EDITOR'S EYE

The World of Software Development.

October 2006

Subsequent to my mentioning COBOL in a pair of posts -- COBOL: 'Nuf Said and again in COBOL: Job 1 -- a bunch of you jumped in to fill in the gaps.

For instance, the folks at Micro Focus pointed out that 75 percent of the world's business apps run in COBOL, and that analysts claim that up to 80 percent of IT budgets now go for maintaining old code. Citing a recent industry survey, 62 percent of the respondents used COBOL and 58 percent were creating new applications in COBOL.

Micro Focus was also quick to add that it has just unveiled its Net Express 5.0, a development environment that extends core business processes to the .NET Framework and other distributed platforms. Using Net Express, you can construct enterprise components and services from existing business logic and use these to develop new Microsoft .NET, web, or client/server apps across the distributed enterprise.

Additionally, the folks at EvolveWare were kind enough to provide more details on the project I mentioned, in which 325,000 lines of COBOL code was migrated to .NET. The system chosen for migration involved the California Unemployment Insurance Scheduling System, which was comprised of two subsystems--a 60,000 line COBOL/CICS/VSAM system, and a 265,000 line COBOL/CICS/DB2 one.

The 60,000 line sub-system was documented and transformed into AllFusion Gen model by EvolveWare's COBOL-2-AllFusion Gen tool in three effort weeks, including QA and verification. The documentation was 100 percent automated and the transformation rate was 78 percent automated. An additional five effort weeks were taken to complete the transformation manually. Once all the code had been transformed into AllFusion Gen models, Java/DB2 code was generated automatically by AllFusion Gen. This code was then deployed in a test environment successfully.

The 265,000 line sub-system was documented and transformed into AllFusion Gen model by EvolveWare’s COBOL-2-AllFusion Gen tool in eight effort weeks including QA and verification. The documentation was 100 percent automated and the transformation rate was 87 percent automated. Currently the AllFusion Gen model is being completed for unconverted code and the entire system is being enhanced manually to include new functionality. This manual effort is expected to take approximately 25 effort weeks. Once all the COBOL code has been transformed and enhanced, C#Net/SQL Server code will be automatically generated by AllFusion Gen. This code will then be deployed in a test environment with the expected date for deployment being January, 2007, eight months after the kick-off date. It is estimated that manually this project would have taken
at least 18-24 months for completion.

Arq. Agustin Zabala was kind enough to send me a note from Buenos Aires that his group are all COBOL teachers and their web site is all COBOL; see http://www.cobol.com.ar.

Likewise, Bruce Hogman provided a vertiable trove of COBOL information. According to Gartner, Bruce reports, there are 250 billion lines of COBOL source code being used, with 15 billion new lines each year. A major AAA national company has some 35,000 COBOL modules plus supporting COPY books and so on in its inventory. A major airlines has 848 COBOL modules in its crew management system with some 3,000,000+ SLOC of code. Merrill-Lynch runs 70 percent of its daily business on COBOL systems.

The Navy named a guided missile destroyer after Adm. Grace Murray Hopper (in 1958 one of those who set COBOL on its path to world domination by giving the language to ANSI standards committee to govern). COBOL's main claim to fame is its distinction of possessing the only programming language whose standard defines handling of decimal currency. A standard conforming compiler therefore handles a bank's funds correctly. Indirectly, this is also why banks offer daily compounding of interest to their customers rather than doing the calculations only every quarter. Due to the bank rounding, pennies are carved off interest to pay interest bearing accounts each time the interest is calculated and added to the accounts. As Bruce says, a penny here and there adds up for millions of customers.

Recently, he goes on to say, one of the world's largest software companies and a partner delivered some 12,000 COBOL modules as new product to a major insurance company.

COBOL can now do object-oriented development with its 2002 (former draft 1997) standard language. IBM has implemented that feature in its Enterprise COBOL for z/OS.

