch more numerous than two or fiveyears ago.”

Kanban doesn’t only work well in the continuous delivery era: It also fitsbetter in the boardroom, where Scrumbecomes awkward. “I haven’t seen com-panies actually doing agile at the portfo-lio level, but I’ve certainly been readingabout it,” said Clarity’s Reagan. “It makessense for the same reasons it makes sensefor development: It’s about being adapt-able, collaborative, iterative.”

Is the glass ceiling SAFe’s open window?As VersionOne, Rally, ThoughtWorksand other agile tool vendors try to bringScrum concepts to the program-man-agement level, they face serious chal-lenges. How do they maintain theembrace of uncertainty and empower-ment while bringing ever higher layersof management into the fold? Not withScrum of Scrums, a technique thatbrings representatives from eachScrum team together for a powwow.

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“Scrum of Scrums is an interestingconcept in that it works really well as acoordination tool where you look forimpediments and coordinate teams,”said Kathryn Kuhn, agile evangelist atHewlett-Packard. “Where it doesn’treally help is if you’re trying to gatherstatus, and in larger programs, status isvery important. Gathering up metricsand where people are and dependen-cies and compliance all come into play.Scrum of Scrums hasn’t always beenhelpful in harnessing all that, so we arestarting to apply concepts from SAFe tomanage our portfolio in a lean waywithout overplanning.”

Though it’s not the only approach,SAFe is likely the most popular. Thanksto Leffingwell’s past lives at bothRational (where he helped develop theRational Unified Process) and Rally(where he was chief methodologist), hisapproach is well positioned for suc-cess—but also an easy target forSchwaber, who said that following a pre-scribed process doesn’t require courage.Discovering what works best does.

VersionOne’s Powell pointed out thatSAFe has roots in Scrum, just-in-timemanufacturing and queuing theory:“Most principles underlying SAFe comefrom Donald Reinertsen’s book ‘ThePrinciples of Product DevelopmentFlow.’ ” VersionOne too is integratingSAFe concepts into its program-levelproduct, having launched a feature calledPlanningRoom Reporting to provideprogram and product managers withdashboards and visualizations of velocity,burn-down and other team metricsacross a program of work.

According to Powell, a critical SAFepractice is shortening the project plan-ning cycle to 10 weeks, spending twodays planning on “potential shippableincrements.” That has a potential tochange company culture: “Once theyrealize they’re actually going to deliver,then they shift away from ‘I better getmy big project in line’ to ‘What is thehighest priority for the next 10weeks?’ ” he said. And it’s intentionallynot a 12-week, quarterly cadence, hepointed out. “It’s the sweet spot, whereyou can plan ahead enough but not

have to replan in the middle.”Powell expected rapid market focus

and maturity over the next few yearsaround discovery, program-level successand continuous delivery. “Organizationsare getting better at figuring out how toblend user experience into their softwaredevelopment life cycle,” he said.

What could go wrong?Intuit, the same organization that Ral-ly’s Nies praised for widespread trans-formation, Schwaber cited as a failure.“The effort to change at the enterpriselevel is so daunting,” said Schwaber.“We have helped hundreds of organiza-tions become very agile, usually drivenby someone visionary at a top level.When that person leaves, the excel-lence disappears.”

Schwaber’s latest book with Suther-

land, “Software in 30 Days,” offersunflinching portraits of similar sagas,such as project management tool ven-dor Primavera (now owned by Oracle),where a successful Scrum transforma-tion was abandoned after its champion,Bob Schatz, left.

Nies portrayed Intuit in a differentlight, however. “In late 2009, Intuitbegan using agile techniques on estab-lished incumbent products. One yearlater, they had $50 million in new prod-uct revenue. Today, they are running1,800 concurrent experiments at anyone time,” he said.

While contradicto-ry, the moral of thesetwo stories might sim-ply be that agile takesan ongoing commit-ment. z

Read this story onsdtimes.com

With Rally Software’s April 2013 IPO, theagile tool market has officially heated up.Here’s a thumbnail guide to its players:

n Rally is on a leading trajectory andenjoys the fruits of an agile internal cul-ture, though more of its revenue stillcomes from consulting than subscriptions.

n Atlassian may be the next to IPO, andhas recently rebranded GreenHopper asJIRA Agile, which works with the JIRAissue-tracking and project-managementtool.

n Microsoft Team Foundation Server andService now come standard with a Scrumtemplate, and they offer excellent scala-bility as well as integration into a fullALM suite, according to Aaron Bjork,Microsoft TFS Program Manager.

n VersionOne is expanding its focus onprogram-level agile with PlanningRoomReporting and other Scaled Agile Frame-work reports.

n CollabNet is another company rumoredto IPO or be acquired. Its ScrumWorks Procontinues to be a popular choice, with on-premise or cloud versions available, aswell as Scrum training and certification.

n IBM Rational Team Concert now comeswith agile process templates, includingits answers to SAFe, DAD (DisciplinedAgile Delivery) and Agility@Scale.

n Hansoft is popular as an agile tool

among top game development compa-nies. It emphasizes native speed for itscustomers with a new Mac OS X version.

n Axosoft has recently changed its pric-ing strategy, aiming for a broader cus-tomer base by lowering the subscriptioncost for its highly usable Scrum-basedSaaS to just $7 per user per month.

n ThoughtWorks Mingle continues todelight agilists with its elegant, non-restrictive interface organized aroundcards and properties.

n Pivotal Tracker is a popular alternativefor cloud-based Scrum, tracking every-thing from stories to epics, and also offer-ing an attractive mobile interface for iOS7.

n Oracle has an Agile Product Manage-ment Lifecycle process available, but Pri-mavera is perhaps at its most agile whenintegrated with Rally.

n CA Clarity PPM has been revampedwith an accompanying Clarity Agile piecebuilt on Force.com, but like other full-fea-tured, traditional portfolio-managementtools, it requires a major commitment forongoing training and optimization.

Of course, there are plenty of simpleralternatives, such as spreadsheets, indexcards and string. “Excel is still probablyour biggest competition,” said Andy Pow-ell, VersionOne’s VP of Customer Experi-ence. z —Alexandra Weber Morales

Scrum tools roundup< continued from page 35



http://sdtimes.com/pdf/Agile/3157

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http://sdtimes.com/pdf/Performance2012/3158

www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times MICROSOFT DEVELOPMENT 39

In Visual Studio 2013, Microsoftintroduces CodeLens and BrowserLink, two tools designed to

increase developer productivity. Otherenhancements to the IDE, which wereannounced after this magazine went topress but were discussed in a pre-brief-ing, focus on making the IDE, DevOpsand the agile life cycle better.

But the behind-the-scenes run-up tothe release is a story that tells howMicrosoft has changed how it works,how it maintains relationships with itspartners and customers, and how itviews the future of development.

Between the 2012 and 2013 release,Microsoft adopted an agile develop-ment cadence, according to AaronBjork, Team Foundation Server prod-uct manager. He noted that this is thefirst release in which the team used a

three-week development cycle.“We’ve had a 2008 release, a 2010

release, a 2012 release, and now herewe are with a 2013 release,” Bjork said.“So there’s a shorter cycle, but also thisis the first release where we’ve really ina lot of ways incrementally deliveredvalue to our existing customers in theway of quarterly updates.

“Certainly, not everything is there;there’s value held back in 2013. But it’sa little bit different, because in pastreleases you kind of went from this real-ly sort of big bang, from 2010 to 2012,and it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s so

much I haven’t seen before. And I thinkfor a lot of our customers, it’s a littlemore incremental, and I hope our cus-tomers like that. In fact I know they likethat, because it allows them to wadeinto some of these new feature, diptheir toe into them, get familiar withthem, and then really realize the valueas those features are maturing.”

