Links for December 1st through December 2nd

A little something extra…

I spoke with John K. Waters in two of the links below, on TaskTop and the project Gemini at Eclipse.

TaskTop – I’ve watched Mylyn and TaskTop for a long time now (see this video with Mik Kersten and the pointers to other notes) and have always been impressed with the software. As I get to in the quote from the Waters piece, the overall goal, as I see it, has been to keep developers in their IDEs rather than requiring them to context switch around. TaskTop (and Mylyn’s) goal now is to integrate with as many different systems as possible as quickly as possible: it’s an exhausting game, but that’s what they’ve signed up for. As a side note, the company TaskTop has emerged as an interesting consultancy for doing Eclipse UI technology outsourcing: outfits like SpringSource hired TaskTop to do some of their major tools and Microsoft is working with TaskTop to make Eclipse more fancy in Windows 7.

Gemini – coincidentally, also an Eclipse project, Gemini is a project to implement several OSGi specs that, in my words, retro-fit Java APIs to be OSGi-ready. Honestly, I don’t know the technical details, but for the projects chosen, it seems like the project will start building the under-pinning needed to OSGi-ify the Java enterprise stack. As I told Waters, Oracle and VMWare/SpringSource are interested in this because they use it for their own middle-ware and are starting to provide it got their users. This Eclipse white paper from last year lays out a high-level vision of why OSGi-driven designs are probably easier to swallow than traditional Java enterprise monoliths (though, it’s scoped down to Eclipse’s OSGi runtime, Equinox)

…and with that added commentary on today’s links (tell me if you liked the extra highlighting, or not), here’s the links:

The Links

• IBM buys database security firm Guardium
  "Guardium makes technology for provides real-time monitoring of database activity, allowing companies to detect fraud, outside attacks and other illegal activities."
• Droid Nears Its Million-Device Target
• IBM Stays Tops as Server Market Stabilizes, Gartner Says
  "IBM took 31.7 percent of server revenue in the three months to Oct. 31, up a fraction from last year, while HP's share stayed more or less flat at 30.2 percent, Gartner said. They were followed at a distance by Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu. Server revenue overall dropped 15.5 percent from the third quarter last year, to $10.7 billion. But it was up by 10.2 percent compared to the second quarter this year, Gartner said."
• The rise of the cloud platform
• As Google Backs Away From A Plug-in, Microsoft Rushes Towards One
  The argument that "you don't really need it" doesn't hold water – otherwise we'd all still be using MapQuest instead of the Ajax magic in Google Maps. But, the trepidation about requiring a plugin is a valid sentiment. Still, the counter question is to compare how many browsers are HTML 5 ready vs. Silverlight ready vs. Flash ready vs. HTML 4/Ajax ready.
• Mylyn-Based Task-Management Layer Links Developers to ALM — Application Development Trends
  "I think the primary goal here is to keep the developers developing code and staying in their IDEs as much as possible by automating all that project management stuff that developers are never very interested in doing, and so don't do very well," said Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk. "Mylyn has a way of dealing with unstructured text — your source code, your bug-tracking system — all of this stuff that developers and development managers use to track a project in the actual code itself. It has a way of cross-linking among all these systems and providing a lot of meta-information tracking around the development process that's extremely helpful."
• ITDatabase – ITMemos
  New email newsletter with tech world awards, events, editorial calendars, and other stuff good for PR/tech news related stuff. From RedMonk client IT Database.
• Medical Transcription | Voice Transcription | Tech-Synergy
  RedMonk is trying these folks out for podcast and video transcripts. Very good and affordable so far.
• And the Winner Is …
  Tarus goes over how he decided to use an iPhone and an AT&T Microcell (to boost signal and get unlimited minutes at home). Pretty good write-up of options, trade-offs, and why he chose AT&T + iPhone. Looks like the Microcell isn't available in Austin.
• Service Level Dashboard 2.0 is available for SCOM 2007
  "Service Level Dashboard 2.0 plugs into an existing SCOM installation to add new features. The premier feature is the service level objective (SLO). An SLO loosely aligns to the industry-standard term service level agreement (SLA). The critical difference is that an SLO within this tool does not enforce the SLA that you may have; it is used to configure service goals for the applications monitored."
• CA Upgrades System Management Products
• Blog.ControlTier: ControlTier 3.4.9 Released
• Ruby on Rails becomes latest open-source offering to run on Microsoft's Azure cloud
  And, in addition to getting RoR on Azure: "Davies noted that Microsoft has demonstrated a number of open-source apps, including MySQL, Mediawiki, Memcached and Tomcat, can run on Windows Azure. Microsoft has been working on delivering PHP and Eclipse tools for Windows Azure."
• Java EE 6 receives approval
• Sun's share of servers still slipping – Gartner, hardware, oracle, servers
• SpringSource, Oracle To Back Modular Eclipse Project for Java
  Piece on the Eclipse Runtime project Gemini, collecting together implementations of OSGi RFCs that retro-fit/wrap OSGi around old Java APIs.
• Seeking Alpha Finds $7 Million In Funding, Partners With Nasdaq.com
  No money in "news," huh?
• SpendMatters: Five Things the Gartner/AMR Deal Suggests for the Future of Industry Analyst Research
• Gartner Buying AMR Research in $64 Million Deal – PC World
  "This transaction essentially makes one big guy bigger, and removes a second from the marketplace, so it certainly changes the analyst landscape in general," said Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of Redmonk. "That said, we're pretty highly differentiated from both, in that our research focus, our audience and to a certain extent, our customer base, is distinct from either Gartner or AMR's. As a result, I don't imagine we'll shift strategies." Major analyst firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester tend to speak to CIOs and other top IT executives, O'Grady said. "Our view is that [technology] adoption is increasingly driven bottom-up rather than top-down. … As a result, we're most concerned with developers, which means that we tend to be more ahead of the curve than the big guys."

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned, like the Eclipse Foundation.