I taught COBOL in 3 days to experienced C++ programmers who found it very easy to understand, so we fielded many people to remediate code for Y2K. I was forward in my thinking and solved a large insurance company's Y2K problem in 1968 when rewriting their master file update program and convinced their VP for data processing that they planned to be in business in 2000, so why not address the data problem while we had time. Since they had life policies with a similar century window already, they decided to solve all their problems and expanded the dates universally and also stored all the dates using ISO dates to make date sorting easy.

Bruce closes in noting that "if we could only get world-wide corporations to run their systems on UTC as well as use ISO dates, we could avoid all sorts of confusion."

And on that note, I'll close too. Thanks to everyone for filling the gaps.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:13 PM  Permalink |

It's finally starting to make sense. SOA, embedded controllers, wireless communication, intelligent systems, electronic product codes. And all it took is the Living Beer Lab.

What all this has to do with the price of hops in Hoboken is a new intelligent wireless project involving Heineken, Safmarine (an international shipping company), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam), and IBM--in conjunction with Dutch Customs, UK Customs, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (Now if that isn't enough bartenders behind the Foo Bar....) The Beer Living Lab tracks cargo container shipments of Heineken beer from Europe to the U.S. using satellite and cellular technology. The goal is to create paperless documentation through better system interoperability, resulting in faster deliveries and reduced costs for international trade.

IBM's Secure Trade Lane provides real-time interoperability via a wireless sensor platform and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), based on WebSphere. The project's SOA, called the "Shipment Information Services," leverages the EPCglobal network and EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) standards. Consequently, instead of building and maintaining a large central database with huge amounts of information, distributed data sources are linked, allowing data to be shared in real time between Heineken, Safmarine, and customs authorities in the U.S., Netherlands, and England.

In this pilot, Safmarine will ship 10 containers of Heineken beer from locations in both Netherlands and England, through their Customs Authorities, to the U.S. Heineken distribution center. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will coordinate the project and provide best practices documentation to share across the European Union.

"The Beer Living Lab is setting a roadmap for the next generation e-Customs solutions. We test innovative solutions, based on IBM's Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC) and SOA developed by IBM that could revolutionize customs," said Dr. Yao-Hua Tan, professor of Electronic Business, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. "Companies using these solutions could benefit greatly due to less physical inspections by customs; thus these e-customs solutions greatly facilitate international trade."

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, more than 30 different documents are associated with one single container crossing a border, which equals roughly five billion documents annually. The findings of the project will provide a viable alternative to manufacturers, shippers, retailers and customs administrations as they look to move to a paperless trade environment. Once accepted and implemented widely, paperless trade will support initiatives such as Green Lane, which will eliminate most inspections on arrival, thus significantly speeding up ocean freight shipments and improving the profit margins for shippers.

If nothing else, Dan Reeder can in his song "I Drink Beer", add "more efficient supply chains" to "improving his mind, ending all wars, and helping mankind" as reasons for drinking beer.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:02 AM  Permalink |

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Arizona in Tucson a $3.5 million grant over the next five years to improve advanced mathematics education. Certainly a fraction of that would improve my education, but then I have a hard time balancing my checkbook.

The grant, shared by the Department of Mathematics and the Program in Applied Mathematics, is to support a project called VIGRE, short for "Vertically InteGrated Research and Education." This project will institute changes that affect students at all levels by "vertically integrating" the way mathematics is taught. Students at various levels of training will be encouraged to interact and cooperate with other colleagues in the math and science community to broaden the students' expertise and ability to work cooperatively on problems.

"The NSF feels like there is a crisis, a looming shortage of people with advanced mathematical training," said principal investigator Douglas Ulmer, a UA professor of mathematics and associate head for the graduate program in the UA's department of mathematics. "For example, biology is becoming much more mathematically sophisticated. Biologists are using more mathematical techniques than they did even 10 years ago."

Each year, the project will support 12 graduate students, two postdoctoral fellows, and 20 undergraduates. Undergraduates will have opportunities to pursue research on topics like cryptography, mathematical modeling, the mathematics of fluids, and number theory. For graduate students, the grant provides funding so they can focus more on doing high-level research in current mathematical fields and improve their professional and communication skills.