What agile changedWhile this was good for customers, itmight have created problems for third-party providers who are used to hearingabout new features months in advanceto get their products ready to supportMicrosoft’s next big release. Bjork saidthis involved a change in how Microsoftcommunicates with its partners.

“It’s been an adjustment,” he admit-continued on page 42 >

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

The making of Visual StudioHow Microsoft is handling its creation,

from listening to feedback to implementing Scrum

New and noteworthy in Visual Studio 2013

page 41



http://sdtimes.com/pdf/Empower/3159

www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times MICROSOFT DEVELOPMENT 41

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Some productivity features and a lookto the future stand out in the release ofVisual Studio 2013, which will officiallylaunch Nov. 13. Aaron Bjork, productmanager at Microsoft, was not able togo into too much detail prior to thelaunch, but he did give a glimpse at fea-tures he described as “really exciting fordevelopers.”

The first is a feature called Code-Lens. Bjork explained:

“It’s more or less what we call a‘head’s-up display,’ right in your IDE.So if you’re looking at some piece ofcode you’ve got, some method or somefunction in your code, you get a littleoverlay right at the top of that methodthat describes for you how many refer-ences, how many other methods andfunctions call this particular method, soit gives you the number of referencesand reference counts.

“It tells you who was the last person toedit this piece of code or this method. Ittells you how many tests are associatedwith it, in terms of unit tests and whetheror not they passed in the last run. And it’sthis nice little head’s-up display that forevery method you see it, and when youclick on it, it just in-line expands to giveyou a whole bunch of detail, so you cannavigate directly to a calling method. Youcan run tests directly from there, you canopen the work item that was associatedwith this last change set, and it brings allthat information around the code thatyou traditionally want... We’ve built itinto the IDE in such a way that it’s rightat your fingertips.

“To give you an example, you mightwrite a lot of code and you have a fairlygood-sized app that you’ve been run-ning for a while, and as you’re scrollingthrough you see some method that sayszero references right at the top, and youlook at yourself and you realize, ‘Hey Iwrote this, but I never hooked it up.’Well, right there, I can just delete thatmethod and get it out of the codebasefor code cleanliness purposes.”

A second feature for Web develop-ers, which Bjork said might seem small

but delivers a big productivity gain, isBrowser Link. He elaborated:

“What Browser Link does is, you’rea Web developer, and you’re writing alot of HTML or CSS. What you end updoing is you end up looking at the fin-ished product in a lot of differentbrowsers. You might have Firefox up,you might have Chrome up, and IE,and as you’re making changes, you’rerefreshing all those different browsers.

“We’ve created a system in the IDEcalled Browser Link where we detect allthe browsers that are currently looking at

the code you’re writing and as you’remaking CSS changes or HTML changes.We actually automatically refresh thosebrowsers for you. So instead of having towrite a bunch of code, save it, and do atraditional gesture like “view in browser,”or go to all your other browsers andrefresh them, those things are beingrefreshed for you.”

Bjork added that developers will seeimprovements in IntelliSense forXAML. “We’re seeing XAML beingused in all kinds of different apps acrossall the different Microsoft platforms,whether it’s [Windows] Phone, Sil-verlight, Windows Store or Windowsapps, and we’ve got some real goodIntelliSense improvements inside theXAML editor.”

Another area of emphasis is the Win-dows Store, Bjork said. “We’ve got a

bunch of great diagnostic tools built intothe Windows Store app developmentexperience. You can not only do thingslike CPU sampling, but you can also runyour code and then look at what it’s doingto energy consumption, or in terms ofbattery life. And there are certain callsthat I’m making by creating a lot of I/Othat’s getting the network antennasinvolved and then draining my batterymuch quicker.”

Going forward, Bjork said users canexpect advances in the DevOps capabil-ities, built around Microsoft’s acquisi-

tion of InRelease this past summer.Also, ALM gets greater emphasis in2013 with agile portfolio managementcapabilities and running an agile organ-ization, not merely an agile team.

Finally, Microsoft wants to give a con-nected experience to developers. “Herewith 2013, you’re going to have cus-tomers with an account with us, and ableto synchronize settings across their dif-ferent environments, so if you’re runningVisual Studio at home, running VisualStudio at work or on your laptop, it’s oneof these ‘sign in and you’re connectedimmediately.’ So obviously we have adeep connection with Team FoundationService as well, so your account is pre-loaded and it’s the code at your fingertipsall the time. It’s something we’ve beenworking on in this release, and we’ll con-tinue in that direction as well.” z

New and noteworthy in Visual Studio 2013

Visual Studio’s new CodeLens gives detailed information about code in a head’s-up display.


SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comMICROSOFT DEVELOPMENT42

ted. “One of the things I start withthere is that the releases themselves area lot less disruptive than they’ve everbeen. If you’re a partner that has somesort of third-party add-in that workswith Visual Studio or TFS or whatnot,we’re going to do everything we can tomake sure it continues to work. We’renot introducing a lot of breakingchanges in these updates. But I think ithas forced us to have probably moreconversations with those types of part-ners, to make sure we’re keeping themabreast of what’s happening.

“You’ve now got much shorter win-dows... You’re thinking more in termsof probably six-month windows insteadof 18-month to two-year windows. Sowe probably have a tighter relationshipwith a lot of those key partners.”

Often, moving to an agile develop-ment cycle involved changing roles,abandoning roles that are no longer rel-evant to that type of development, orcreating new roles. Bjork said Microsoftexperienced some of that in the moveto three-week cycles.

“I wouldn’t say we’ve had to dismantleroles. I think we’ve had to adjust someroles and tweak expectations of roles,” hesaid. “One of the common ones is theprogram manager role. We have a titlehere at Microsoft called ‘program man-ager.’ If you rewound a few years, youwould find that a program manager moreclosely equated to a project manager. Ifyou fast-forward today and look at ourprogram managers, I would say they’reclearly aligned with what I would call aproduct owner, to use a Scrum term.

“A program manager is less con-cerned about schedule and more con-cerned about value. And I do thinkwhen you look at the engineering disci-plines, the dev and test disciplines, you

see those groups operating much morein lockstep than they ever have before.

“So instead of a development teamwriting code for four weeks, six weeks,even eight weeks, and then declaring amilestone...you now have a dev and testorganization, or a dev and test team,working in lockstep and writing code,testing code and delivering that codewithin a three-week cycle,” he contin-ued. “And so it’s definitely forced us tokind of step back and look at those rolesand look at how we had traditionallydone them, and then put them backtogether a little bit differently. But the

core roles are still there.”Bjork described the service engineer

as the team member responsible fordeploying the bits to the service at theend of every sprint. The service engi-neer monitors the application and isresponsible for the production environ-ment. “I think their job is to help usbuild a really fast and efficient pipefrom a developer’s keyboard all the wayto the production environment wherethe customer can be leveraging that val-ue from their keyboard on the otherend,” he said.

Part of building that bridge, ofcourse, is listening to what users want.Bjork put it this way: “Our job isto...make sure we’re building themwhat they need—and wants and needssometimes differ—and...we apologizefor everything we’re not doing.”

Sometimes customers take Micro softin directions it never thought it wouldgo. “If you look back over the course ofthis year and look at some of the thingswe’ve introduced into the product, agreat example of this is Git support,”Bjork said. “We had developers scream-ing at us that they wanted us to supportGit in a really good way, inside the IDEand within Team Foundation Server.

And that, at the time, felt like a verycontroversial move. But the more westudied it, we realized it was absolutelythe right move. And that was 100%based on customer feedback.”

