Conference organizers sometimes spring their events on would-be attendees, announcing things just one or two months in advance.  That’s not FileMaker’s way.  Today, FileMaker opened registration for its 2011 Developer Conference, which will be held in August.

That leaves developers a whole lot of time in which to decide whether or not they’ll go.  It also gives them a large window in which to take advantage of early bird pricing, since discount rates ($1,295 and $1,949 versus $1,595 and $2,199) won’t expire until June 17th.

As for some info that should help people make up their minds, FileMaker said in a statement, “The 16th annual FileMaker Developer Conference, Aug. 2-5, 2011, at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, a new waterfront venue in downtown San Diego, will bring FileMaker developers, consultants and trainers together from around the world to share best practices and talk with exhibitors about their products.”

Also, “More than 1,000 developers are expected to attend DevCon, which annually presents unique content on the most important trends in FileMaker tools and solutions.  Hot topics will include FileMaker Go and the FileMaker platform for easily putting organizations’ solutions on iPad and iPhone; integrating FileMaker in institutional environments; database web publishing, and much more.”

Here’s hoping you enjoy the conference if you choose to attend it.

AdMarvel has launched a mobile advertising platform for the Verizon Devloper Community.

AdMarvel provides software developer kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers for Android and BlackBerry operating systems.

This platform also offers developers and publishers the unique capability to source and serve their own advertising, including house ads, to cross-promote and cross-sell their applications.

“We are very pleased to launch this solution for VDC developers and look forward to helping them monetize their new VCAST applications,” said Mahi de Silva, CEO of AdMarvel.

“Our focus is on helping developers to easily incorporate advertising into their applications and provide them with sophisticated tools to help them analyze and optimize their bottom line. We are most excited about delivering an open and extensible platform which provides a scalable growth path as usage and volume expands.”

NoSQL continues to get more and more coverage as scalability issues arise from popular web applications that have witnessed a need for a massive amount of basic primary key queries that return a single row of data. With less of a need for the extraneous features of a traditional relational database, many web applications, to improve performance, have moved to a hashmap-style datastore that stores values based on a key. While NoSQL databases provide a simple mechanism of storing and retrieving data, many organizations implement a relational database in addition to a key-value-store in a mixed-use environment when complex queries are necessary. The relative immaturity of NoSQL technologies compared to the long history of relational database techonolgies makes using them in production a risk. In an interesting case of adapting well-tested database technology with new paradigms, Yoshinori Matsunobu recently discussed and released a MySQL plugin, called the HandlerSocket plugin, that provides a NoSQL front-end to a MySQL database using InnoDB as it’s database engine.

We have covered NoSQL before on our sister site SQLProNews, where Mike Marr gave an introduction to the concepts and motivations behind NoSQL, and Mike Kavis compared NoSQL and relational databases. Yoshinori-san combined the best of both worlds by implementing and releasing the HandlerSocket plugin that uses the InnoDB database engine through the MySQL plugin API. The plugin decreases the overhead of key-based lookups, as a NoSQL solution provides, while continuing to support more complex SQL based queries through the MySQL interface. In his blog he details the setup procedure for installing the plugin as well as its numerous advantages.

The HandlerSocket plugin adds the value of NoSQL, with extended queries, concurrent access handling, its high performance with a single cache, without giving up the power that a full SQL query engine allows. By keeping all the data in one place for both SQL and NoSQL queries, it makes it more trivial to keep data consistent than it is in a mixed environment. Seriously consider using Yoshinori-san’s HandlerSocket plugin for MySQL for a less risky foray into NoSQL territory. It brings NoSQL to MySQL; so that developers don’t have to sacrifice either.

Rhomobile, makers of Rhodes, a smartphone app framework for enterprise mobility, has introduced RhoGallery, an enterprise app store.

RhoGallery makes it easy for developers and administrators to create “galleries” of mobile apps, which are then provisioned to their mobile workforce via a native smartphone application that sits on their handheld device. Workers have one place to go to launch all mobile apps that are relevant to them to do their job.

“RhoGallery is a new and economical way for enterprises of all sizes to easily deploy and manage smartphone applications to their mobile workforce,” said Adam Blum, CEO of Rhomobile.

“With RhoGallery we offer companies the ability to provision smartphone applications for all leading platforms, including those written with the underlying native OS language and SDK.”

The Federal Communications Commission is perhaps not the first organization any developer’s likely to think of when it comes to interacting with the tech community in a positive manner.  Just the same, the FCC hosted an event called Open Developer Day for the sake of improved accessibility online.

The event can be considered a success.  Leading up to it, an official wiki promised, “Engineers from the Yahoo! Accessibility team Lab and Yahoo! Developer Network will be providing technical instruction for some of their technologies that support working with web-based information and their ongoing work in accessibility.”

Then it noted that the collaboration wouldn’t stop at the end of the day, since “[a] priority area is the development of a web application that will serve as a clearing-house of information on accessible information and communication technologies (ICT).”

Also, we should point out that this Open Developer Day was supposed to be the first, but not last, of its kind, with others following at some point.