In addition to increasing vertical integration of mathematics training, the project will also increase horizontal integration. Horizontal integration means going beyond geographical and institutional boundaries to provide support to other organizations involved in mathematics education.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:48 AM  Permalink |

On the heels of last weekend's Ruby Conference in Denver (for a report, see Jack Woehr's blog), Sun Microsystems made a Ruby-related announcement of its own.

Led by Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the chief maintainers of JRuby, a 100% pure Java implementation of the Ruby language, Sun has released JRuby 0.9.1. Among the features of this release are:

• Overall performance is 50-60% faster than JRuby 0.9.0
• New interpreter design
• Refactoring of Method dispatch, code evaluation, and block dispatch code
• Parser performance enhancement
• Rewriting of Enumerable and StringScanner in Java
• New syntax for including Java classes into Ruby

In related news, Ola Bini has been inducted into JRuby as a core developer during this development cycle.
Details are available at Thomas Enebo's blog and Ola Bini's blog.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:50 AM  Permalink |

A couple of rich guys recently gave something back to the schools that got them started. Sean O'Sullivan, founder of MapInfo, donated $2 million to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to create the Rensselaer Center for Open Software, while Ming Hsieh, founder of Cogent Systems, donated $35 million to the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering.

O’Sullivan is funding the Rensselaer Center for Open Software so that student developers can perform work related to their academic pursuits during the summer months. Through the program, up to 100 Rensselaer students annually will be given stipends to develop software and content.

Systems developed at the center will have a broad range of applications, which may include: groupware systems for coordinating response to natural and man-made disasters; Web-based project management and monitoring systems to improve transparency and the accountability of donated funds; enabling and monitoring balloting systems to ensure fair elections; and neighborhood-based security systems to improve public safety and reduce crime.

According to Prabhat Hajela, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education at Rensselaer, the center will call upon such organizations as Engineers Without Borders, ASHOKA: Innovators for the Public, and Engineers for a Sustainable World to provide a series of seminars on best practices and applications software most critical for generalp-urpose civil society use. The center also will seek large-scale involvement from collaborating companies and organizations in the global community, further opening new horizons for Rensselaer students.

For his part, University of Southern California engineering alumnus Ming Hsieh's donation of $35 million is the largest of its kind when it comes to engineering departments. In recognition, USC is naming its electrical engineering department the "USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering." Hsieh received his B.S. in 1983 and his M.S. in 1984 in electrical engineering both from USC. In 1987 he founded AMAX Technology and in 1990 co-founded Cogent Systems, which supplies automated fingerprint and other identification systems to governments, law enforcement agencies, and corporations around the world. He is currently president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Cogent.

When in high school in northern China, Ming Hsieh was given some old transistors and other electronics and began building primitive radios and television sets. With encouragement from an uncle, P.Y. Hsieh, who earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering from USC in 1952, and an inheritance from his grandfather in Taiwan, Hsieh emigrated frdom China to the U.S. to attend USC.

"I will always be grateful for the engineering education I received from USC and I want to help others do the same thing," Hsieh said.

"We have a duty to our fellow man to improve life on this planet. While technology has always been a huge enabler in improving quality of life, we now are at a point where, through open software and open content, these improvements can come at close to zero cost, opening up opportunities to all," said O’Sullivan. "Particularly in Third World situations, but also in government and consumer applications, open source solutions can cut through economic, political, and social divides, and enable people to simply get the job done. This center at Rensselaer may very well become a model for accomplishing this. With the global perspective and global reputation of Rensselaer research, I hope this hands-on development center will both engage students and engage the world."

Nicely put.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:50 AM  Permalink |

The fun part of Web 2.0 has always been its informality. Everyone from middle-school students to PhDs putting together sophisticated mashups and building unique social networks--and some (well, a couple anyway) of them even picking up $1.6 billion and change.

That informality is changing, however, as evident with the launch of a collaborative initiative between IBM and the University of Arizona to develop a course aimed at helping developers build online communities and social network systems using Web 2.0 technologies and blogs, wikis, online social networking, and podcasting.