One Microsoft, one heartBjork stressed that Microsoft does fol-low a road map for the evolution of itstools—keeping up with Azure andOffice, for example, is a part of that—but he said the team believes one of itsmost important jobs is “to make ravingfans out of our developer community,”and that can only be done by respond-ing to what they’re telling the company.“You wish you could respond to every-thing; you clearly can’t, but really pay-ing attention to those things that devel-opers are screaming for,” he said.

Meanwhile, keeping up with the oth-er teams is part of Microsoft’s “OneMicrosoft” initiative, aimed at bringingall the business units in the company inline with one another. As for develop-ment, Bjork said, “I can say that we havereally strong relationships with all the bigplayers, whether that’s Phone, whetherthat’s Windows, whether that’s Office,even Xbox, and we absolutely look tothem to say what we need to be support-ing next and how we need to be support-ing it well.”

As for a recent cartoon published inthe New York Times depicting the teamsat Microsoft aiming guns at one another,Bjork said, “I see that, but I’ve neverseen that from our side of the house,though. I think we’ve always been astrong partner for those platforms andmake sure we’re supporting them theright way. If we’re not supporting Win-dows app development or WindowsStore development or Windows Phonedevelopment, well, what are we doing?”

Supporting each of those platforms,though, does present a challenge.“You’re seeing us start to do some workalready to make sure that we want youto have a ‘write yourcode once’ experienceand have it run on all ofthe Microsoft plat-forms, and we’re defi-nitely taking steps inthat direction.” z



‘If you’re a partner that has some sortof third-party add-in that works withVisual Studio, we’re going to doeverything we can to make sure itcontinues to work.‘—Aaron Bjork, Microsoft



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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN 45

While often ballyhooed as ameans for covering thewide variety of computing

screen sizes company websites mustaccommodate, one-size-fits-all web-sites are actually a trade-off that oftenend up being more trouble thanthey’re worth.

The problem: These “responsivewebsites,” sites that auto-sense adevice’s screen size and reconfigure textand graphics to fit it, often render ondesktop PCs with ridiculously large textand other overblown features that aretedious to wade through.

The impetus behind the approachmakes sense. Web designers usingresponsive design take great pains toensure that anything that appears on tra-

ditional-sized websites will look good onthe smallest of screens, even a smart-phone’s.

Said Rupinder Dhariwal, cofounderof Web design firm Creative Cranes:“We are heavily pushing responsivewebsites to our new clients, and updat-ing a lot of existing sites to include thisfunctionality.”

Plus, by sticking with one websitefor all screen sizes, businesses can gen-erally save on Web design costs, as com-pared to attempting to maintain onesite for desktops and laptops, a secondfor tablets, and a third for smartphones.

“Updates are also easier to apply to

versions for all screen resolutions, sincethere is no need to work on multiplewebsite versions,” said MichaelDobkowski, president of Glacial Multi-media, a Web design firm.

And a single website generally trans-lates into higher rankings on searchengines, given that all the traffic to yourbusiness goes to one location. Split upyour presence with three websites—desktop, tablet and mobile—and searchengines like Google will split the trafficratings to your presence on the Webthree ways.

But, generally speaking, the prob-lem with dealing with the “tyranny ofthe tiny”—or ensuring that every web-site design looks good on the smallest of

One-size-fits-all websites: Not always a genius move

Molding screen sizes for desktops, smartphones andtablets looks like a good idea, until you see the results

BY JOE DYSART



SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comRESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN46

smartphones—is that responsive sitesoften render as ridiculous monstrositieson desktops and laptops, and are oftendifficult to use on bigger screens.

“I have been to many websites bybig companies, and they have notadapted for responsive design,” saidSean B. Jamshidi, owner of Design-Facet, who has been designing websitesfor more than a decade and has littlelove for responsive Web design. “Theremust be a reason why.”

A wide berthIn addition to poster-sized headlines,you’ll often find that responsive web-sites make generous use of wide swathsof blank space, space that you mustscroll through when using a desktopPC, but often look just fine on a smart-phone.

Plus, responsive websites that needto feature a great deal of text—such asproduct descriptions, company back-grounders, customer testimonials andthe like—often look more like trainwrecks on a desktop.

One glaring example: On a desktop,the text of a responsive website oftenruns the full length of a 23-inch screen,so it will shrink down nice and tidywhen viewed on a smartphone screen.For the mobile user, that’s convenient,since the responsive website reconfig-ures text margins to fit a palm-sizedscreen. But for the desktop user, tryingto read a sentence 23 inches long is notnearly as fun, unless you’re a giraffe.

Said Russell Uresti, a responsiveWeb advocate and Web developer withSchoology (creator of a learning-man-agement system): “Often, so muchemphasis is made about mobile devicesand making the site look good on aphone or tablet that designers will over-look extremely large monitors and failto design for them. Which is, again,more of a failure of implementationthan with the methodology.”

Incredibly, the scores of designerschampioning responsive Web designare either unaware of the unacceptableusability they’re creating for desktopand laptop users, or they’re silently will-ing to sacrifice desktop and laptop

usability, all in the name of the iPhoneand related trends.

“It kind of becomes a fanatical pointof view that they keep about theirwork,” said Design Facet’s Jamshidi.“They design more for themselves thanfor the client.

Media Queries, for example, is anever-expanding gallery of the best andbrightest that responsive Web designhas to offer from the responsive Webdesign community. It showcases dozensof examples of company Web presencesthat, when viewed on desktops, are sim-ply bad.

The Republic of Quality, a Webdesign and marketing firm whose site isfeatured prominently on MediaQueries as a shining example of respon-sive Web design done right, is actuallyemblematic of everything that is wrongwith the design approach.

Visit the home page for the compa-ny, and you’ll find bloated text andgraphics that look better suited for achildren’s book than for a company try-ing to market to other businesses. Clickon the site’s “Our Projects” page, andyou’ll find text that runs the full lengthof a 23-inch desktop screen. Plus, you’llbe treated to one-sentence projectdescriptions that take four times longerto read on a desktop than they normallyshould because the text and line spac-ing is unnecessarily gigantic.

Ditto for its blog. If you like blogsthat look more like posters on a desk-top, you’ll love this one. Otherwise, notso much.

Meanwhile, you’ll find similarly (andunnecessarily) overblown text andgraphics at another website showcasedby Media Queries: the site for The NextWeb. Ironically enough, The Next Webis a magazine, conference and educa-tion company that reportedly stays onthe “bleeding edge” of where the Webis headed.

Here, using a desktop, you’ll findyourself scrolling through scores ofencephalitic headlines and images on ahome page that takes much longer toread through than necessary. And you’llfind a job board that would be much eas-ier to work with on a desktop if it wereone-third or even one-fourth its size.

Other designs heralded by MediaQueries that leave many desktop usersscratching their heads: Build, a site for aMicrosoft-sponsored trade show; Paid toExist, a personal growth site; and ModoDesign Group, a Web design firm.

Mobile is not the leaderWhen challenged by desktop and laptopusers regarding usability, champions ofresponsive Web design often insist thatwith the frenzied proliferation of smart-phones and tablets, mobile is the de fac-to standard, and that the days of desk-tops and laptops are numbered. Anyrational designer, they insist, most pro-ceed with a “mobile first” strategy.

Unfortunately, the statistics tell astarkly different story. In an April 2012study conducted by comScore, which hasbeen chronicling the Web’s evolution formany years, 91.8% of all devices connect-ed to the Web were PCs. Only 5.2% ofthat traffic was from smartphones. As fortablets, a paltry 2.5% actually accessedthe Web during the study period.