Hopefully all this work will ensure people with disabilities are able to access the Web with relative ease, since so much communication and research takes place online anymore.

XML has many widely accepted uses and applications. One of these is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Recently tasked with a project where I opted to customize a WordPress RSS feed, I discovered the easier part of the whole project was building and formatting the RSS code. Prior to this project, I only knew of RSS and what it does. I had no experience of the reading, writing, or editing of RSS files. Here’s what I took away from working with RSS:

Range

There is a range of versions to choose from when publishing an RSS feed. Like many other web technologies, the most recent version isn’t necessarily the most widely used. Sources varied on what versions were most popular, but in the end, I chose to utilize RSS 2.0. The spec is over seven years old, and thus any credible RSS reader supports it. Since RSS files are simply defined XML structures, you can create any valid XML elements in your file. However, RSS 2.0 and other more recent versions support additional predefined elements that applications can be programmed to utilize.

Straightforward

RSS is really straightforward. Actually, per its name, it is really simple. You can grasp the basic format of RSS without even viewing spec; just look at a properly formed RSS feed. You simply create a channel element with specific child elements to define your RSS channel. Inside a channel, you declare one or more item elements that define what items your RSS channel contain. It’s really that easy.

Small

RSS has a very small footprint. This is likely a contributing reason it has become a great aggregation tool for the vast amounts of information available on the Internet. Even after adding various custom non-standard elements to my RSS feed, the file size for my RSS feed came in under 2kb. There is a lot of information crammed in that small space, and coupled with the RSS format makes this information easy to extract and use.

Recent news coverage could suggest that the Java ecosystem is about to implode, and thereby put at risk the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours the customers and developers have invested in Java. The reality couldn’t be farther from that prognostication.

Java’s rocky 2010
Java champion and Apache Software Foundation member Stephen Colebourne provides a good summary of recent trials and tribulations that the Java ecosystem has endured. In his post, “Babylon 5 & the Great War of Java,” Colebourne writes: “In a short period of time, Java has gone from the platform designed to unify the entire industry to a highly politicized punching bag.”

A key element surrounding the angst around Java’s future has been Oracle’s lack of public engagement with the Java ecosystem as the events in Colebourne’s blog post were unfolding.

The Eclipse Foundation’s Ian Skerrett provided helpful advice to Oracle on working in open communities:

The basic premise of the book [The Cluetrain Manifesto] is that communities are really conversations and to succeed you need to be part of and interact with the community. I know this can be a challenge with all your lawyers and marketing executives trying to control the message, but you have to do it to gain the trust of the community. Companies like IBM and SAP manage to do it, so you can too.

The good news is that Oracle has broken the silence and is helping to clear up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt behind its recent Java-related decisions. For example, Oracle’s Adam Messinger, vice president of Java development, commented on Colebourne’s Java Community Process (JCP) post:

On the topic of Hologic, our feeling is that standards folks, technologists, and technology vendors are already well represented and there is room for some new opinions at the table. The fact is that a big part of Java’s success is driven by thousands of developers at small and mid-size companies like Hologic. These developers, who are working squarely in the Microsoft sweet spot, are on the forefront of our competition with .Net. Hologic has bet its business on Java — not as a supplier of Java, but as a consumer — and we think having their perspective on the [Java Community Process Executive Committee] is valuable. They are absolutely representative of a large cross-section of the Java community.

When explained, the nomination of Hologic is perfectly logical. In fact, you could question why Java customers were not better represented on the Java Community Process (JCP) in the past. In response, you could presume that Java vendors, like IBM or Red Hat, brought forward the needs of their customers to the JCP.

The Java ecosystem – too big to fail

The Eclipse Foundation’s Mike Milinkovich wrote a well reasoned and rational post about the future of Java and the JCP. One conclusion that Milinkovich makes is that “IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and others are committed to making OpenJDK and the JCP successful, so there is no vacuum to fill.”

Whether the vacuum posed a significant risk to companies or developers adopting Java is a separate matter.

Ex-JBoss executive and now CEO at CloudBees, a Java ecosystem vendor, Sacha Labourey tweeted: “The ecosystem has no other way but to recover, somehow; it’s too big to fail.”

While the words “too big to fail” have gained a fairly negative connotation of late, Labourey correctly highlights a key facet that “Java is dead” prognosticators neglect to mention.  The financial investments and skills built around Java are simply too large for Java ecosystem vendors to do anything but move forward in the interests of their customers and developers. With IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle pledging support and development resources, the open source OpenJDK project now appears to be a rallying point for the Java community to do just this.

Even Microsoft, hardly considered a Java ecosystem vendor, continues to highlight its support for the open source Apache Tomcat servlet container on the Microsoft Azure cloud. According to RedMonk analyst Michael Cote, in attendance at Microsoft’s annual Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft executive Bob Muglia stated in his keynote, “We’re making Java a first-class citizen on Windows Azure.”

Looking beyond vendors, a review of enterprise Java jobs at Indeed.com suggests that enterprise Java skills remain in high demand.