Co-developed by the U of A Management Information Systems(MIS) Department and IBM, the course will address topics such as:

• The role of online communities in business
• Common types of community tools and environments
• Making successful communities

The class will culminate in a final project where students from the class works with their own separate group of students from Howenstine High School in Tucson, Arizona, to organize into many micro-communities. This offers hands-on experience in leadership, communications and community-building skills. Each high-school student will also learn how to use social software towards the goals of their community. This partnership between industry, university-level education and high schools aims to encourage greater interest in the field of Information Technology at one stage earlier in a student's academic career, with hopes to encourage other universities to adopt a similar model.

In addition to the new course materials, students and faculty members can access IBM's developerWorks to help them implement and develop dynamic web applications using development technologies such as Ajax, PHP, and Ruby, available in the developerWorks recently launched Web development zone.

The growing use of social and community systems in businesses to support customers, users, and the general public, is creating an increasing demand for the job role of a "community manager." The new course enables students to explore and recognize various online collaboration tools and social software to provide an understanding of how they are used in businesses today. In addition, the classes are structured to promote leadership qualities, collaboration, and peer-interaction. Students are expected to carry out a number of group assignments and projects, as well as individual presentations.

According to the Gartner Group, by 2008 the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0 to advance their businesses. As companies increase their reliance on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities, the industry is showing greater demand for technology experts who can build and manage Web 2.0 resources including wikis, blogs, user groups and forums. The IBM/University of Arizona partnership is supposedly the first of its kind to bring these principles to the classroom, giving students early exposure to influential, emerging technologies. This is also the first in a new suite of courses from the MIS Department related to managing and marketing online services.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:20 AM  Permalink |

Although I don't recall seeing a computer -- let alone compiler -- anywhere in my classic edition of The Whole Earth Catalog, there's no argument that there's a link between personal computers and the groundbreaking catalog. No less than Apple's Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as a conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine.

Launched in 1968 by Stewart Brand and colleagues, the Catalog was more than pile of paper. Indeed, it was the basis of the social networking and virtual communities that's emerging today. Or as described by Fred Turner in his recently released book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism:

In the fall of 1968, Stewart Brand published a 61-page miscellany of hand tools, books, and other gear. A generation of long-hairs was heading "back to the land" and Brand aimed to give them the tools they’d need to get there. While most rural communes soon failed, the ideals and the social networks Brand and his colleagues built up around the Catalog would last a lifetime. Over the next forty years, they transformed American notions of technology and particularly, of computers. They shaped the defining notions of our digital world, including "personal" computing, virtual community, and the vision of cyberspace as an electronic frontier. They helped give rise to such influential venues as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or WELL) and Wired magazine. And in the process, they transformed the ideals of the generation of 1968 into a deeply optimistic vision of the social potential of digital technologies.

What makes this noteworthy is the November 9, 2006 symposium "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog" which will trace today's cyberculture roots. Symposium participants include Brand and two other figures who prominently have embraced the social potential of digital technologies: Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy, and Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

The symposium, which will be moderated by Turner, will be held from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. in Cubberley Auditorium on the Stanford University campus.

The event is sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication and the American Studies Program. The libraries' Special Collections department holds the archive of records from the Whole Earth Catalog and related publications including editorial files, reader correspondence, photographs, memorabilia and other material.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:21 PM  Permalink |

Government agencies are usually viewed as "takers," as in they take tax dollars, rather than "givers," as in giving us back something of value. In fact, we usually get back more than what's taken, considering highways, schools, and the like. And now, Sandia National Labs is giving back a little more.

Sandia is doing this with the release of its freely available Acro 1.0 optimization software. Developed by a team led by Bill Hart, Acro (which is short for "A Common Repository for Optimizers") integrates a number of optimization libraries and solvers that have been developed for large-scale engineering and scientific applications.

Since Acro was developed to facilitate the design, development, integration, and support of optimization software libraries, it includes both individual optimization solvers as well as optimization frameworks that provide abstract interfaces for flexible interoperability of solver components. Furthermore, many solvers included in Acro can exploit parallel computing resources to solve optimization problems more quickly.

"Acro puts together different optimization software applications into one large package, making it easier to solve large-scale engineering and scientific problems," says Hart.