Granted, there have been millions ofsmartphones and tablets shipped sinceApril 2012. But even so, Deloitte, a mar-ket research firm, predicted that for2013, more than 80% of all Web surfingwill still be done on desktops and laptops,according to Jolyon Barker, Deloitte’smanaging director of global technology,media and telecommunications.

Put another way, sure, there are plen-ty of people on smartphones browsingthe Net for a minute or so while waitingin line for their latte at Starbucks. Butany serious and substantial use of theWeb will continue to be overwhelminglydone on desktops and laptops.

Bottom line: The next time a Webdesigner shows up at your office prom-ising to build a state-of-the-art, respon-sive website that will deliver a consis-tent and optimized user experienceacross the wide variety of devices andplatforms that Web surfers use, makesure you read the fineprint.

Fortunately, ifyou’re reading it on a responsive website,it’ll be the size of awooly mammoth. z




www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN 47

BY SUZANNE KATTAU

Responsive Web design (RWD) is amobile website development techniquethat uses CSS, HTML5 and JavaScripton the client to create websites that auto-size themselves to the width of mobiledevices. Responsive delivery (RD) is aserver-side technique that canhelp enterprise Web develop-ers avoid the rebuilding thatwould otherwise be necessary(using RWD) to transformtheir company’s website tomake it responsive.

“Responsive delivery is atechnique we are pioneeringwhich uses a cloud-basedserver to transform a website’sbusiness logic and assets fortarget devices,” said IshanAnand, director of new prod-ucts at RD platform providerMoov web. “With responsiveWeb design, it’s a bundle ofCSS, JavaScript and HTML5; you buildyour site to that specification and then itwill [automatically] adapt to differentdevices—at least as it appears to the user.

“All of that [automatic] logic is hap-pening on the browser, inside withJavaScript and what is called mediaqueries. But it’s being powered by thebrowser itself, and that can lead tobandwidth and performance issues.”

RWD (a term coined by “Responsive

Web Design” author Ethan Marcotte)and RD both have the same goal: to pres-ent mobile users with an interface thathas the full functionality of a website ona desktop. But RWD does this client-sidewhile RD does this server-side.

“RWD wasn’t meant to be added to

sites,” explained Anand. “As a result,RWD expects sites to be designedaround it so it doesn’t have to be con-cerned with preserving the existingsite’s logic and workflow.”

Thus, the greatest benefit of RD isthat it helps enterprise Web developersavoid these time-consuming and costlywebsite rebuilds. “Typically a site mustbe built from scratch to support RWD,”said Anand. “As a result, migrating anexisting site to RWD entails rebuildingit. RD is directly applicable to existingsites without any changes to the existingsite or needing new APIs.”

A twist on RWDA few years ago, a technique was pro-posed that mixed the server-side natureof RD with the client-side nature ofRWD. Responsive Web design withserver-side components (RESS) wasthought up by “Mobile First” author andRWD practitioner Luke Wroblewski.

Anand said RESS arose out ofattempts to address the limitations ofRWD; RESS was introduced as a way

to lift some of the burden off the client.“RESS lets the server do some of thework to take the load off the browser,but not all of it,” he said. He added thatRD technology can be seen as a succes-sor to RESS since RD puts all the workon the server.

Anand said that one ben-efit of using RD over RWDis that RD can help devel-opers avoid the bandwidthand performance issues inRWD. These issues comefrom the same HTML codebeing sent to every mobiledevice whether or not theyneed all the code, which canslow down performance. Byusing RD and creating aresponsive website server-side, only code that thedevice needs is sent.

“The server does mostof the work, and that

makes it very performant for all sorts ofdifferent devices,” explained Anand.“We’re not relying on the power of thesmartphone because a lot of thesethings are on constrained battery, CPUand memory.”

Another benefit of using RD lies indevelopment, according to Anand.With RWD, the same HTML code hasto do double or triple duty for differentdevices, whereas RD tailors the HTMLcode for each device.

RD also helps developers avoid theneed for the back-end engineering thatwould otherwise be required to supportadditional devices and user experiences.According to Anand, RWD does notavoid this, nor do most cross-platformmobile development frameworks. “RWDwill require you to change your site’scode and rebuild it,” hesaid. “And for mostother frameworks,there will also be inte-gration work neededthat will requirechanges to your site.” z


Responsive delivery’s advantage over RWD is

in being server-side, says Moovweb’s Anand.

Moovweb’s responsive delivery pushCompany seeks to bring together server-side and client-side processes

System diagram of Moovweb’s cloud-based Responsive Delivery platform.

Source: “Responsive Delivery: A methodology for mobile development and deployment,” Moovweb, July 2013


Screen image simulated. © 2013 BlackBerry. All rights reserved. BlackBerry,® BBM™ and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of BlackBerry Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times EDUCATION 49

In 10 years, Michael Torres wants tobe the CEO of a gaming company.He sees himself founding the next

EA or Ubisoft.“I’m interested in creating software

and developing games,” Torres said.“I’ve always wanted to do that since Iwas a little kid. I was always playing LegoStar Wars when I was little and I reallyenjoyed it, so I thought, why not try toget a job doing this?”

But that will have to wait for now. Atthe moment, Torres is a ninth grader atthe Academy for Software Engineering

in Manhattan, and his favorite class is atie between integrated algebra and gym.He’s one of 250 students enrolled at theAFSE, a new high school dedicated tothe design and development of software.The academy is now in its second year,offering both a ninth- and tenth-gradeclass, each totaling about 125 students.

Inside the classroomThe AFSE (and its sister school BASE,the Bronx Academy for Software Engi-

neering) are the first steps in New York’sfast-developing pipeline fostering thenext generation of software and technol-ogy professionals who, city officials hope,will power economic growth in the city.

Over a planned four years at theAFSE, students will move through acurriculum of computer science cours-es combined with typical classes likeEnglish, history and math. Even stan-dard classes are integrated with CS-based tools and skills, though. For anassignment on “To Kill a Mockingbird”

BY ROB MARVIN


Educating the newclass of developers

High school students get the skills and experience to become the computer scientists and app developers of the future

The Academy for

Software Engineering,

New York City

Phot

os b

y Ro

b M

arvi

n

SDT295 page 49-52,55_Layout 1 10/24/13 1:24 PM

SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comEDUCATION50

or the War of 1812, students might cre-ate a Web page or Scratch project(using a tile-based visual programmingtoolkit) instead of handing in a paper ora PowerPoint presentation.

The AFSE has unscreened enroll-ment, meaning admission decisionsaren’t based on academic performance.All students need to do is attend an openhouse, apply, and hope their lotterynumber is picked.

The school’s two computer scienceteachers come from eclectic back-grounds: one a former Amazon andMicrosoft software engineer, and theother a former classical guitar maker.And the AFSE is actively recruitingmore specialized teachers as the schoolexpands.

Outside the classroom, the AFSEimmerses students even more deeply inthe world of software engineering. Fieldtrips take students inside the New Yorkoffices of companies like Facebook andGoogle, and the school matches eachstudent up with a professional mentoron top of summer internships.

The school’s philosophy—more thansimply giving kids a leg up on the latestsoftware knowledge or industry

trends—is based on equipping studentswith the skills, concepts and experienceto flourish no matter what technologicalchange the future brings.

“We’re taking an entire school andacculturating them in software engineer-ing and computer science,” said LeighAnn DeLyser, the AFSE’s computer sci-ence consultant. She works with com-puter science teachers to develop curric-ula, and with non-CS teachers tointegrate computer science into theirclasses, along with cultivating profes-sional connections and partnerships withthe school. “The students who walk ourhalls are the next generation of creators.And whether that creation happens insoftware engineering or in some otherfield, the skills they learn here will justhelp them fuel that creative spirit as theymove forward,” she said.