And Devoxx, a European Java conference billed as a “conference for Javaholics,” is sold out with nearly 3,000 attendees from 40 countries. Oracle Glassfish team member Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine recently tweeted, “Every conference I’ve been to recently was sold out. JUG (Java User Group) meetings are as popular as ever. It must be Java’s decline causing this.”

Encourage programming language diversity
While Java’s future appears far less unclear than news reports may suggest, IT decision-makers should still evaluate Java alternatives in the enterprise.

Why? Because, few of as today’s new college graduates consider themselves simply “Java developers.” Rather, they are familiar with multiple programming languages. Many even moonlight with PHP or Node.js. By allowing developers to use those skills for certain enterprise projects, IT decision-makers could help accelerate application delivery.

Plus, increased technology competition within your IT department ensures that technology ecosystems, such as Java, Node.js, and .Net, and the vendors in those ecosystems don’t become complacent or ignore innovation occurring in another ecosystem.

Apperian has introduced the Enterprise App Service Environment (EASE) that allows enterprise developers to build, secure, and mange applications for the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices.

EASE helps enterprise developers build secure mobile applications that improve company productivity, while maintaining control for IT departments. With EASE, companies can focus on the development of business-focused applications, without having to worry about infrastructure issues.

In addition to the iPhone, EASE will fully support the Apple iPad running iOS 4.2 or later with “over the air” app delivery. The company plans to offer an Android-based version of EASE in the first quarter of 2011.

“EASE provides a serious solution to the mobile application management (MAM) issues that are beginning to be recognized in organizations,” said David Patrick, Apperian CEO.

“EASE is the right solution at the right time for companies that want to take the lead in developing and deploying enterprise-wide, mobile business applications that will result in productivity gains. As the number of ‘bring your own’ and corporate-issued smartphones increases, EASE is the first solution of its kind to provide a SaaS-based approach that can be up and running in minutes.”

It’s almost that time of year again – the time of great food, general goodwill, and seriously stretched budgets.  So today seemed like an opportune moment to bring you yet another story of an independent developer who’s achieved financial success.

A developer who goes by the name KreCi provided what he calls an “Android Developer Income Report” earlier this morning.  KreCi also noted that he doesn’t devote all his time to developing apps, his apps are only ad-supported, and his apps haven’t been huge hits.

Nonetheless, after a bit of a rough start (earning just $4.92 in May and $138.87 in June), KreCi’s Android apps started to provide him with a respectable amount of spending money, generating $538.26 in July and $920.00 in August.

Then, in September, he earned enough money from his apps to cover living expenses in many parts of the country ($1,545.45), and the October number ($1,059.31) was pretty impressive, too.

Kreci’s apps are X-Ray Scanner, Cracked Screen, Virtual Drums, Daily Beauty Tips, Don’t Push It, and WP stats if you feel like checking them out (either as a fan or just to scope out the situation).

In my opinion effective visuals are one of the greatest assets that a consultant possesses.  However, we’re not just talking about pretty pictures, heck any designer can come up with pretty pictures.  What I’m talking about is a way to visualize information in a simple way that makes sense to the client.  I recently saw Dan Roam, author of “Back of the Napkin,” speak at a conference in San Francisco, and his whole basic premise for his keynote was that,

“the person who makes the best images wins (or gets the budget).”

In Dan’s example for the power of visualizations he talked about the new 787 Dreamliner that is being built by Boeing.  The parts of the aircraft are being built all around the world in multiple countries and languages, yet somehow when all the pieces come together, they fit.  Why?  Because of visual data and information that people can look at, these images transcend language and words and allow for a greater understanding of whatever is being discussed.  I wholeheartedly agree.  In fact I have found that the use of visuals in blog posts, presentations, reports, and pretty much anything I do, always makes things easier.  I just wrote a post for Social Media Examiner on Social CRM using a few visuals (and also eliminated the jargon) and every single comment I received on that post was all about how much “this made sense,” “was easy to understand,” and “how great the images are.”

Peter Block who is perhaps one of the most famous management consultants today said:

“Concentrate on the visual impact of your format and how easy it is to understand.”

Again, I’m not talking about putting together visuals just for the sake of putting them together, I’m talking about effective visuals that convey a message, tell a story, and allow anyone to understand what you’re talking about.  The new Chess Media Group site has a lot of visuals on it depicting our client and strategic methodology.  The Social CRM process diagram that Chess Media Group created is perhaps the most widely circulated and used Social CRM image today, why?  Because we took a concept and an idea that people didn’t fully understand and explained it in a simple to understand way that anyone can understand.

Going forward we’re going to get even more involved with visuals!

So why am I so crazy about visuals?  Well, a few reasons actually, visuals:

• convey a message in an easy way
• transcend language barriers
• provide a good summary of information, data, and concepts
• support information, data, and concepts
• take less time to understand and read through
• are simple
• test your ability to breakdown concepts into a simple easy to understand way
• are creative
• humans are visual beings and most of the information we consume and interpret is visual
• are crucial for concepts such as “social CRM” and “social business” which are still amorphous and hard to grasp for many
• and more and more and more

Comments