Hart and his team have been developing Acro for the past year-and-a-half. Both Sandia-developed and off-the-shelf software are included in Acro. In particular, Acro integrates Sandia’s APPSPACK, Coliny, OPT++, and PICO optimization software. Acro includes optimization techniques like linear programming, mixed-integer linear programming, derivative-free local search, and genetic algorithms.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:31 AM  Permalink |

On the heels of my COBOL: 'Nuf Said post, I ran across a set of statistics on the current state of the venerable "COmmon Business Oriented Language" known as COBOL.

According to a Computerworld survey of 352 companies, 62 percent said they still use COBOL -- and 75 percent of that 62 percent said they use it "a lot." Moreover, 58 percent said they are using it for new application development.

But the problem with COBOL that organizations face isn't a technical one, it is a personnel one. They just can't find enough COBOL programmers. According to the Computerworld article written by Gary Anthes, 45 percent of the respondents said their "ability to hire Cobol programmers was either 'worse' or 'much worse' than their ability to hire programmers for modern languages such as Visual Basic, C++ and Java."

Part of the reason for this is that COBOL is no longer being taught in many schools. I did a quick, and admittedly non-scientific, search of three leading universities and couldn't find any classes that focused on COBOL. Plenty of Java. Lots of C++. But COBOL? Forget it.

At the same time, a quick search of TechCareers using the keyword "COBOL" turned up 304 job openings. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the Y2K bug-a-boo hasn't gone away. If you recall, COBOL programmers were coming out of retirement in the late '90s -- and writing their own ticket to do so -- just to cope with issues surrounding Y2K hysteria.

(Oh, I really miss seeing those article headlines, like "Countdown to Chaos!" and "Y2K Crime Alert!" to "The Gun for all Reasons" and "Wood Stoves: Reliable Heat Y2K Can't Stop!".) For a refresher on what Y2K was all about, see articles such as:

• Date Compression and Year 2000 Challenges by Robert L. Moore and D. Gregory Foley.
• Strategies for Solving the Y2K Problem by William Gothard and Les Rodner.
• A Year 2000 Tool Suite by Dev Bhattacharyya.
• A Chat with Bob Bemer by Michael Swaine.

No, COBOL won't go away anytime soon and if you're worried about paying the mortgage, learning about COBOL is close to a sure bet.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:27 AM  Permalink |

So tell me--does this fall under the heading of "a day late" or "a dollar short"? Well, the easy answer is that I'm always a dollar (or two) short, but in this case I was a day late too.

In yesterday's post, you might recall, I touched on the subject of computers and clocks. What I missed was the news out of the University of Nevada that researchers in its Physics Department have increased the accuracy of atomic clocks.

In its research, the team of Andrei Derevianko, Kyle Beloy, and Ulyana Safronova isolated a significant portion of the error in atomic clock output. The portion of error that the team studied has now been cut to one-fiftieth of its original size. Interestingly, the team’s research was based solely on calculations, many of which were conducted on high-performance computers. They've also published a paper on their findings.

The team's project was based on 2004 research by Italian researchers who found evidence that suggested that atomic clocks were less accurate then previously thought. "It seemed like a good time to reexamine the problem," Derevianko said. "The uncertainty of the issue was a good primer for the research."

Atomic clock technology is based on the fact that atoms emit a fixed frequency. Lasers, which also have operating frequencies, can be calibrated so that their frequencies match that of a given atom. Since atomic frequencies are constant, syncing a laser with an atom and counting the laser’s oscillations will always provide a steady measurement of time.

More accurate atomic clocks will lead to improved technologies. Most technical systems that employ satellites, including GPS technology, make use of atomic clocks; these technologies can now operate much more accurately.

The findings for the University of Nevada team are paving the way for extremely accurate measurements. The extra time-keeping precision will let scientists explore hypotheses about the big-bang theory. The improved technology might even be accurate enough to provide evidence related to the controversial theory that universal constants, as in the amount of charge in an electron, are changing.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:18 AM  Permalink |

Timing is everything, which is why I was alarmed that National Clock Month almost slipped past. No need to get that excited, however, since October is also National Apple Month, National Dessert Month, National Roller Skating Month, National Stamp Collecting Month, National Popcorn Popping Month, Polish American History Month, and (my favorite) National Pizza Month.