Building out an ideaThe AFSE occupies the fourth floorand half of the fifth floor of the Wash-ington Irving High School, right byUnion Square. The school is scheduled

for closure by 2015 due to low gradua-tion rates, but in its place the AFSE andfour other academies are graduallyexpanding within the building. They’vemade made this modest chunk of theaging building their own, hanging inspi-rational slogans, plaques with tech bil-lionaires’ bios, and the histories of pro-gramming languages on the walls. Notto mention installing two brand newcomputer labs and branding each roomwith a different software company logo.

The Academy grew out of a sharedidea. Back in the late 2000s, MikeZemansky, then and still a computerscience teacher at Stuyvesant HighSchool, and venture capitalist Fred Wil-son imagined a school where computerscience was a core, fundamental sub-ject. They proposed the idea to theNew York City Department of Educa-tion, and Wilson—a managing partnerof Union Square Ventures with invest-ments in companies like Foursquare,Disqus and Twitter—offered to helpfund it. Originally envisioned as aschool where the city’s best and bright-est were screened for admission, theAFSE became a place where any NewYork City student with an interest insoftware engineering or app develop-ment could apply.

“In our first year, we were a brandnew school,” DeLyser said. “They toldus we’d be doing awesome if we filledour seats, and we’d be doing phenome-nal if we got 300 applications.” TheAFSE received more than 800 applica-tions to fill 120 seats for the 2012-2013school year, and this past year itreceived 1,500 applications. “Our

LOCATION: Washington Irving HighSchool, Floors 4-5, Union Square, ManhattanSCHOOL TYPE: Public, CTE (Career & Technical Education) discipline, no tuitionCURRENT ENROLLMENT: Approx. 250(ninth and tenth grades)EXPECTED ENROLLMENT: 500 (9-12)ENROLLMENT PER GRADE: Approx. 125CLASS SIZE: Approx. 30STUDENT-TO-TEACHER RATIO: Approx.15:1 (17 staff members) ADMISSION: Unscreened lottery enrollment. No entry testing or academic restrictions. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS:

Students must pass eighth grade,attend an open house and mark AFSEon their high school choice formsPRINCIPAL: Seung Yu

The Academy for Software Engineering

The term “Silicon Alley” can be traced back to the mid-1990s, used to describe Internetand new-media companies clustered in the Flatiron, SoHo and Tribeca areas of Manhat-tan. It eventually became a general term for the tech industry in New York City.

The term really began to take hold in 1995-1996, when newly launched publica-tions like @NY, AlleyCat News, Silicon Alley Reporter, and the greater New York mediabegan covering the emerging venture capital and tech opportunities in the area. Thename was popularized, and the idea of New York City as a center for technologicalinnovation on the East Coast was pushed.

After the dot-com bubble burst, “Silicon Alley” began making a comeback with thehelp of events like NY Tech Meetup and nextNY, connecting tech professionals in thecity and encouraging more startups. Now, with Mayor Bloomberg’s recent economicand educational push, a term that’s been thrown around for almost two decades mayfinally hold some real meaning. z —Rob Marvin

The history of ‘Silicon Alley’

Principal Seung Yu and curriculum advisor

Leigh Ann DeLyser.




expectation this year is that we maydouble that again,” she said.

Changing educational culturePoliticians often preach that Americaneeds more STEM education—science,technology, engineering and mathemat-ics. But according to DeLyser, the Unit-ed States is overproducing in every cate-gory of STEM except technology.

“We only produce about a third of thecomputer scientists we need in this coun-try for the jobs we have,” she said. “If wefilled every open computer science orsoftware engineering job in the UnitedStates with an American, we’d be at 4%unemployment right now, as a nation.”

The still relatively new AFSE wasjoined this fall by the BASE, with aninaugural ninth-grade class of 115 stu-dents. DeLyser and AFSE principal Yuhave kept an active dialogue going withBASE, and the two schools are lookingat planning a meet-and-greet orGoogle Hangout between students.

The computer science teachers fromeach school have also begun to co-plan,weighing in on each other’s curricula.(There is no set New York City Depart-ment of Education curriculum for theschools to follow.)

But the AFSE and BASE are far fromthe only New York City schools integrat-ing CS and software engineering classes.According to DeLyser, 28 more schools

are offering computer science classes thisfall that didn’t have them before. Tenhigh schools and 10 middle schools areoffering classes through MayorBloomberg’s new Software EngineeringPilot Program, while other schools utilizea program called Technology Educationand Literacy in Schools (TEALS).

“The software engineer comes firstperiod in the morning to co-teach a class,so that you don’t have to have a teacherwho has all of that knowledge, and theyreceive a lot of support training from theTEALS organization,” DeLyser said. “Sothere’s a lot of this growing in the cityoutside of just our little school.”

Tailoring personalized pathways“Many of our students come in with littleto no background in computer science,so we start with a level playing field,” saidDeLyser. “We teach them basics of com-puter programming, Web design andsome other really fundamental things inthe first year. Our goals for Year 1 are notto turn out software developers.

“We have them for four years. Wewant to give them a foundation thatsupports their confidence in them-selves, because we all know softwareengineering is a lot about solving prob-lems. They’re not the kind of problemswhere you can raise your hand and havethe answer right away. You have tostruggle with the problem a little, and

that takes self-confidence.”The students’ freshman year is what

the AFSE labels their “ToolboxCourse.” Students get a mix of tech-nologies, taking intro to computer sci-ence and elective courses like roboticsand Web design. In computer scienceteacher Sean Stern’s introductory class,his ninth-graders are in the midst ofconstructing their first robots beforegetting a taste of programming.

“Our math teacher designed thatcurriculum so it ties in with a little bit ofalgebra—like, how long do you have topower the wheel to make it go a certaindistance—and you can imagine map-ping that to a linear function, and sortof connecting that within the mathe-matics curriculum,” he said.

Stern is a former software engineerwho worked on retail systems at Amazon,using Hadoop to analyze shipment costs.Before that, he worked at Microsoft onthe Windows 8 app store.

He found his way to the AFSEthrough a nonprofit organization calledGirls Who Code, which tries to close thegender gap in technology and engineer-ing fields through programs and classesfor high-school girls. He was volunteer-ing as a teacher and speaker when hemet DeLyser, who also serves as curricu-lum coordinator for Girls Who Code.

Stern left Amazon in 2012, and spentmuch of last year student-teaching whilegetting his certification. He started as afull-time computer science teacher thisfall, and he runs the school’s Mac lab.

“Most people don’t have a goodunderstanding of what software engi-neers do or what computer scientists do,”Stern said. “There’s computer scienceyou can do without a physical machine,that it’s not the same as building a com-puter. I think the habits of thinking asso-ciated with that field are very powerful,like how to break down problems intostep-by-step pieces, how to test them,how to iterate on things.”

The students enrolling at AFSE comein with different skill sets, so the course-work must be relevant to each of them.

“We’ve tried to develop a curriculumwhere they feel like computer scienceor software engineering is something

Robotics classes are offered to freshmen students as a way to break into development.



SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comEDUCATION52

they can do,” said Stern. “Our assign-ments are such that if every kid comesin here and follows the basic instruc-tions, they have the capability to pro-duce something they find interesting.We also have kids who say, ‘I’ve donePython before,’ so we try to put mean-ingful challenges in our projects sothose kids aren’t disengaged.”

Even building something as simpleas an About Me project allows the stu-dents to create something in the mind-set of a software developer: to build,test and improve something. The AFSEis focused on teaching concepts andskills more than keeping up with theconstantly evolving software industry.

“I think sometimes people get toocaught up in how to integrate with whatthe industry is doing today, because if Iwas learning this stuff in high school, itwould’ve been like, ‘Java! Everything inJava!’ ” said Stern.

DeLyser added that the goal of theschool is to base academic performanceless on grades and more on what stu-dents accomplish and create.

“A lot of the work that we do is

around the building and construction ofartifacts in all of their classes, and waysthat their academic performance can bebased upon the things that they produceand the skills they demonstrate,” shesaid. “We really want to give studentsmore opportunities to build things thatexist outside of the classroom. Projectsand things we can engage with them thatwill live on their cellphones, that will bepublic on the Web, which will be usednot just for a grade in a grade book.”

Armed with a set of skills and theright mindset, students move down thepersonalized pathway into year two, theA.P. year. Some sophomores take A.P.Computer Science, essentially an intro-duction to programming in Java. Otherstudents are part of the College Board’spilot program for the new A.P. Comput-er Science Principles course.

After these first two years, the person-alized pathways will really start to takeeffect. The school plans to negotiate formore building space each year in Wash-ington Irving to accommodate two more125-student classes. Juniors and seniorswill have a better idea of what areas ofcomputer science they want to explore,

with a menu of electives to choose from.These electives also vary depending onthe expertise of the teachers the AFSEhires.

“After the first two years, which arepretty well set for the students, theynow have a good understanding of whatthe field looks like,” DeLyser said.“They know what a software engineeris; they know who a tech support personis. They have this vision of what thesecareers might mean. So then they’rebetter able to select the elective coursesthat will meet their own personal goals.

“So some of our students may decidethat a four-year college program is not forthem; that computer science is maybetoo rigorous a discipline for them. Soinstead we’re providing them with hard-ware support courses, as an example.We’re looking at multiple pathways formultiple types of students.”

New York’s pipeline to Silicon AlleyAmeer Baksh and Pomeroy Mohabirare best friends. They’re both 10th-graders at the AFSE, and the school setthem up with internships at MorganStanley last summer.

They want to go to college togetherto somewhere like MIT or Embry-Rid-dle Aeronautical University: Baksh formechanical engineering and Mohabirfor aerospace engineering. A decadefrom now, they want to start an aero-space company together, designingfighter jets and spacecraft for the com-ing age of space travel, along with thesoftware to pilot and control them.

Baksh and Mohabir are just two of thestudents moving through the pipelinefrom schools like the AFSE throughinternships, college and directly into theworkforce. If soon-to-be ex-MayorMichael Bloomberg has his way, Bakshand Mohabir would base their aerospacestartup in New York City’s “Silicon Alley”rather than San Francisco’s Silicon Valley.

The AFSE’s ability to create intern-ship opportunities and professional con-nections for students is founded in therelationships the school has fostered withNew York-based software companies,and the AFSE works with them on threelevels. The lightest commitment on the


While New York’s strides in CS education may outpace others, it’s far from the only placein America where programs and school districts are bolstering the “T” in STEM education.

One of the earliest examples of CS education reform began in the Los Angeles Uni-fied School District back in 2004, with an organization called the Computer ScienceEquity Alliance (CSEA). Its efforts to expand high school access and broaden partici-pation in computer science more than doubled the number of A.P. CS courses offeredin LAUSD from 11 to 24, and drastically increased the number of female and minoritystudents enrolled in the classes.

Out of the CSEA has grown the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum,which has expanded to statewide education initiatives in Oregon and Utah, as well asthe Washington, D.C., Santa Clara and Chicago school districts. The yearlong curricu-lum is broken up into six topics: human-computer interaction, problem solving, Webdesign, programming, computing and data analysis, and robotics. In Chicago in partic-ular, every high school now offers an optional ECS course.

DeLyser said the AFSE is aligning its ninth-grade curriculum with ECS goals andstandards in an effort to partner with Chicago schools. “We want to bring our teach-ers from New York City into that community of practice, so they can share lessonplans, and participate in activities and things like that as well,” she said.

Another initiative DeLyser mentioned is an organization called the Computer Sci-ence Teachers Association (CSTA), for which she used to serve on the board of direc-tors. The CSTA has chapters in almost every state and support from universitiesaround the U.S., and its members total more than 15,000 worldwide in countries likeCanada, Israel, New Zealand and the U.K. The CSTA connects and supports CS teach-ers around the world, developing a community of CS educators to share ideas, com-pare curriculums and teaching strategies, and spearhead programs and initiatives. z

—Rob Marvin

Innovating computer science education across the U.S.



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companies’ part is through an iMentorprogram, where individual professionalsvolunteer to mentor AFSE students, e-mailing back and forth once a week andmeeting up once a month.

On the second level of the school’sprofessional network are speakers andfield trips. Many of the companies sendone or more employees to the AFSE togive assemblies, or even employeesfrom human resources departments todo mock interviews with the students.

The third and arguably most impor-tant level gives students software engi-neering internships they normally would-n’t pursue until college. Last summer, 12students (including Baksh and Mohabir)did six-week internships at Morgan Stan-ley, with several others interning atJPMorgan Chase. They all worked onreal projects that the companies haveimplemented into their systems.

“I worked for this team in [MorganStanley’s] Information Security Depart-ment,” Mohabir said. “We make rulesfor people to follow so they won’t laun-der any money. So I made a website forthem, used HTML...and it turned outpretty professionally; they loved it. It’s agood thing this school taught meHTML.”

In two years, when the inauguralAFSE class looks toward graduationwith these internships on their résumés,the school sets them up on a clear path

to college. The AFSE’s college advisoryboard has members from Columbia andNYU to help students network, andwhile nothing is stopping kids likeBaksh and Mohabir from going to MIT,Bloomberg would prefer they stay local.

“Mayor Bloomberg has been so sup-portive because he sees that the lack ofpipeline is an economic issue,” DeLysersaid. “Silicon Valley has this shiny glowaround it, right? That’s where you wantto go as a CS major when you’re doneand you want to do something cool.

“What we’re hoping to do here inNew York is create a cadre of people withprofessional training and experience whohave a loyalty to the city... We’re feedingthe pipeline not only with people who’llhave the skill set we need, but who alsosee New York City as home, and willhopefully continue to stay here after theygraduate from college.”

The next generation of innovatorsErlyn Ysit wants to be a software engi-neer at Google. Right now, she’s aninth-grader at the AFSE, and herfavorite class so far is robotics.

“I love robotics. I’ve never done itbefore; it’s really fun,” Ysit said. “We’remaking this robot that basically picks upa box, that’s it. But there’s so much workbehind it.”

“Ten years from now, these studentsare going to be some of the mostsought-after graduates, because they’ll

have this history of experience, and alsothis real connection to New York Cityand its community,” DeLyser said.

What’s happening with computerscience education in New York City isunprecedented. Students like Baksh,Mohabir, Torres and Ysit are receivingwide-ranging classroom experience andprofessional exposure to the world ofsoftware engineering and applicationdevelopment. High schools, colleges,software companies, and an entire cityare partnering to create opportunitiesfor a diverse young generation.

“One of the really exciting thingsabout our schools is that we’re ethnical-ly representative of New York City pub-lic schools,” DeLyser said. “We are 96%minority or bi-racial, and these studentssee the world differently than themajority of the current software engi-neers. They come from different back-grounds, different heritages.

“Using that knowledge and lifeexperience, they can build morediverse things and attract a larger pop-ulation of consumers, just becausethey come from that world and theyhave different perspectives. We allknow that a diverseteam makes morediverse products, andI think diversity isgoing to be theirbiggest contributionto tech innovation.” z

A history assignment on the creation and development of different

programming languages.