As far back as th 17th century, clocks and computing have gone hand-in-hand (and not just the hour hand and minute hand). In 1624, for instance, a fellow named Schickard built a "calculating clock" that could add and subtract. Since then, clocks have become fundamental to programming, whether your trying to crank up the performance of your system or need to track data in real time. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that Dr. Dobb's and other programmer pubs have published lots of articles involving clocks, including

• "Using the Real-Time Clock", by Kenneth Roach.
• "C/C++ in Embedded Chronographs", by William Smith.
• "Lies, Misdirection, and Real-Time Measurements", by Cort Dougan and Zwane Mwaikambo.
• "Using 1KHz Interrupts On AT Clones", by Paul A. Cornelius.
• "A Simple Real-Time Executive" by Chuck Allison,
• "A Polled Timer Class", by J. David Wendel.
• "Real Time Zones", by Ed Nisley.
• "Timed Callbacks in C++", by Christian Stapfer.

And these articles are just the start.

You'd think that after all this time, however, that clock-related issues would be passe', at least when it comes to computing. That's far from being the case, however.

Concurrency, multi-threading, and multi-core processors will likely be changing this, at least to some degree. As Herb Sutter points out in his article "A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" instead of driving clock speeds ever higher, devleopers will be instead turning to hyperthreading and multi-core architectures.

And believe it or not, clocks can mean business. Most recently, for instance, Cypress Semiconductor has spun out the assets and intellectual property PC clock business into a new and independent company called Spectra Linear.

The transaction calls for the transfer of Cypress's frequency timing generators and buffers optimized for desktop and notebook computers, computer servers and memory modules to Spectra Linear. It does not include Cypress' general-purpose clock offerings of fixed and programmable timing products.

As for me, I'm still having trouble with this daylight savings thing. Now is it "spring forward" and "fall back" or the other way around?

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:42 AM  Permalink |

To be truthful, I haven't thought about handwriting recognition for a while, even though it wasn't that long ago that handwriting recognition was the cat's pajamas of anyone interested in mobile computing. Heck, even at Dr. Dobb's Journal we held our Handwriting Recognition Contest.

Ray Valdes, then a technical editor for DDJ, organized the contest with Ron Avitzur's help. You can find out more about Ron's algorithms and techniques in this article. More recently, handwriting recognition popped up in Regan Coleman article "Symbian Database Components". In a nutshell, Regan's point is that operating systems for a variety of mobile devices to be flexible and accomodating to meet the needs of the design.

Out of blue, a press release from Vision Objects, a vendor of handwriting recognition and text input tools, found its way to me this morning, announcing that its MyScript recognition technology now support of 70 languages. Coincidentally, the company will be demonstrating its technology at the Symbian Smartphone Show 2006 in London next week.

Additionally, the company also announced MyScript Letra, a pack of resources specifically designed for mobile devices. MyScript Letra also recognizes hand-printed and isolated characters in 70 different languages. According to Vision Objects, MyScript Letra can be integrated into small footprint platforms using a touch screen and stylus-based interfaces such as PDAs, electronic tablets, smartphones and gaming devices. It recognizes language-specific sets of characters including upper- and lowercase, accented characters, digits, punctuation marks and even individual and country specific writing styles.

You'd hope that after all this time that handwriting recognition technology would have overcome its biggest hurdle -- doctors writing legible prescriptions. One language or 70. That's still the biggest hurdle.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:01 PM  Permalink |

If you don't know what Rich Internet Applications are, then you aren't keeping up with this week's buzzwords.

Just to fill in any gaps, RIAs are "web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the ... back on the application server."

Today's big news about RIA is that Sun Microsystems and Laszlo Systems are collaborating to bring Laszlo's RIA development platform to Java ME enabled devices. Laszlo Systems is the original developer of OpenLaszlo, an open-source platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 applications. OpenLaszlo technology has been widely adopted by application and service providers in the consumer, enterprise, education and government markets. Laszlo Systems provides updates, training and support for OpenLaszlo and offers rich-experience web-based digital life applications such as Laszlo Mail, built on OpenLaszlo.