Tenth-graders Ameer Baksh (left) and Pomeroy Mohabir want to start

an aerospace engineering company.




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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times COLUMNS 57

Code WatchBY LARRY O’BRIEN

The more I learn about the rollout of healthcare.gov, the sicker I get. According to

Reuters and a June GAO report, the website has sofar cost almost US$300 million, almost two-thirdsof which involves money thrown at the train-wreckdevelopment over the past six months.

In the realm of national expenditures, $300 mil-lion barely warrants a mention, and what conversa-tion there has been about the website has focusedon its functional problems and, to a lesser degree,the 3x cost overrun. But reflect on the absolutenumber of $300 million, your own software budget,and your own experience of the industry. And let’sremember: This is green-field code for a website.

My gold standard for spectacular incompetencecame in the early 2000s, when I was brought in todeal with performance on the Web-based configu-rator for a Fortune 100 company. The project wasthree years old and had managed to burn through$30 million. To get a price, you had to set yourbrowser’s timeout to five minutes and get yourselfa cup of coffee, but at least it worked!

When I first heard the status of that project, Iwondered how it was even possible for a softwareproject to burn through so much money. I learnedthere were 50 full-time developers and 14 archi-tects, which I always thought represented anincompetence event horizon: One more architector full-time developer, and the energy needed tomake a change would cause space-time to collapse.

But leave it to the government to take things to anew level! Close to $200 million in overrun costsover six months: What miraculous innovations insoftware development did this lead to? There’re onlyso many developers you can pay better-than-SiliconValley average and bill out at 4x their salary, and onlyso many Alienware rigs and 4P displays you can buythem. It still doesn’t add up! No, my friends, only apure bureaucracy can absorb so much money in sucha short time. (Like a “pure function,” a “pure bureau-cracy” consumes resources and has opaque internals,but a pure bureaucracy produces no value.)

So far, my favorite artifact is the “Periodic Tableof I.T. Build Work Streams” from an article in theWashington Examiner. I bet it cost a million dollars,what with the salary paid to the nothing-better-to-do middle manager who conceived it and thedesign consultancy that probably billed out a cou-

ple hundred hours on fonts and color selection.And what does it mean? I thought I knew how todecode every single worthless project-managementchart used in software, but I have no idea what tomake of a trans-Uranium I.T. Build Work Stream.Is it an extremely short-lived by-product of collid-ing bureaucratic processes? (And, at the risk of justspluttering, can’t you just picture someone decid-ing, “Looks like we need another contractor in thenoble gasses or it will ruin the symmetry”?)

Unable to bear thinking about the price anymore,I thought I’d take a look at the technology. Accordingto a comical-in-retrospect Atlantic article from June,healthcare.gov is a static site, generated by Jekyll.That’s clearly only a part of the story, but althoughwww.healthcare.gov/developers says that the sourcecode for the website is open source, the GitHub linkwas returning a 404 as of this writing.

An initial analysis of the staticpart of the website shows mis-takes both trivial (too many con-nections downloading non-mini-fied JavaScript) and petty(removing attribution in theOpen Table library, a violation ofits GPL v2 and BSD licenses), but the real function-al mystery of healthcare.gov revolves around non-static elements.

In fact, according to the previously mentionedGAO report, more than 55 contractors were involvedin the process. The major one was CGI Group,which had billed $88 million by June of this year.Their code is not open source nor have they beenforthcoming about their technology stack. (Silentregarding healthcare.gov, their website’s press pageinstead contains such gems as “Railroad Commissionof Texas taps CGI to fuel performance gains.”)

The finger-pointing has begun and things areobscure, but one theme seems to be a lack of inte-gration testing between the Jekyll-generated frontend, an identity validation module (provided byExperian), and CGI Federal’s components. There’salso the usual nonsense, from the disingenuous(“We were shocked—Shocked!—to discover therequirements were incomplete”) to the perverse(people claiming that the project was underfunded).

CGI Federal has an additional federal billingpipeline of $8 billion. I have a headache. z

It’s enough to make you sickLarry O’Brien is a

developer evangelist/advocate for Xamarin.

Read his blog atwww.knowing.net.

The real functional mystery

of healthcare.gov revolves

around non-static elements.



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www.sdtimes.com November 2013 SD Times COLUMNS 59

Joe Herres is the executive vice president

of products at H3Solutions.

Guest ViewBY JOE HERRES

Over the last six years, we have seen a majorshift in the use of mobile phones for both

businesses and consumers. What had been adevice strictly used for making calls and checkinge-mail is now a lifeline linking people to their workand private lives through connected services.

The expectation of users today is that they willbe able to leave their desks and continue to stayconnected in some capacity via their phone. As aresult of this shift in technology and expectations,Web traffic from mobile devices has skyrocketed.According to Cisco, traffic from wireless andmobile devices will exceed traffic from wireddevices by 2016. This means that businesses—whether marketing to consumers, the enterprise oranyone in between—must have a strategy for mak-ing their services and websites mobile.

In the mobile Web development community, fewwords get thrown around as much as “responsivedesign.” This technique allows you to build a singlesite that can provide an optimal experience regard-less of screen size. The technique has garnered sig-nificant buzz, with its most ardent proponents claim-ing it as the Holy Grail of mobile Web design.

As with anything, it has its limitations. Shouldyour business utilize responsive design? It depends.

Consider www.newsgator.com and www.pittsburghkids.org. Both are well-constructedresponsive sites that are easy to browse on any screensize. Clicking around, you will find they are similar innavigation style, providing long scrolling screens ofcontent when displayed on a phone. They do nothave a ton of interactive content, just a couple con-tact forms with some filtering and embedded maps.

If you look under the hood, the load sizes for theNewsGator and Pittsburgh Children’s Museumhomepages are 1.9MB and 1MB, respectively. Thisdemonstrates the compromise that has to be madefor responsive sites: Either they have large down-loads, or trimmed-back functionality on full-sizedbrowsers. With mobile bandwidth improving everyday, it is not a huge concern, at least in developedmarkets, but anything less than a 4G connection willtake time to download an almost 2MB homepage.

An alternative to responsive design is the dedi-cated mobile website. This tried-and-true tech-nique provides mobile devices with their owninterface separate from what is displayed on a

desktop. While this means two separate codebasesfor a website, it also means greater control over theuser experiences on both sides.

Consider Facebook.com and ESPN.com. Built asdedicated mobile websites, they have a much biggerdigital footprint with significantly more content.They relate better to internal, back-office applica-tions rather than external, public Internet sites.

For example, Facebook is analogous to anintranet or social enterprise application. ESPN couldbe analogous to a company intranet portal providingnews, information and other services to employees.

At 209KB and 242KB respectively, these sitesare a much smaller load than the responsive exam-ples. They also provide an experience that is morelike a mobile app, which puts more actions on thescreen and less scrolling through content.

It may not seem fair to compare a site like Facebook to the Pittsburgh Chil-dren’s Museum, but when itcomes to responsive design, notmany big content sites areemploying it exclusively. This islikely because of the limitations inboth the mobile and full versions.

Thunder SEO and MeteorGroup developed a nice infographic that lays outsome important questions for determining whetherto pursue a mobile website or a responsive designstrategy, including:• Can you support both mobile and desktop ver-

sions of your site?• Do you have a lot of rich media content like

images, videos and animations?• Do you want to utilize your built-in mobile

device capabilities?This decision doesn’t just stop at your public

website either. One must think about intranet, cus-tomer-relationship management and other back-office applications needed to empower a mobileworkforce.