The collaboration wil enable OpenLaszlo applications to run on devices supporting Java Micro Edition (Java ME). With this move, Sun and Laszlo are actively contributing resources to a new project for the OpenLaszlo community, code-named "Orbit."

If you want to find out more about Laszlo Systems and OpenLaszlo, listen to Dr. Dobb's audio interview with Jim Grandy, Director of OpenLazlo at Laszlo Systems.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:44 PM  Permalink |

One of the many fun things about programming languages is that you never know when and where a new one -- or a new kind of one -- will pop up next.

Take Martlet, for instance. Marlet is a workflow language for analyzing large datasets whose distribution is continually changing across a number of widely dispersed servers. Designed by Oxford University's Daniel Goodman, Martlet implements a functional programming model that lets you write parallel programs and analyze distributed data without having to be aware of the details of the parallelization. Martlet abstracts the parallelization of the computation and the splitting of the data via functional programming constructs that let programs be written as abstract descriptions that can be adjusted to match the data set and available resources automatically at runtime. In short. this means that inexperienced users can take advantage of the power of distributed computing resources, while reducing the work load on experienced distributed programmers. To allow the evaluation of the language and programming model, a supporting middleware has been constructed using web services supported by Apache Axis and Jakarta Tomcat.

To gauge its effectiveness, Marlet is being tested with the ClimatePrediction.net project, a distributed computing project similar to SETI@home. With CliminatePrediction.net, users download a model of the Earth’s climate and run it for approximately 50 model years , then return results read from their model to one of multiple servers. The output of these models creates a data set that is distributed across the servers.

"Existing workflow languages are not up to the task because they implement a style of programming where the number of data inputs and the paths of data flow through the workflow are set when the workflow is submitted. This makes them unable to cope with subsequent changes to the dataset," says Goodman. Functional programming constructs let the workflow adjust to the requirements of the data at runtime and changes to the way in which a dataset is split can be accommodated dynamically, so removing the need for users to keep adjusting their workflows.

Martlet has potential for use in many science applications which distribute data between servers in a similar way to climateprediction.net. Its development also suggests that there could be other powerful new algorithms awaiting discovery once people start to think in terms of this alternative programming model. "Daniel's work has shown how work on core computer science can be used to meet the exciting challenges generated by e-Science applications. He has demonstrated how taking a different approach to organising the way in which tasks are executed can produce scientific results much more quickly," says Professor Paul Watson of Newcastle University.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:49 AM  Permalink |

What with all the hoopla over cell phones and likeminded mobile computing devices, it isn't often that you get the chance to read anything about mainframes -- anything good, that is. But according to a recent report, there's life in the old tyrannosaurus yet.

In a report entitled "Mainframe Role TCO" that focuses on IBM's System z mainframe, the Robert Frances Group believes that mainframes have a 20-year advantage over other platforms, especially when it comes to partitioning and virtualization. More specifically, the report considers "the new wave of server and storage consolidation, partitioning and virtualization as an affirmation of the mainframe model."

It further states that, "in addition to the power and cooling advantages of the mainframe, [we] should consider the mainframe as a 'Tier 1' option for hosting new applications and acting as a central hub for security, server pool management, and consolidated workloads/data."

The report goes on to point out that:

• "The mainframe has unique technology and characteristics (i.e., being the strongest commercial platform for generalized computing, with multiple internal processors for handling input/output (I/O), etc.)."
• "[IBM database] DB2 is a long-term winner in the database management system (DBMS) world ... DB2 workloads running on the mainframe generally make sense to keep on the mainframe. The strengths of the backup and recovery, functionality, and security warrant keeping the data there, not to mention better pricing in comparison to Oracle on HP or Sun configurations."
• "In the context of TCO [total cost of ownership], the main advantages for the mainframe are the people costs as well as the superior management tools and capabilities to ensure good service. The Wintel platform, however, is the widest known for its low average utilization. Indeed, many customers are paying for boxes that are averaging 15 percent utilization or less ... while mainframes run at 85 percent or more."