Responsive design techniques are fantastic.They can even be employed in mobile websites toaccount for screen orientation. But they are not theend-all be-all solution for the mobile Web. Thebottom line is that the decision will hinge on theservice being provided and how the users need tointeract with it. z

Is responsive design overhyped?

Responsive design usage

hinges on the service being

provided and how users will

interact with it.



SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.comCOLUMNS60

Analyst ViewBY JEFFREY HAMMOND

It’s no secret that the software developmentlandscape is rapidly evolving. But today’s

hottest technology trends—mobile, cloud andBig Data—don’t replace existing platforms andprogramming languages. In order to take thepulse of the software development landscapein North America and Europe, we surveyedmore than 1,600 software developers about avariety of topics, including the types of appli-cations they build and the platforms and pro-gramming languages they use. In addition, wealso asked them about their careers, aspira-tions, and how they learn about new technolo-gies:

Mobile is hot, but developers aren’t yet“mobile first.” It’s easy to think that PCs andlaptops are going the way of the dodo. We

found that while developersare certainly building moremobile apps than ever, Webapplications and relationaldatabase applications are stilla primary focus.

This data underscores arecurring theme in our results:

A company’s existing application portfolio nat-urally constrains how quickly developmentmoves toward modern application platforms,languages and tools. Developers repeatedlyindicate strong support for traditional tech-nologies, like Windows 7 as an operating sys-tem deployment target and development plat-form, as well as continued use of traditionalstatic languages like Java, C++, C#, PS/SQL,and even COBOL in comparison to newerdynamic language like Python and Ruby.

Mobile platform priorities show divid-ed developer loyalties. When it comes tomobile developers and which devices they sup-port, it’s clearly a two-horse race betweenAndroid and iOS, with iOS ahead by a length.

When we look at which device iPhonedevelopers chose to target as a second priority,it’s clear that they like to stay within the Appleecosystem. Almost two-thirds (63%) make the

iPad their second choice, while one-third(33%) target Android phones as their secondpriority. It’s a similar tale for Android develop-ers. Of those that target Android phones first,56% take Android tablets as their second prior-ity, and only 21% target iPhones as their sec-ond priority.

Web developers are crossing the brows-er chasm to HTML. If you’re a Web develop-er, you know all about the emerging impor-tance of HTML5. Our survey found that 55%of Web developers have already embracedHTML5. Developers that use HTML5 tend tosupport more devices on more platforms, andthey test their sites in more browsers.

So what about the 45% of Web developerswho aren’t yet using HTML5? When we askedthem why, the main reasons for not using it werea lack of time to learn about the new tags andAPIs (46%), and a lack of need for them (45%).

Developers that know the cloudembrace the cloud. We had no problemsfinding cloud developers in our survey popula-tion, and those who use the cloud today intendto use it more in the future—a lot more.

We found that the average cloud-wieldingdeveloper today deploys 40% to 59% of server-side code to a cloud environment, butexpects to deploy between 50% and 79% ofcode to cloud environments by 2015. A keyreason for greater use of cloud resources lies in the connection and usefulness thatcloud infrastructures have when it comes todelivering emerging new workloads like analy-sis of Big Data and multi-channel mobileapps/websites.

It’s surprising to find that cloud adoption bydevelopers at small firms tends to lag behindenterprise adoption, except where the publiccloud is used to stand up application testingand QA environments. For developers, itseems that moving to the cloud is as much away to circumvent traditional provisioningpathways through IT operations as it is improv-ing efficiency or reducing cost. z

Mobile is growing, but the Web still rulesJeffrey Hammond is a vicepresident and principalanalyst at ForresterResearch serving applica-tion development anddelivery professionals.

A company’s application

portfolio constrains how

quickly development moves

toward modern platforms.



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COLUMNS

Industry WatchBY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

So much has changed the technology land-scape over the past decade or so. The Inter-

net has exploded. Mobile devices are ubiquitous.There’s more information available to people thanever before.

Yet one thing that hasn’t changed is the enter-prise buying process. Matt Gorniak, cofounder of anew type of analysis firm called G2 Crowd,believes buying is “stuck in the ‘80s,” when compa-nies would spend 12 months making a selection ofsoftware. The process, he said, is totally broken.

“It took them three months just to shortlist ven-dors,” he said. “They are spending a million dollars

just on resource costs. And, afterall that, they still were not confi-dent they made the right choice.”

Customers either have totake a vendor’s word for theirclaims (“industry-leading, best-of-breed...”), try to go to a forumof customers somewhere online,

or seek out an analyst’s opinion. “The process isexclusionary” to customers, Gorniak said. As foranalysts, he said, “It’s hard for them to keep trackof an entire market. They track only the top four orfive, so their research is skewed to large vendors.”

Take CRM as an example. “Vendors like theirsoftware to be deployed in 5,000-user environ-ments,” Gorniak said. “Most analysts don’t use thesesystems, so have no hands-on experience. Even ifthey try one, they’re not trying it at that amount ofusers. They have no knowledge of whether it’s scal-able, or if the vendor is good to work with.”

With IT spending projected to be US$3.8TRILLION this year, it’s a problem of huge mag-nitude. “People are making decisions on million-dollar systems with very little facts. It’s all market-

ing and hearsay,” said Gorniak.He thought about other industries and how pur-

chasing was handled in them. He thought of Tri-pAdvisor, where users of hotels and other travelservices could leave reviews of their experiences.He thought of Angie’s List, where people couldread recommendations for handymen and otherservices. And, he thought, why not do this for tech-nology purchases?

G2 Crowd was created in July 2012 and launchedto the public this February. Today, Gorniak said, thewebsite has more than 6,000 users and more than15,000 ratings and reviews. “Our premise is, thou-sands of users and experts are more influential thanone person.” Through the use of social reviews andLinkedIn to verify the reviewer, the site boasts ofpeople who have worked with vendors in the indus-try for years, adding legitimacy to their reviews.

The company has even put together a GridReport for various software systems—not unlike aquadrant graph offered by another analysis firm.The G2 Crowd grid is ever changing, ranking soft-ware based on leaders, high-performers and niche.A click on each of the offerings in the grid leads to alink where the reviews of that product can be found.

Customers can pay for the research, whichincludes ratings based on effectiveness, popularityand other metrics, coming from the results of thecompany’s compilation algorithm for the data.

“People are used to going to the Internet forinformation,” said Gorniak. People can suggest orrecommend product areas for review, he added,and a development tools category will be added inthe near future.

Soon, small development shops will be able toaccess Big Data research, at a small cost, for a bigreturn. As they say on TV, “Bigger IS better.” z

Let them know what you think

‘People are making decisions

on million-dollar systems

with very little facts. It’s all

marketing and hearsay.’

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

DATE SHOW CITY SPONSOR LINK

Nov. 10–15 Better Software Conference East Boston SQE adc-bsc-east.techwell.com

Nov. 11–13 QCon San Francisco San Francisco QCon www.qconsf.com

Nov. 12–13 DevBeat 2013 San Francisco VentureBeat venturebeat.com/devbeat2013

Nov. 12–15 AnDevCon San Francisco San Francisco BZ Media www.andevcon.com

Nov. 17–22 SC13 Supercomputing Conference Denver Supercomputing.org sc13.supercomputing.org

Nov. 18–21 Dreamforce San Francisco Salesforce.com www.salesforce.com/dreamforce

Nov. 18–22 VS Live Orlando Orlando 1105 Media vslive.com

Events Calendar

For a more complete calendar of U.S. software devel opment events, see www.sdtimes.com/calendar. Information is subject to change. Send news about upcoming events to [email protected].

62 COLUMNS SD Times November 2013 www.sdtimes.com



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The ideal database system

would combine

very high performance

with zero administration.

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