It should come as no surprise that IBM likes this kind of talk. "The IBM System z mainframe offers a superior economic proposition as well as unmatched security and the kind of rock-solid performance required by the world's best-run companies," says Jim Stallings, IBM general manager, System z. "We are continuing to make the kind of investments in the mainframe that will enable IBM to continue to take market share from our competitors."

Two questions (or observations, depending on how you read them): Okay, market share in the mainframe arena. But what about market share when compared to concurrent systems such as grid computers based on hundreds or thousands of PCs? Secondly, who paid for the report?

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:24 PM  Permalink |

Okay, I've finally found the second best job in the world. (The first best job, of course, is being editor of Dr. Dobb's Journal and working for a great boss. That performance review season is just around the corner has nothing to do with my saying that.)

Unfortunately for me, Jan Chipchase already holds the second best job in the world, although at the pace he's been going, I just might have a shot at it one of these days. Jan is a principal engineer for Nokia Research where he splits his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services, and products. Chipchase specializes in what's called "consumer behavior research" where he leads teams of concept/industrial designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists, and ethnographers into the field--and hopefully gets them home safely.

I say "hopefully" because Chipchase doesn't necessarily hang out at your local Target or Best Buy store, polling consumers about what they like (or don't like) about cell phones. Instead, Chipchase goes to the end of the Earth--literally--to ask find out what, how, and why people do what they do when it comes to mobile phones. Places like Mongolia, Uganda, Tibet, and the like. He also visits run-of-the-mill places you'd expect--China, India, Latin America, and even the U.S. on occasion.

When there (wherever "there" happens to be at the time), Chipchase employs a variety of observation techniques, including: "shadowing" people as they come and go throughout the day (with their permission, of course), "wallet mapping" (where they divulge what's inside their wallet or purse), "contextual interviews" (where he walks around with them), and even conducting "expert interviews" (such as with blind people who explain how they use cell phones). Of particular interest to Chipchase are the nearly 800 million illiterate people of the world, who somehow need to be able to navigate the often less than intuitive user interfaces of mobile phones.

More often than not, what Chipchase and company discover is amazing even to them. Like rural Ugandan cell-phone owners who make a living by becoming virtual ATMs using pre-paid phone card credits, or street vendors in India who repair cell phones using nothing more than a screwdriver and toothbrush.

The end result of Chipchase chasing around the world like this is his coming back to Nokia product development teams with information that informs and inspires them to look at cell phones in new and different ways, and design products accordingly.

Walking around talking to people? Sounds okay to me. Checking out cell phone use in Mongolia? Sure, I can handle that. Just give me an interpreter and an unlimited American Express card and I'll be on the back of a yak heading that way. After all, the boss says that she likes it when I'm on the road. Of course, she didn't say where or how. Come to think about it, she didn't say anything about that unlimited American Express card either.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 06:39 AM  Permalink |

Small devices, low power. You can't have one without the other. But this is easier said than done. Addressing this conumdrum, however, is Nokia's Wibree technology--an open industry initiative that extends local connectivity to small devices.

This radio technology, developed by Nokia Research Center and announced on the 20th anniversary of the lab, offers connectivity between mobile devices or Pcs, and small button cell battery power devices such as watches, wireless keyboards, toys, and sports sensors.

Sound like Bluetooth? No surprise. Wibree builds extends Bluetooth by making it possible for devices to operate at lower power. It can do this, says Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center, because it is based on variable-length packets which deliver low data rates. Bluetooth is bounded in how low it can go by fixed packet length.

Nokia expects to license the technology to others in the market, likely in the form of Wibree chipsets. According to current estimates, the first commercial version of the interoperability specification will be available during the second quarter of 2007. "Our aim is to establish an industry standard faster than ever before by offering an interoperable solution that can be commercialized and incorporated into products quickly," said Iannucci.

Wibree can be seen as a competitor to Zigbee, however, from the Nokia perspective, Wibree is "free" in that it makes use of existing Bluetooth support in mobile devices without additional support.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 03:40 AM  Permalink |